LOS ANGELES—When The Taking of Pelham One Two Three—the story of a hostage-taking in a subway train—was made in 1974, New York City was as famous for its crime waves as its commerce. Things have changed. New York is now a tourist mecca, and its citizens are the respected survivors of a terrorist attack. When director Tony Scott (Days of Thunder, Top Gun) set out to remake the film as The Taking of Pelham 123, he altered the plot. It now sees the kidnappers hoping that the media and public will assume they are terrorists and that the people they are dealing with at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) will think they are just greedy criminals out to score a quick $10 million. The film, which opens June 12, stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta.

“We felt that the city should be the third lead character in the movie,” Scott says in an L.A. hotel room. “That’s why I opened the movie with freneticism. I wanted to introduce it as a character right at the beginning. Then we shot it in a way it hasn’t been shot before. It’s always about noise and people and anxiety, but here we brought in a contrast in that we moved from the intensity of the world of the underground to the NASA–like quietness of the MTA. Then we could punctuate it with the activity in the streets. It gave us a great canvas on which to work.”

The work Scott put on his canvas was as real as he could make it. He says he has always tried to avoid taking his films to the digital realm, choosing to shoot them on location rather than with a green-screen backdrop. Of course, deciding to shoot in working subways and on the streets of New York is not the easiest of options.

“My mother was 95 when she died, and she had watched a lot of movies and she would say, ”˜That thing doesn’t work,’ and it was always something that was digitally generated. To me, there is something great about working in a real live situation, whether it was on the Manhattan Bridge with helicopters or down in the subway. I think it elevates performance and drama. We had real trains running behind the actors when we were shooting down there. At the same time, it’s a tremendous responsibility for a director. Standing in the subway was dangerous, because we were working at night and people get tired and they can lose concentration. If someone was to step the wrong way and put their hand in the wrong direction, you could have something more serious. It was a huge responsibility, and every night that I went down in the subway, I would have to remind myself that one of the stamps of my movies is that I shoot real things in the real world.”