This, obviously, is what drew him to the script--"It interrupted all my plans, this movie"--and he's relying on the camaraderie of the set and sheer focus to get him past weird stuff like shooting in an intensive-care unit very similar to ones he's familiar with. "It gives me the creeps going in there," the towering, tattooed director acknowledges. "It takes me a lot of places I don't want to go. Is that cathartic, or is that some kind of sacrifice you make for your art, or just to tell a story? Was my kid sick for a reason, or am I doing this movie for a reason? These are all things that I really can't put my finger on. But here we are." He rises as cinematographer Rogier Stoffers calls him over to the camera. "It'll all get sorted out in the wash."
Cut to February 2002. New President. New world. Scary world. Maybe not a world predisposed to look kindly on a movie about a guy waving a gun in an emergency room. But here we are. Washington's still on a roll, having followed Titans with a freshly Oscar-nominated bad-cop turn in Training Day. Heche is now married to Laffoon, and eight months pregnant. Sasha's holding steady, according to her dad. And John Q., which is dedicated to her, worked first-weekend audiences into a happily outraged, $23.6 million lather with its mix of nice-guy antiheroics and unapologetic HMO-bashing (see review on page 55).
In a sense, the moment is no less ripe for a pop-culture debate than it was nine years ago, when Kearns wrote the script. "I don't know that a movie's going to change the way people think," says Washington, "but at least it keeps it in our minds. We've got so many other pressing issues now, with the military and terrorism, that this is going to be pushed even further onto the back burner." And, says Cassavetes, "everybody's had a family member or a friend or an acquaintance or even themselves who've been screwed around by the medical bureaucracy. Everybody knows a horror story. And why should we?"
In the end, of course, it's not its message or its politics or its back story or even its stars that put John Q. over. Washington knows. People like the movie or they don't. And apparently they like it.
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