Director Davis Guggenheim is best known not for the handful for TV episodes he’s directed or his feature films like “Gracie” or uh, “Gossip,” but instead for the probing hot button documentaries “An Inconvenient Truth” and the recently released “Waiting For Superman.” But we may have never gotten those films if weren’t for Denzel Washington who didn’t want him to direct “Training Day.”
Speaking to the AV Club, Guggenheim reveals how getting canned from “Training Day” led him on the path to making movies about “people I like.” Zing. We guess Denzel and Davis don’t exchange Christmas cards.
The A.V. Club: What’s the relationship between your documentary about first-year teachers, The First Year, and Waiting For Superman? Davis Guggenheim: I was going to direct the movie Training Day, and I got fired. Denzel Washington didn’t want me to direct the movie. Yeah, everyone in Hollywood behaves so badly. So I thought, “I’m going to go make a movie about people I like,” and I bought a little camera, and I spent a year in five different schools, and I was literally in the car with them driving to their first day of school.