Denzel Washington stars as Banyan Key, Florida chief of police Matt Lee Whitlock in director Carl Franklin's new suspense thriller Out of Time. Whitlock is respected by his peers and loved by his community, but when Banyan Key is shocked by a double homicide, everything he thought he knew starts to unravel, and he finds himself in a race against time to solve the murders before he himself falls under suspicion.While trying to discover the truth, Washington shares a steamy scene with co-star Sanaa Lathan. While it looks great on-screen, filming it was a bit different. "The good thing was that in the screen test, you know we screen tested four women, one of the scenes we did was the scene when you first see me come to her house and that was the only sexy scene that we did. So the ice was broken already. You know those kinds of scenes, there is nothing sexy really about them with a hundred strangers in the room and all that."
You often wonder what actors' and actresses' significant others think about their love scenes. Denzel learned to show his wife the film early, so that she knows what to expect come premiere time. "When we did 'Mississippi Masala' I made the mistake of not showing her the film and we went to the premiere. It wasn't a good day. I guess because - and she's already seen this film months and months ago - she feels like she should know before people are snickering or whatever their response is, I guess that can be personal or painful. I told her what was going on while we were shooting. And she saw the film in January or something like that. She saw it early on."
His character in the film gives in to temptation which gets him in trouble. Is Denzel immune to it? "Nobody's immune to temptation. I'm a human being. I don't read the tabloids, whatever they say. They hail you and then they nail you, don't they? So sooner or later, they'll be coming my way. I am an actor and I am a human being. People say 'Well, you're this.. Ayeee, don't put that on me. You don't know me. You know the parts I played. I played Steven Biko, I'm not Steven Biko. I played Malcolm X, I'm not Malcolm X. I love my family. My family's first, and that's it."
Casting is always a little strange when it comes to ages. For example, Denzel is about 20 years older than both Sanaa Lathan and Eva Mendes. "Carl called me and said, 'I got the girl [Eva] and I think she's great but I just wanna run it by you because you're working with her.' I said, 'Who? He said, 'Eva. I said, 'Oh, yeah, she is great.' So I had nothing to do with that decision in the casting process other than signing off on it when we made the decision."
The police chief does more than just fooling around in the thriller. One scene required Denzel to fall over a building, which wasn't very comfortable but was effective. "Because I had this strapped harness on so when you fall over the side, you jerk, kinda (clears throat) and your voice goes a little higher. It was really clever filmmaking, the illusion. There �s one shot where the camera falls off the railing, they built it so it falls over. There's a couple of shots where it starts with me laying on it, and they let it go and I drop over the side. It almost makes the audience feel like they're being dragged too. So instead of just seeing two people go over then cutting to something else, the audience goes over."
Once the conspiracy kicked in, Denzel had to maintain frenetic energy for most of the film. "Some of that stuff was the most frustrating to do. I just didn't like being in that position, me, Denzel. It was like, oh, I'm sick of being the one who has to worry for 14 hours a day or being nervous. Carl said we're not gonna always shoot all those scenes in order, or it's not a full scene, we're gonna get this piece and that piece because he needs all the pieces. You see a look, you see the fax machine, you see the fingers, you see the screen, you see the wife looking at me. Itt's not all like you get two minutes to give us the whole scene, it's pieces and pieces and pieces, it's really Carl building the film."
You can see what Carl Franklin has build when Out of Time opens on October 3.
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