World Trade Center
Cast & Crew

Interview By: Harry Kaplowitz
HarryKaplowitz@TheCinemaSource.com

A director challenging the status quo with a controversial film is nothing new to Hollywood. Stanley Kubrick's 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange bombarded critics with gritty depictions of gang violence and rape, earning the film an X rating in the United State and a withdrawn distribution in England. Walter Hill exploited violence and conventional tastes in 1979's The Warriors and then Spike Lee terrified white suburbia ten years later with the racially charged Do The Right Thing.

But few directors can say they've challenged critical and audience acceptance with nearly each film they've created. From 1986's Platoon to 1991's conspiracy theory-laden JFK to 1994's ultraviolent and all-too-realistic Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone, 59, has been the kind of director that people love to hate, yet can't help but watch.

With the upcoming World Trade Center ' set for wide release in the United States and Canada on Aug. 9 ' Stone is once again breaching tongue-in-cheek territory, offering up the story of John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority officers who become trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center while trying to evacuate the building during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

But rather than delving into the politics behind the tragedy, Stone has opted to make 'a simpler film' about two men and their story for survival.

'(It's) a modest film about working class people. And we have here a series of facts, a chain of evidence that's amazing and still fresh enough after five years that we can go back and have numerous rescuers to help us actually put together almost a documentary,' the director said. 'It isn't cinema verit', it isn't United 93. It is the tightly connected emotions of four characters ' two wives and two husbands ' and that's a challenge to do things that way.'

And while cries of 'too soon' have lambasted the movie and its production team since filming began on Oct. 19, 2005, Stone insists that the necessity for a movie like World Trade Center will only diminish with time.

'There's 3,000 dead, approximately ' and what' ' 20 survivors. These two men went through the epicenter of the story symbolically. They were at the very center of the collapse. It's a story waiting, dying to be told,' he said. 'There are so many challenges in this movie. Why not tell that story' It's dying to be made, dying to be made.'

Nicolas Cage, one of the film's stars, related to World Trade Center's sense of immediacy. Cage, 42, plays McLoughlin, a father of four and husband of 25 years who led a group of four officers into the soon-to-collapse first tower.

'This movie is a triumph of the human spirit. It's about survival; it's about courage. And I think trying to link it to anything else right now would take away from what the movie is really about,' Cage said of the backlash the film has been receiving. 'It's a very emotional film, it is not a downer. You walk out feeling like, 'Yeah, angels do exist. These people are heroes.''

In order to instill an added sense of realism into the film, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Pe'a and Cage each spent time with their real-life counterparts to understand their emotions and actions during the fateful day. Playing Will and Allison Jimeno, Pe'a and Gyllenhaal, were forced to confront the notions of playing a soon-to-be parents and how one man's heroism could've been met with tragedy.

'The thing that I wanted to get right more than anything was just the brotherhood and the real feel of uncheesy love that you have for the people that you work with and the people you're trying to save,' the 30-year-old Pe'a said of his time spent with the real Will Jimeno. 'There's a line, specifically, he said, 'My whole life, I just wanted to be a cop.' I'm like, 'I think we should cut it.' And the first time I met him, it was the second thing out of his mouth. So I had to re-evaluate the whole situation.'

The connection that Gyllenhaal, 28, fostered with Allison Jimeno became stronger when Gyllenhaal became pregnant nearing the end of filming. Her pregnancy, she said, helped her to better understand Allison Jimeno's outlook on the situation.

'Trying to imagine what pregnancy is like for anyone that hasn't been pregnant is very hard. I mean it's very different that you think it's going to be. So I think now, I can relate to differently to what Allison went through,' she said. 'I've also found I'm also pretty strong and pretty clear during pregnancy that I wasn't before, so maybe there's a kind of mix, that it was probably both more emotional and more rooted than I imagined it might have been.'

Gyllenhaal also said that her interactions with Allison Jimeno were shrouded by the potential pratfall of imitating Jimeno as opposed to playing her role instinctively.

