“To Protect The Sheep You Gotta Catch The Wolf, And It Takes A Wolf To Catch A Wolf.”
That motto used by corrupt policeman Alonzo Harris summarizes his situation in the ferocious crime thriller “Training Day” (2001) which – seen under the new perspectives gained after this Summer’s headlines – has become timelier and more prescient than ever. For Alonzo, the line between criminality and law enforcement has been completely blurred. I hadn’t seen “Training Day” since the year it was released, becoming a box office sensation and garnering an Oscar for Best Actor to Denzel Washington as well as a nomination to Ethan Hawke for Best Supporting Actor. The original release date had been pushed back slightly after 9/11 – and because our trust and respect for police officers were at an all-time high. Screenwriter David Ayers had written the script years before Rampart CRASH Officer Rafael Perez’s arrest for swiping cocaine from an LAPD evidence locker leading to the scandal of widespread corruption involving police officers’ misconduct and covering up of evidence – including unprovoked shootings, beatings, planting of false evidence, theft and drug dealing.
Ayers based the screenplay on his experiences going to high school in South Central near “the Jungle.” It’s quite a strong narrative – that is part “Chinatown,” “The French Connection,” and “Serpico.” It all takes place in one day that transforms the lives of two officers: Jake Hoyt (Hawke) – a by-the-book yet ambitious young police officer with a young wife and kid who wants to be selected for an elite narcotics unit and is being evaluated by Alonzo (Washington) – the unethical detective who works the gang-infested, perfidious territory of the Rampart Division. “I’ll do anything you want me to,” Jake eagerly tells him. Alonzo drives a 1979 Monte Carlo Lowrider which he calls his office. They start off their day by dramatically pulling over three college kids buying marijuana. After confiscating it, Alonzo encourages Hoyt to smoke it. “A good narcotics agent should have narcotics in his blood,” he says. Jake refuses at first but agrees to doing it after Alonzo puts a gun to his temple. The marijuana turns out to be laced with PCP.
“What’s wrong with street justice?” asks Alonzo when Jake wants to arrest and process some junkies he stopped from raping a young girl. Alonzo pulls out his guns, threatens the punk and beats them up. In order for him to rein in crime in Los Angeles, Alonzo has become as ruthless as the streets he patrols – bending and stretching the law for his own benefit. It turns out that there’s an urgency to Alonzo’s day – and we learn that he needs Jake as much as Jake needs him. He will take the rookie onto the mean streets of Los Angeles.
Denzel Washington – one of the most charismatic actors currently working in cinema – relishes inhabiting this villainous role. We’ve never seen him tackle such a character, and he does it with precision and intensity. His smile is simply covering up his true nature. Just like the wolf he mentions throughout the movie – he uses his seductive quality to get you to side with him, and slowly he starts to show the dark side of his persona. The character he’s playing maybe losing control, but not the actor. It’s a staggering achievement. In the last scene, he does a speech that has a Shakespearean quality to it. “King Kong ain’t got shit on me!” he shouts. It’s extraordinary. Ethan Hawke is a great sparring partner.
Director Antoine Fuqua has a strong grip on this material. He uses the ride through the streets of Los Angeles – this urban nightmare – as a representation of Alonzo’s mental state and as well as a larger commentary on the system and our society. The streets become a mind game. I love that he chose the high key lighting to show us a vision of dishonesty in plain sight. The sun beaming harshly down on us. At times the movie has the feel of a Western playing out in an urban landscape – a showdown between the two cops’ moral beliefs. There’s a Mexican stand-off between Alonzo and Jake – and Fuqua has Jake on high angle and Alonzo on a low angle. Their final duel has a lot of verve – and great camera work. That it takes place in one day – from 5am until late at night — works on many levels. It’s a long day’s journey into night.
Alonzo Harris: “Nothing’s free in this world, Jake. Not even arrest warrants.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on HBO Max and Sling TV and to rent on YouTube, Google Play, Amazon, Microsoft, iTunes, Vudu, Apple TV, FandangoNOW, Redbox, DIRECTV AND AMC Theatres on Demand.
