Denzel Washington on whether he's reached a peak and when he'll start slowing down:

"I’m not moving that fast. People say, 'Wow, you’ve got a lot of movies out.' And I’m like, ‘Well, actually, I did one last year and one this year.’ I did American Gangster last year. They waited a year before they put it out. I’m enjoying what I’m doing. I’ve got a new life now behind the camera, so it’s really like I’m starting over. So, the plateau, for me, was probably about ten years ago in terms of how I felt about what I was doing and the work and all of that. I started looking for other things to do at least about ten years ago. It’s just getting out there now. This didn’t start yesterday."

On drawing inspiration from other directors:

"We didn¹t talk a lot but I have a greater appreciation, even in the first film I directed, especially, a great appreciation for what a director does. I had no idea. I just thought, ‘Action! Cut! Press junket.’ [laughs]. There’s a little bit more than that. So, I had studied Spike’s {Lee] film and I’ve studied a lot... I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with a lot of great filmmakers, so I went back and I look at a lot of their work, and suddenly things click and make sense that I may have learned from them; from Spike, from Ed Zwick, from Jonathan Demme or Ridley Scott or whoever that I hadn’t been able to apply yet. But now, as a filmmaker, I’m able to apply them. All of that was getting stored in the computer [motions to his head]. Now I’m getting a chance to use it."

The state of debating in the 1930s versus debating today, and whether we've lost the art:

"We’re not developing that muscle that imagines as we used to. We went from spoken word to radio to television to film or computer. I got a letter from Henrietta Wells, and one of the things that was beautiful about it was how well it was written, the penmanship. My kids write like chicken scratch because they don’t have to write anymore. It’s not the sport that it was. Talking to Dr. Freeman, they do have big debates but he said, many times there will be ten, fifteen, twenty people in the audience. It seemed to make a turn around post World War II. I think, with the advent of television, it just wasn’t as popular anymore. I don’t know that it ever will be like it was, but I think the spoken word still is popular. It’s no coincidence that one of the dominant themes contributing to our culture now is Hip-Hop or Rap, which is getting right back to poetry whether you like what they’re saying sometimes or not. There’s good poetry out there and bad poetry. And I kind of wanted to... I didn’t do it in any obvious way, but I wanted to make that connection to the spoken word. It was important for me to have young people speak so that "F**k the Police" is not the only thing young people have to say. But that is somehow what we end up writing about or what ends up on the airwaves. But there are other rappers as well that are very intelligent, that have a lot to say like Common or Tribe Called Quest or other groups. These guys [young actors] are basically doing what rappers say, they’re spittin’ in competition. It’s verbal jujitsu, absolutely."

Wshington on a single word describes how he feels about The Great Debaters:

"Well, my kids grew up with "Do what you gotta do so that you can do what you want to do." That came from me. [laughs] I don't know if it came from me. I must have heard it somewhere else. But it was a theme in the movie. So again, going back to our fast food society - we teach our young kids, everything we sell them tells them that it can happen fast, that you don't really have to do anything. That you can leap over and just do what you want. 'You can just put down four lines on a piece of paper and be a millionaire rapper tomorrow. It's fine.' You know, it doesn't talk about the process that it takes to get there. So I've always instilled that in my children: You do what you have to do first. It doesn't work the other way around. 'Dad, can I go out?' 'Did you do your homework?' 'No.' 'Well, do what you have to do so that you can do what you want to do, and so that you can feel good having done that.' And it's just a lesson for life, because to try and learn that lesson at 19, 20, 21 is too late."

On whether he encourages kids to debate:

"Well, to express their opinion. Whether they're on the debating team or go out for the debating team, I haven't necessarily encouraged them to do that. But just to believe in themselves and to stand up for their own opinions, and to do their research, you know? To do what they have to do to study hard and believe in themselves. But no, I haven't encouraged any of my children to debate, no, to join a debating team, necessarily."

Denzel Washington on what he's doing next:

"I don't know what I'm going to do next. So I like to keep it close to the vest. But, you know, this was just a really good story. I liked it. I call it a sports movie. You know, in those days, that's what they considered it, a spectator sport, and it was a very popular event to go to, so that was interesting. The fact that there were only 360 students at this college and they were going up against these big schools, that was very fascinating. When I interviewed Mel Tolson's son at Henrietta Wells -- she was actually - she actually debated in 1931. And what they talked about was how prepared they were. They weren't intimidated. They were prepared. It was a sort of cocoon, if you will. It's a movie so there are big dramatic strokes in it that didn't necessarily happen in two hours in their life. Maybe it happened in the course of 20 or 30 years or five or 10 years, but the fact of the matter was that when they got up on that stage and they went against anyone, they were not intimidated by anyone. And as a matter of fact we changed it. I said I wanted it to be Harvard, in actual fact the national champions were USC. But there's no question that everybody they went against they beat. So it didn't matter if it was Harvard, USC."