Entrevista a Denzel Washington

Although two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington and two-time Oscar nominee John Travolta star in the 2009 reworking of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, they're rarely in the same scene. Still, the two actors formed quite a bond while working on the action drama directed by Tony Scott from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland.

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."

Denzel, you said you didn't want to play a cop or an FBI agent, you just wanted to play an ordinary guy. Where do you go to study someone who is an ordinary guy?

Denzel Washington: "The deli. Not New Delhi, the deli. Just ate a lot. Ate a lot and just kept getting smaller and smaller sweater to wear and spilled over on myself. I was concerned a little bit with Inside Man where I was a cop and hostage negotiator. And I just liked the idea that when they hand him a gun, he had never held one before and that he was an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation. And with this cloud over his head, he didn't come to work knowing he was going to get an opportunity to redeem himself. He didn't even know if he was going to redeem himself, but it was something he felt he needed to do. As he got into it, deeper and deeper, he went for it and he brought home the milk."

You carry around a yellow plastic bag in the movie. What's in the bag?

Denzel Washington: "My sweater with the coffee stains. My coffee-stained sweater. I brought my lunch in that bag and I took home my sweater. One of the reasons I like working with Tony is because, like myself, he's a research fanatic. I know going in that he's going to have a lot of stuff for me to look at and go to. So, he's got, 'See MTA Command Center,' so that was one of the first things that I did months before we started shooting. I went out to the command center, which is huge, which was ten times bigger than our set or something."

Tony Scott: "It's the size of a football field."

Denzel Washington: "It's huge."

Tony Scott: "It's unbelievable. It's like NASA. It's the last thing you'd expect, especially if you look at the old one, because the old one is just sort of a grubby office with this subway thing on the wall. But in the real world, I get to educate and entertain myself by going and touching the real world and touching real people. And that's my way into movies. So, I love that and I bring that…"

Denzel Washington: "And we share that. It's the same thing for me; I like being with the real folks. Once I got there and we made the introductions, then I kept going back and you sit and talk with people. Our technical advisor was a guy who started at the bottom and worked his way up, so you talk to him about, 'How do you get to be in the position I'm in.' And he said, 'Well, you start as a track maintenance, you might become a flag man, you work your way up to local dispatcher. You might be a conductor. You work your way all the way up the ladder.' I don't think the character went to college. I think he got a job at 17 or 18, as track maintenance and worked his way up."

Did you ever have John Travolta's voice in your ear? Was it like animation where the two of you came in and did your stuff separately?

Denzel Washington: "No, no. We were always there for each other, always off camera."

How did that work? Can you explain?

Denzel Washington: "I wouldn't be on camera and I'd talk. He wouldn't be on camera and he'd talk. We were off camera, it's the same thing as being off camera. You're off camera. You're not on camera. And, to be serious - if I can - you actually do develop a relationship. For the first six, seven or eight weeks, we didn't shoot any scenes together on camera, but we were developing a relationship off camera, through the microphone, through the speaker."

Tony Scott: "That made it great for the characters, because John developed that relation through [that]. For me, it's really a tough movie to do, because two-thirds of the movie is two guys on the phone. So I saw that as being a challenge because I said, 'How do we keep this anxiety and momentum going?' But it comes with the actors and the writing. It's a daunting challenge because it's like two-thirds of the movie is two guys on the phone with each other, and the boys stay separate. John's on one side of the studio and they shook hands once and..."

Denzel Washington: "I'd see him at lunch. [Laughing] They wrote that in that we never saw each other. I saw him every day."

What does John bring to this film?

Tony Scott: "You know, John has a big heart. He's got a big heart. He's dangerous, he's sweet and he [sparkles] as a bad guy in this role. It's sort of a contradiction in terms of what we expect from the bad guy. So I think John, he's funny, he's smart and has this big heart, so he plays against what you'd normally expect from the bad guys."

To follow up on doing your roles in the studio, were both of you there for the entire scenes talking on the phone to each other?

Denzel Washington: "Yeah."

Was it like a radio play in a way?

Denzel Washington: "Yeah, I guess you could say that. Yeah. And you had the luxury, or he had the luxury first of practicing, because for three weeks I was on camera first. We shot all the command center stuff first so from day one, I'm on camera. There's no like, 'Can I change it tomorrow?' We were moving on. But he had the chance to work on his part, to develop it."

What was it like when the two of you finally clicked?

