First Hollywood film about 9/11 premieres at New York festiv

[Ian]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,,1746350,00.html

First Hollywood film about 9/11 premieres at New York festival

Paul Arendt
Tuesday April 4, 2006
The Guardian

Later this month Robert De Niro's Tribeca film festival will host the world premiere of United 93, the first mainstream Hollywood film to tackle the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Directed by British film-maker Paul Greengrass, who made The Bourne Supremacy, the film is a real-time, partly improvised reconstruction of events on board United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers tried to overpower terrorist hijackers. The film opens the Tribeca festival on April 25, three days before it goes on general release in the US. (It will be released in the UK in September.)
Flight 93 was unique among the planes hijacked on September 11 because it was late taking off from Newark; its passengers already knew what had happened in New York. "Those people on that aeroplane, via a quirk of fate, were actually in the post-9/11 world by the time that plane was hijacked," Greengrass says. "To me, the central drama is about a group of people forced to confront our choices today, which are, what are we going to do when faced with this problem? Do we do nothing? Do we do something? And what are the consequences? That's really what the film's about. It's about today."

Greengrass began his career as a political film-maker. In 2002 he made the award-winning Bloody Sunday with James Nesbitt; before that, there was an acclaimed TV drama about the murder of Stephen Lawrence, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Ashley Walters. "I think it's a very rich time for films that are socially and politically aware," Greengrass says. "Hollywood has got an admirable history of making films about how the world is: think of Vietnam and McCarthyism. I don't think this is any different."

Greengrass's film is a fitting choice to open the film festival, which was conceived as a direct response to the World Trade Centre attacks. Jane Rosenthal, who co-founded the event with De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in 2002, says: "9/11 changed us, in indescribable personal ways, but also by forever altering our downtown community." Many of those connected with the tragedy of flight 93 will be attending the premiere. "We are humbled to host their families, first responders, and others who were most profoundly affected that day," says Rosenthal.

United 93 is the first in a slew of forthcoming Hollywood films that address the 9/11 attacks and their after-effects. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, which opens in the US in August, sees Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as Port Authority police officers trapped in the rubble of Ground Zero. Mike Binder's Empty City, which stars Adam Sandler as a man who lost his family in the attacks, is currently shooting, and several Hollywood directors, among them Ridley Scott and Ron Howard, are preparing films set against the backdrop of the Iraq war. Paul Haggis, who directed this year's Best Picture Oscar winner Crash, is developing Against All Enemies, a drama based on the memoirs of former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke. Has Hollywood finally got its politics back?