There are people whose reputation precedes them. And then there’s Oliver Stone.
Case in point: Though he’s rapidly gaining respect after key roles in Crash and Million Dollar Baby, Michael Pena is not a Tom Cruise who can look a solid film offer in the mouth.
Still, when Stone approached him for one of the two lead roles in his long-awaited film World Trade Center, Pena was ready to turn it down flat.
“I said, ‘I want to read the script first. I don’t want to be part of a conspiracy movie, to be honest with you.’ I just didn’t want to tell a story that made things worse.’ ”
“But when I read the script, I wanted to make the movie immediately.”
Producer Stacey Sher says that’s about par for the course when people heard Stone was entering the 9/11 fray. The assumption was that the guy who gave us JFK, a filmmaker who almost never takes on a project that doesn’t court controversy, would do the expected and quack like a duck.
“I think 50% of the people were relieved to find out that he didn’t make a conspiracy movie,” she says, “and the other 50% were angry that he didn’t make a conspiracy movie.”
In Toronto to promote World Trade Center, a surprised Stone chuckles amiably when I pass on Sher’s comment. “Fifty per cent, huh? I’ll take those odds,” he says.
In fact, against all odds, Stone made the least controversial movie that could have been made about the events of Sept. 11, 2001 — one in which nearly all the participants are alive to verify the tale and which even boasts a happy ending.
(Even the movie’s production history has a tragic side. Sher inherited the project from producing partner Debra Hill, who died of cancer last year at age 52).
World Trade Center is the story of John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Pena), two Port Authority Police Department “first response” officers. They were among a team charging into the underground concourse between the towers to begin evacuation procedures when Tower Two fell on them. Though horribly injured and pinned, both survived, along with another officer, Dominick Pezullo. Pezullo pulled himself loose and began trying to free the others when Tower One fell, setting off another cave-in that killed Pezullo.
Trapped and bleeding internally, McLoughlin and Jimeno had nothing to do but try to stay alive by sheer force of will. Jimeno reported a vision of Jesus. They talked at length with each other about their wives and children (Stone’s movie is intertwined with subplots of McLoughlin’s and Jimeno’s family, including their wives, played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, respectively).
Eventually, they were rescued in an operation that was life-threatening to all involved. They were the 18th and 19th of only 20 people who’d be dragged out of the rubble alive (in fact, it would be discovered that many more of the 3,000 or so victims were trapped alive like them, but never to be rescued).
“I’m very proud of the movie,” Stone says. “It was built out of attention to detail, concrete detail, with the participation of survivors and witnesses. How many participants could have talked? There’s only 20, so there’s really only so many stories to tell.
By contrast, he points to his early film Platoon. “It was one of many stories you could tell out of Vietnam. I was one of many survivors,” the ’Nam veteran says. “I said (in script onscreen) at the end of that movie, ‘We have an obligation to remember and an obligation to do good with the remainder of our lives.”
He was fascinated, too, with the experience of being a WTC survivor. “Imagine how strange it is to be one of the 20. The rest of their lives they know they’ll be walking reminders of that day. It’s not fun to be a walking memorial. It’s a heavy burden at times, and I think they feel it.”
World Trade Center is part of a first-wave of 9/11 projects that included Paul Greengrass’ United 93 last April and an upcoming miniseries with Harvey Keitel that was shot in Toronto.
Stone says he’s happy to not have been the first out of the gate. “There was a process in our case that took four years to get going, John and Will in recovery, then them mentally being able to talk about it, the writing of the script. But I’m glad United 93 preceded us, because it broke the ice.”
In particular, it seemed to have absorbed the brunt of the “Too soon?” questions. Though Stone asks and answers the question himself, unprompted. “The Killing Fields was made five years after the Cambodian genocide,” he says. “World War II movies were made in the heart of it.
As for 9/11, he says, “there’s no ‘too soon.’ The consequences of that day are all around us.”
Which starts Stone talking politically about the fallout of that day. As he talks, you start to visualize the movie he could have made (and may still).
Turns out the “inside job” conspiracy theories (in which Bush, Cheney, the CIA, etc. planted explosives in the towers) leave him cold. “(JFK aside), I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories per se. You do have to be aware of alternative explanations for things, because that’s the way the world is. There’s no one explanation for anything. But I don’t buy the prime motive of this thing.
“So I don’t subscribe to a conspiracy on that day, above and beyond what 20 conspirators and al-Qaida did. But there is a conspiracy since then, and it’s in front of everybody’s noses. It’s been outed by people like (former Bush terrorism adviser) Richard Clarke, how a cabal of neo-conservatives decided to go to war with Iraq against all the advice of the CIA and State Department and all the branches of government who fed them intelligence.
“It’s a consequence of 9/11, and the consequences of 9/11 are far worse than 9/11 itself. We have beheadings on the Internet, a moral climate of fear, more deaths in the world from terror, a breakdown of constitutional protections — which is very important in America, people don’t understand how important that is.
“Also the debt, the waste and $50 billion on a Homeland Security Act. It’s been a nightmare, and we’re in for worse.”
These were the thoughts that Stone says preoccupied him at the time World Trade Center was offered as a project. “My thoughts were, ‘Go back to the day, Ground Zero. It all springs from that. If you were raped and suffered consequences from that all your life, you’d go to a psychiatrist, perhaps, and go back to the day of the rape. Face your demons, don’t live in fear.
“I did it with Platoon. It was, ‘Let’s go back to the jungle, try to remember it, smell it, sense it as it was.’ In a way, this is just a different jungle.”
