Travolta plays the mastermind behind a group that holds a subway train full of passengers hostage in an effort to force New York City to pay $10,000,000 for their safe release. Washington stars as a disgraced subway bigwig who happens to be working as a dispatcher when the hostage situation goes down. Throughout the film they're shown communicating via radio as the negotiation process unfolds. And while they seldom share a scene, Travolta and Washington did at least get to talk to each other throughout the production, actually performing their lines off camera for the other to work off of throughout the shoot.
John Travolta is still dealing with the devastating loss of his son, Jett, and couldn't attend the LA press conference for The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. But Washington, director Scott, and writer Helgeland handled the press duties and answered pressing questions about this 2009 version of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.
Denzel Washington, Tony Scott and Brian Helgeland Press Conference
You're obviously not adverse to doing remakes since you did The Manchurian Candidate. What is your criteria in (a) remaking a movie and (b) wanting to be a part of it?Denzel Washington: "I think number one, especially in the case of this film - even more than Manchurian - I don’t think it is a remake. I think that it’s basically the hostage situation on a train in New York City. I think that’s what the two films have in common – and the fact that it’s New York City. I don’t know that my character and the character that Walter Matthau played are that similar, necessarily. I don’t know why anybody would 'remake' a film. I mean that’s the literal translation of the word. The definition of the word is to redo it the same way or something like that. But, this is probably a better question for Tony and Brian than me. That’s my two cents."
Tony Scott: "I think the motivation of the characters is very different. The similarities is that it’s a hostage situation in the subway, but if you think about the two, you think about the Robert Shaw character. The thing about the Robert Shaw character, if you think about Denzel’s character, the whole motivation is very different."
How so?
Tony Scott: "Well, for one thing, Walter Matthau was playing a cop..."
Denzel Washington: "I didn’t want to be a cop."
Tony Scott: "But also in terms of John’s (Travolta) character, it’s based off a real guy who actually came out of Brooklyn and gravitated to Wall Street and worked for the city and then he went and did time in jail. He just got out of jail, before the movie, and his character is motivated by revenge, [taking] revenge on the city of New York. In the original movie, the movie was about the million dollars, about, 'Let’s hold hostages in a subway for a million bucks.' It was sort of a stupid place to hold hostages because it’s a cul de sac. And this here, the John character, he had a plan. He had a plot. [...]So it is based off of real events and real characters."
Denzel Washington: "Garber was based on…where did you guys find that back story?"
Brian Helgeland: "The best way for me to describe it is, I write R-rated action dramas and every year that goes by, it gets to be a smaller and smaller world you have to work in. So when I sat down, and you have to think about how to get the studio excited, how to sell them something and it’s a little bit of a heist, in a way, getting this movie made, and this might answer some of these questions… If I write and I’m interested in that situation of two guys who are on opposite sides of an issue, an antagonist and protagonist, and it’s like, 'Do you want kind of a play between them?' - a character play in this whole thing that is going on. I knew that Sony owned the rights to Pelham and I really love the original film, and the last thing that I want to do is go in and muddy around what they did so well. But if you look at, in this case anyway, making this movie is a little bit like trying to pull off a heist, trying to put the pieces together, get the getaway car driver and get the safecracker and all that stuff. The idea for me at the start was that using that as the title and being something that the studio feels comfortable making, rather than just a nameless sort of orphan idea that you might have on your own, but let’s try to keep that together and use that, use Pelham as a way to springboard your own crime movie that you might have want to do. And so I started out talking to Todd Black, who is a producer, and tried to put together the pieces. And the idea was to always stay away from Pelham, the original, in the particulars, because we stated that, 'Well, we couldn’t do it better than they had done it.'"
"But we have that same situation as before, a hostage situation, one guy in the train with the hostages and another guy outside dealing with them over the radio. And that, as Denzel said, that’s kind of where, for us, the similarities end because we took our guys in the direction we want to take them from there, rather than in the direction that they necessarily go in the original movie with the nature of that idea limiting some of the places that you can go. You’re going to have overlap, but that’s kind of the long-winded answer."
Denzel Washington: [Laughing] "I’ll be using it the rest of the afternoon. That’s my idea now."
Brian Helgeland: "But that’s the thing, to use it as a way to do our own crime movie but have a thing that is recognizable and give it some kind of beat, if it was music, and the original film as the base."
