Cheshire on Film | Godfrey Cheshire | Two Tar Heels In Hollywood: Working With Denzel Washington and Will Smith

Two Tar Heels In Hollywood: Working With Denzel Washington and Will Smith

By Godfrey Cheshire

For many folks, the December holidays mean seeing old friends and new movies. For me, this year, the convergence is unusually personal and intriguing.
Peyton Reed and Hughes Winborne are Raleigh natives and graduates of UNC-Chapel Hill who now live in Los Angeles. They’re not acquainted with each other, but I’ve known both for decades and have enjoyed watching the successful careers they’ve built in Hollywood. Hughes, a film editor, won an Oscar for his work on the 2004 drama Crash. Peyton, a director, has made four features, all comedies; the last, The Break-Up, starring Vince Vaughan and Jennifer Aniston, earned over $200 million worldwide.
I would venture that the success of both filmmakers proves that studio moviemaking not only permits intelligence and integrity, but in many cases also requires them. That may be especially true when the movies in question involve Hollywood’s most valuable commodity: A-list movie stars.

The movies these two have in store for us this month illustrate the importance of top talent to Hollywood’s year-end sweepstakes. Peyton’s Yes Man stars Jim Carrey, a comic actor whose movies have surely grossed in the billions by now. Seven Pounds, Hughes’ latest project, toplines Will Smith, whose earnings have made him the world’s number one movie star.
I caught up with Hughes and Peyton separately in mid-November to talk about their latest movies and the challenges of working with two of Hollywood’s priciest leading men. We were all aware that their films will be going head-to-head in the movie year’s busiest week: Both open nationwide on Dec. 19.
Peyton and Jim
“I was challenged because Jim Carrey was interested in the material,” Peyton recalls of first sizing up the script of Yes Man, as we chat in a mutual friend’s apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village.
There’s a subtle distinction in his use of “interested.” Carrey hadn’t “developed” the project, nor was he “attached,” in the usual Hollywood parlance. His potential involvement was conditional: He would consider moving forward if he liked the director and his ideas about how the script should be shaped.
The script under consideration, adapted from a comic memoir by British writer Danny Wallace, concerns a guy who, depressed after a breakup, meets a man on a bus who urges him to turn his life around by saying “yes” to everything. Peyton’s interest in working with Carrey on the material was likewise conditional: He inclined toward it if the high-concept nonsense of many studio comedies could be jettisoned in favor of a much more realistic, down-to-earth approach.
“When I went in and first talked to Warner Bros. about what I wanted to do with the script, and in the movie, I said that most Jim Carrey comedies have some kind of magical conceit, like the ones in Liar, Liar and Bruce Almighty. And I liked the idea of doing that type of comedy with Jim, but without the conceit.
“Also, when I think of those movies, I think of a setting that’s like Anytown, USA, or the back lot. And I really wanted to take Jim out and put him in real locations. I made the choice to place the story in a very specific part of Los Angeles: Echo Park, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, that area just east of Hollywood. So it was shot all on real locations, and that part of Los Angeles is a real presence in the movie. To me, that was important because it was all about trying to make Jim Carrey seem like a real guy.”
Fortunately, the guy himself welcomed the idea of playing a real guy.
“I met with him at his house the first time. With so many actors that have been around for a while, you never quite know what to expect. There’s a certain amount of legend that surrounds Jim. So I was very surprised to meet him and find that in person he’s a very kind of quiet and thoughtful person. And it became clear to me very early on that we did have the same movie in mind.
“I talked to him very straightforwardly. I said for me this film needs to have one foot in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — in terms of his performance — and one foot in a more straightforward studio comedy. And that was what we really clicked on. When the comedy comes, it’s got to be aggressive and funny, but it’s also got to be very character-based and situation-based and grounded.”
That basic agreement, Peyton says, led to a collaboration that was consistently smooth and collegial, belying the rumors of difficulty that tend to accrue to stars like Carrey. Budget and schedule meant that they had to shoot in a tight 60 days, rather than the 100 that many studio movies take, and Carrey kept the team spirit up by hanging out on the set and joking with the crew — a quality Peyton feels is reflected in the movie.
“I had my personal feelings about what I’d like to capture of Jim. For me it was — particularly when I started to spend time with him in these writing sessions, discussing the movie — I wanted to capture that guy. Because Jim is really, really funny in real life, but it’s a very different, more grounded type of comedy than what you think of in his more stylized, broad movies. I wanted to capture that Jim Carrey, who seems like someone you would hang out with, someone you would know in real life.”
I ask if he would work with Carrey again. He replies without a pause: “Yes, absolutely.”

Hughes and Will (and Denzel)
“What, are you trying to get me in trouble?” Hughes laughs over the phone. We’re talking as he drives from his home in east LA to his editing suite on the Sony Pictures lot. I’ve just asked him to compare the last two stars he’s worked with: Denzel Washington and Will Smith.
In a serendipitous career turn, Hughes has developed associations with the country’s two top African-American male movie stars. Recommended by Crash director Paul Haggis, he edited The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Smith. Then he cut last year’s The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Washington. Now he’s working with Smith again, on Seven Pounds. How, I wonder, did he get to work with both stars?
“I guess it’s my plantation background,” he deadpans. There’s another pause for laughter, then he explains that one of the producers of Pursuit of Happyness also produced Great Debaters, and recommended Hughes to Washington.
He clearly likes both stars personally, and says that, for him, the differences between them have to do not only with their personalities, but also with the circumstances in which he worked with them. Since Washington directed Great Debaters, he and Hughes spent seven months in close, daily contact. Their schedule was so tight that when Hughes wanted to get married he did so in the editing room with Denzel serving as best man.
Smith’s latest, by contrast, was directed by Gabriele Muccino, an Italian hand-picked by the star for Pursuit of Happyness. There’s no question who the final arbiter is, Hughes says.
“In Seven Pounds, Will is very involved. He’s the last word. After all the producers and everybody have signed off, it’s not done until Will signs off. And he has his own perspective on things. This is kind of a trickier film, and trickier for him.
“It feels very plastic. It could be restructured in many different ways, and characters could be drawn differently just by dropping a few lines. Will’s character could become more accessible or more inaccessible or less dangerous by dropping lines. He has a bit to say about that. He tends to want his jokes to be more edgy than some of the producers do. He’s taken a lot of chances on this film.
“It’s dark. I can’t tell you that much because it’s a mystery and I would give the whole thing away. But I can tell you it’s about a guy who’s done something horrible, in his mind, and is trying to do something to make up for it. He’s trying to help a certain number of people. One is a woman, played by Rosario Dawson, that he wants to help and happens to fall in love with. That changes everything and puts him in a real quandary.”
I ask why he thinks Smith has pursued so many dark, dramatic roles in recent years, when his forte clearly is light comedy.
“I think he’s a very ambitious guy. I don’t think he wants to do just the things that he’s good at. He likes to take risks. He’s a very smart person and, you know, he’s not hurting for cash. It’s not that he’s not thinking of his future in the industry. He’s very good at promoting himself. He loves people, and it’s totally genuine. He loves performing. But he also wants to broaden his horizons. He wants more respect than would come from just doing a comedy. I mean, he’s a natural for that. It’s almost effortless for him.
“He wants to expand his abilities, to improve. I truly think that’s what he’s trying to do.”