Oliver's 'WTC' to honour Sept. 11 heroes

As the Twin Towers burned on Sept. 11, 2001, five New York City Port Authority Police officers - Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer Will Jimeno among them were in the underground concourse connecting the two buildings, preparing to enter one of the burning skyscrapers and rescue the people trapped inside.

Then the world caved in, burying the men under 20 feet of concrete, glass and metal. Roughly 12 hours later, McLoughlin and Jimeno were extracted from the rubble. They were severely injured but alive.

Their miraculous story, as well as the experiences of their wives and children anxiously awaiting their fates, forms the basis of World Trade Center, which opened Wednesday. Unlike Flight 93, another Sept. 11-themed movie released earlier this year, World Trade Center is expected to connect broadly with movie-going audiences. Despite the severity of its subject matter, the story is an inspiring, even uplifting tale of survival and heroism, complete with a happy ending.

And unlike United 93, which had the harrowing, you-are-there feel of a documentary, World Trade Center looks and feels like a Hollywood production, boasting famous actors, big-budget production values and a famous, Oscar-winning director.

Except that director happens to be Oliver Stone, a filmmaker as polarizing as he is celebrated. The iconoclastic creator of JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street, Stone at first seems like a curious choice to direct a movie meant to honor and celebrate instead of aggravate.

Stone was also the one who, in the fall of 2001 during a panel presented by HBO entitled Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Filmmaking in the National Debate, caused a minor ruckus by referring to Sept. 11 as a "revolt" and later contemplating a ''bullet of a film'' comparable to the 1966 classic The Battle of Algiers, which presents a sympathetic view on the roots of terrorism.

But the script for World Trade Center, which was made with the cooperation of the real-life participants in the tale, avoids politics altogether. By focusing almost exclusively on the points of view of McLoughlin (played by Nicolas Cage) and Jimeno (Michael Pea) and their families, the film presents a grunt's-eye view of the nightmare at Ground Zero a counterpart to Platoon's foot soldier's perspective on the Vietnam War.

Stacey Sher, one of the producers of World Trade Center, says Stone lobbied to direct the project from the moment he read Andrea Berloff's script. "I think he was very moved by it, because being a native New Yorker, it was very resonant to him. And he also wanted to tell a simple story of courage, because having served two tours of duty in Vietnam, that has been a defining issue for him."

A the script showed up out of the blue and it was fate. It was an amazing script. My agent showed it to me. He said, ''I don't know if this movie will ever get made, but it's something I can't put out of my mind.'' I read it and had the same feeling.

There had already been Sept. 11 material floating around books, documentaries, television of course dealt with it through 24 and The Cell. But this script was different because I had never thought about that approach. It was a microcosm.

A plain, simple, Frank Capra kind of story. I had never thought of doing Sept. 11 that way. It just hit me as the right way to do it. And these two guys were at the epicenter of the collapse. They were right in the middle of it that's symbolic. And when I met with them, they were everything unglamorous, working-class New York policemen are supposed to be. Two hard-working, ordinary guys.

And their families happened to be intact, so you had the potential for creating a real relationship between a husband and wife that went beyond the clich, of a housewife. You have to take into account that the wives suffered equally that day, because they had to accept the fact that their husbands would not come home. The buildings came down and there were 20 survivors. Twenty! That's nothing.

So that's why I did it. It was original, and yet it was a clich, at the same time. It was challenging to say to myself, "Why can't I do a housewife? Why can't I do Donna Reed? Why can't I do Frank Capra?".

(The Miami Herald).