Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds Talk ‘Safe House’Posted by Wilson Morales
February 7, 2012
Coming out this week is the action thriller, ‘Safe House,’ which stars Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds.
Directed by Daniel Espinosa, Reynolds is a young CIA agent tasked with looking after a fugitive (played by Washington) in a safe house. But when the safe house is attacked, he finds himself on the run with his charge.
In promoting the film at a recent press conference, both Washington and Reynolds spoke about their characters and filming in South Africa.
After doing this film, are you more weary of this country’s security or were you left with any doubts?
Denzel Washington: Weary of this country’s security?
Yeah, and what goes on in the government.
DW: Why? What goes on in the government?
Ryan Reynolds: It’s a Disney movie, isn’t it?
DW: Years ago, even prior to 9-11, I did a movie called ‘The Siege.’ I did a lot of research with the FBI and the CIA and I was amazed at that time, I guess we might all know it now, how little information they shared with each other. So after that I’m not surprised by anything.
RR: I always think it’s not what we know that’s terrifying, it’s what we don’t know. That’s sort of pervasive with everything in life really, but, I’m sure a book or two could be written about what really goes on.
There are a lot of action scenes in this movie. How do you keep your body in shape? How do you train?
DW: We worked with, what was this guy’s name? Oliver!
RR: Yeah, Oliver Schneider.
DW: These French guys who you would always want to be with you. The most unassuming guys and we really had the luxury of time; a good two or three months while we were over there. In fact, there’s a fight I have where I crash through the roof or something and start fighting this guy, and even the fights we do at the end, we had two or three or four months before we even got to do those fights. I did mine, I don’t know about you. You saw Ryan crashing through windows. Your fights were nasty!
RR: Yeah, these guys are really great at making it look real ugly, that knife fight in a phone booth kind of feel and that’s kind of what you want. We had a couple of rounds that we went, which I practically had to wear an adult diaper before. I’ve seen ‘Hurricane.’
Did anyone get hurt during filming and did either of you do any research with any real CIA operatives?
RR: We had a CIA operative on the set.
DW: Yeah, all the time. And Ryan gave me a black eye.
RR: I did.
DW: There’s a scene where I reach over and try to choke him when I have the handcuffs on and we were flying around in the car, and he wasn’t actually driving the car, it was being controlled by someone else, so it just happens as I was reaching forward, he was flying back and “Pow”!
RR: And that was my early retirement. That first look you gave me after it happened, I just …
DW: It was a real look!
RR: It was weird to feel my face on fire.
DW: I never had a black eye in my life, but can’t say that anymore.
RR: I’m glad I was your first.
Denzel, in the production notes it states that rather study CIA operatives to prepare for the film, you researched sociopaths. What did you learn from your research that helped you portray this character? It’s a mystery as to why your character did what he did.
DW: There’s a book called ‘The Sociopath Next Door’ and I thought most sociopaths were violent. In fact they aren’t. But almost all sociopaths want to win no matter what. Some sociopaths use pity. “Oh, woe is me. I just can’t do it like you.” And then you go, “Oh, no no. You’re all right,” and I already got you. I got you in a weak position and feeling sorry for me. I read about one sociopath who was actually a psychologist and she was so sick, there’s this other psychologist that she hated and she had a nicer car than the other woman, so she would purposely park her car next to the other woman’s car just to make her feel bad every day. She was that sick. She was working with this other psychiatrist’s patient and all the work that this woman had done, she destroyed. She brought the person in the room and just destroyed them. They just want to win. There was one sociopath who would steal things in the post office and then get there the next day because he just loved the chaos that it created. He wanted to see how everybody was trying to figure out what it was. I guess it’s a feeling of power. In my journal as I was writing, going through the script, as we were shooting, I had to find a way to win every situation no matter what. There’s a scene we were talking about earlier at the football game, the soccer stadium, whete my character’s willing to even act like a scared little girl to get away. A sociopath will do anything to win. Anything.
Can you talk about being locked in the trunk of a car and going through the waterboarding? Were you scared at all? Was there a safety procedure in case things got close to the vest.
DW: No, I’m not claustrophobic and I don’t want to give it away, but the car wasn’t moving. And I knew how to get out. But no, it didn’t bother me. The waterboarding was close to real and I really wanted to get into it and see what it felt like. It doesn’t feel good. You’d give up the answers.
RR: That was the most disturbing thing I think I’d ever seen, watching him be waterboarded.
DW: Yeah, it was trippy. I wanted to see what it really feels like and I did.
Did you come close to losing consciousness, were you out of breath?
Washington: Once you get caught with an in breath, the water keeps coming and then you’re in trouble. Then you try to hold your breath, but the water’s coming and they’re filling up your mouth. You’ll give up the answers.
Ryan did you really drive the car at all? That was an intense action scene!
