While some filmmakers love to switch genres after every movie, David has once again made a film that deals with the LAPD. Here’s the synopsis:

Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is a veteran LAPD cop who finds life difficult to navigate after the death of his wife.  When evidence implicates him in the execution of his former partner, Detective Terrance Washington (Terry Crews), Ludlow sets out on a quest to find the real murderers responsible and bring them to justice.  With the help of a young Robbery Homicide Detective (Chris Evans), the two team up to tackle the diverse communities of Los Angeles.  Forest Whitaker plays Captain Wander, Ludlow’s supervisor, whose duties include keeping him within the confines of the law and out of the clutches of Internal Affairs Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie).

To help promote the film, I recently participated in roundtable interviews with most of the cast. I’ve already posted the Chris Evans, Cedric the Entertainer and Common interviews, up now is Firest Whitaker.

Since I recently interviewed Forest for “Vantage Point,” I’ll admit I wasn't sure how much new stuff he could talk about. Thankfully, he had a lot to say and I think you’ll find it a great conversation.

As always, you can either read the transcript below or listen to the audio of the interview as an MP3 by clicking here. Finally, here’s a link to the movie clips we posted for “Street Kings.” Again, “Street Kings” opens this Friday at theaters everywhere.  

warning...minor spoilers are discussed in this interview

Question: Are you surprised by the success of Vantage Point?

Forest Whitaker: someone just told me that it made like $80 million already overseas or something. Maybe it'll make $60 something here. So you never know how a movie is going to do. That was like a tough movie to do in a way, physically.

Question: This character was very complex and had at least two faces. When you researched this character and talked to police officers were you surprised at what you found?

Forest Whitaker: I think the classic Rampart thing, that was interesting to study. I guess I wasn't surprised at the corruption. I think in most countries the police aren't paid that much money and they're touching people who have a lot of money. So corruption happens, and I think there's probably less corruption in our police force in some ways than in a lot of other places. But we do have police corruption. We do have it in L.A. We do have cops that go against the rules and do certain things. When they were bringing in advisors, one of them showed me a picture of someone getting interrogated and it was so physically violent. I said, 'Why do you carry this picture with you? Why is this something to be proud of?' So that's a statement that it's real. Also there's the way that criminals are dealt with. I know that cops sometimes over step their bounds and harm people, kill people, beat people, put people on the ground, put people across cars and make you lay in the middle of the street – that's just what they do.

Question: How did you see your character?

Forest Whitaker: I saw him in a way as the head of a family. He's the head of these other cops, but it's also like, 'This is my family and I take care of them. We can all be alright if we stay loyal to each other and follow code.' In that way he's like a Godfather in some ways.

Question: Good or bad? Did you see him either way?

Forest Whitaker: I think some of the things that they do are bad in the sense that they're making judgments on people's lives and killing people. The first time you see him really he's all excited because all these people have been killed. That's not a great thing. I don't think that when I was working on the character though that I was thinking, 'Oh, he's a really bad guy.' I was thinking more about what makes a person like this, who he is, what was he thinking about – that's what I was looking at. Then when I start to put all those things together and I create this weird sort of code in my head, in a way the character becomes moral because I understand the rules and the boundaries that he lives by. In his family everyone understands the rules except for – this is the problem – that Keanu [Reeves] didn't because he hadn't been truly exposed to the truth mainly because he didn't want to see it. So that was the problem, there was a break in my code, a break in the rules, of people understanding truly what was happening.

Question: And that's what Keanu's character was.

Forest Whitaker: That's what happened, yeah.

Question: Was the character corrupted in the name of justice or was he more obsessed with protecting that group?

Forest Whitaker: I think that he viewed bad guys a certain way in the beginning and didn't feel that they had rights because of the things they'd done and the things that he'd seen. I think it's typified by the first scene where they find the two young girls who they've been having sex with and it being put on the internet and stuff, the kiddie porn ring – I think he sees people like that as people who deserve to die and they have no right and if you continue to let them live they'll just continue to, like a fungus, propagate and continue to corrupt the world. So when he finds money on people like that he's like, 'Yeah, I'll take it. Who else is going to get it?' When he finds things like that there's no moral questions there because these guys are wrong, but then once you start to build that kind of power base then all of a sudden it starts become a question too of not losing it. I think that's when power starts to be a problem. How am I going to lose my power? Then you start to make decisions that I think were morally wrong, passing the line of the question. So it's then like do you kill a cop because he knows something about you in order to save your kingdom, your world? That's when you start to lose it and alliances start to be broken.

Question: Was there anyone that you based this character on that you met?

Forest Whitaker: No. I just tried to channel the character and find this energy that would make the character live based on the way that I created the codes around him. I didn't copy any person or something like that.

Question: Did you get any hesitation from the officers you talked to while working on the character? Did body language shift when you were asking those questions?

Forest Whitaker: I think that they had these advisors, some of them who weren't on the force anymore, and those advisors were telling us stuff. Everyone already knew it. There've been books written about Rampart and so some of that stuff is common knowledge, the corruption and we've seen it in many films. We've seen cops taking money out of the trunk, from the drug guy and taking their cash. We've also seen in many films cops fighting other cops. We see that they try to inform on them. We saw that in 'Serpico'. It's nothing new that way. It's just something about the spirit of this one that I think makes it feel a little bit new.

Question: What was working with Keanu like?

Forest Whitaker: I think he's really fun to work with. We started in rehearsals and doing improvs and stuff at David's [Ayers] house, just trying to find our relationship and stuff and the characters and where we were going with it. David was really trying to embed that into the script. Keanu really worked hard. From the very beginning he was into the character and mold the character. He went from being really scruffy with a beard to being the character that he came to now that was even more dark in it's base. I thought that it was nice doing the scenes with him. I thought that he was right in the pocket of the scenes. They were very emotional scenes and he did a great job.

continued on page 2 --------->

Page 2 >>>