Stone hits home with 'World Trade Center' (LIBERAL BS ALERT)

America's most controversial filmmaker is mulling over the state of the nation, and he isn't quite sure if he's feeling hopeful or hopeless about America these days. "I feel hopeful and I feel like we're in deep sh--," says director Oliver Stone. "I guess I feel like most people do. There is an America that I grew up in that I love. I think to some degree that it's been stolen. But there are enough of us to get it back."

This brings him to his new movie, "World Trade Center," opening Wednesday. Based on the lives of two real Port Authority Police officers who get trapped in the towers, Stone has made a brutal yet touching film about the terrorist attacks in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.

But his reaction to the bombings of the World Trade Center might surprise a few people.

"At the time, I thought we were overreacting," he says. "I've been through many disasters in my life. There was Vietnam. The Kennedy assassination, Watergate. The last presidential election. Sept. 11 to me was a national wound. It was one big murder job. But it plunged us into this homeland security state of mind.

"All I can say is that we had the sympathy of the world on that day. The rest of the world was with us. We had a right to pursue those murderers. We should have closed the circle. We didn't need more and more terror, Constitutional breakdowns and more pain. But those are only my opinions as John Q. Citizen."

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Of course, he is not just a regular guy. He's Oliver Stone, conspiracy theorist, controversial moviemaker and rabble-rouser. Stone, who will turn 60 in September, calls from his hotel room overlooking the San Francisco Bay, where he's once again stirring things up.

In his new film, Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena play John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority officers who try to save lives as they rush into one of the burning towers on Sept. 11 only to get trapped 20 feet under rubble when the building collapses.

Already the film has stirred up several controversies. Commentators across the nation are asking the big question, which is somehow more pressing now than it was earlier this year upon the release of another Sept. 11 movie, "United 93": Is it too soon to bring these painful memories to the big screen?

"How can we possibly say it's too soon?" Stone says. "You must confront your demons and then you understand your fears. It's about overcoming that fear that paralyzes us."

"My wife woke me up and said, 'Oliver, put on the TV,' " he recalls. "Some wake-up call."

"The beauty of my original premise was to take you inside the lives of these two men," he says. "I wanted to narrow it down to two men and feel their fear, their strength and their courage. I thought this was a fresh way to purge our systems of this tragedy."

"The movie is about following the story lines of two cops," Stone says. "We needed to see what Will and John saw. John never saw the first plane go in. He was at the station. He was in the tower with Will trying to get people out when the second plane hit. Will felt the impact and saw the terror of a building falling down around him.

"These men also told me that earlier in the morning they saw a shadow of a plane move across the city flying low. That's what is in the movie. I also didn't show the planes hitting the towers because those are such sensationalistic images. And it's just not necessary."

Stone also doesn't talk about the attackers much, except to have one rescue worker dub them as "those bastards."

"Of course, there is still a huge amount of anger," Stone says. "But there was no need to talk about the attackers. It could have been like an Oklahoma City -- a domestic terrorist bombing. We didn't know who the attackers were on that day, so it didn't apply to this film."

The man who gave us "JFK" (1991) also didn't choose to turn his film into a platform to discuss theories of why the attack happened.

"I didn't go that route. It wasn't the film I wanted to make," he says. "There are people who still talk about conspiracy theories concerning that day. The irony is that whether these conspiracies are true or not, the consequences of that day have been far worse. So I guess whatever conspiracy it was worked.

"We're in far worse shape now," he says. "But there is also an open conspiracy in front of our eyes. A small group in our government ignored all the other branches and got us into a war."

Stone has a problem with how the Bush administration and the country handled the 9/11 crisis.

"We live in dangerous times, but our reaction was dangerous," he says. "Frankly, I think it would have worked better to have responded with a covert lethal reaction.

"You have to play dirty in these instances," he says. "But you do this out of the public sight. But that wasn't done, as a political choice."

"This movie, for instance, hasn't left me," he says. "I guess what I want is for this movie to linger with audiences, too. I want people to go home and let it settle in them.

"I don't even like to talk about the film after I see it," he says. "It's too painful. I've been through screenings where I've sat there with people crying and I've sat there crying."

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Stone says he was amazed by the courage he saw on Sept. 11.

"The reaction from the rescue workers, the cops and the firemen was an honest reaction," he says. "We put the armor on and on and on in this country," he says. "This is a country that does step up."

Stone set out to make a film for the masses Among the many controversies surrounding the film "World Trade Center" is this one: that director Oliver Stone was forced by Paramount to cut graphic scenes deemed too difficult for audiences to watch.

"This is the film I wanted to make and I'm a final-cut director," he says. "No one tells me how to cut my films."

Stone admits he chose to tone down a few of the graphic scenes where police officers are dying in the towers after the second plane hits.

