Paul Rusesabagina: "Kofi Annan has got a lot of responsibilities in the Rwandan genocide."

Paul Rusesabagina, humble real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda and subject of the book An Ordinary Man, discusses his experience of the Rwandan genocide.

Berlin, 2005

You have said that during the genocide you thought there were more people acting like you. When did you realise this wasn’t the case?

“During the period of what you call the end of the genocide, I took a car with my wife and a friend and we drove south, because me, I was born in the central south, my wife in the Deep South, and all along the way there were so many dead bodies. The whole country was smelling, and there was no human voice. There was no human being moving around except for rebels on the roadblocks. I went to my home and there was one of my brothers who was still there. I asked him, ‘What happened with our neighbours?’ He told me then that these ones had been killed by the militia. ‘And how about the others?’ They had been killed by the rebels. 'And how about so and so?' They were burning in a nearby house. It was burnt the previous night by the rebels. He looked at me and told me, ‘Listen, my dear brother, even these trees you can see have got ears, they’ve got eyes, they see. Please, do me a favour and leave this place.’ I drove south to see my mother-in-law. We were very, very sure that nobody could have killed her. She was a wonderful woman who was always helping her neighbours. She was a wonderful person. When we arrived, we saw first of all that the houses were destroyed; she was killed with her daughter-in-law and six grandchildren. I sat down in the ruins with my wife, we looked all around, the whole country was empty of people, and I said, finally, the whole of the country has become a hell.”

Some people find it impossible to speak about events like these or refuse to speak about them. Were you like that and has making this film been a positive experience?

“I think, psychologically, it is a mistake not to talk about it because talking about it is a kind of therapy. It is a cure. It helps to get that out and share it with other people. This is my belief. [Making this film is] a positive experience, although so far it seems strange to see your life on the screen. But I think this message had to get out and we had to tell the world that we have failed.”

Are you considered a hero in Rwanda?

”How can you call a hotel manager, who never changed, just remained the hotel manager, from 1980s to late 1990s, a hero? That would mean being a hero is very simple. Everybody can be a hero quite easily. [Laughs]”

What was important to you?

“What was important to me after a certain time was not getting the hotel clean! You can imagine a hotel where you don’t have running water -- it cannot be as clean as you might think. You can imagine a hotel where you don’t have electricity for months -- it can’t be that clean. You can imagine a hotel which was supposed to cater for diplomats and businessmen, now catering for the peasants, most of them. A hotel which was having a hundred guests, 120 according to its capacity, filling up to 1000, 12 times and more, it was not supposed to be that clean. My main concern was to give, for instance, food. You can imagine having a meal for more than a 1000 people, getting them food, something to eat, that was my main concern. I lowered the standards of the hotel a little bit.”

At the beginning of the film you talk about only saving your family and then you changed. What was it that made you change?

“I never realised that I changed. From the day that genocide broke out I had 26 strangers in my own house and when I left I said to myself, ‘Will I leave these people here? If they die, I will never go to my bed and sleep. I will never eat and feel satisfied. I will never have a drink and feel my thirst quenched. One day, all this will be over. I’ll have to face history and my own conscience. If it ends right now and I face my own conscience and history, what kind of man would I be?’ I had to take them, at my own risk, as you see in the movie. Thank God I succeeded and took them to the end.”

Did you have any sense of what was going to happen before the genocide started?

“Right from the beginning to the end, I said no. I wouldn’t be ashamed of saying no as long as I could justify my no. I can always tell you no, but I have to tell you why I say no. In such madness saying no, you had to go around and show that you’re saying no, without going straight in the subject.”

But did you have any suspicions about what was going to take place?

“Well, I was certain that I would be killed. At a given time I was the only person who could say no and who had many times said no; they had tried to kill the refugees many times, and every time I refused. So the only solution was to get me killed. So I was sure I was going to be killed. The only thing I was sure of was that. But how, when, where, those were the questions I was asking myself. But when was very easy – I know that each and every person dies just once. Then my days on earth will be over. Whether I am killed by the soldiers or the militia, how I will be killed, but when that day comes, I will die. But when that day comes, let me not die with hands crossed, fighting.”

Are you still in touch with the people at Sabena?

“Very much. We kept a very good friendship. Even when I left Rwanda and went to Belgium as a refugee, they offered me a job. But, you know in life, no one was willing to leave his office and give it to me. No one was willing to give me his chair. So I said: ‘If things are like that, if no one can sacrifice his chair and give it to me, let us remain good friends. Our relationships will be always friend to friend and we’ll have nice meals as we have always been doing, but let me do things my way. If I don’t succeed, I will come to you. But if I succeed, we’ll keep our friendship and keep our relations as you and I. And instead of being boss and employee, let us keep it the way it is.’”

What do you do today?

“I’m in the trucking business. I’ve got a trucking company in Africa. I stay in Belgium with my children and wife. We live in the suburbs of Brussels.”

They say in the film that Belgium created the divisions between Hutu and Tutsi. What do you say?

“That is from back in the roots of the Rwandan history. It was there. But when Germans came they made it a little bit wider. They even measured the noses of people and said who was smarter than whom. Who was more like Europeans and whites. Who was more elegant than whom. Who was more clever, more intelligent, than whom. They even said that Tutsis were made to rule and Hutus were made to respect. First of all Germans ruled with Tutsis and when Belgians came, in 1923, they maintained the same politics. They were the ones who introduced the first identification cards. That was a big mistake. In 1959, the revolution in Rwanda was not really a Rwandese revolution, it was a Hutu revolution overthrowing Europeans, the colonisers, and their partner, the Tutsis. Of course Belgians came to Belgium and Tutsis went to neighbouring countries. So it was in the history of Rwanda. When Europeans came in they maintained that politics, that supremacy of the Tutsi race over Hutus. In 1959, when the Rwandese took power, they never removed in the ID’s the words Hutu and Tutsi.”

Today there is no difference . . .

“It doesn’t change anything. Today those two words have become taboos. Do you believe making them taboos is the right way of solving problems? To me the right way is to let a Hutu know he is a Hutu, and a Tutsi should know that he is a Tutsi. And they should respect each other.”

The role of Kofi Annan is not mentioned in Hotel Rwanda and I wonder what your opinion is.

“Kofi Annan has got a lot of responsibilities in the Rwandan genocide. Sometimes I wonder does he go to bed and sleep without nightmares? Does he eat his meal cheerfully and feel a free man? He was the director of operations in the United Nations. He is the one that was corresponding with General Dallaire immediately. He is the one who withdrew the United Nations army instead of increasing the army. So Kofi Annan has a lot of responsibilities. And what took place in Rwanda, he is the one who influenced the United Nations decisions.”

Has he ever spoken openly about his role?

“I think each and every person feels so guilty that many times they don’t want to talk about Rwanda. He, of course, apologised. But was it enough? I do not know. It is for you to draw your conclusions.”

But behind his decisions might have been the Americans and the British.

“To us, he is the one who was writing, corresponding, saying yes, saying no. And yet we do not know the British and the Americans in the United Nations. We know the United Nations as an institution. Of course America has a big share of responsibility; they were the ones that helped with the withdrawal. Instead of reinforcing the mission of the United Nations in Rwanda they just decided to withdraw, because 10 Belgian soldiers had been killed. Why didn’t they say now what we’re going to do is reinforce the mission of the United Nations? You guys go in and get the guys who killed the 10 Belgian soldiers and bring them to trial. [If they had done that], I’m sure no one else would have killed anyone anymore.”

Could you live in Rwanda today?

“Well, according to all I have seen there is no lasting peace in Rwanda. There is an opposition of a winner and a loser. A winner is dictating his conditions and a loser is sometimes saying yes, because he has got to say yes. So if there was a lasting peace, I would be the first person to fly back.”

