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Thursday, June 11
Sony gave a private press tour of some of the forgotten Byzantine labyrinth beneath New York City's streets as part of its promotion of The Taking of Pelham 123. The warren of abandoned subway stations and caverns play a significant role in the story, and part of the reason for the press tour may have been to make sure people realize that filmmakers didn't just make it all up.
In fact, as director Tony Scott emphasized earlier, the subway itself is one of the real stars of the movie, and he went to great lengths to make filming down there as real as possible. UGO has some cool pictures from the event, including shots of the abandoned City Hall Station, the Wine Cellar, and other atmospheric bits and pieces of discarded urban infrastructure.
Posted 6/11/2009 by Bill
Related: Tony Scott | The Taking of Pelham 123
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Monday, June 1
Not all the action in The Taking of Pelham 123 takes place down in the subway or in the offices of the MTA. Three new clips from the movie show off some intense car chase scenes, as well as the more personal negotiations between the amateur hostage negotiator Garber (Denzel Washington) and his wife (Aunjanue Ellis) as he prepares to head into danger.
There's also a new featurette that descends back into "the darkness and the grittiness of the bowels of New York" for some commentary by director Tony Scott and the cast on the the film's other star, the subway itself.
Posted 6/1/2009 by Bill
Related: Denzel Washington | Tony Scott | Aunjanue Ellis | The Taking of Pelham 123
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Wednesday, May 27
There's lots of new footage and interviews with the stars in ET Online's sneak peek at Tony Scott's reboot of the classic hostage thriller The Taking of Pelham 123. The highlight of the piece is the interview with John Travolta, who is sporting a truly skeezy-looking mustache. and looking every inch the bad guy. He tells ET that he really enjoyed playing the evil mastermind:
Playing a bad guy is always a freeing experience -- because you don't have the same envelope of restrictions that you have playing a good guy. Good guys restrain themselves. They kind of have their moral fiber cut out for them in varying degrees. And a bad guy you can create your own moral fiber. And it's usually a wide envelope of behavior. So I can be as wild as I want...
In the accompanying footage we get to see some pretty good examples of exactly how wild that can be. Clearly not a man you want to mess with. Unfortunately, it seems to take the authorities a few bodies to figure this out.
Posted 5/27/2009 by Bill
Related: Denzel Washington | John Travolta | The Taking of Pelham 123
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Wednesday, May 20
In an interview with Film Journal, director Tony Scott explains that for him making a movie is a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. He doesn't start with a complete script. Instead he starts with the real-life situations and characters he is interested in and tries to figure out how they might work together.
For example, he says he "reverse-engineered" Ryder, the lead hijacker in The Taking of Pelham 123 starting with a real former New York City contractor with a chip on his shoulder for doing 12 years in prison. This gave him a template for a character motivated by revenge and also helped set the stage for what he calls "the third character" in the movie, the city that wronged Ryder.
Scott, who calls himself a "great plagiarist," isn't afraid to borrow liberally from earlier movies either. And the influences aren't always what you might expect. The complicated time-lapse sequence of New York City at the beginning of Pelham is, he confesses, a "rip-off" of a scene from the 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi.
Posted 5/20/2009 by Bill
Related: Tony Scott | The Taking of Pelham 123
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Saturday, May 16
An Esquire preview of Tony Scott's new interpretation of The Taking of Pelham 123 compares the characters in the remake to those of 1970s original and finds them refreshingly gray.
It starts out just like the reviewer expected it to: "It's fast and violent and profane. It's unmistakably modern, and, sure enough, it's loud as hell." The characters come off as mostly black and white, good or evil. Denzel Washington plays Garber, a regular out-of-shape Joe who just happens to find himself on the other end of the radio with a team of ruthless hijackers. John Travolta takes up the other end, as the ruthless hijacker Ryder, a stereotype of pure evil.
But then things got a little more complicated:
... as Garber and Ryder talk, and revelations are made, and they begin to make their confessions to each other, the lines begin to blur. Garber -- who has his own mixed emotions -- isn't all that good, and Ryder -- who believes the city has done him significant wrong -- isn't all that evil.
The director's willingness to think outside the box on good and evil extended to some of the other characters as well. Looking for real life personalities to model Travolta's accomplices on, Scott tells Esquire that he
unearthed a pair of real crazed Albanians who may or may not have spent time in prison ... and eventually they jobbed their way into parts in the actual movie ... "Now they want to be actors," Scott says with a shake of his head, perhaps wondering whether he's saved us from two monsters or created two more.
Overall, the review concludes, Scott really has managed to one-up the original, and his version of Pelham is that "rare popcorn movie in which we're never sure whose side everyone is on or where they might end up."
Posted 5/16/2009 by Bill
Related: Denzel Washington | John Travolta | Tony Scott | The Taking of Pelham 123
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Thursday, May 7
The New York Times goes down into the tunnels with the makers of The Taking of Pelham 123 to get some face time with the movie's 400-ton star. Subways have been a hot spot for cinematic terror lately. Witness the truly harrowing train crash sequence in Knowing. Here the train is even more critical to the action and the atmosphere.
In Tony Scott's remake of the 1974 classic hostage thriller, every effort was made to keep it real by filming as much as possible inside the actual New York City subway. "I feel that's always been my m. o. -- it's something about touching the real world," says the director. Not an easy feat in this case, considering that the train system there never sleeps, and shows little deference to star power even for the likes of John Travolta, who plays an angry, neck-tattooed hijacker, or Denzel Washington, who plays a doughy, good-guy train dispatcher. And, of course, they always had to watch out for the third rail.
One scene in Grand Central proved so difficult to film that Scott vows never to shoot at that station again. It hasn't put him off trains, though. The director says he's already begun scouting locations for one of his next projects, which is "about a runaway train hurtling toward a defenseless city with a cargo of toxic chemicals."
Posted 5/7/2009 by Bill
Related: Denzel Washington | John Travolta | Tony Scott | The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three | The Taking of Pelham 123