![]() ![]() It was such a journey for all of us, and I never felt any opposition. He stressed the importance of being honest to whatever moment you’re in. Something I loved about his directing style he encourages you to do it a lot of different ways, seeing-as he says-‘what kind of stuff is in the air.’”Īnd Parker added, “I never once felt that I was acting ‘against’ Denzel, or Mr. Smollett added, “The Award is kind of a celebration of all the sweat and all the tears that we collectively shed. It’s definitely a team effort on the set.” He’d always come up to us and say, ‘What do you think about your character in this scene?’ or ‘How do you feel?’ And to me, it was like, ‘Why is this Academy Award winner, two times at that, coming up to me and asking me what I think?’ He trusted us on our research, and trusted that the information that we brought to him and the character we presented would be right for the movie. He never said, ‘Do it this way’-we’d never have to mimic him. But the way he got it out of us was collaborative…he really respected our research. “I would say he expected you to really, really bring to the table what we were hired for. “He was demanding, but I wouldn’t say demanding in a negative way,” Whitaker said. When asked about being directed by-and playing scenes with-Denzel Washington, the trio were unanimously enthusiastic. ![]() He had to somehow put those demons down.” That inner turmoil was what I really wanted to bring to the screen. He had to deal with the fact that he wasn’t considered the equal of his counterparts. had to deal with the day-by-day task of compromising himself as a black man because of his environment. A lot of my research came from talking to Mrs. Nate Parker said of his character, the brilliant but troubled rebel Henry Lowe, “My character is taken from Henry Heights, who was very much Henry Lowe. sat down with me, and we talked about the role and kind of brainstormed how we would play him.” We went to their library, and they had old books-textbooks, yearbooks, artifacts, printouts from newspapers, just everything we could grab onto about our characters. We had to find out background, and to do research they actually took us to Wiley College. Of course there’s a lot with him in the Civil Rights movement, which is passionate and inspiring. “The problem,” he said, “was that there’s not a great deal of James Farmer, Jr., when he was younger. If more of us would do that now, the world would be a much better place.”ĭenzel Whitaker, who plays Samantha’s teammate James Farmer, Jr.-not a composite, but the man who became a celebrated Civil Rights leader, also emphasized the need for researching the characters. You were either a sharecropper or an educated person.’ are taking back something that had been stripped from them. Henrietta said, ‘Education was the death of slavery, of mental enslavement. I figured, not that may other people know about the story, either, and how many of us should know about it-a period of our history when there were so many people striving to defy their circumstances, using the power of the mind and the power of their tongues to do this. That’s one reason I wanted to be part of the project-because I didn’t know about it. I tried everything, couldn’t find anything. She helped me tremendously with my research, because when I read the script about a year and a half ago, I’d never heard about this story, and I started trying to find out…. And she was the one that I tried to draw inspiration from. “But the main thing is that she was the only female on the team. Jurnee Smollett-who plays one of the members of a debating team at Wiley, a small black college in Texas that overcame the odds during the segregated 1930s to challenge squads from other universities (including a culminating match at Harvard)-had just gotten off the phone with ninety-six year old Henrietta Bell, the model for her character of Samantha Booke. The three year stars of “The Great Debaters” visited Dallas on the very day their fact-based movie, directed by Denzel Washington and co-starring him and Forest Whitaker, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as best drama. ![]()
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ERIC
6/11/2024 07:13:43 pm
MIRO TOLIC FROM HOLLY FAMILY DENTAL COME TO MISSISSAUGA ONTARIO 2181 BELFAST CRESCENT TO TAKE 2227 HOUSE
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