You basically say that you did what you did because as a human being you had to. Do you understand at all the people that acted in the opposite way?

“This is what I don’t understand. There are many people that I consider as gentlemen, I respect them as people who are respectable and also respect a human creature. So I was very disappointed to see the way all of those people were acting. I was very disappointed by the way many people behaved.”

Your attitude to life must have been changed by this.

“Certainly. You can imagine someone who could trust people, have friends and share life with others, disappointed like that . . . if you’re in my position, it’s obvious.”

Do you see the film making any changes?

“I think so. The main objective of the film is to convey a message about what is happening, and to inform. Hopefully this will help to change what is happening in Darfur. It might help to change what is happening in the Congo where 3.8 million [according to human rights organisations] have been killed since 1986. Even the media don’t talk about the Congo. It doesn’t come on the headlines. Nobody talks about it.”

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Kevin Willmott: "We've really always had two Americas - the USA and the CSA - and 9/11 has made us go even more towards the CSA."

Kevin Willmott, writer/director of CSA: Confederate States of America, discusses race and the legacy of slavery in the United States.

London, 2006

How difficult was it to fund CSA: Confederate States of America?

"We ran into some opposition, big time. We really funded it ourselves. We got a small grant from The National Black Programming Consortium and then we just kind of went to friends and family. We found one investor and it took us about three years to make the film. So we just did it the best way we could with the limited resources that we had. That's okay. That's a reality I expect when you're doing something that the system - I hate to use that term - but the system doesn't want to see you do. So you've got to be honest about it and go, ‘Okay, I'm going to have to make this movie somehow on my own.' But it's been a real, beautiful thing, because the discussions we've had have just been incredible. People have made all kinds of different connections to the film. It just opens people up to a whole host of issues and ideas. People relate to the CSA history with their history, which could be a whole different history, like the Israeli and Palestinian thing. There's so many different connections you can make. Here we are talking about putting a wall between Mexico and America now, and we just had it in the film [as a wall between America and Canada] as a joke. They've also been putting a wall up in Israel. The world's big on walls these days, you know?"

PBS gave you seed money but didn't give you any after they'd seen the script? What scared them off?

"Well they've been really honest about the fact it's just too controversial. And I appreciated their honesty about it. A lot of times, we run into things with the film and no one's honest enough to tell us, ‘You're dealing with things that are just too hot and we're afraid we're going to offend somebody.' What I love is that there's no bad language, there's no sex, there's only historical violence in the film, and it's too controversial? Wow, dull American history is too controversial. So the stuff that puts most people to sleep you can't put on television. It just lets you know we still got a problem."

The History Channel also refused to show it, didn't they?

"That was the most disappointing because that was supposed to be a conversation. A debate. But they showed a documentary a couple of years ago about the Confederate flag and they caught so much flack from those people. And those people that watch the History Channel, a lot of them are those battlefield memory people. They watch those documentaries about the Civil War and they don't want to talk about the causes because that's no fun. I thought it was a really fine documentary. It wasn't just saying the flag is wrong, it showed both sides. It was here's this one group that believes one way about the flag, here's this other group. But the fact that you have the other group is the problem [laughs]. It's something that's not even worth debate. So I think the History Channel wasn't even in a position to have an honest debate about it, because a lot of the bread-and-butter comes from those, and I'm just going to say it, red necks, that like to watch those kinds of programs."

It's a fascinating film but as a non-American, I wasn't always sure where historical reality and your imagined reality parted ways. Are Americans always sure themselves, or is the fact that the one is not always distinguishable from the other the point?

"Well a little bit of both. It varies about how well we know our history, which is part of the problem in a way. We tried to use history that was pretty general. There's some specific characters we mention in the film that a lot of people don't now much about, but our important figures, in terms, I think, of understanding the concepts of our film, are well known. What we hoped for was to use what I call ‘historical signposts', kind of the big events that happened in American history and most people know about internationally. There's clearly some things that are very specific, but the big overall point of the film is the Confederacy did win the Civil War. So hopefully by telling a fake history, you tell the real history. So I think your feeling that way is kind of part of how the movie's supposed to work."

Is what you're talking about an American crisis of identity?

"No doubt about it. 9/11 made a lot of issues come forward that have made Americans question who they are and how they want America to work, and what democracy means, big questions like that. And so, you know, the film really kind of poses it as you've got two Americas. And we've really always had two Americas - the USA and the CSA - and the CSA is that other America that we can choose to be. We've chosen to be it many times in our history, and I think 9/11 has made us go even more towards the CSA in ways. So that's the idea."

I'm sure that the negative image of America you paint in the film will appeal to a lot of Europeans in the sense that it reinforces many of the negative opinions people have about the country, albeit it in a satirical register.

"It's nothing new really. For an African-American, we've had to deal with the CSA all our lives. Many of us look at it like the more you understand about the victims of American history the more you understand what American history's all about. What the film tries to do as well, I think, is make you relate to the CSA from the slave point of view. It puts slavery central to what the CSA means, so you can't look at Gone with the Wind and just get caught up in the romance. Suddenly you look at Gone with the Wind and you see how slaves are treated and how slaves act in that film. I think it's just one of many examples, hopefully, the film gives of showing there's this other reality going on [laughs]. And the more we relate to that other reality, I think the more we know what's maybe going on in the world."

I read that you first had the idea for the film 20 years ago. Is it really that long?

"Well, yeah. I think the thing that came to me a few years ago when we got started on it was finally how to do it in a form where I believed it - the structure and the format of the movie, the fake documentary, from the point of view of the Confederate Television - and the fact that I discovered that the Confederacy did have an actual plan, had they won, to do all these things [build an empire in Latin America, for example]. Those were the big revelations that kind of defined the film for me. I wanted it to be real for people. I wanted it be uncomfortable.

"I love the film Dr Strangelove and the thing I love about it is there's never any comedy at the expense of the truth. There are rarely bits in the film where they're just trying to make you laugh. The humour comes from the absurdity of the Cold War and nuclear weapons and all of that stuff. That's what I wanted to do with this, to have the humour come out of the reality of slavery, of the reality of expansionism, and the CSA mindset that still exists, and the link between the CSA and the USA. So the idea had been around a long time but I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to take the idea of what if the South had won. I think a lot of people had had that idea."

Yes, there have been a few books based on it.

"I avoided all of them. For me that wasn't the point. I didn't want to give a battlefield kind of history of all this, about Generals and how that would have turned out. I think that's actually part of the problem with the Civil War in America, that people love to talk about the battles but they hate talking about slavery. But slavery is the thing that still defines us today in America. It defines our understanding of race still in America. We still understand each other based in a lot of weird concepts left over from slavery. So, all of that, once we really found a way to create a structure that made it all real, then the movie kind of clicked."

Is there a taboo surrounding the way that not only slavery is discussed in America but also the terms in which the Civil War is talked about? It seems incredible that the causes are still a matter of controversy when they seem clear enough.

"Well it's amazing, and one of the main reasons why I wanted to make the film was exactly what you're talking about. The Civil War's still going on in America. There's still many people that want to hold onto the Confederacy as this great concept that had nothing to do with slavery. That was one of the things, if you honestly look at history, and you read books outside of battlefield books, you quickly find out that it was all about slavery. So that's really the chief reason I wanted to make the film, to finally give the history of America from this other point of view. You know, the Confederate flag still flies over the State of Mississippi, over the State House. You still see it on a lot of people's cars and trucks. You still see Hollywood making movies that celebrate the Confederacy, in various ways, as a sad, lost cause. A great civilisation gone with the wind, as Gone with the Wind calls it. But from the slave point of view, there's nothing civilised about it.

