A View of 9/11

Having shied away from the subject for the last few years, Hollywood is now turning in full force to the events of 9/11. Heather Timmons reports

With a violent shudder, the front of a reconstructed Boeing 757 pitches toward the ground. Actors struggle not to slide from their seats, some screaming, one chanting, "Oh, my God." A camera flits from seat to seat, stopping to focus on individual vignettes of terror, as an actor playing a hijacker barks, "Sit down!" over the loudspeaker.

After almost universally shying away from the topic for the past four years, Hollywood is turning in full force to the events of September 11, 2001. Painful memories, all-too-familiar news clips and personal stories are now being transformed into big-screen dramas, as studios look for commercial value in the still-fresh trauma, while prompting the mass audience to revisit its thoughts and feelings.

This spring will bring the release of the first feature film to focus specifically on the attacks: Flight 93, from the director Paul Greengrass, based on the hijacking that led to the crash of a United Airlines plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

The film, to be released by Universal Pictures, is being filmed in Pinewood Studios (the site of many James Bond films). The filmmakers said Flight 93 had the cooperation of all the families of the passengers who died on the flight. Many agreed to participate because they felt that previous attempts to document the crash focused on just the few passengers who had been able to make calls to their family members.

Greengrass directed The Bourne Supremacy, but is perhaps better known for the 2002 movie Bloody Sunday. In the latter, rather than looking for heroes or villains, Greengrass sought to explain how such an event could have occurred, and the filmmaking was grounded in realism – for example, he used former British paratroopers who had been stationed in Northern Ireland to play some of the paratroopers that day.

In Flight 93, Greengrass incorporates information about the disaster, including the plane's exact movements in the air, the times and content of phone calls to family members, recordings from inside the cockpit and reaction on the ground from air traffic controllers and the military, as well as details about the passengers' personalities and mannerisms provided by the families. The aim is to weave what he calls "a believable truth" about what happened in midair. Many of the scenes in the plane are being filmed in long, gruelling takes, with actors improvising dialogue and actions.

"One of the reasons why Flight 93 exerts such a powerful hold on our imaginations is precisely because we don't know exactly what happened," Greengrass said in an interview on the set, a concrete hangar dominated by the sections of the rebuilt plane, which are on mechanised scaffolding to make them pitch and roll during filming. "Which one of us doesn't think about that day and wonder how it must have been and how we might have reacted?" he asked.

Also in the works are several more traditionally structured dramas. Oliver Stone's movie about the last two men to be rescued from the World Trade Centre, starring Nicolas Cage, is beginning production in Los Angeles. Reign O'er Me, directed by Mike Binder, to be released in 2007, will star Adam Sandler as a man who lost his family on September 11 and is still grieving. An adaptation of 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer, a reporter for the New York Times, and Kevin Flynn, a special-projects editor and former police bureau chief at the New York Times – a book that recreates the moments between the first plane's crash into the World Trade Centre and the second tower's collapse – is also tentatively scheduled for a 2007 release.

Hollywood has digested traumatic events before, notably the Vietnam War and World War II, even making movies about them before they were over. But until now, it has largely avoided the events of September 11 (with the exception of Spike Lee's 25th Hour, which used the scars of New York City as a backdrop), partly from a sense that the trauma is too immediate to draw audiences.

Many of the actors have had direct contact with family members while researching their roles. Most stress that they are not seeking to impersonate the passengers they represent, but instead are trying to portray the way they might have reacted.

Leigh Zimmerman, the actress playing the passenger Christine Snyder, was sent Snyder's wedding video by her family. "I got to see the way that she walked and talked, I got to see her be with her family," Zimmerman said. "I think she was a calming presence," she said, an interpretation reflected in Zimmerman's portrayal.

The Flight 93 set has been full of unintentional shocks and incongruities. For instance, before the long take (more than 20 minutes) that leads to the passengers' trying to get into the cockpit, the actors make breezy jokes and banter with one another and the film crew. Afterwards, they emerge from the shell of the plane, faces solemn, wiping away tears. Levin said the lengthy takes were "like asking actors to perform the end of Long Day's Journey Into Night over and over again."

After one take, Omar Berdouni, a Moroccan actor who plays a hijacker, idled outside the open-ended fuselage of the rebuilt plane, leaning on the wall and toying with the wires from the "bomb" around his waist. (The hijackers told the plane's passengers that they had a bomb.)

Asked how fulfilling this kind of role could be, Berdouni, who has about four lines, all shouted in a thick accent, said, "Paul's approach is, 'These guys were real, let's not try to stereotype."' To prepare, the actors playing the hijackers have studied what they can find about their characters, including the written instructions issued by Mohamed Atta, the plot's leader.

Inevitably, some people will not want to watch these films. "Different people cope with very horrible experiences in different ways," said Dr Cynthia Pfeffer, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York, who has treated many patients affected by the events of September 11. Some people who were close to the situation or lost loved ones should probably choose to avoid the films altogether, because they will just reignite traumatic feelings, she said. Others may want to go with someone they can talk to about the film afterwards.

For Greengrass, though, it was the story's broader implications that inspired him to make Flight 93. "Forty ordinary people had 30 minutes to confront the reality of the way that we're living now, decide on the best course of action and act," he said. The passengers were the "first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world," he continued. "They had to choose because they were in that airplane. Their choices are our choices, and their debate is our debate."

©The New York Times