Written by David Ayer
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott, Glenn, Cliff Curtis, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
122 minutes
Writing “Training Day”
…David Ayer grew up in this same area of Los Angeles, where he was personally witness to the ways in which hardened gang members and equally hardened inner city cops danced around one another. Long before the Rampart scandal, Ayer wanted to show how it really is in these war zones within America – and just how hard it is to walk the line between cop and criminal in a place where neither can afford to show any mercy. In 1995, he began writing a screenplay that would prove to be prophetic. “I wanted to capture the rough and raw reality of the law enforcement mind-set in inner cities and look at where it comes from and also where it can lead,” says Ayer. “I wanted to ask the question: ‘When a cop goes bad what does it do not only to the man but to the community?’” While writing “Training Day,” Ayer unflinchingly immersed himself in the day-to-day rapport between gang-bangers and undercover officers in Los Angeles’ toughest neighborhoods. “I spent a lot of time observing and talking with people who live and work in these areas,” he says. “I really wanted to get beneath the surface of what it’s like to be a cop out here and how the community looks at them.”
Ayer put most of what he learned about how and why cops use down and dirty methods into the character of Alonzo, who he calls “a guy who’s so good at his job, it’s come at the expense of his soul.” Ayer wanted Alonzo be a seductive character, someone you want to believe in, want to care about, but who exists in a moral gray zone where right and wrong are no longer clear to him. “I myself had many different feelings while writing him,” admits Ayer. “There were times when I thought he was the greatest person in the world and other times when I was furious with myself for writing the words he speaks. One thing I knew for sure is that Alonzo himself believes he is right. He doesn’t see himself as evil – in his own heart, he has decided that he is doing what is best for everybody.” As a counterpoint, Ayer then created the character of Jake Hoyt, the young rookie who, until this day, had no idea how things really operate in the streets. “The interesting thing is that Jake is who Alonzo used to be. Jake’s a young, daisy-fresh rookie from the Valley. He’s a guy who became a cop because he really believed in justice,” says Ayer. “But the more he sees of Alonzo, who is so incredibly charismatic and effective and yet a real trickster, the more he has to question his beliefs until, in the end, he has to make his own decisions about what’s right and wrong.” Once Ayer had created his characters, he made the decision to tell the story over one adrenaline-fueled 24-hour period. “I am fascinated by the kind of day a person has where everything is transformed,” says Ayer. “I liked the idea that Ethan Hawke’s character wakes up in the morning, kisses his wife goodbye, goes to work and comes home a different man. He will never be the same again.” (web.archive.org)
Director Antoine Fuqua on “Training Day”
Fresh from his stylish thriller, “The Replacement Killers,” Fuqua wanted to create a gritty, unflinching, fast-moving intro to life on the other side of the legal line. From the moment he read David Ayer’s script, Fuqua had in mind the raw realism of films such as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Serpico,” but with his own contemporary street-wise visual style. “I was immediately drawn to the script because it reminded me of the great cop dramas of the seventies,” he says. “It’s about something but it’s also a really interesting challenge for a filmmaker because you have to take these characters through an incredible amount of action and transformation in just one day.” For Fuqua, capturing the visceral nature of life on the streets was paramount. “I only wanted to shoot in real locations with real people in the background,” he says. “I want to make it clear that these are everyday experiences in some people’s lives. The reality of life for cops and criminals in the inner-city isn’t something we should hide from – it’s something we should be talking about and thinking about.” Fuqua came to the project with a street credibility that uniquely prepared him for what was to come. “Antoine Fuqua might be the only director around who can move through Hollywood and the gritty streets of Watts or Rampart or Crenshaw with equal agility,” says Bobby Newmyer. “And that’s what this movie required.” (web.archive.org)
Denzel Washington on “Training Day”
For Denzel Washington, it was an irresistible opportunity. “I always look for a departure in every new role I do,” he acknowledges. “You might say that this is the first time I’ve played a bad guy, but I don’t really see Alonzo as bad. He’s confused, he’s over the line, he’s angry, but he’s not entirely bad. I think in some ways he’s done his job too well. He’s learned how to manipulate, how to push the line further and further, and, in the process, he’s become more hard-core than some of the guys he’s chasing.” Washington was able to understand the ways in which Alonzo may have shifted over time, winding up as the man who takes Jake Hoyt into a 24-hour pressure cooker. “I think it’s a case of if you’re dealing with violent people every day, you wind up having to be just as violent,” he says. “Alonzo didn’t start out like this, but he had to be more clever, more cunning than the criminals he was after and it taught him how to go over the line. And, once you’ve crossed that line, it’s very hard to go back.” Washington even had a strong sense of the