"I think it's interesting how our [fake] historian says that by losing the war, the South and the Confederacy really wins. Our sympathies go to them in movies. Our sympathy went to them in literature. Unfortunately, to get these two regions, the North and the South, back together again, we had to remove the issue of slavery from the cause of war. It's like two guys fighting over a girl, and once the two guys decide to become friends again, what happens to the reputation of the girl? And the reputation of the girl is slavery. That's what happened. Slavery was just removed from the cause of the war so North and South could become friends again."

In the film the South take advantage of the fact that Northerners were once slave owners, and, indeed, that the founding fathers were slave owners. The implication is that this is not just an issue for the South but for the whole of the United States. It's an American issue.

"That's exactly right. And that's the other big theme in the film. It's kind of easy to attack the Confederacy in the South and call them racists. The reality of it is that slavery did start in the North and some of the worst places Dr King went in a protest was not down South, it was Chicago. The other example I always gives is I live in Kansas, so it's not the Mississippi Board of Education case that desegregated schools, it's the Topeka Kansas Board of Education case. So, you know, even places like Kansas, where we fought over being a free state here, and we love our abolitionist roots in many ways, even Kansas became segregated and Jim Crow existed here. So it's a very complicated history and you're trying to find ways to simplify it so that people can take what I like to call ownership of the history. Right now, I think the big problem we have as Americans is we've not fully taken ownership of this history. We can't talk about it freely, we can't talk about it openly, we can't talk about it without feeling guilty, or without feeling angry. So it's also a real problem."

You address the myth of Manifest Destiny in the film and suggest that underlying it is a belief in white American racial superiority. Bush has spoken in terms of something like manifest destiny in his justification for the invasion of Iraq.

"Well yeah. It's interesting because to own slaves means you have to turn people into things and the whole concept of slavery goes along with colonialism and Manifest Destiny and controlling other people's countries, the whole list of that kind of stuff. I think we see them as separate things at times, and we discuss them as separate things, but the reality of it is that they all started out of the same kind of concept, which is: we are better than you. And any time that you go into the ‘we are better than you' kind of idea, you're going to run into this kind of reality. So yeah, it's an interesting kind of situation. Hopefully showing how the real CSA wanted to take over Central America and South America and so forth means you do make those links to Afghanistan and Iraq, Vietnam, the whole list of things that we've gotten involved in that, in the end, are CSA kind of feelings and ideas."

Different generations of the fictional, ultra conservative Fauntroy dynasty represent the continuation of these values and attitudes throughout the film, and, I suppose, American history.

"That's exactly right. They're kind of the Bushes or the Kennedys of the CSA [laughs]. You know, they have this point of view which is the world is there to serve us, its resources, its people, whatever. It's the essence of the Manifest Destiny concept that the world is ours to use at will. And, you know, it's all point of view. Obviously the Bush administration and others would say, ‘That's not the way we feel at all about all of this,' but from the slave point of view, from the point of view of the people that are in a country and then suddenly people invade it, for whatever reason, they go, ‘Last week I could go down to the market and today I can't, because we're shooting and killing people outside.' It's one thing to talk about it politically; it's another thing to talk about it in terms of human life. And what the film tries to do as well, I think, is to show what's at stake for the little people."

At the end of the film Ambrose talks nostalgically about family friend Hitler and his dream of America regaining its Aryan heritage. That's disturbing because some people in American are warning about a drift towards fascism.

"The problem is a lot of the folks that really believe in that don't realise what it means. They'll talk about heritage, they talk about the ‘good old days', but from the African-American point of view, we don't have the ‘good old days'. The good old days started like about five years ago [laughs]. We have moments in America that we can celebrate, but it's hard for us to celebrate the whole thing, if we're going to be honest about it. Even with people like Fauntroy, there's a huge thing of denial that's going on where they pick and choose the history that they want to celebrate. They talk about heritage but never speak about slavery. They talk about heritage and they never talk about the people they hurt when they invade these countries. So the thing the movie tries to do is be like the Howard Zinn book [A People's History of the United States], in that it's a people's history of the world. It's the history that we feel as much as it is anything else."

I corresponded with someone at the Hunter Museum and she said that there was no real controversy when they screened the film, that it was a fascinating look at what might have been. However, the way you're talking about it, and the way that I understood it watching it, is that the film is a ‘What is' rather than a ‘What if'.

"Yes. The thing we worked to achieve was not to give people that out. I think that Hollywood, oftentimes, even science fiction at times, give people an out. It says ‘Oh, this is just a fantasy. This is just a crazy, crazy little world I've created that has nothing to do with you,' or the connections are so subtle, most people don't find them. We wanted to be artistic and subtle as well but we also wanted to be honest about the history. People say, ‘Well, this is really heavy handed', and I'm like, not really. What may feel heavy handed to people is just the reality of slavery. We don't make you feel better about what happened. The example I always give is Nazi Germany, or the bombings in England. You wouldn't want to deal with that by saying, ‘This stuff makes you a little uncomfortable so we're going to hold back on this.' No, these were horrible things that happened to people and you can't make people feel better about these things by toning them down. They're realities. Part of the problem, oftentimes in film, I think, is you don't feel the impact of what this thing you're trying to express is.

"So, anyway, the point being that for me at Chattanooga, it was a beautiful experience. I think in some many different ways some of my best experiences have been in the South talking about the film, and some of my worst have been in the North. I think liberals, and I would probably be called one of them for no better choice of word, liberal folks are even a worse part of the problem, because good liberal people don't want to go there. It's ugly, it's uncomfortable, it makes people feel bad at times. There's a part-liberal thing that has said, ‘Oh, let's all be nice to each other, even if it means being dishonest with each other.' Political correctness, in a sense.

"See, liberal folks like to believe if you say the right words and look in certain directions and not other directions, that everything is great. And conservatives would get mad at me and say, ‘Well this is not my America.' Well that's a valid argument. If you don't want to believe this I guess that's okay. But you kind of expect liberal folks to be open. Liberal folks' whole thing is, ‘I'm open [laughs]. I'm open to suggestions and other cultures and other ways of life, blah, blah, blah.' The reality of it is they're closed to it for a whole other set of reasons. They're closed to it because they can't control it, and they can't control the feeling of it. It makes them feel bad. It makes them uncomfortable. Americans need a lot more of feeling uncomfortable about their reality. I grew up with the movies in the Seventies and the Seventies movies always did that. They made you question what was going on, what's happening, what reality am I living in, all those things. I think that's good."

Have you had problems knocking down some of the walls between the film and some people who still support the notion of a Confederacy, though? I have read comments on the net where people say they cannot even begin to debate the film because they feel you're trampling over the memory of ancestors who died fighting for the South, painting them as racists.

"They don't think about my ancestors who they had chained up to a tree. So, you know, I think the fact that they're able to divorce my reality from their reality is the problem. A gentleman I met in Chattanooga, which is one of the reasons why I loved that experience so much, he was the first gentleman who you'd call probably a Confederate, and somebody who was probably a member of the Sons of the Confederacy or something, he said, ‘I disagree that you compare the Confederate flag with the Nazi flag.' I said ‘That's fine, I understand.' ‘But,' he said, ‘if I was a black man, I would be upset about this. I would be offended by the flag as well.' I said to him, ‘Well why isn't that enough? Why isn't that enough? If you know why I would be offended by the flag, then why isn't that enough?' And that's the issue. They don't care about my reality enough to make them give up a whole kind of heritage that, in my opinion, is not worth celebrating the way they want to try and celebrate it. What this gentleman was trying to get at was can't the Confederate flag mean a lot of different things? I said it can't. I said ‘If I put an X on a piece of paper and I went to your house, and me and these other guys were carrying this sheet with an X on it, and we burn down your house and we shoot your dad, and we rape your mom, and we take your brother and sister away and enslave them, what would that X mean?' And that's just the reality of it.

