FIRE FIRE

interview | DENZEL WASHINGTON & JODIE FOSTER
Washington vs.Foster:
HEAD-TO-HEAD
Two of this generation’s greatest actors finally find themselves together on screen, playing
adversaries in Spike Lee’s heist pic Inside Man I BY EARL DITTMAN
Over the years, two-time Academy Award-winners Denzel
Washington (who won for Glory and Training Day) and
Jodie Foster (winner for The Accused and The Silence of the
Lambs) had talked about finding a suitable project to do
together. But scheduling conflicts, prior commitments and
delayed productions all conspired to keep them apart.
Then, last summer, the planets aligned and Foster,
Washington and fellow Oscar nominees Clive Owen (Closer)
and Willem Dafoe (Shadow of the Vampire, Platoon) all got the
chance to appear in the same film, Inside Man. The icing on
the cake was that the man behind the camera for this twistyturny
heist film would be director Spike Lee.
famous 26 | march 2006
“The way all of us came together for the film was pure fate,”
recalls Washington (who’d previously teamed with Lee for
Malcolm X, He Got Game and Mo’ Better Blues) during a recent
interview in New York City. “Spike and I were wanting to do
another movie for a long time, but I was already committed
to other projects. And it was the same with Jodie. She told me
that she and Spike were always talking about doing a movie
together, but they could never get the timing down right.”
In the summer of 2005, after completing his run in
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on Broadway, Washington was
about to make the drug-lord bio-pic Tru Blue. “It’s about
Frank Lucas, one of the biggest drug dealers in the history of