JUST LIKE XABI Alonso in the Champions League final in 2005, snatching up the rebound after his penalty had been saved by AC Milan goalie Dida, Richard Wenk got two bites at The Equalizer. The first time he was offered the chance to write a big-screen reboot of the ’80s Edward Woodward vigilante show came around the year 2000. “I said, ‘It’s a TV show, thanks a lot’, and that was the end of that,” laughs Wenk. He then went about his business as an in-demand writer of solid, character-based action with the likes of 16 Blocks and The Mechanic, but it came his way again, courtesy of producers Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal. This time, before he could say no, they dropped a name that is the Hollywood equivalent of an open goal. “They said, ‘We have Denzel Washington, who will read it without an offer,’” recalls Wenk. “I was like, ‘Oh, hold on…’” Back of the net.
Which is how Wenk began the journey that has seen him write all three of the Equalizer movies for Washington and director Antoine Fuqua. When Wenk began work on the first movie, though, he threw away pretty much everything from the TV show, bar the general notion of his hero righting wrongs, or ‘equalizing’ (yes, we know that’s the American spelling), and the character name. Everything else —McCall’s OCD, his calmness, his inventive use of über-violence —came from Wenk, knowing that he was writing for Denzel Washington. “I started writing without an outline, as if I just stumbled upon this guy,” he tells Empire. “Denzel can do more with nothing than even the greatest actors can do with a soliloquy. That’s what inspired the first 30 minutes of the movie, in which nothing happens.”
Nothing, that is, until everything happens. When McCall explodes into action, time seemingly slows down as he turns the tables (and chairs and corkscrews and credit cards, and anything else he can get his hands on) on the bad guys. “I remember writing the Russian office in the first one, and writing it very poetically, where you’d go into his eye and you’d see the room how he sees it,” says Wenk, who was inspired by hearing Michael Jordan talk about how he perceived the final ten seconds of basketball games. “And I never thought Antoine would shoot it. It was just a good read. But Antoine read it, figured out a way to shoot it and enhance it. He embraced the violence.”