"The point I would love to have people see is that it's time to try and make the American flag have some kind of real meaning instead of holding on to dead flags, and dead iconography. The American flag has been in some really bad places, and done a lot of really bad things, but the one thing you have to say about the American flag is it's still a living flag. It's a living thing and it can become better [laughs], it can do good things as well. And it has done good things. So you try to sell them on that idea of, why are you still holding onto this other thing? And I know why they do, because they were raised to believe that's what that was. But they were raised to believe it at the expense of not thinking about my pain."

Finally, how optimistic are you that these debates will take place?

"Well things get better all the time. You can't help but be optimistic. I try to look at myself as an optimistic person. But it's tough. I'll just be honest, it's tough to get black folks and white folks to talk about these things.

"The road blocks we ran into with the media here [America] in being afraid to talk about it is probably the best example. I think the History Channel is the best one. When we kind of get to the core of things and the things that still separate us, we choose to just go, ‘Well that's a little too uncomfortable. We're not going to talk about it.' And those are the very things we have to talk about. We have to find a way for black people to deal with their residual anger, the pain that we still have about these things. And we have to find a way to talk to these Confederates and others that still want to hold onto these things as a beautiful concept, and talk about their ancestors and so forth.

"I always say celebrate their courage but not their cause. If I had a relative that died in the war or fought in the war, I would certainly want to honour their courage. But I would separate it from the cause. And that's the part that we have not been fully able to achieve. They feel like to celebrate the courage they have to lie about the cause, and water down the cause, and make the cause better or different than it actually was. That's a huge gap that we still have. A huge gap. We've come a long way but we've still got a long way to go."

CSA: Confederate States of America is available to buy on DVD.

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Oliver Stone: "I didn't want to be the bad guy again."

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: cop out or honest response to 9/11?

A month after the 11 September attacks, Oliver Stone gave a talk in New York. He said that if he ever tackled 9/11, his movie would be a realistic, politically balanced examination of terrorism from the American and Arab perspectives. He offered The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s unbiased account of the Algerian revolution, as a touchstone.

Five years later, Stone’s World Trade Center is being hailed as a masterpiece by American conservatives – a first for the director who attacked US foreign policy in Salvador, portrayed a disabled Vietnam veteran's transformation into an anti-war protestor in Born on the Fourth of July, and explored numerous conspiracy theories with JFK. He has made it easy for them: there is no mention of terrorism or Arabs or George Bush's failure to respond swiftly to events.

Instead, Stone focuses his narrative on the true story of two Port Authority police officers, Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) and Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), who survived beneath the rubble of the Twin Towers, and the tense uncertainty experienced by their families. It is powerful cinema, just not in the way you expect from Stone.

What happened to that other film, I ask him, when we meet at the Venice Film Festival? He sighs and recalls another comment he made in New York.

“I said that 9/11 was a rebellion against what Arabs considered an oppressive system of capitalism and military troops in the Middle East. I got killed for that.” He claims it was a misunderstanding. “In the English language, the concept of rebellion or revolution is considered to be a good thing, but I didn’t mean it that way. To those Arabs who felt that way it was a good thing, is what I was saying.”

The attacks hit Stone hard. He concedes that while it would have been impossible to finance the kind of film he was advocating in America at that time, he could have tried to make it abroad. “Suffice it to say that after the criticism I got I kind of shied away," he says candidly. "I didn’t want to be the bad guy again.”

Some have now accused Stone of going soft, or doing World Trade Center to atone for the (perceived) failure of his historical epic, Alexander. That film actually did very well outside America, he insists. “We did $170m. It’s no joke. It was one of the top 20 films of the year. It’s not a turkey like the British-language press would say.” Nixon and Heaven and Earth were by far his “worst financial disasters”.

Stone, who unusually was a hired hand on WTC, says he did the film because he liked the script and because he understood the camaraderie between its uniformed protagonists, having served as an infantryman in Vietnam. Wounded twice, he also knew what it was like to survive by a hair’s breadth.

“I got a bullet wound right here,” he says, pulling up the hair on the back of his neck. “The bullet went right through. I guess this much more and I would be dead.”

The director argues that he is not avoiding politics in the film because there were none that day, just shock and anger. Even so, a “stupid comment” made at the end of the film by a marine calling for revenge means he now finds himself accused of making a pro Bush film by some liberals.

Stone is eager to defend his record. While he believes they were right to “take vengeance" in Afghanistan - "We went after the right people” - he was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning. “I was castigated in America for my positions against Bush and the Iraq war,” he says. “Many of the liberals in America, don’t forget, were for the war. Hilary Clinton voted for that war. John Kerry voted for that war. The New Yorker voted for that war. I didn’t. I did Alexander instead because I wanted to get out of America.”

He dismisses suggestions that World Trade Center could help the Republicans in the forthcoming mid-term election because it would reinforce the fear of terror. “I don’t see it that way. It’s demystifies part of the 9/11 phenomena. It puts you right in the middle and says, ‘Okay, how bad can this be?’ Yeah, it’s as rough as it gets, but those two guys got out. In other words: you can conquer your fear.” At a time when governments are using fear as a weapon, this is arguably a political statement in itself.

“This movie was not to be politicised,” Stone protests. “To politicise it is to indicate that the Left is as fucked up as the Right, frankly. Some of these people on the Left have lost sight of humanity. They’re so anti Bush that they have lost sight of the possibility of change, and change comes out of the heart. We’ve got to talk to the centre again. We’ve got to be at the centre. The movie is very much about peace at the centre.”

In this respect, World Trade Center is, arguably, as much a reaction against trends in Hollywood filmmaking as anything else. Stone appears to suggest that US cinema, consciously or otherwise, helped prepare the American public for the invasion of Iraq. ”The war iconography changed again,” he says, “and it went back to shock and awe at the American military machine.”

Films like Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbour (“I hated that film because it basically said we won Pearl Harbour”), even Saving Private Ryan (“If I had been in that group, if I had been in the infantry, we would have killed that sergeant long ago”), he believes, “had a big influence on people about how powerful and technically superior we were”. Meanwhile, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, which showed the cost of war, were ignored, he claims.

“I got very depressed in that period,” he says sadly. “I mean it was my life’s work. I was a forgotten figure. Nobody even mentioned those films, or very rarely. I got my first taste of how history filters out what it doesn’t want to remember.”

Conversely, World Trade Center put Stone on the cover of Newsweek. He is the hero of the hour. However, his conservative supporters could be in for a shock. Speaking in Moscow recently, Stone reinforced his maverick reputation by hinting that he was considering doing a film about “a conspiracy by a group of people in the American administration who have an agenda and who used 9/11 to further that agenda”.

Has Stone gone soft or is he playing a long game? Time will tell.

The original version of this article appeared in The Big Issue.

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Eugene Hutz: "I didn't want to do acting just because acting is the highest cult of celebrity there is. I wanted the right role."

Gogol Bordello wildman Eugene Hutz talks about his screen debut in Everything is Illuminated.
Venice, September 2005

So you’re a musician and you were cast in your first movie.

“That’s a true story.”

Yeah, the sort of all-American story.

“Oh no. Now I have to represent Ukraine and America. Now I have to represent the Ukrainian dream and the American Dream. Oh my God. I don’t think I want to do that.”

How did you get involved in Everything is Illuminated then?