character’s street-honed style. “I always saw him wearing a lot of jewelry – you know, he’s got his diamonds and his gold rings and his imitation Rolex,” says Washington. “He’s not the kind of cop who’s sneaking up on people. He’s in the neighborhood operating like the drug dealers he’s after.” Also intriguing to Washington was the increasingly complex relationship between Alonzo and the rookie Jake. “I think that Alonzo starts out seeing Jake as someone he can use, another potential member of his gang, but he also really wants to teach Jake to be a good cop,” explains Washington. “He wants to cut to the chase and show Jake how things are really done, take the weakness out of him. The big questions for Alonzo are can he trust this kid, and can this kid survive.” Perhaps the most interesting, and frightening, aspect of the role for Washington was honing the kind of aggressiveness that marks a successful undercover cop. “When you add aggressiveness to your personality, it magnifies who you are,” he observes. “It brings out the darker side, and that’s what happens to Alonzo, so I had to be willing to go to those dark places.” (web.archive.org)
Fuqua on Filming “Training Day”
“When I shot ‘Training Day,’ he was, “Absolutely you’ve got to shoot down there [in South-Central] — where else you gonna shoot it?!” And I remember one day down on the set with Denzel, I was filming and I couldn’t find him, and I looked up on the porch, and he was up there on the porch with all these older women, and they were cooking for him, and all the young kids were around, and he was just hanging out where all the people were. And that told me right away what kind of person he was. I don’t know how many times he was in his trailer. He was always with the kids — him and Ethan (Hawke, his co-star) — hanging out with everyone. And that influenced me a lot because I realized by watching the effect they had on these kids.” (edition.cnn.com)
About Director Antoine Fuqua
A native of Pittsburgh, Fuqua cut his teeth in film by directing videos for such artists as Arrested Development, Prince, and Toni Braxton, and the tell-tale signs of admitted influence Tony Scott could clearly be seen even in these early works. Commercials for Reebok and Toyota found Fuqua continuing to develop his strong sense of style, and in 1998, he finally earned his first feature-film credit with “The Replacement Killers.” A loud, flashy, and exciting journey through the criminal underworld, the film was initially dismissed as an exercise in style over substance, despite the fact that it was an undeniably enjoyable action romp. He went on to film “Bait,” an action comedy starring Jamie Foxx, but it was Fuqua’s next film that would prove that he could also paint interesting and compelling characters. Though the good-cop/bad-cop routine had been played out by the time “Training Day” hit theaters in 2001, the combination of David Ayer’s smart script, Fuqua’s assured direction, and powerhouse performances by lead actors Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke created one of the most arresting police dramas of its time. In addition to substantially boosting its director’s reputation, “Training Day” earned lead actors Washington and Hawke both Academy Award nominations — with Washington taking home the Oscar for Best Actor. Fuqua followed up with the bombastic action thriller “Tears of the Sun” and his 2004 blues documentary “Lightning in a Bottle” found the generally flashy director toning things down a bit to investigate the history of one of America’s most beloved musical styles. Later that year, Fuqua returned to feature territory with what would be his biggest production to date, a historical drama detailing the life of the eponymous leader of the Knights of the Round Table, “King Arthur.” (apbspeakers.com) …Fuqua most recently directed and executive produced the critically acclaimed documentary, “What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali,” for HBO. Fuqua Films is also producing the drama series “#FreeRayShawn,” starring Laurence Fishburne and Stephan James, for short-form streaming platform Quibi. He has executive produced and created numerous television series including “The Resident,” “Shooter,” “Training Day” and “Ice.” On the feature side, Fuqua recently reteamed with Mark Wahlberg (“Shooter”) and Lorenzo di Bonaventura for Infinite and also reteamed with Denzel Washington on “Equalizer 2.” He previously directed Washington in “Training Day,” which earned the actor an Academy Award, “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Equalizer.” Fuqua’s other features include the boxing drama “Southpaw,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, the blockbuster “Olympus Has Fallen,” starring Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman; “Brooklyn’s Finest,” starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke; and the international hit “King Arthur,” starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. In the documentary genre, Fuqua also directed the acclaimed live-blues documentary “Lightning in a Bottle,” executive produced by Martin Scorsese, and directed and produced “American Dream/American Knightmare,” about record industry mogul Suge Knight. “With all of the new digital platforms and the growing appetite among viewers for fresh, original work, it’s an incredible time to be directing and producing television,” said Fuqua. “I’m excited to be working with the amazing Propagate team to bring great stories to life.” Fuqua is also an award-winning commercial and music video director, having worked with artists including Prince and brands such as Nike, Armani and Pirelli, among others…(deadline.com)