Denzel Washington: "Again, it didn't just happen once we got on screen together, you know? We have five senses and the other four were heightened. Yes, we didn't see each other, but it's like an old courtship over the phone, a long distance relationship and you get to know a person. You talk. We would sing songs. We would even tell each other jokes and singing, doing Broadway tunes and all kinds of stuff. 'Good morning Mr. Travolta.' 'Good morning, Mr. Washington.' That was the nature of the relationship."

Was shooting this film in the subway really dangerous or was it easy?

Tony Scott: "It's a tremendous responsibility for a director and being down there, so we never did dangerous things. The driving above ground is much more dangerous than some of the things in the subway. It's actually a lot more dangerous because we are shooting at night most of the time. People get tired, and there's this thing called the third rail, so people that lose concentration [can get killed]. So to me it's a huge responsibility. So every night I went down in the subway, and I loved shooting this…I think that's one of the stamps of my movies is that I love shooting with real things in the real world and it gives a level of drama and performance and everything just seems to come up and seems to rise to the occasion. At the same time, it's worrying because all you need is for somebody to step the wrong way or put their hand in the wrong direction and you've got a serious accident."

Had you spent a lot of time in the subway before making this movie?

Denzel Washington: "Well, I grew up in New York so I was like born on the subway. I took the subway almost every day for many years."

Since you grew up in New York, was there anything you found surprising about the city while doing the movie in the subway and in the tunnels?

Denzel Washington: "Well, you know, when you are young you sneak on the trains. You have fun. You go down the steps and you take a few steps down that dark tunnel, but you don't go too far because you're not too sure what's down there – and you know that you've got to get back before the train pulls in. Well, our day started at the steps and we would go a quarter-of-a-mile or half-a-mile down, and it's just a whole other world under there. One set, I think it was an old station that they didn't use any more, Church Avenue or something, so that was kind of trippy, seeing that. It was kind of trippy being on the other end, because I can remember coming home late at night or whatever at two or three, four in the morning from wherever, and slowing down and seeing those workers. You know how the train would slow down, you see the guys working, they look up and you're like, 'Man, what are they doing out here?' With this, we were those guys. [Laughing] We were out there at four, five in the morning. I remember, I think it was a woman, that was looking and I was standing, and she was like [makes faces]. I was just down there working on the train, getting the tracks together."

What did you learn about New Yorkers by working down in the subway?

Brian Helgeland: "For me, what I started to realize while we were making it was that the city was really comprised of the people that keep it up and running. When we would go on our research, John Turturro's character is based on the guy who is the head of New York's Hostage Negotiation Team. His name is Jack Cambria. He came in one day and I just sat with him and went through all the dialogue of Turturro's character and he said, 'I wouldn't say that. I would say this. I wouldn't say it that way, I would say it this way.' And basically he wrote the dialogue for Turturro's part. That, to me, was like the city. And we had that over and over again, whether they were train people or the criminal element in the story. That to me always felt like what New York was. It took all those different people, lumped them together, and it kind of becomes one great big person."

This version of Pelham focuses a lot on the way the MTA deals with hostages more than the police. Did you research all of that?

Brian Helgeland: "We did research as far as what the police response would be, but I think we tried to stick to the union response. You know, if you are on the other end of the phone, all you're thinking about is the guy you're dealing with and the passengers. Once you get past the, 'Is this a terrorist situation or not,' we just tried to be true to how the people would react in a hostage situation."

Tony, since you like to shoot real people in the real world, how do you feel about special effects? You have never really used them, so which side do you stand on with the CGI debate?

Tony Scott: "My mum was 95 when she died, and she would watch movies and she'd say, 'That scene doesn't quite work,' and she always managed to finger out the scene that didn't work because it was usually digitally-regenerated. There's something, I'll say, in terms of what you get in terms of working in a real life situation – it's on Manhattan Bridge at the end, there's helicopters and the guy just turning the dial on the computer can get it. But [in real life] what it does is it just elevates the performance, elevates drama. Or down in the subway we have real trains running behind the boys standing there…"

Denzel Washington: "Yes, he did."

Tony Scott: [Laughing] "At the same time, what it does, we just do rehearsals and then when you run a real train through it, you'll watch everything change. There's a whole shift, in the best possible way. So for my whole career I've always tried to avoid CGI, whether it's planes, cars or trains. It's something in terms of the drama and the performances that gives me a reality and more of an edge."

Have you gotten the chance to talk to John Travolta since filming the movie? Did you get any sense of where he is today?

Denzel Washington: "I talked with John about two-and-a-half-weeks ago and, needless to say, he's struggling. He's struggling. More than talking to him, I listened to him for about two or three hours. So, it's going to take time. What can you say? What can you say, really? Just be there as a friend. This is such a sweet, sweet person and our prayers are with him and his wife."