“Um, Well, exactly as you said, being a musician is actually what led me to this movie. Liev [Schreiber, writer/director] had Gogol Bordello, my band, on his radar for the soundtrack, and us being basically the only musical force that could have done the cross-over of Eastern European authentic gypsy music and rock ‘n’ roll, and, you know, versus electronica versus and all the new mediums, because we’re friendly with all those things, living in New York.

“So I had a meeting with him to talk about music and it was like a streak of lightning went through the room, where I told him that I’m actually reading the book. I said, ‘How fantastic is that? You’re asking me to do the soundtrack for the book I’m reading?’ Which I was because my friend gave it to me saying how much similarity he thought there was between the way the book is written and the way I write my lyrics, which is kind of, like, fuck the syntax, treat the language as your own creation; say what you need to say, it doesn’t matter how long the sentence is and whether it’s rightly or wrongly constructed. And it’s true. I never properly studied English and I never properly studied music, and I never studied acting. I just went ahead and did all those things.

“So, getting back to the story, he said, ‘I can’t believe you’re reading this book. What do you think of the character of Alex?’ That’s when, I think, lightning kind of struck and he was like, ‘I’ve been looking for somebody to play Alex for so fucking long here and in the Ukraine. Do you think you could do that guy?’ I said, ‘Consider it to be done.’ [Said like a Genie granting a wish] He and Peter Saraf, who was one of the producers, looked at each other and said, ‘You have to come in for a reading tomorrow.’ Which I did and five days later my candidatura was approved.”

Why did you think you could do it?

“Well because of a couple of reasons. First of all I thought the character of Alex is very fun and has the Eastern European energy that I can identify with. He was a very comical, and tragical, character. A character who is deeply based in bravado and then gets his whole fancy storefront blown into pieces. The contrast of that was already interesting for me.

“Second, I always knew I am going to do some acting, it was just a matter of time. And I felt that was the time it was coming. Because since I have moved to New York, people have always pushed me towards acting and tried to lead me on, saying, ‘I’m going to introduce you to Jim Jarmusch’, or some other director. Which I did but I didn’t really pursue it because music is my first passion and I went with that more than anything. I had to be honest to myself and truthful to myself; I didn’t want to do acting just because acting is the highest cult of celebrity there is. I wanted the right role. I wanted an artistic film. I wanted it to be something that is meaningful. And here was this role.

“That is why I had that confidence. I am sure Liev got me not only because I said, ‘I am that guy, consider it to be done.’ I think he felt my enthusiasm. I think he felt I could do it, and I knew I could do it too. I don’t think my reading was fantastic; I think it was OK. But we knew we were going to do it once we get there.”

Alex seems very unaware of his own country’s history. Are there elements which have been suppressed?

“In me?”

In the Ukraine, I mean. He is shocked to hear that there was anti-Semitism before World War 2, which I’d have thought was a pretty well known and well-established fact.

“Well for sure. There are people that are still not able to deal with it, really. They are in denial. Ukraine is a very confused country -- East and West Ukraine constantly versus each other – and never finds peace. Uh, Anti-Semitic question and gypsy question being the forefront of disharmony, you know?

“That was one of my connections with the film, actually. My deepest connection, really, with the story lays not in the fact that I’m a party animal, night owl, bar-hopping maniac, and I could identify with Alex’s party sense. It’s not because of that. It’s because [taps his foot three times, suggesting this is emotional territory for him] the film is based on the Jewish theme of investigating your heritage and looking into how much your past pre-determines your future, really, as a being, and I’ve dealt with that issue. It’s very much along my wavelength, because I come from a mixed family, which is gypsy and Russian and Ukrainian. If you look into history, you will find that the Final Solution plan was originally conceived for eradicating gypsies and later on applied to Jews. Those two went hand in hand.

“Even now, finally the Ukraine came to terms with establishing monuments to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and now it’s the same with Roma, the gypsies. And I know that, for example, that monument to gypsy victims of the Holocaust, when it opened last year, it was very much attended by Jewish community.”

Have you met the actress Fairuza Balk?

“No.”

She’s American and she’s part Roma. She’s tattooed as a sign of protest with the mark the Roma were made to wear in the concentration camps.

“Really? No, I’ve never even heard about her. I’d better look her up. It’s important to link and connect the dots like this because the struggle still goes on. I just got back from gypsy camps in the Ukraine where I was tracking down my extended family. I mean the conditions of that are just like . . . even the gypsy ghetto would be right in downtown of the small city. The things that go on there are unbelievable. For example, if somebody would be having a heart attack, the ambulance simply wouldn’t come. To call it poverty, the conditions they’re living in, is to say nothing [said bitterly]. It would be just like a bunch of burned mattresses laying in the middle of a field and people literally live like that, including through the winter. They’re like living in holes in the ground.”

Could you identify with what’s been going on in New Orleans, because the Federal Government were very slow to respond there?

“That very much reminds me of how they acted in the Ukraine when Chernobyl blew up. Passivity! Of course they throw force to deal with, like, the immediate, most obvious aspects of disaster. But then the government never mobilises itself to a full degree to do all it can for some reason. And those reasons are oftentimes racist, you know? Most of the time they’re racist. Same thing in New Orleans, basically.

“Yeah, of course all the Russian people split from New Orleans because they had Russian relatives all over the place, in other communities, to where they could go. But people who were up in Louisiana and basically had two bucks to their name, they had nowhere else to go. Same thing in the Ukraine. When Chernobyl blew up, I found out about it with my family not because our TV told us or our newspapers told us; I found out from the BBC. I listened to the BBC for musical broadcasting, I wasn’t even trying to listen for anything like that. It just happened that that night instead of musical programming, on both Voice of America and the BBC, talking heads were talking about a nuclear disaster that happened in the Ukraine, and anyone who has any concern for their health had better get out of there. But for a week afterwards it never appeared in any papers or anything. People were still going to work and to school. So there is your care system for you.”

What do you think of a new report that says the number of victims of Chernobyl is astonishingly low? Do you believe it? They claim the number of victims was over-estimated.

“I don’t think it can be over-estimated. How can it be? I think the damage of Chernobyl goes much beyond Ukraine. Traces of it are found in Scotland and Ireland, you know what I mean? It’s like what the fuck are they talking about? It’s the most shameless cover up.”

If you lived there at that time, when did you move to America?

“I left Ukraine – it gets confused in my biography a lot of times in the press, evacuation and immigration, because I was evacuated from Kiev, I was 13 or 14, and that is why when that happened I ended up going to the Ukrainian countryside, and I was stationed with my extended family, who are gypsies, Roma, and that is when I found out who we are.

“Because in Kiev my family was hiding it, they didn’t want anybody to know, because we would never get out of our lower social status and things like that. So there I found it out and I came back to Kiev already with a different mind. And then when I was 18, I left again, which was 1989 or 1990, and we finally got refugee status and approval to go to the United States, which didn’t happen so quickly because we went through Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy. We were in Italy for a year before we went to the United States.”

When you discovered your Roma identity what were your feelings given that it had been suppressed by your close family?

“Well, I was coming from a more naïve, let’s say romantic, perspective, because I always loved gypsy music. I was, like, going nuts for it as a matter of fact. I was also into punk and rock ‘n’ roll, and any music that was extreme and wild. So I thought I was an outsider and when I found out I’m an insider, I got twice as excited, and kind of went to the theory. I also, when I started speaking up about it, invoked some pride in my family about it and kind of was able to battle their internalised shame of their ethnicity to some extent. But, you know, that ethnic identity is a very complicated thing. Even within the gypsy community, the real gypsyness is constantly an issue, forever. Nobody gives each other ultimate approval of that.”

It’s very similar within the Jewish community.

