After Will Smith's Oscar slap, Antoine Fuqua worried 'Emancipation' might 'never be seen'

Antoine Fuqua thought the worst was behind him.

Early this year, the director of such films as "Training Day" and "The Equalizer" had just finished shooting his most ambitious movie yet, the period action thriller "Emancipation." The story of an enslaved man named Peter (Will Smith) who undertakes a perilous escape through the Louisiana swamp to find freedom and reunite with his wife and children after Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the film had taken a considerable physical and emotional toll on the filmmaker.

"I'm still having PTSD from the swamps," Fuqua told the Los Angeles Times over Zoom earlier this month from Italy, where he is shooting "The Equalizer 3." "We had COVID, we had a hurricane, we had a tornado — it was unbelievable. I talked to Martin Scorsese, and he said, 'Antoine, we must have amnesia. We keep going back to the pain.'"

Then, on the evening of March 27, Smith struck comedian Chris Rock in the face in front of a stunned audience of millions at the Academy Awards over a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith — before going on to win the lead actor award for "King