PITTSBURGH — Antoine Fuqua has been a consistent presence behind the camera since 1990 and cemented his place in Hollywood by directing Denzel Washington to an Academy Award in 2001's "Training Day." The man put out two movies this year alone: "Infinite," a sci-fi adventure released in June on Paramount+, and "The Guilty," a claustrophobic thriller set in a 911 call center. That film streams Friday on Netflix.
Fuqua, who was born in the Hill District and grew up in Homewood, said his childhood helped shape his worldview as a man and still affects how he makes movies.
"I had a great family, beautiful mother, father, cousins and all that stuff," he told the Post-Gazette. "The violence that took place around us was part of the world that we unfortunately all lived in because of economics. What affected me most was that Pittsburgh is a tough town. Gotta play football, basketball, baseball. It's cold in the winter. It's like 'Deer Hunter.'
"But also, those kind of towns are tricky because if someone's dealing with mental health, it's not something we talk about. You get up and go to work. Sometimes emotionally, you smother what you're really feeling and dealing with, which was masculinity in my case. That's not always good. I've carried that through 'Training Day' and 'Brooklyn's Finest' and 'The Guilty' for better or worse. ...
"'I don't have to deal with therapists, I got this.' And that's not always good.
"It's a place where the cliche is: Men are men. When you grow up and have kids, what does that really mean? It can get you in trouble because you don't ask for help as you should. I've carried that with me. I've seen friends and family members that way. I try to put some of that in the movie. I had a very spiritual youth. I went to church every day. So that's in all my movies as well.
"Pittsburgh is a big influence on my way of thinking," Fuqua concluded. "The town's changing, and so is the idea of masculinity."
He tries to explore mental-health struggles and what masculinity can look like in 2021 in "The Guilty," which finds Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to save a woman who says she's been kidnapped while also navigating troubles in his own personal and professional lives. The whole thing takes place in that 911 dispatch facility, a function of the COVID-19 pandemic and Fuqua's desire to experiment with the traditional action-thriller setup.
"The Guilty" is based on a 2018 Danish film of the same name. Fuqua wasn't familiar with the story until Gyllenhaal asked him to consider directing this project. The two worked together on the 2015 boxing film "Southpaw" — filmed in Western Pennsylvania — and had been searching for a way to collaborate again ever since. Gyllenhaal acquired the rights to remake the Danish film and Fuqua was down for the challenge.
"To create a suspense thriller and have it centered on one guy was really exciting," he said. "Difficult, but that's what we live for."
The character of Joe Baylor is "kind of dying on the inside" as he faces what Fuqua likens to a Dante's "Inferno"-esque journey on a single night with a burning Los Angeles only visible on video screens in the call center. He wanted Gyllenhaal to be a little more expressive than the lead in the Danish original, but the general framework remains: a relatively ho-hum evening "and then one phone call changes his life."
Directing the film became even more difficult when Fuqua was exposed to someone with COVID-19. Rather than shut down production, he opted to direct the whole thing from a van parked a block away from the studio. The van was tricked out with monitors so Fuqua could see what was taking place on camera, and he communicated with Gyllenhaal and the other actors through phone and Zoom calls.
"At first it was very frustrating," Fuqua said. "You want to be with your crew on set and do that work. At some point, I realized I was in the same situation as the character. I couldn't move. Something about the energy of that started to work. It was all about listening and sound and what you don't see. Somehow, it became a creative opportunity."
There is also quite a bit of voice-acting in "The Guilty" due to most of Gyllenhaal's conversations taking place over the phone. Fuqua compared his direction on vocal performances from the likes of Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough and Peter Sarsgaard to making a long podcast episode.
"When I was in my van and my space, when I would talk to these other amazing actors, we were very precise even in rehearsal about what was being said and the rhythm of that," he said. "Since they weren't going to be on camera, it was like, if a blind person was listening to this, how would it sound?"
Fuqua said that he did have a shot list of sequences that could have been filmed instead of just implied over the phone. Once "The Guilty" came together, however, he decided that "imagining is stronger than anything I could've filmed."
