..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

An Interview
With Oliver Stone

Heartfelt, hopeful, relentlessly linear, coolly elegiac, and even emotionally overpowering at times: no one expected that movie when Oliver Stone was announced as the director of World Trade Center (*** ½). 

Based on exhaustive research but confined to the stories of two police officers, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) who were trapped twenty feet beneath the rubble field, World Trade Center telegraphs a simple story of community, of community coming together in difficult and tragic moments. The claustrophobia of the two officers' day-and-night under tons upon tons of rubble is palpable, but the story is a larger one, drawn through the perspective of others, especially their wives Donna (Maria Bello) and Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and of their unlikely savior, an all-business Marine named Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon). [Slate recently republished a September 10, 2002 account by 60 Minutes II associate producer Rebecca Liss, which appears to be primary research for several events involving Karnes' role, including one of the movie's best moments.  

This conversation took place July 25, 2006, at Chicago's Peninsula Hotel when temperatures approached 100 degrees. Stone wore a robin's-egg blue Polo shirt and carried a personalized note pad with a Tiffany-blue pages, jottings covering the space. As Stone walked into the suite, he headed for the draperies, batting them back before opening the window. In speaking, Stone often hesitates and corrects himself, which is reflected in this transcript. 

STONE: Dallas was like 117 the other day. Is this the end? 

PRIDE: When this project came to you, what was your response, more as a New Yorker than as a filmmaker? You have a vivid identification with your subjects, Platoon and your war experiences, Wall Street and your father's background. What empathetic reaction did you have from the pages, whether from your love of, or your hate of, the city? 

STONE: [laughs] Believe me, I grew up 30 years in New York, and there is a love of New York no matter what happened there in your life, so. I never felt that welcomed in New York, as an older person. and as a film artist I had to leave, I made my fortune, my fortune was made in L.A., y'know, it wasn't made in New York. The film community, if that's what you mean. Wall Street, I made with love for my youth as well. I did parts of The Doors there, too. But my father and mother. My mother still lives there and my son is actually ... my son has moved there with his girlfriend. So, New York is a vibrant city, it continues and changes directions every few years. This is simply something that really was sent to me. And it was a microcos-I just thought it was very fresh and original way of going, looking at 2001, which was at that point freighted with baggage. It was heavy. Everybody was a mess. But to remember that day, as it was, through these five stories, plus the two rescue teams, it was very fresh to me. I just never thought of it. Insofar as it was all true, it was a story that was begging to be told. It was something that you almost can't see, it's like buried under a bush or the weeds, y'know, after all the destruction, it was there. But there was gold there, to focus on this story. 

PRIDE: The confinement, the amount of time the characters are buried, is horribly claustrophobic, but then there's the shot where the camera ascends from the rubble they're trapped beneath and into the sky along the plume of miles-high smoke and then behind the satellite- 

STONE: Yeah. The point was to go from the microcosmic to the macro and to also, y'know: Remember this. On that day, the world did have great empathy for the United States, great empathy. And pity. In some way, as you know, that was not a political point, but it was squandered. I think we recognize that now. 

PRIDE: Anyone who has a fear of high-rises should be troubled by the way you show the collapse. 

STONE: I think that's one of the most powerful sequences I've come across, the concept of the building coming down on you. It's frightening to anybody. As a country, it's a collective psyche thing, that we were attacked. In a sense, the nation was raped that day. I think the film is confronting some of those feelings and saying, look, go back to the psychiatrist and start talking to him about what it was, who was the attack, what was the day like? What is it you fear? Y'know? Describe to me the rape, so to speak. And I think in doing that, the patient often unlocks the armors that keep their fear in. Those guys and women [on that day] fought back. In the sense that they overcame fear. Of course they were terrified. But they fought back, they helped each other, they depended on each other. In the two rescue teams, more than fifteen men plunged into the earth and there was a hard, miserable, dangerous descent to get those two guys out. The Marine story is extraordinary. It sounds like a B-movie on top of it, you know what I'm saying? It's like another movie, but it was true. I mean, that happened. [See the Slate link above.] 

PRIDE: No problems working with a first-time screenwriter [Andrea Berloff]? 

STONE: Oh no, no, no. I read [screenplays] across the board. No, it's often the freshest view. But of course, it was guided by Debra Hill, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, who are veteran producers. They have always been after these kinds of stories [such as Erin Brockovich]. They got one. Andrea researched and wrote it, but it was rewr-it went through the sawmill, believe me, we collaborated heavily afterward. It still was not ready to be m-, filmed, but it was a great, inspirational story. But there is no such thing as a screenplay that comes in and is word, letter-perfect. I think that it's a process of revision. And during the shooting, things also change again. And also what isn't taken into account is during the editing, a lot of things change. Editing is a form of revision. 

PRIDE: Do you know the term of art that was used to describe the crystal-perfect weather that day? "Severe clear"?  

STONE: Was that the condition? Blue. 

