LOS ANGELES—It’s been 35 years since the release of the film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the story of a hostage-taking in the subway tunnels of New York City. The movie may have seemed a little outrageous at the time, but a remake, The Taking of Pelham 123, has the dubious benefit of history as a backdrop. Denzel Washington says in an L.A. hotel room that he was working at a naval base near San Diego on his directing debut, Antwone Fisher, when he heard that terrorists had attacked New York City’s World Trade Center.

“I got up to work on the script and we were on our way to the base and I checked the news before I got going. They locked the naval base, and we had our actors on a ship out at sea and they immediately flew them back in on a helicopter. I remember driving back to L.A. from San Diego and the roads were empty.”

In the film, which opens Friday (June 12), Washington—who costars with John Travolta—plays Walter Garber, a suspended senior executive for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority who has been reduced to working at his old job as a dispatcher while waiting for the transit board to hear his case. He gets a call from a subway hijacker called Ryder (Travolta) who tells Garber that he wants $10 million. If Ryder doesn’t get the money, he will start killing passengers. When a hostage negotiator (John Turturro) arrives on the scene, he tells Garber that he can go home, but Ryder wants him there and says he will shoot someone if Garber doesn’t get on the phone.

Washington spent several days in the MTA offices in Manhattan in an attempt to get into character. He says that he learned a lot about the way the subway system works and the people who make the trains run on time.

“I like being with the real folks,” he says. “When you are researching, you get to sit around and talk to the people, and I like that. Our technical adviser was a guy who started from the bottom and worked his way up, and he said, ”˜You start on track maintenance. You might become a flagman, and from there you could become a dispatcher or a local conductor. Eventually, you work your way up the ladder.’ I don’t think the character I play went to college. I think he got a job at 17 or 18 on track maintenance and he worked his way up to a senior position.”

In some ways, Washington himself has worked his way up from beneath New York City. He may arrive at media-junket hotels in limos now, but there was a time when he rode the subways in his hometown. He says that shooting in the tunnels reminded him of a time when he was curious about the world inside the subway tunnels.

“When you are young, you sneak on the trains and you take a few steps down that dark tunnel,” he says, “but you don’t go too far because you are not sure what is down there. In our movie, we would go a quarter-mile in and it’s a whole different world down there. It was kind of trippy, because I can remember going home at 2 or 3 in the morning and the subway slowing down and seeing those workers on the side. We would look at them and think, ”˜What are they doing out here?’ but we were those guys when we were shooting late at night.”

Asked if it is difficult for him to find a working-class character within himself now that he is a leading man, Washington says that Garber’s story is as much a universal story about redemption as it is about his profession. And, by the way, don’t call him a leading man.

“A ”˜leading man’ is something people call you when you do press junkets,” he says. “That is what that is. I am not a leading man; I am an actor. You get a part and you interpret the part. Walter started at the bottom and got close to the top and is brought back and he is in denial. He didn’t know when he came to work that he would have a chance to redeem himself, but it was something he felt he needed to do as he went deeper and deeper into the hostage drama. He decided to do whatever it took to free the hostages, and I liked that about him.”