Owen Roizman The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Owen Roizman (1936–2023) shot The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) in 35mm anamorphic Panavision using Panaflex cameras with Panavision anamorphic lenses, finishing photochemically at 2.39:1 scope. He came to the project one year after The Exorcist and one year before he would shoot Three Days of the Condor. He had already filmed inside New York's subway system for The French Connection (1971), and his instinct for the space shaped the film's visual identity from the first production meeting.
Roizman chose anamorphic because the subway car demanded it
The decision to shoot in 2.4:1 widescreen came from looking at the physical dimensions of the location. Most films set in enclosed spaces avoid anamorphic — the format wastes vertical space. Roizman saw the opposite problem.
"I noticed that the dimensions of the subway car was an almost perfect 2.4:1 aspect ratio, and decided that anamorphic lenses would allow us to get more interesting compositions, close-ups and more information into shots." — Owen Roizman, MovieMaker Magazine (2009)
The director and producer initially resisted. Anamorphic required more light, which meant more equipment in already cramped tunnels.
"At first, Joe and Edgar said no. In fact, they sounded incredulous." — Owen Roizman, ICG Magazine (2009)
"I instinctively felt anamorphic framing was right for this story." — Owen Roizman, ICG Magazine (2009)
The tunnels were familiar territory
Roizman had shot the subway chase in The French Connection three years earlier and knew what working underground in New York required. That experience gave him a practical advantage that offset the anamorphic format's extra demands.
"I was in familiar territory. I had traveled by subway a lot when I lived in Brooklyn. I had also shot a sequence for The French Connection in a shut down subway station." — Owen Roizman, ICG Magazine
Roizman pre-flashed the negative to solve the light problem
The abandoned Court Street station and the tunnel interiors had almost no usable light. Roizman loaded 100-speed film — a slower stock that needed more illumination — and then had Movielab pre-flash the negative at twenty percent, exposing it to light before a single frame was shot. This was the first feature to use Movielab's flash process. It gained roughly two stops of effective speed and cut five days off the production schedule.
He replaced existing tunnel bulbs with 500-watt photofloods, sprayed them to eliminate hot spots, and worked primarily with available light supplemented by minimal modeling lights. The result was a look that felt real rather than lit.
"Pelham had a realistic scariness to it, and one of the ways to get that scariness was to create a mood that was real, like it could happen. So that is the approach that I took to doing it." — Owen Roizman, ASC In Memoriam (2023)
The emergency lighting was built into the subway car fixtures
One of Roizman's practical innovations was designing the lighting to serve both the story and the cinematography simultaneously. When the hijackers cut the subway car's power, the fluorescents go out and the emergency lighting kicks in — a shift that changes the visual texture of every scene inside the car.
"We used the existing fluorescents in the cars, but when they went out, we switched over to 'emergency lighting' which consisted of these little incandescent bulbs. We built them right into the regular fixtures so you couldn't see them while the fluorescents were on." — Owen Roizman, ASC In Memoriam (2023)
Sargent and Roizman worked without storyboards
The production moved fast — no storyboards, a single camera on a dolly tracking with the actors, blocking worked out each morning on the day's pages.
"We mainly shot with a single camera and occasionally with two. There were no storyboards. Every morning we went through the pages of the script we were going to shoot that day." — Owen Roizman, ICG Magazine