"This movie went through a sawmill," he says. "There were images that were tough, and I'm not interested in rubbing it in anyone's face.

"It does prove that real life is tougher than movies," he says. "But how much can people take? I wanted a woman to see this movie and a child to see it. I don't mind if they're wincing. There might be moments where you want to put your hands over your eyes.

"I even screened this film for my 10-year-old and she could handle it," Stone says. "I screened it for 16-year-olds because I was curious. They were 7 at the time of the real attack and they heard all the rah-rah. They were very interested in this movie."

He also watched the movie in New York with some of the police officers, firemen and first-responders who rushed into danger on Sept. 11, 2001.

"When these people walked out, I saw relief on their faces. They said, 'Thank you. You got it right. This is the way it was. Thank you for respecting us.' "

World Trade Center”: A Masterpiece

by L. Brent Bozell III
July 21, 2006

By L. Brent Bozell III

“You kept me alive!”

I wasn’t skeptical when I was invited to a private screening of Oliver Stone’s upcoming “World Trade Center” movie. I was downright cynical. As a conservative I’ve long considered so much of his work the bane of my existence. From “Platoon” to “Salvador” to “Born of the Fourth of July” to “JFK,” and let’s not forget last year’s ghastly “Alexander,” Stone has delivered one leftwing screed after another specifically intended, I’m convinced, to bring my blood to the boiling point. When I learned a few months ago that he was working on a project about 9/11, I fully expected another tiresome, loathsome Bush-lied-thousands-died production designed to titillate the Michael Moore leftwing fringe. It is why, when the movie was ready for screening and my friend told me I was going to like it, I thought he was mad. But as a personal favor I went. And by the time I digested that triumphant line – “You kept me alive!” – I was ready to put everything I’d previously felt aside.

Let me be unequivocal. Oliver Stone has delivered a masterpiece.

You kept me alive. I wanted to preview this movie free from any outside influences so I made it a point not to read anything about it in advance. I didn’t know what viewers surely will know, namely that this film deals with the successful rescue of the two trapped policemen in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center buildings. The emotional roller-coaster was that much more pronounced for me since I didn’t know how the ordeal would end., but it makes no difference, really. When Officer John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) emerges from the rubble, is rushed to the hospital and in the pandemonium briefly is reunited with his wife Donna (Maria Bello) greeting her with those words, you will weep, too.

It would be enough simply to plumb the story of the extraordinary rescue of these poor men, buried up to their necks for almost a day in broken concrete, twisted metal, dust and crushed glass – the shattered, smoldering remains of what once were two proud skyscrapers, and now had become a shocking testimony to the reality that a worldwide terrorist enterprise successfully had attacked America. Add some awesome special effects – ever wondered what it must sound, look and even feel like having a 110-story building come crashing down on you? – and you’d have a box office hit.

But Oliver Stone chose to dig deeper. Most of the movie focuses on the two policemen, McLoughlin and Will Jimeno ( played by Michael Pena, and here let’s also recognize the heart-wrenching performance of Maggie Gyllenhall as his wife Allison), pinned under the devastation, with only their dusty faces partially visible, talking to each other, using their voices, and their words as the only instruments available in their darkened tomb to keep each other alive as their crushed bodies slowly seek surrender from the physical agony of countless injuries.

And what keeps them alive are the very footers of civilized society that our cynical, enlightened popular culture is seemingly so desperate to discard: fraternal love, devotion to family, allegiance to country, and faith in God. Each element is powerfully developed not just in the officers’ dialogue but also in the cutaways to the battered co-workers and the two anguished families anxiously praying for a miracle; in the quiet resolve of the former Marine who dons his uniform and enters Ground Zero, ultimately to make the discovery; and most poignantly in Jimeno’s visions as he teeters on the brink of death. A Catholic, Jimeno sees not an ambiguous Hollywood representation of a Higher Power, but the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is – this being a true story, it was -- these values that kept these two heroic policemen tethered to life.

You kept me alive. After 9/11 we pledged as a nation that this atrocity was something we would never forget. We declared that loudly on our bumper stickers, on our license plates, on our billboards and in our corporate advertisements -- a national “post-it” note on our collective conscience, as it were. Yet only five years later the fires of purpose, stoked by a nation’s sorrow, rage and commitment to justice, are waning. For a brief moment after that fateful day there was a sense of national unity unseen since the glory days of the Greatest Generation a half-century before. Now where are we?

“World Trade Center” pleads with us to remember that moment, and to keep it alive. It is not appropriate for the very young, of course. It is appropriate, indeed necessary, for everyone else, just as it is appropriate, and necessary, for Mr. Stone’s critics now to salute him, and thank him for the gift he’s given his country.

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