PRIDE: Visible for miles on miles. It evokes something with your movie as well, the struggle to see something fresh, not to repeat or exploit tragic imagery from September 11 but also selecting what is most iconic and true. 

STONE: [indicating poster] It's also that image behind you. You could say that. the Towers [that are in] darkness, and the light is in between. 

PRIDE: What was your immediate impulse to how to show the events of that day, how do I make this fresh? How much known footage do I use? What do I recreate? 

STONE: No, I wasn't thinking like that because there was a script and once I came aboard, I, I, promised and delivered that I would shoot the parameters of this script. We would try to improve things inside the script, but this was the script. It was twenty-four hours, and the script was written. The style of the film was a subjective style, we would follow these five people. So we're inside, John and Will. Neither John or Will saw the planes hit, ergo Will felt a brief shadow on the wall at 42^nd Street there [in an early scene in the movie]. You have to follow those [events]. They saw the buildings fall from within and the wives only saw the television [coverage], and presumably saw the building fall, and I wanted to explain what the fall inside looked like from the outside. It wasn't necessary to show the plane, which is an incredible shot, true, but it's like the Zapruder film, y'know, it just wasn't necessary, to the, we know, it's said repeatedly that the plane has struck the building. 

PRIDE: Those images, what I'm getting at, they don't necessarily offer a filmmaker dramatic clarity, but instead they can distract from the fabric of a story. They no longer have a meaning of their own. Just a punch. 

STONE: As you were saying. Yeah. 

PRIDE: How did you make those choices? 

STONE: Only on TV, limited amounts, chronologically correct, like at 12 something, the 37^th Barksdale Air Force base, it's about the time that the accountant comes into the picture. So everything is chronologically laid out. It's helpful, too, because what you don't know, what that third crash is when Building 7 comes down at 5:30, really, you don't know from the point of view of John and Will, it's just another fuckin' horror show that's coming down, they almost get killed. And then you cut outside to the TV and show that Building 7 has just collapsed. Those are informational tools to guide, especially a young audience that doesn't know what happened, they don't know the details. We had kids in Minneapolis and Seattle, they were, the previews, they were like 7 years old when this happened. And it's what, five years, let's say 12 now, 13. They were seeing it, understanding it for the first time. You have to guide them a little bit, you know. And you have to keep it chronologically correct. I was leading to another thing that you asked about, uh, you were asking about what, exactly? 

PRIDE: How images, by overuse, no longer have clarity. 

STONE: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We also built computer animations of the buildings on fire, the Trade Towers on fire, and the jumper. And aside from that, we used computer on the concourse, the concourse destruction and the day and night buildings outside of the rubble. We built a rubble field, one acre, the real rubble field was 16 acres. It was huge anyway. We built the holes [they were trapped in at] hangers at the Howard Hughes Aircraft [property]. [The sets] were on wires, we had to move them around and have access to the actors. It was very rough. It was like shooting in a coal mine, frankly. A lot of non-toxic smoke, but smoke nonetheless. We shot 25 days in New York, which was excellent, because we got a lot of realism from the streets. Real people. Accents. They allowed us to go about two-three blocks north of the Trade Center and then they wouldn't let us go further. They were nervous. No paper. No extras looking up at the buildings, nothing like that. But we got a lot of realism and cooperation from the real, street people. 

PRIDE: Talk more about the collective national analysis. 

STONE: [laughs] It could, I say, [happen because of] this movie. [Whether it's the right time] is beyond my choice. I mean, there is a destiny to these things whether Paul Greengrass gets his movie together, it takes two years for John and Will to survive, operations, talk about it, process it. Another year for Andrea and Michael and Stacy to get a script. It sits for another year because it's not, it's like a wine, it doesn't come ready, it's not due, I dunno why. But then I came in on the fourth year, and we activated with Cage, and this is the fifth year now. So. It was all, y'know, per chance, and here we are. Vietnam took me fifteen years. I lived with Kennedy thirty years later, Nixon, twenty-five years later. But I'm a dramatist and I don't regard myself as a. I can't chase the news. You can't possibly. People say, why don't you do an Iraq story? Well, it would be a dramatist's answer to say, let me see what's happening and what will happen through time. And see if it is a Trojan War like Vietnam was, or not. Maybe it'll have another turn. I mean, it's not resolved yet. You have to resolve these things to make. I mean, the sad part about the Kennedy murder, and I know this is not part of the story, was that it lapsed. Nothing did happen. That was part of the urge to do, the spur to do it, because it had lain there dormant. I feel the same way about My Lai, frankly, and I was thinking about it for years, the My Lai massacre, I don't know if you remember. You do? '69? In Vietnam? It was an ugly affair. And then Haditha happened and all these things that have happened. You feel like you should memorialize some of these, these things, because they get forgotten so quickly.  

PRIDE: CNN's started calling Iraq "The Forgotten War." 

STONE: Already? Vietnam's a forgotten war.  

August 9 , 2006

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