In the first few years after 9/11, whenever there was talk of the possibility of a movie being made about the events of that day, there was a cry of “Too soon! Too soon!” It was felt the trauma was still too fresh.
Now, five years later, the movies are here: there has been one TV film, Oliver Stone has made a movies about the firemen of New York’s actions on that day, and British director Paul Greengrass put together United 93, about the one flight of the four that did not hit its presumed target, but crashed in a field in Pennsylvania because the passengers fought back.
When asked if he felt it was “too soon” to make the story of United Airlines Flight 93, or any project about 9/11, Greengrass says: “I’ve been asked that a lot by journalists, but never by any of the families [of those who lost their lives]. Some of them said, ‘Why did it take so long?'”
Greengrass, however, had his own way of doing the film, and he and three cast members explained it to us, a group of reporters gathered at London’s Dorchester hotel in May this year as the film was released in the United Kingdom. In 2002, Greengrass made Bloody Sunday, a careful reconstruction of the notorious 1972 massacre in Northern Ireland, and he wanted to do a similar thing with the story of Flight 93.
He approached the families of the passengers who died on the flight and got their support and direct assistance. Through the families, he and the cast researched the characters of the passengers on the plane as fully as possible. Each actor absorbed as much as he or she could about the person in question.
Greengrass and his team had looked carefully at the flight itself: the 40-minute delay before it took off, the nearly half an hour before the hijacking began, and then the last half hour of the flight before the plane hit the ground. They established the sequence of events that could be known — when phone calls were made by passengers to family members, when officials on the ground began to feel something was wrong, and so forth.
These moments provided a structure; what happened between them, and how precisely events unfolded, is not known. So Greengrass required his actors, in character as the various passengers, to workshop and improvise to fill the gaps, and between them they worked out what was most likely. Shot in long, continuous takes to allow the situation to develop naturally, the flight’s last half-hour, from hijacking to crash, are filmed in real time, minute for minute.
“The whole film is an act of research,” says Khalid Abdalla, who plays Ziad Jarrah, the leader of the hijackers on Flight 93. Abdalla himself was born in Glasgow, of Egyptian parents, and brought up in London. “I speak Egyptian Arabic,” he says, “and the character I play is Lebanese, so I had to do a fair amount of dialect training.”
Jarrah, he points out, was “the odd one out” of the hijackers: he had a secular education and became involved in al-Qaeda, it seems, only when he went to Afghanistan in 1998 or 1999. He was the only one of the hijackers who kept in touch with his family while in the United States on his fatal mission, and, it seems, even wanted to pull out in July 2001, but was persuaded to stay.
It was possibly his hesitation that delayed the hijacking. The other hijackings, Abdalla says, all took place “within five minutes of the seat-belt sign going off”; on Flight 93, though, there was a gap of 28 minutes. Moreover, the plane had already been delayed on the ground for 40 minutes, so when the hijacking took place there was time for the passengers to find out that two other planes had hit the World Trade Centre, and realise what could be happening to them.
Abdalla did not contact the family of Ziad Jarrah, though they would have been easy to find: his father was a Lebanese MP and a relative lived in London. The actors playing the passengers, however, drew heavily on what the passengers’ families told them. It was an emotionally wrenching process, said Chloe Sirene and Leigh Zimmerman, who both have roles in the film and spoke about them at the press junket at the Dorchester.
Her overwhelming feeling, researching her character (Christine Snyder) and playing her, says Zimmerman, was “wanting to do her justice”. Sirene, who plays Honor Elizabeth Wainio, says she felt a responsibility to the family: “I wanted to give back to them some of what they’d given me, which was a tremendous amount.”
Certainly, this research and the subsequent improvisation out of it got the actors fully immersed in their roles. United 93 barely feels acted at all.
The sense of real people in a real situation is extraordinary; the effect is one of harrowing realism. You feel that it really must have felt and looked very much like this — even a documentary, had there been cameras on Flight 93, could not recreate it like this. Greengrass even got the real people who were leading soldiers and air-traffic controllers to play themselves in the film, and the film cuts between what was happening on board and what was taking place on the ground. But there’s not a single shot of George W Bush; this is no Fahrenheit 9/11.
“I wanted to make a film about ordinary people,” says Greengrass, “not kings, princes and presidents. One of the central truths of 9/11 is that the further up the ladder you were, the less you knew about what was going on and the less you could influence it.
“I wanted to make a film about 9/11 because it drives our politics today,” says Greengrass. “This is not just any old film.” Universal Pictures backed him unquestioningly, riding as he was on the success of his only commercial picture so far, The Bourne Supremacy — a franchise movie he made, he says, because he relished “the challenge”, and because it had an anti-establishment tone unlike other films of the Mission: Impossible ilk.
But, when it came to United 93, he felt he couldn’t just go off and dream up his own version of events. He was always going to make what was very much his own film, but it was important that it be responsible both to the events themselves and to the families involved. Greengrass was asked, not least by cast members such as Abdalla, whether one could make such a film without being exploitative or propagandist, and the film itself is the best proof of his integrity.
This, he says, was Greengrass’s pitch to the passengers’ families: “Let me make my film as best I can, but you must be the judge, and if you don’t like it you must denounce it.” None of them has.
United 93 is released in South Africa on August 18. World Trade Center is released on September 29. Shaun de Waal attended the United 93 press junket in London as a guest of Universal Pictures