RR: Oh yeah, lots of it. What’s odd about the sequences driving the car is that when I’m driving the car it’s actually much less terrifying for me than when we have a pilot guy that’s on top of the car for some of those scenes and he’d have that car on two wheels and Daniel, our director, who’s sitting in the wheel well beside me giggling like a little schoolgirl while the car goes up on two wheels and just yelling, “Faster! Faster!” He can’t see anything and I find out later that Daniel’s never driven a car before in his life. He doesn’t drive. Being in that position was crazy because we would head headlong for a brick wall and I would hit the break and the guy up top would hit the gas. That was a very strange feeling. I’ve never been in a situation like that. I’ve never seen a rig like that for a car. And this is a professional driver up top and he just knows the weight of the car. At least that’s what you’d like to believe when he’s doing it. That stuff was pretty intense.
How was it filming in South Africa post-Apartheid?
DW: When we shot ‘Cry Freedom’ I wasn’t even allowed in South Africa. They told me I could come but I wasn’t going to leave. I had a lot death threats at that time. So we shot in Zimbabwe. In 1995 I had the privilege and the honor to meet Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela the same day; breakfast with Desmond Tutu and lunch with Nelson Mandela. Then, I had the good fortune to have Mr. Mandela actually come to my house in California. There is a whole new generation from what was there in ’89, ’91 so you got twenty year-olds that only heard about it. I saw this show on television and they were talking about South Africa now and it had kids with Valley accents because of the Internet and the information age that we’re in. They are exposed to so much more.
At the same time I still saw a lot of psychological damage. I met a woman there, a very, very fair-skinned woman who was studying psychology. She lived in an area over by the coast, Seacrest, and her mother was Black. Her father was Jewish but in order for her mother to live in that neighborhood, she had to act like she was the maid. They kept the charade up for twenty years. Now imagine the psychological damage it did not only to the mother but also to the daughter. So, there will continue to be psychological scars for years to come. Cape Town is like Santa Monica on steroids. It’s one of the most beautiful towns you’ve ever seen but it’s still set up the old way. You go ten miles inland where the townships are and they are still there. They are helping to build some of them up. It was also interesting talking to an elderly man who built a nice house for himself in the township. So it was like, ‘Why are you living here in the township? Why not move towards the beach?’ He said, ‘Oh no, I don’t trust these people. They might change their minds.’ He was more comfortable there because that was where he grew up. I was quite surprised about Langa. You would think that it’s all just slums, but they had three and four bedroom homes on an acre of land. It’s an area an area they were allowed to live so people decided to stay there.
RR: Langa is one of the oldest townships in South Africa but it’s just teeming with joy. The people there are just incredibly happy given the horrendous circumstances in which they are living. If you’re from the United and you go over there, you can’t believe what you’re seeing.
DW: Langa is so big, it’s not like you can call 911 and the police show up. So they police themselves. We were driving back from the set to the base camp and the women were making all these sounds while these men were walking around this one guy. A man had a big stick and he was whipping the guy. I asked my driver, Jack, ‘What are they doing?’ He said, ‘They’re putting him in his place.’ I said, ‘Whoa! What do you think he did?’ He said it was something related to the women and I said, ‘Well, why doesn’t he run?’ He said, ‘They will kill him if he tries to run. They will stone him.’ So, that still exists, but you can get Direct TV.
RR: Yeah, you get ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’
DW: Yeah, that’s the weirdest thing seeing the Kardashians in Langa.
Denzel, do you have more fun playing bad guy?
DW: The next picture I make that’s coming out the beginning of next year is called ‘Flight’ and I play an alcoholic, drug-addicted pilot who crashes a plan but saved a lot of lives. It was the most intense film I’ve done probably in 20 years. It’s clichéd to say that a bad guy is more fun ‘cause you can say anything, you can get away with anything. Sometimes when you’re the good guy, you’re sort of trapped. ‘Oh, he can’t say that. And even when you’re playing a real person like a Steven Bilko, you’re sort of stuck within those confines. So, yeah, bad guys do have more fun.
Ryan, what attracted you to this story? How was it working with a director who’s making his first American film?
RR: Obviously, the reason I really wanted to do the film was to work with, what I think is the greatest actor working in Hollywood today, Denzel. That was a huge impetus. I just love the idea that my character is sort of slowly disillusioned with everything that he believes in. It’s the slow disintegration of God and country for him and that’s sort of what means everything to this guy and watching that be peeled away slowly, measure by measure by Tobin Frost, who Denzel is playing, goes back to what you asked earlier. It’s what we don’t know that is more terrifying than what we do know. So much goes on behind the scenes that we’ll never, ever know about and I like investigating that world. And to answer the other question, Daniel Espinosa is just a truly incredibly gifted filmmaker and so insightful and a guy who almost acts like a bit of a thug, but he’s read every book you can pretty much imagine and he’s seen every film that you can imagine and he’s learned from the best, and that’s applied everyday to what he does. It really is a craft for him. Daniel’s a guy you want to buy stock in.
‘Safe House’ opens nationwide on February 10.
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