“Yeah but what counts, to me, is that that is what makes me who I am at the end, which is what the movie is about. It’s like when I was younger, I thought I was breaking away from all my baggage and brushing away all my Ukrainian past and fuck it, I’m rocking in the free world. Now I’m turning 30 and I’m constantly asked, ‘How come you’re so comfortable in any society you enter and you’re so comfortable on the road? You spend six months on the road and you come back like you just came back from a gig.’ It’s like no, I looked around and there’s something bigger than me about it, which that is my Roma ancestry. It’s a more advanced way of living. It’s not a way that’s built on possessing a house.”

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Julien Temple: "I was drowning with too much footage. It was a nightmare. I was sick."

Julien Temple talks about bringing one of the world's greatest music festivals to the screen in Glastonbury - The Movie.
Berlin, February 2006


How well do you think Glastonbury - The Movie is going to travel, because it is a very British film. It actually made me proud to be British.

“Yeah, there was this great review that I never expected I would get, saying, ‘It makes you absurdly happy to be British – The Daily Telegraph,’ which is very strange for me. I think it will work if people have got the right frame of mind. It’s partly a formal thing as well as a cultural thing, because I did decide to do it without a kind of television narrative telling you what happened, or linear approach. I did very much make the decision that I wanted to try and be as random as the festival. I wanted to do it from the sense of being in the festival from the point of view of the crowd going through, not the kind of usual rock star sound bites or simplified way of reducing this event to something it isn’t.

It is a very sprawling, spontaneous, anarchic, vibrant, random thing. You go around one corner and you hit something, you go around another, and you have a totally different experience. It’s all rushing at you. Some heads won’t be able to take that. But, I think culturally, we showed it in Salt Lake City, which is pretty hardcore, mid-west, fundamentalist America, and they seemed to love it. So I think it depends.”

What I liked about it is the way you mix up footage from different years rather than editing it chronologically. Is that because you feel that for all the changes in fashion and so forth, there is a continuity of spirit at Glastonbury?

“Yeah, I think there is a continuity on the level that it has tried to remain true, certainly through the person of Michael Eavis, to its roots and its spirit. On the other hand it’s been forced to adapt in order to survive to the pressures of the outside world. So, you know, the history of it is very much present in the fact that the event is there and has survived. There is a kind of pride in it still continuing, in many ways, against all the odds, because it does retain an element of its original purpose and spirit.

“I also wanted people to think about the difference between these different years. And if you label them and make them too easy in a linear way, then people just say, ‘Oh, well that’s like I Love the 1980s’, or whatever. But if you, say, put an image from 1983 next to an image of 1999, they’re forced to say, ‘Well what’s different about that image?’ in a sense challenging them to think about what the differences between the times are. And I think it’s very important that people do think about the difference - in a very small amount of time, the huge differences between 1970 and 2006 - because those changes, as they’ve happened, have been very invisible: you live through them and you’re not really aware how quickly things are changing around you. It’s only when you have a chance to take a constant like an event like Glastonbury - that’s travelled, like a strange spaceship through these decades - and you look at people with that perspective, you get a sense of how extraordinary the changes have been. I don’t mean just in a man on the Moon, Mrs Thatcher leaves Downing Street kind of way, but in your persona, how you see your life and see who you are. And your body language tells you a lot about that. Obviously the clothes and the slogans on T-shirts, and the corporate invasion of the space tell you a lot of things. So I made a choice to stick within the festival; you didn’t need to get in library footage from outside. You could actually tell this journey through those decades through this one event.”

For me one of the most interesting pieces of footage was when your late friend, former Clash lead singer Joe Strummer, starts attacking the cameras. You show the CCTV cameras at the festival and appear to use this to illustrate how, as a society, we have kind of sleepwalked into this situation where we are highly monitored.

“Yeah, that was an important part of the film to me. And actually there was a lot of pressure not to use it. It’s really interesting. I have done two films where the censor has not just asked me to take things out but asked me to put things in, which is a very strange sort of censorship, actually. I don’t know whether any other filmmaker in England has had that problem.”

What were you asked to put in?

“Well I was asked to put in the apology. Although Joe said this he apologised for it and that was the only way I was allowed to use that footage. They all were all saying the cameraman’s traumatised and whatever and he did apologise. But, you know, the circumstance was he got on the stage, after 20 years not playing to an audience, and the first thing that happens is there’s a crane, wherever he walks, between him and the crowd. For 15 minutes there’s a camera right in his face, so he had reasons to push the camera away, because he wanted to re-connect with the audience. But, you know, he did make that very important point that we have, I think, walked into that situation.

“I ran away from school and didn’t tell my parents and went to the ’71 Glastonbury – Joe was there, and he became a vegetarian for life there, which is strange – and if you’d said to me then, ‘In 35 years you’ll be sitting here with a steel fence being filmed, surveillance cameras everywhere,’ you’d have just said, ‘George Orwell fantasy, don’t be stupid.’ But that’s what’s happened. And they’re testing out all these retinal scans and fingerprint stuff, and the Gleneagles guys asked for Glastonbury to be postponed so they could use the fence at the G8 in Edinburgh. It’s a very different world. But just as strange today, I suppose, is the idea of walking in, in bare feet, sitting down and that’s all you had to do. Now there are guys walking in with fridges and washing machines for this weekend. They can’t handle the idea of being away from home.”

Despite all this, what the film seems to show is that there is something irrepressible about the British spirit which we should remember is still there.

“And celebrate, yeah.”

Definitely. There is a kind of freedom in that spirit of eccentricity, a kind of, not to be too romantic about it, unconquerable force, which is worth remembering at a time when our civil liberties are being eroded.

“I think that that, in a sense, is the underlying message of it. We are in danger of becoming extinct as a species, human beings. We worry about the rhino and the blue copper butterfly or whatever, but we are on our way to becoming a different thing, a half-computerised species. I think there is something about just the eccentricity of the Englishness of the event that does say, ‘Remember you’re a human being and you’re not programmed. However much you’re bombarded with things telling you what to be, you should find that in yourself and with other people, and not ever lose that or you’ll lose humanity.’ And the journey’s been so rapid so far, we should wake up to that, not just Global Warming, which is a problem the festival pointed out 35 years ago and only recently have governments and Churches got worried about it, but we should worry about the very nature of our humanity and our soul being taken away.”

Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society and technology now, rather than bringing us together, is in some ways actually alienating us from one another. But this event also appears to show that there is this desire in people for community and there is a need for closeness with other human beings.

“Yeah, I think that is the wonderful thing about Glastonbury. I mean I love that moment where the guy says, ‘I’m an insurance salesman or whatever’ and the interviewer says, ‘Why have you come here?’ and he says ‘Because my job’s not real. I want to find out what it is to be real again.’ I think the degree of alienation in jobs, or careers, where you’re made to think of yourself as that, as an achiever or non-achiever in that little box that you’ve put yourself in, and you’re worried about how people view you in that box is immense - I’ve got a lot of metaphors of that, like that invisible tent or see-through tent - and it’s great to go to Glastonbury and just leave that at the door and get on with people, whoever they are. They could be a corporate lawyer and I will sit and have a great conversation with them, whereas if I was sitting in a skyscraper, I would probably hate the guy.”

Absolutely. Glastonbury allows us to escape the definitions that society places on us.

“It’s really about being open-minded being in there. You have to be to survive it. It is a mental obstacle race – from wherever you come in to wherever you come out – a survival course in mental stamina. And, you know, if it’s bad weather, it’s physical stamina too. If the Global Warming thing goes as it’s predicted to do, we’ll have to get used to living a bit more like that. It’s not a bad preparation [laughs] for what’s to come in a way.”

People talk about being changed by Glastonbury. You went there for the first time when you were 17. What are your memories of that experience and what lasting impact did it have on you? Is it a regular thing for you now?

