With his bold and controversial film United 93, writer-director Paul Greengrass becomes the first filmmaker to directly explore the terrorist airline hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001 in a traditional big-screen Hollywood drama. Talking with Hollywood.com, Greengrass just as directly tackles the behind-the-scenes issues of how to treat the tragic topic and whether mainstream audiences are ready for it.
Hollywood.com: Did you feel an additional amount of pressure making the first film to tackle the events of 9/11, however non-exploitative?
Greengrass: The stakes are high on a film like this. Of course they were, because it’s an important subject and it affects many, many people’s lives. There’s a responsibility to be mature and not cause gratuitous offense, but to tell the truth as you see it. I think to that end we made some decisions very early on as to what kind of a film would withstand the best chance of fulfilling that criteria, and that to me meant a small film. This was quite a small film. This wasn’t a big budget blockbuster with movie stars. I can make those myself, but it didn’t feel to me like the way that I wanted to address this subject. But ultimately, at a certain point you have to set down–you’ve got to look at those concerns. You’ve got to look at the stakes before you start and be clear about why you’re doing it and what you want to do and what you want to say.
HW: Information from that day is still only trickling out. How did you zero in on the details of what was said and done, and how to depict them?
PG: I’ve spent a good deal of my career making films about these kinds of subjects–not just in Northern Ireland, [but] in the Middle East and elsewhere. Not everything that I’ve ever made has been on the subject of terrorism or political violence, but I’ve returned to it numerous times and I suppose that over the years I feel that there is a place for films that tell you what happened. Now you have to gather your material as comprehensively as you reasonably can within the period of time that you’ve got to make the film. You need, in my view, to gather together people who can help you, who are willing to recreate that from a position of expertise. You can’t do it just with actors, though actors are very, very important. You need to get that cross-fertilization between actors and professional people, so that you gather together in a place for a couple of months and together you say, “Let’s try and explore a believable truth based on what we can know”…You gather together a group of actors, the families, real pilots, real military folks who were present on that day, real air traffic controllers and various people and you gather. That’s literally what you do–you have a conversation. You don’t all agree with each other. On the contrary, you try and synthesize things…You make a thousand judgments in an attempt to try and create something that feels truthful.
HW: The passengers in the film are not presented like typical movie “characters”—the audience doesn’t necessarily get a traditional backstory on them to tell us who they are as the events begin to unfold. How’d you come to that decision?
PG: In reality when all of us get on an airplane, we actually have very little conversation. We might have a bit, but more often than not we travel alone. The people who got on the airplane that morning were unexceptional. They were like you and I or anyone. They were just getting on a routine flight, and what interested me was the way that when faced with this unimaginable event collectively they moved from a position of being held in abject terror at the back of the airplane in within about 20 minutes to basically fomenting and insurrection. That, to me, wasn’t about their individual characters. I mean, you know enough to get some sense of the businessman at the front and the stewardess at the back, enough I think to recognize distinctions, but to me it was always about creating the interaction between the hijackers and the hijacked because that’s our world today.
HW: The passengers begin as blank slates, and we really learn about them through their reactions to what’s happening.
PG: My whole thing, and the thing that interested me the most about making this film, was the fact that by a quirk of fate, that quirk of fate being that United 93 was on the ground for 40 minutes because of routine, random air traffic control difficulties on that day–what that meant was that by the time that airplane was hijacked at just before 9:30 a.m. 9/11 was substantially over. It had been half an hour since the towers had been struck. Flight 77 was a minute or two from striking the Pentagon. What that meant was that those passengers on United 93 were the first people, I think, to inhabit our world which is the post 9/11 world, which is the world dominated by “What are we going to do?” Now we can—as societies, as we do necessarily—avoid that and not want to look at that, and not want to confront those hard choices, not want to deal with the fact that it’s difficult to find an answer because it is, but those passengers did not have our luxury. They couldn’t avoid it. That was their choice. Start clear. They knew exactly what they were dealing with, and they came to believe that they knew what the stakes were and in that interaction between them as a group and those hijackers is our world today. That’s what this film is about. I think that whatever you think about what has happened in our world since 9/11, I hope that you can look at this film and see some common ground.
HW: And you did not shy away from presenting a multidimensional interpretation of the hijackers, beyond their horrific deeds.
PG: Well, I think that I wanted them to be real. I wanted them to be a very, very difficult thing to achieve… I wanted them to be both small and inconspicuous and unformidable in every way, but also dangerous, lethal and terrifying–two totally contradicting things. Also, I wanted them to show us something very, very important, I think, about 9/11, which I hope comes through and I certainly think it will come through to audiences in other parts of the world…There were two hijacks on that day. There was the hijack that we all know about, the hijack of innocent people on four airplanes, death and destruction on an unimaginable scale–all of the things that we know. But there was a second hijack which is the hijack of a religion, Islam. It was by a group of extremely zealous, pious, ideologically deluded young men who when they got up to kill, as we know from the cockpit voice recorder, they did it in the name of their God. In that act they’re hijacking us, but they are also hijacking Islam, and that’s one of the terrifying things about the day, I think. And one of the things that stays with us because, of course, that continues.
HW: Were you ever concerned that the film might be criticized for investing the hijackers with some humanity?
PG: The film judges them for their most appalling acts. The question, really, is does it make it easier for us if we think that they’re not human? I think that it does, and I think that we need to confront the fact that this danger remains. There are a lot of young men who flock to that banner, who are hijacking Islam and perverting it. The one thing that we can know about this day without a shadow of a doubt is that there was nothing exceptional about those young men, either. No one noticed them. No one sitting next to them said “You’re not human.” They looked like us. They looked unexceptional.
HW: How important was it for the actors that played the American characters to meet with their real-life families? Did you encourage that?
PG: Well, beforehand we had obviously spent a lot of time with the families, and it was really down to the families–did they want to be contacted by us or would they rather not? Pretty much I think that most of them wanted to be, and I think that pretty much all the actors did that then, in one way or another. Subsequent to that, I don’t think that any of them met at that point, but I think that subsequently whole groups of them have. I think that it’s very moving. It was an amazing couple of days when they watched that film.
HW: You obviously do not agree with the argument that it’s too soon to be exploring the subject of 9/11 in film, typically a medium of popular entertainment.
PG: Each and every person involved in this film gave the utmost in an attempt to make a contribution on this subject with a belief that we cannot avoid discussing this subject on film because movies are important. They are one of the principal ways that we talk to each other and tell stories to each other. And so my feeling about this whole “Is it too soon?” thing… I think to myself, “What are we saying here?” I mean, let’s assume that the answer to that is yes, and so what we’re saying is that newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet can discuss 9/11, but movies are to be disenfranchised. We’re not going to let our filmmakers make films about 9/11? I don’t understand that. That can’t be right.
United 93 opens in theaters April 28.
