What was it like to be carried alive from the ruins of the Twin Towers on 9/11?
Oliver Stone was in London last week to discuss his movie World Trade Center and shed light on a film critics have called one of the most pro-American pictures of all time – no mean feat for a director previously accused of being unpatriotic.
The director was accompanied by New York Port Authority Police Department officer Will Jimeno, one of only 20 people to be pulled alive from Ground Zero on September 11.
Stone’s film brilliantly evokes the confusion and fear of the tower’s attack and collapse, before documenting the terrible predicament of Jimeno and his sergeant John McLoughlin as they struggle to keep each other alive under the wreckage.
Stone lived through the Kennedy assassination, and says he quickly realised that in many horrible ways the events unfolding on his screen on 9/11 resembled a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. How then did he distance himself from simply recreating the disaster as a Hollywood event?