“Well, I didn’t for a long time. It’s a non-Punk thing to do.”

Actually, I thought it sounded somewhat oxymoronic when I heard your name attached to this project. It’s ironic that the man who made movies about the Sex Pistols is now making one about an event which conjures up images of hippies.

“Well, I like the irony of it. You know, it’s quite liberating to make a film about hippies – although it’s not just about hippies – and to give hippies a platform to say something. Some of those guys in the tepees, who have lived their all of their lives, would have had their tepees burned down by Punks in 1976, just for being hippies. But what you understand is that however differently that hippy thing manifested itself and the Punk thing, totally antithetical in image and portrayal of what they were doing, underlying it is a similar need to celebrate being human and having a voice of your own, and questioning what you’re told. And the hippie thing, you know, did degenerate into a horrible, depressing thing, in the early and mid 70s, but so did Punk. They all get co-opted and fizzle out in a horrible way. But the renewal of it is what’s important. So it was quite ironic for me to make a film about hippies. And I’m pleased I did, because it’s good to do things people don’t expect you to do.”

Yes, and in the film you have a Punk saying that Glastonbury is a Punk event.

“[Laughs] Well Glastonbury is . . . I learnt a lot of things doing this film. I didn’t understand that Glastonbury was, and Stonehenge as well, this melting pot crucible of hippie and Punk becoming melted down and mixed. When Thatcher created unemployment on that huge scale in the 80s, and kids, like the guy says, had the choice either to live in a cardboard box, under Charing Cross Bridge, or get on a convoy and see the country and live in a community, a lot of Punk kids did take that option and you have this strange hybrid thing of hippie-punk characters, which I’d kind of missed because I wasn’t in England at that time. So it was interesting for me to explore that and excavate that theme, which gives a slightly biblical sense to the film. I like the way they were thrown out of Stonehenge, which is kind of like the English birthright, and given refuge at Glastonbury, and then the Garden of Eden was somehow poisoned. But there’s an accommodation as well. It’s an interesting story.”

Did you have the themes that run through the film in mind from the outset, or did they emerge as you went through the footage?

“I think a lot of them emerged from seeing the footage. As I say, I wasn’t an expert on the history of travelling and Travellers, I learned that by looking at the footage and being attracted to it as kind of a narrative strand. I love this kind of filmmaking because you are free to do what you want; I don’t have people telling me what to do, and if they do I tell them to back off, because they don’t understanding this kind of filmmaking. Even though you don’t make any money and you don’t have a big budget, you have this freedom to follow a course where you discover. You don’t have to pitch exactly this is the film A to Z. You’re saying, ‘I’m going to discover this film in the process,’ which is a hard thing to live up to.

“I got to the beginning of the edit and I freaked out because I felt I had too much material, I had too many options, I had too many ways of going – I really felt I was drowning with too much footage. So I was like, ‘Shit, I said I was going to make this film and I don’t have a fucking clue how to do it.’ It was a nightmare, and a nasty place to be. I was ill. Sick. But then, you know, you find something in the film swamp to hold onto and you go, ‘OK, if I can make that work. . .’ because your preconceptions go out of the window. I had originally thought I would find interesting footage of the outside world and interact the festival with that, and then I started looking at that and it looked horrible, clichéd, like Tony Palmer-type rubbish. So that was no good. I’d had all these ideas and they weren’t working and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do something with all of this.’ So it was very improvised. You know, it’s a high-wire act, really. It was with The Filth and the Fury: there was a story to this band [the Sex Pistols] but I didn’t have footage to tell the whole story so you’d get to a point where you’d say, ‘What do we do next?’ and try and find ways of solving it, which was nice. But this was on a bigger scale and more of a morass of footage.”

So how long did this take?

“Well I had about a year of looking at the footage. Because you’ve got to remember three million people try and go to Glastonbury, so when you put a call out on the website for footage, you’re getting a big response. At the time of year when they’re all trying to get in we did it. We got 900 hours and it kept coming and coming, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a bit too much here.’ A lot of it was rubbish but there was lots of interesting stuff that people had filmed themselves, which was very interesting in itself, because it gave you that point of view of the crowd and being there, none of the ‘fluffy-microphone-in-tent syndrome’ that just kills everything stone dead. So it was exciting on one level. But when I got to the editing and tried things out, I was a bit overwhelmed by it. But I hung in there.”

Was there stuff you wanted but didn’t get? I saw that you’d put a call out for footage of Bowie in 1971 and didn’t get any. His performance of Heroes from a later year is amazing, though.

“Yeah, he is wonderful, David Bowie. The Holy Grail would have been footage of him at the first one, because I saw that. When he performed in ’71 it was very early in the morning. I was asleep and this big bloke shook me awake, saying, ‘Wake up, you got to see this guy’, and the whole festival, which was much smaller then, was waking each other up saying, ‘You’ve got to see this guy.’ So it was the moment, or a moment, when everyone was turned on to what Bowie really was. He’d had Space Oddity a few years before as a one-off, freak, novelty type hit, but he wasn’t a star at all. And there he was in a dress, long hair, and just a guitar, sun coming up . . . it was magical. So if there had been footage of that . . . There is sound of it, actually. I don’t know why we couldn’t use it.”

A lot of your career has been making films about rock stars and I wonder what fascinates you about them. In Pandaemonium, your film about the Romantic poets, you portrayed them as kind of the rock stars of their day.

“I’m not really interested in rock stars per se; I’m interested in figures who impact on the world they live in. It doesn’t have to be a rock star for me to be interested. You know, I love music and I grew up at a point where music was very direct. In the mid 60s I could see the world through music and it was talking about how I felt and how the world interacted with me. Those songs were very visceral and very connected to young kids at the time. So whether it was The Kinks or The Who or The Stones, you really felt that music was talking to you and what you were feeling. And Punk did that again, I think. That to me is when it connects. In that way it’s interesting. And I think the Romantic poets did connect, obviously to a much smaller, literary audience at the time, and did make people question the way they felt about the world. You know, I’m bored with rock stars really. I don’t like them. But I am interested in extraordinary human beings, and some of them are, and some of them aren’t. Some of them are for a while and they’re not anymore.”

You’re maiking a documentary about Joe Strummer? Where are you with that and is it quite an emotional experience going back and watching footage of him?

"It is, yeah. Because I don’t really think of Joe as a rock star, because I knew him on and off, sometimes more intensely, other times not, as a friend and as a kind of non rock star for a lot of the time, he wasn’t making a lot of big music, so I’m not going to make a film about a rock star, really. I want to make a film about a very special life that, again, enlightens certain worlds and journeys from one world into another that’s very interesting. I find the kind of minor public schools of the 50s a very interesting world. And again, there are Orwellian questions there. And I find the squatting world the 70s, which is a disappeared world that I lived in and Joe lived in, fascinating. I find the whole American thing he got involved in - American record companies - another strange world. So hopefully it’s not a biography of a rock star, it’s a life lived on many levels.”





© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Paul Greengrass: "They were fighting for their lives and they were fighting to get home."

Paul Greengrass tackles the story of the flight that fought back in the award-winning United 93.
France, May 2006

How do you think this adds to the debate about what happened on 9/11 and do you think it will help in a dialogue between communities?

“OK, well, it seemed to me, starting this film, that 9/11, and particularly this aeroplane, United 93, in some ways symbolically the heart of the event, had been kind of corralled from two sides of a political debate. On the one side you had ‘Let’s roll’ turned into a political slogan, that it meant all sorts of things, you know? And on the other hand you had the kind of conspiratorial left, in a sense, arguing that this was not the truth and the truth, ultimately, was that the bad guys were our government – we were being lied to and so on and so forth.

