Oliver Stone is about to surprise you

MIAMI — Few filmmakers are recognizable brand names. Oliver Stone is.

And we think we know what we are going to get with an Oliver Stone movie — a little conspiracy, a bit of politics and a lot of controversy. After all, this is the guy who gave us Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon.

Luis M. Alvarez/Special to The Palm Beach Post (enlarge photo) Director Oliver Stone talks to the media about his new film 'World Trade Center' at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on July 18, 2006, in Miami. Paramount Pictures Read reviews of "World Trade Center."

So when audiences are taken aback by the conventional tale of heroism he has made from one of the most pivotal, potentially controversial events in our history, World Trade Center, he gets a little rankled at the expectations attached to him.

"I think you're pigeonholing me a bit," he complains during a promotional stop in South Florida last month. "I never wanted this character called Oliver Stone that has been created — which really has nothing to do with me, he's sort of this person out here — never wanted (him) to get in the way of the films. It does many times, partly because of the media."

Stone, 59, knows he is a victim of his own success. "It's like when you get a reputation, which forms an impression. I think I've been able to overcome that, but it can be a curse, in the way that John Wayne became John Wayne. Each time, I'm trying to do different things, to find another aspect of myself. I don't think I've locked in to these habits yet.

"Nixon is a good case. Didn't you hear that we were going to do a hatchet job on Nixon? What the hell is Nixon, but a very human portrayal?" he asks rhetorically. "Alexander, I guess they expected Gladiator, but it was truly an attempt to enter his mind. Anyway, I just don't know what to say, except to keep doing what I'm doing. That's what's so beautiful about it, I love to surprise you guys."

After the critical and box office drubbing he received two years ago on his fevered Alexander the Great film, Stone was particularly interested in striking out in a new cinematic direction. Unexpectedly, he received a screenplay by a new writer named Andrea Berloff about two New York Port Authority police officers who answer the emergency call on the morning of September 11, enter the World Trade Center's concourse and become trapped under the falling rubble.

"I wasn't looking for the (9/11) story," Stone shrugs. "It came to me in the mail, one of those things that happens where a script comes in and it just hits you in the heart, and that one did. I wanted to do it right away. What was different about it was I never thought of 2001 that way. I never thought it would be a microcosmic story about two real Port Authority guys, the least glamorous of all the departments, who not only went through this horrendous day, but also their wives. Their wives could be conceived as clichés, these working class housewives, but there was far more there when you get into it."

World Trade Center stars Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as the trapped transit cops and real-life heroes John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, with Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as their respective wives.

"Nic Cage wanted it, he responded to me within 24 hours, he took a big cut in his pay to do it," Stone said of the casting. "It was never supposed to be a star vehicle, but we needed somebody to focus on and to get this thing financed. At the time I cast, the other actors were not as well known as they are now, but each one is a first choice."

Co-producer Michael Shamberg (Erin Brockovich, Pulp Fiction) describes Stone as an artist in search of the truth.

"You may disagree with his interpretation of the truth in some of his films, but this is a very clear truth here, which was represented and told to us by many, many people. He vowed to serve that truth. Because if he didn't, if we didn't, everyone would say, 'It didn't happen that way.' And the highest compliment we can get is, 'Maybe you don't want to see this movie, maybe it's too tough for you, but we were there and those guys told that story right.' "

What is likely to surprise moviegoers is the lack of Stone's usual conspiracy theories, especially since there have been alternate views on the cause of the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi War that followed. But Stone again labels that as stereotyping.

"By those standards, I should have been doing something on Bosnia at that time or I should be doing something on ecology or global warming," he says. "I'm not a documentarian, I'm a dramatist, and I have to do what calls me. I can't chase the news. On the contrary, maybe I should stay away from Iraq. There are larger issues going on. The consequences of 2001 are disturbing. The day itself is not as bad as what's happened since ... I don't think the consequences of that day are even clear yet, besides the state of the world being so precarious."

The mantra "too soon" has surrounded movies such as World Trade Center and United 93. Stone frowns at the notion. "Not to my way of thinking. It took four years to get to the place where I got involved. Two years, I would estimate to recover from the wounds, to ingest the process, to be able to talk about it. And we're here now today in the fifth year.

"The Killing Fields was five years after the Cambodian holocaust. There have been documentaries on the subject (of 9/11), why not movies? Where we are now is in far worse shape than on Sept. 12, so perhaps this is a way out, a way to begin the healing."

There will, of course, be those who reject the idea of seeing World Trade Center at all. "I can understand that," says Stone. "And I would say at the same time, 'Let it happen. Confront your fear.' The film is softer perhaps than the day was. It does seduce you in a sense that it creeps up on you like the day does."

Shamberg agrees. "I would say you don't have to see the movie, but for the guys who served, and they all say this to us, they don't want it forgotten what happened that day. You can't have it both ways. You can't say our world was irrevocably changed because of this event, but we don't really want to remember it, the heroism and the courage and the horrors of this event. You have to keep them both in perspective."

Stone believes his film can have a therapeutic effect and he compares the viewing of it to a trip to an analyst.

"If America was, let's say, raped that day and then five years later you developed all these fears, if you went to a psychiatrist, the first thing he would do is say, 'What happened on that day? What were you doing?' He would have you confront those fears. 'Turn around and look at those buildings. Tell me, what was it like?' And then perhaps in that process of description, your own fear will diminish."

No one is a bigger booster of Stone and his film than Will Jimeno, the Port Authority cop pinned under World Trade Center debris for 13 hours. "Oliver Stone can be controversial, but this guy saw something and he's a great storyteller. He said, 'Y'know, I need to tell the world this story,' and because of that maybe people around the world will see this film and say, 'Maybe we should stop throwing rockets at each other,' like what's going on right now."

Working with his director of photography Seamus McGarvey (The Hours, Sahara), Stone heightened the drama of the day in subtle ways. "In a broad sense, it was a battle between light and dark. The movie starts in the darkness and it comes into the light at the early dawn, very gradually. As the destruction devolves, it goes back into the darkness and gets plunged into blackness. The very first shot in the hole, it's all black. We cut from white to black and then we see Nic's eyes open, we can barely see him. Then as the day dims and the hopes for the lives dim, I think they had to know by 1 or 2 o'clock, that there were people that weren't coming out of this thing. As the twilight comes, it reflects the emotions outside as we go back into the hole. Rather than keeping them dark, we started to warm them up with the rescuers' flashlights and so forth, so it becomes a more hopeful situation."

Stone concedes that World Trade Center is more conventional in style than many of his past films, but the term sits uncomfortably with him. "It isn't really conventional, in the sense that no film has been done quite like this one. The spiritual and the physical interrelate so," he says, a reference to a vision seen by trapped Officer Jimeno of Jesus Christ with a bottle of water. It is a literal depiction of the policeman's hallucination, but it seems like a Stone embellishment. "I would say Ladder 49 would be conventional or Backdraft. Those would be the conventional treatments of firefighters. I wouldn't make that kind of movie."

He hears himself and quickly amends his thought. "I mean, I don't think conventional is a bad word either, because it implies mainstream. I do want to be a mainstream artist, worldwide," says Stone. "A lot of my movies have been too complicated. I made Nixon for that reason, and JFK. But JFK did very well, so you never quite know."

Currently, he says, he feels too tired to consider future projects, but he does not rule out a large-scale controversy-laden look at the Iraqi conflict.

"I'm saying it could be. Again, I love surprising you. It's not like I'm hiding anything. I don't know what I'm going to do next. I'm living through this experience now, which is intense and I'm exhausted."