'I heard that Michael (Pe'a) kind of moved in with (the Jimenos). That he was there all the time and that he asked thousands of questions and spent lots and lots of time with Will (Jimeno). And with Allison and I, it was a little bit different. I guess I felt like I also didn't want to let anyone down and I wanted to make a movie that was as affecting as possible,' Gyllenhaal said. 'I guess for me, I thought the way to do that was to experience the things Allison experiences in the script myself. For me, I was worried about falling into the trap of imitating Allison as opposed to experiencing it myself. But at the same time, every time I was with Allison, it was this really intense experience that really impacted me. And I think I was mostly interested in being near her less than actually asking her about the specifics of the days. Although we did some of that, most of what was going in really was just being near her.'

For Cage, though, the process of character preparation hinged on his want to not let anyone down, as each actor expressed the concern of the weight of the role being primarily on the desire to 'get it right,' a phrase Stone was said to have repeated countless times on set.

'Well, I never met anyone before who had been tested to the level that John McLoughlin had been tested on that day. So, I did go into those first initial meetings with some nervousness. But he put me at ease right away and he allowed me to videotape him and ask him literally thousands of questions about the experience, how he got through it, what he relied on,' Cage said. 'So it was enormously helpful ' I really wanted to get it right. I didn't want to let John McLoughlin down. I didn't want to let Will (Jimeno) down. I didn't' want to let the rescue team down. Without John McLoughlin's help, it wouldn't have happened.'

Many would say the primary challenge of a movie like World Trade Center is the attempt to capture the universal emotion of a day that meant different things to millions of people. Stone shirked that challenge, essentially, by using Gyllenhaal's Jimeno and Maria Bello's Donna McLoughlin as the film's mirrors of emotion.

'Through the wives, we could only do it through the wives, Donna and Allison, and what they go through, we try to pay special attention to them. Not only because we wanted to get out of the hole to relieve the burdens of the hole, but to get to the light, to go back to Jersey,' Stone said of the film's emotional centers.

Another important task in the film, Stone said, was the avoidance of cinematic clich's in developing the film's tragic story arc.

'There had to be a moment in that day when they accepted that their husbands would probably not come home. And that was a very important moment to go beyond clich's,' he said. 'And what makes Donna ' married to John for 25 years with 4 kids ' what keeps them together' It's just a clich' if you say you're married. That doesn't mean anything. What is marriage' What are the little things in life that they will miss, take for granted' So that's the only way we can relate to it. We can live the New York experience only through them ' and the marine.'

The marine Stone mentions is the character of Dave Karnes, played by Michael Shannon, a Connecticut accountant who felt manifestly compelled to aid in the evacuation of the World Trade Center and ultimately rescued McLoughlin and Jimeno.

'The rescue of the men by this accountant in Connecticut, this ex-Marine, is something from a Hollywood movie. People don't believe it at first ' we had previews. People were shocked; they didn't think this guy existed. He did. He went to Iraq for two tours,' Stone said.

Filming the scenes depicting Cage and Pe'a trapped beneath the rubble of the collapsed tower also proved to be an eye-opening experience for the actors as well as Stone.

'We built these vast interior holes in Playa del Ray, Ca., as well as an exterior rubble set. These were vast sets and we had the actors in different modules and they never saw each other in the whole time, so that's an interesting aspect to it. You don't even have visual contact, so, it's all suggested,' Stone said. 'I think the key is lighting. There's not much camera work you can do. And I think (cinematographer) Seamus McGarvey deserves tremendous credit for the work. To me, the story was always about shadow and light ' they were in the darkness, but they were always reaching for the light.'

Cage, a self-proclaimed kinetic actor, saw the filming of World Trade Center as an opportunity to broaden his scope of playing McLoughlin.

'It was actually quite liberating. I'm a very kinetic actor, and I like to move, but I was in that hole boxed in like that, I didn't have to think about movement,' he said. 'So I was able to go inward and rely on my imagination to try and recreate, in some small way, what John's experience might have been like.'

But at its core, World Trade Center remains a film about the tragedy of the civilian casualty. And it's in that thematic center, Stone says, that the film finds it's primary insistence for peace.

'We made the point at the end of the film that citizens from 87 countries were destroyed, most of them were civilians. It's the nature of modern warfare, since Dresden, since World War II, and it has gotten worse and worse,' he said. 'It's the nature of modern warfare: When's it going to end' I just hope to God that we can move to a peaceful world where we can respect the lives of civilians.'

If it can rise above the controversy, World Trade Center might be a start.