THE FILM STRIP: Denzel is back in command in 'The Taking of Pelham 123'
Also: Star of ‘Away We Go’ Carmen Ejogo says she and hubby Jeffrey Wright are strange fish, and director Duncan Jones ‘Moon’ walks in father’s footsteps.
*It’s been said there is no transit system like that of New York City and Denzel Washington has spent his fair share underground although he now resides in California. Looking dapper as always, he was quite at ease in his role at the Command Center as subway dispatcher Walter Garber. “I grew up in New York so I was born in the subway,” he boasts. “I rode it almost everyday for many years. And he’s seen it all underground. “Yeah, if you can do it on a subway, then I’ve seen it--from robbery to parenting.
“When you are young you sneak on the trains, have fun, go down the steps, and take a few steps down that dark tunnel. You don’t go too far because you don’t know what’s down there. You know you have to get back before the train pulls in there. Our day started at the steps. We would go a quarter of a mile or half mile down. It’s just a whole other world under there. One set was an old station they didn’t use anymore. Church Avenue or something. That was trippy being on the other end. I remember coming home late at night, two, three, four in the morning, from wherever. The train would slow down and you would see the guys working and looking up. You were like, ‘Man, what are they doing out here?’ We were those guys out there at four or five in the morning. I remember a woman on the train was looking down at us and wondering what we were doing down there. ‘I’m down here working on the trains.’” [laughs]
But the NYC Transit’s Rail Control Center is an entirely different environment. “That was one of the first things I did, months before we started shooting, I went to the Command Center. It was huge. It was 10 times bigger than our set. It’s huge. One of the reasons I like working with Tony [Scott] is because, like myself, he’s a research fanatic. I know going in he’s going to have a lot of stuff for me to look at, to go to, so he got the MTA Command Center. We share a lot of these elements.
“I like being with the real folks. Once I got there and we made introductions I kept going back. You sit and you talk with people. Our technical advisor was a guy that started at the bottom and worked his way up. You talk to him and ask how you get to be in the position I’m in. He said, ‘You start at track maintenance. You might become a flagman. You work your way up, local dispatch, might be a conductor. You work your way all the way up the ladder.’ I don’t think that the character I played went to college. I think he got a job at 17 or 18, as track maintenance, and he worked his way up.”
Washington has certainly worked his way up the ladder, so he can choose what type of role he wants to do. So why another remake, he’s asked. “I think that number one, and especially in the case of this film more than ‘Manchurian’, I think it’s basically the story of a hostage situation on a train in New York City. I think that is 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, literally the translation or definition of the word. Why would you redo it the same way? That’s my two cents. Now I haven’t been lying when I said that the backstory for Garber was based on a guy at the MTA.”
It is always great to see an actor with a track record should as Washington, still excited about the game and enthused about playing an everyday blue collar worker. Explaining how he got into the role, he says, “It was the deli. Just ate a lot and kept getting smaller and smaller sweaters to wear. I spilled coffee on myself. I was concerned a little bit about ‘Inside Man’ where I was a cop and a hostage negotiator. I just liked the idea of when they hand him a gun he had never held one before. He was an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation. He had a 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. It was something he felt like he needed to do. As he got into it deeper and deeper he just went for it, and he brought home the milk.”
John Travolta, Washington’s co-star did not do press for the film because he is still mourning the death of his son. “I talked to John two and a half weeks ago,” Washington says. “Needless to say, he’s struggling. He’s struggling. More than talking to him, I listened to him, for about two or three hours. It’s going to take time. What can you say but just be there as a friend. He’s such a sweet, sweet person. Our prayers are with he, his wife, and family.”
Carmen Ejogo accepted the role in “Away We Go” because she thinks the director Sam Mendes (“Revolutionary Road,” “Road to Perdition,” “Jarhead,” “Things We Lost in the Fire”) is “brilliant.” Most of the material offered her in the past was not up to her standards. “I’ve done many project where I thought this was my last project and I will never work again gladly and couldn’t have cared less if I didn’t. This project is the sort of thing that gives you excitement again.”
Maya Rudolph, the main female character, is the daughter of singer Minnie Riperton and Ejogo feels Mendes took a leap of faith casting her. “I absolutely love it. Love it,” she says. “I was watching the sound of music with my kids the other night and I was thinking about the roles I would’ve loved to have played growing up but were not able to because of my race.” Although Ejogo is happy about some change of events in colorblind casting, she knows all is not right with the world. “There are still issues to be dealt with.”
The English native and her husband actor Jeffrey Wright lives in Brooklyn, New York and The Film Strip asked her why put roots down there? “Love,” she beams. “My husband is American and this is where he calls home so I came to be here with him and I definitely can relate to the film in that way in terms of feeling displaced and not really knowing where home should be.
“I often contemplate whether we should be back in England but then what would that England be? I don’t even know what that is any more because it’s been so long since I’ve been there and to be here in 2001 was a really hectic time to decide to make this home. But I think when we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on 9/11 to Brooklyn to be away from the craziness a little bit, reinforced our decision. And then you have kids and you can’t really move.” Not that Ejogo and Wright would want to uproot their kids because Tinsel town doesn’t tug at their hearts.
“We’re both sort of strange fish in this business. We’re not really enamored by it for the most part. It would have to be something really spectacular that would make us want to go [to L.A.].
David Bowie’s son director Duncan Jones first feature film,”Moon,” is quite a sci-fi undertaking. “I think we tried to stick to the science in certain aspects of it. As far as Helium 3 mining goes there was a book by Robert Zubrin called 'Entering Space' that I read quite a few years ago which is an amazing book. It's nonfiction by a guy who used to advise and work with NASA and it's all about how we would go about colonizing the solar system and doing it in a way which was sort of financially viable,” Duncan declares.
NASA being of great interest to me since I interviewed the first Black astronaut in Texas before his maiden voyage into outer space, I asked Jones if he kept us with the goings on at NASA? With an overwhelming and enthusiastic response of “Yeah” he was more than happy to explain his last encounter with NASA.
“There was a festival that we did in Texas and I actually got invited to do a screening of the film at NASA. So I went to Houston and did a screening at the NASA Space Center where about eighty percent of the audience was NASA employees. Astronaut Tom Jones was there. I showed the film, did a Q&A afterwards that started off with them asking me a few questions and then about three or four questions in I was asking them questions…Then basically the audience just started discussing things amongst themselves and I sat back” [laughs].
Duncan, whose father starred in sci-films, is not the reason he did “Moon,” but his father’s influence did rub off. “It didn’t really occur to me until after we finished the film and people started mentioning it to me,” he says. “My parents divorced when I was very young, and fairly unusually I was given into the custody of my dad so I grew up with my dad. So a lot of the things that he was listening to and the films he was watching and the books that were appropriate for me at that age when I was growing up he recommended.
“The whole idea of alienation and isolation which obviously he investigated in his early mid-twenties, I lived through and went through in my own way growing up. I was at graduate school at Vanderbilt in Nashville Tennessee and spent three years feeling I was on the far side of the moon and it’s no coincidence that the character Sam’s three year contract is the same as my three years at graduate school. That was kind of how I felt. I also had a long distance relationship like Sam.”
