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Hold your left hand in front of you with your thumb and forefinger forming an L. Then do the same thing with your right hand. Now move them around in unison. This is what Denzel Washington does when he talks.
He knows it, too, and he's embarrassed. ''It's such a cliche, it's silly,'' he says when he catches himself in the act.
Apparently he's been gesturing like this for some time. Since 1996, in fact, when he first met with producer Todd Black to discuss playing the role of a military psychiatrist in the biographical drama Antwone Fisher. ''He was talking and he kept making camera movements with his hands,'' Black recalls. ''I'm like, 'You're talking like a director.' He said, 'Well, I'm thinking about maybe directing, and maybe directing this.'''
Six years later, Washington's hands have fashioned something extraordinary. Antwone Fisher, the story of a foster child-turned-Navy seaman whose therapist pushes him to confront the abuse he suffered as a child and to find his biological family, is notable for its sensitive direction. The film not only marks Washington's feature debut behind the camera but also caps a remarkable year for the man, who turns 48 on Dec. 28. His Best Actor Oscar win in March for his villainous turn in Training Day made Washington the only African American to claim that statuette since Lilies of the Field's Sidney Poitier in 1964. He scored his first $20 million paycheck for the upcoming thriller Out of Time. Even the potential throwaway John Q., in which he played a father who takes an ER hostage, became a $71 million-grossing crowd-pleaser. Add it all up, and there's simply no one else who could be our Entertainer of the Year.
As his old friend Julia Roberts, who had a hard time masking her glee when she presented him with the Oscar, puts it: ''To watch someone that you know to be an exceptional flier expand their wings just a little bit further, and to know that they can capture just that much more altitude and wind speed -- it's a treat.''
''It's been 20 years since I came out here to do St. Elsewhere. It was 1982,'' says Washington, dripping honey into his chamomile tea at a hotel bar in Beverly Hills. ''I was thinking about that right after I won the Academy Award. I was going, Boy, that was an interesting 20-year chapter.''
The time had come, naturally, to turn the page. Washington says he realized his new career incarnation should begin with Antwone Fisher when he first perused the raw autobiographical script Fisher had cobbled together (he'd later turn it into the 2001 book Finding Fish: A Memoir) during a five-month stint in 1993 as a security guard at the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City. ''There were tears on those pages when I read it,'' Washington says. ''Whether it was a perfect screenplay or not doesn't matter. The same emotions that people are feeling when they watch the movie now are the same emotions I felt when I read it.''
But it would be a while until Washington had his own director's chair. ''Once I said I'd do it, I had another four or five years to get ready,'' he says. ''All the films I did from that point, I'd be watching the director.'' His tutors, whether they knew it or not, included Phillip Noyce (The Bone Collector), Norman Jewison (The Hurricane), and Antoine Fuqua (Training Day).
