Denzel Washington rarely likes scripts, likes to get involved in the process

Denzel Washington is one of Hollywood’s most well-known and successful actors, so it should come as no surprise that he’s picky when it comes to scripts. Really, really picky, actually.

Speaking in an interview with The Observer, Washington detailed just how involved he is in the film-making process, even when he’s not producing and directing it. If he sees a script he doesn’t like–which is very nearly all of them, apparently–he’ll get involved.

“Training Day, that character was nothing like it ended up being – it was more like a Lethal Weapon kind of guy, a beer-drinking kind of guy,” Washington explained. “Antoine Fuqua [the director] brought the whole gangster element to it, and we developed it and improvised a lot…”

“Nine times out of nine the script is not there, to my liking. And I’m a logic monster. If things don’t make sense, I gotta make sense out of them, and you get into the process.”

Washington says that he has script approval on every movie he makes, but he points out that “the other side of that is: how can I say anything about it if I haven’t done anything about it? So you start getting in there, and I like that part.”

You can catch Denzel Washington in Safe House, which opened in theaters February 10. You can check out a trailer for the film directly below.