Text size:

Standing his ground

Oliver Stone is keeping it real as he tells the heroic tale of 2 survivors in "World Trade Center"

BY LEWIS BEALE | Special to Newsday

August 6, 2006

There are undoubtedly people who think director Oliver Stone was absolutely the wrong person to make "World Trade Center," opening Wednesday, a film about two Port Authority police officers trapped beneath the rubble of 9/11, and the brave men who rescued them.

Stone, goes this line of thinking, is a raving left-winger who has denigrated our fighting men in films such as "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July." He's trashed America's financial system in "Wall Street," spread paranoid assassination conspiracy theories in "JFK" and glorified serial-killing scum in "Natural Born Killers."

All that, and Stone remains unrepentant about his political convictions. Even today, asked about his reaction to the fall of the Twin Towers, Stone takes a decidedly political, some would say very un-PC, position.

"My initial reactions, having come from Vietnam, having seen the disaster of that, having seen Watergate, having imagined what JFK was like, I can't say it was the greatest disaster of my life," Stone says of 9/11. "It was one of several big, bad nightmares along the road for America, but it has to be kept in perspective. When you live life, over 60 some years" - Stone turns 60 in September - "come on, we're not Boy Scouts here."

Make of this what you will. The fact is, Stone is one of the most honored directors around. He's won Oscars for directing "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July," and has been nominated for, or won, just about every film festival and critic's prize you can name. So if he wants to make a movie about, as he puts it, "ordinary people, simple lives and how they were affected" by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, it seems he's earned the right.

"Oliver is an adult, he has a real gravitas and real passion," says Michael Shamberg, "World Trade Center" co-producer (along with partner Stacy Sher) of the director. "If we had gotten a younger, flashier filmmaker, he might have emphasized the parts of the film that were the worst parts. He loved the script, and made the script better."

"World Trade Center" is based on the stories of Will Jimeno (played by "Crash's" Michael Peña) and John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), Port Authority policemen who were among the first responders to the trade center disaster, and were then pinned beneath the rubble when the towers collapsed. For the next 12 hours, they kept each other alive by

talking about their families (McLoughlin and Jimeno's wives are played, respectively, by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal), hopes and fears, while rescuers tried to find them and dig them out.

Not too soon for 9/11 films

The film is "about survival," Stone says. "There are so few people who made it , 20 out of roughly 3,000 people dead, and of those 20, these are two of the best stories. This is about Port Authority policemen at the very center of the tragedy, and that very special metaphysical connection they have between each other and their wives."

Stone was not one of those people who thought it was too soon to begin making films about 9/11, that the wounds were still too recent and too deep. Shortly after the terrorist attacks, in fact, he remembers being asked by a reporter if 9/11 meant the end of realism in movies, and "I remember my reaction was, on the contrary, this is the time to be realist, to face our fears, not run from them, and to show a terror movie, make a good terror movie like 'Battle of Algiers.' That didn't go down very well."

Despite this, Stone didn't jump on the 9/11 film bandwagon right away. The director says he was depressed by the march to war in Iraq, and as a way to "get out of it," he decided to make the 2004 release "Alexander," which allowed him to "go into another world of ancient history, and the first East-West clash. I'm very lucky in my profession to be able to do that, because these last three years in America were --, they were hard. It's a tough fight for Americans."

When Andrea Berloff's screenplay came to him out of the blue, Stone says, he immediately felt "it was the right thing for me to do. This was down-to-earth, New York, my town, working class, and I wanted to refresh myself, going back to 'Born on the Fourth of July,' 'Wall Street,' those kinds of films."

What Stone means here is he has returned to the days when he was considered something of a realist filmmaker, and the hyped-up visual style of movies like "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers" was in the future. So "World Trade Center" is shot and edited like a traditional Hollywood feature - no wild jump-cut editing, flashy pans and zooms or bleached-out film stock - and features a decided absence of cynicism. "Oliver chooses a style that's appropriate to the material," says co-producer Sher. Adds Shamberg: "Oliver wanted realism that wasn't documentary realism, where you could just be standing there and it looked like it looked to the eye. And that's what we have. There's not a lot of camera movements."

A "meat-and-potatoes film"

Stone puts his own take on this stylistic preference by calling "World Trade Center" a "meat-and-potatoes film," akin in some ways to "John Ford doing 'The Grapes of Wrath.' This was about working men, telling it straight."

But it's also about two guys stuck in a pit under rubble, a situation that isn't exactly cinematic. "World Trade Center" cuts back and forth between the trapped Port Authority cops and the families, desperate to find out what has happened to them. It also features several subplots, the most interesting of which follows Dave Karnes, a Connecticut accountant and former Marine who put on his old uniform, bluffed his way onto Ground Zero, and found Jimeno and McLoughlin. But even with these disparate stories, Stone knew "World Trade Center" had to avoid a sense of being closed in and trapped.

"The idea was to light in a way that was luminescent, really make you look into their eyes," Stone says. "We had to make the audience want to go back to the hole. There's only 32 minutes of hole. In those 32 minutes, we go back eight times; it's about four minutes per, which is not a lot. And I wanted each one to count. I didn't want to make a claustrophobic movie."

"World Trade Center" is, ultimately, a film about heroism and sacrifice. It's also a "feel-good" flick in the sense that the protagonists are rescued and reunited with their families. Yet there's still the question of whether the American public is ready for a film about 9/11. "United 93," possibly the most critically acclaimed movie of the year, has grossed a mediocre $31 million to date (although it will turn a profit), possibly an early indicator that audiences do not want to revisit the 2001 tragedy. But Stone claims it's never too early for filmmakers to confront the ugliness of our times.

"'The Killing Fields' was made five years after the Cambodian genocide," he says. "'Casablanca' was made prior to America entering World War II, in 1941, and it called openly for intervention. There's no reason movies should not be part and parcel of the time. People are scared of their fears. I say try to live our lives without fear. Learn the skilled art of fearlessness. And this movie hopefully can help."