“One of the things this film is an attempt to do is take those two propositions and say, ‘Let’s try and explore this story based on what we can verifiably know and then, in good faith, using the tools at our disposal, which are the 9/11 Commission, and a group of actors and aviation professionals and pilots, and sitting in a real aeroplane, with the timeline, let’s explore what probably happened, and be faithful to what we know happened.’ Because we know, broadly speaking, what happened; we know when the hijack occurred, we know roughly when it ended, we know roughly where they were in the aeroplane, we know when they started making calls, we know from the many calls over the next 20 minutes, roughly speaking, what was happening, we know from calls made on other aeroplanes, because they were doing the same thing, so we can extrapolate a lot, and the 9/11 Commission did that, and we know when the counter-attack began, and we know from many of the phone calls that it had the character of a mass attack, not just a tiny group of people, and we know from what the plane did in the air what must have been occurring in there, and we know from the 30-minute cockpit voice recording what was going on in the cockpit. So we can know an awful. But, of course, we can’t know all.

“So, using all of that, let’s explore a believable truth, because that has got to be serving us better than either the political sloganeering or the conspiracy mongering, if you like.

“Now why is that important? It seems to me important because, at the moment, in the post-9/11 world, all our societies, but obviously the United States particularly, are riven with a debate between those two poles about what we’re going to do in the post-9/11 world and what our correct response should be. And obviously, clearly, clearly, we’re not improving the situation, the situation’s getting worse. So maybe we should go back to the place where it began. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, I think it’s common ground that something happened that day that caused our perceptions to change. So let’s sit down and tell the story of this one event and see what that tells us.”

How about also looking at the pre-9/11 world and the events and decisions which may have contributed to the reasons for the 9/11 attacks? My concern is that the power of films like United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre could make it appear almost obscene to engage in that kind of debate, that you drown out that kind of enquiry, that things like foreign policy and so on don’t get debated, especially in the mainstream discussion.

“I understand the question. I don’t agree at all. I think precisely the opposite, actually, and I thought that for quite a number of years, and that’s why I’ve made some of the films that I have. I think the attempt to contextualise in some ways leads you into more problems than refusing to contextualise, because one man’s contextualisation is another man’s propaganda, and that then becomes what the film is about. When, in fact, what you want is for people to contextualise it themselves. And I think they do.

“Now why do I think this? Well, I can tell you very clearly why: I can remember, a year ago, starting to explore in a serious way doing this film, but I wasn’t sure. You know, and it was having to do with making films like ‘Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Omagh’, and films like Stephen Lawrence, films about political violence where I’d worked very closely with families, so I was sort of thinking about should I, could I, what would it be, where would it go, and then 7/7 happened [the bombings in London in July 2005]. And I remember, I remember it quite distinctly, my son, we couldn’t find him for about an hour. He was fine, he was nowhere near the Tube, but for an hour, like I’m sure hundreds upon hundreds upon hundred of thousands of people, just like what happened in Madrid, just like happened in New York, just like happened in Bali, there’s this rippling out where you think, ‘Oh my God, maybe this thing has touched me.’ And you feel fear and anger. And when it’s over, and it’s all alright, you like look at this child and just think, ‘How have we got to this place that these things happen and what are we going to do about it?’

“What’s interesting here is it’s about this thing, which is, why involve the families? You have to involve the families, number one, because they’re the foundation of legitimacy. If you don’t have the strongest possible, and widest possible, support from the families, then you have no business making these films, in my view. But there’s another reason which in a way is even more important and it’s this, and I’ve said this many times when I’ve made films in Northern Ireland: If you wanted to understand the sort of real truths that lie at the heart of political violence in a democracy and what it’s about, go and talk to people whose lives have been destroyed by it. Really talk. Spend time with them. And I’ve done it, I’ve been lucky enough to do it, quite a lot in different places, different sorts of violence. The Bloody Sunday families, these innocent family members shot by the British army in a counter-terrorism operation; the Omagh families, people from all across the political spectrum and religious spectrum, blown up by a bomb on a market square; the United 93 families. Stephen Lawrence - it’s political violence, essentially; it’s racial violence the same thing - a Jamaican family, a son murdered in the middle of the street. What you find when you go and meet these people and spend time with them is the absolute reverse of what you think you’d find. You very rarely find bitterness and a thirst for revenge. But what you do find, always in my experience, is this sense of lives destroyed and changed in their direction irrevocably. You find a pattern of many of these people, from different backgrounds, different starting points, then compelled on a journey towards meaning, because their children or their parents or their husband or their wife have been killed, or horrendously injured. Why has this thing happened? What are we going to do to stop it?

“Those of us not touched directly don’t really ever want to engage in these questions. For us, we see these things happen on the television, and of course we’re shocked and momentarily we stop, pay our respects, but then we want to carry on with our lives, untouched, because it’s the World Cup coming, because I’m going to the pub, because I’ve got my holiday booked, and all that. And what we expect of these families is having had their anointed moment as victims, they disappear. But if you’re a family, compelled against your will and never expecting it to happen, parked up against the overwhelming psychological imperative to seek meaning, you refuse to accept victimhood. You demand to speak. You demand that we all address this issue. Why has this happened? What are we going to do about it?

“But we don’t really want to do that because to do it involves profound change, so you find often that we have this question, ‘Is it too early to do a film about 9/11?’ We don’t mean for them. They say, ‘Why wasn’t the film made the day after?’ We mean it’s too early for us to stop having our summer holidays and get to grips with this thing. Because we know what the context of this thing is. Every one of us, from wherever we are on the political spectrum, and whatever we think about what’s going on, know, ultimately, deep down, that our world is divided by this Western pocket of extraordinary modernity and wealth, and the rest of the world is a seething cauldron of resentment and anger. We know that.

“Now, we can have an argument about what we can do about it. But we know that that’s the reality. Somewhere this thing comes from there. But do any of us in any of our countries elect governments who are going to fix that? Would we vote for a party that would say, ‘We’re going to quadruple your tax because we’re going to deal with the problems of the world?’ No. Nowhere would we do that. Of course not, that’s the problem.”

How did you get the families’ permission?

“By asking them and accepting that if they said no you wouldn’t make the film, and by showing them the previous film’s I had made, and by making a commitment to speak to them, because I believe, based on the films I had made, that that wasn’t something that you get. It’s by engaging with them that you suffuse your film with exactly what I’m talking about:: the search for meaning, the requirement to find it.”

Were they all onboard from the start?

“I found this before when I asked, you tend to have three pockets of people: people who definitely want a film made, people who are not sure, and people who are opposed. Then you have to get into a dialogue and explain who you are, what you’ve done, and how you propose to make the film. Then what happened in this case is the undecideds became strongly convinced, and the sceptical people, we learnt a lot more about what their scepticism was based on, and that’s really quite interesting.

“Mrs Felt, her husband died in the plane, and I remember sitting at a meeting with her, and she was initially opposed to this film. She said she would meet and talk about it and I explained as honestly as I could what we were trying to do, and I said, ‘One of the problems, of course, is that any film I make will be quite realistic, otherwise there would be no point in me making it.’ I thought, of course, this would be one of her issues. I said, ‘It would be harrowing, and we must confront that, and if that’s not something people want then I wouldn’t make it. But I am worried that I might create images that would cause you distress.’ She’s a most impressive and formidable person and I’ll never forget it. She fixed me with a very steely eye, and she said, ‘There are no images that you could ever create that would come near the images that I live with every day and have done since September 11. The issue for me is not that. The issue is that I’m opposed to a film being made that doesn’t have them in it, because if you’re not prepared to address honestly the reality of this thing, then I’m not interested in being involved.’ So she came to believe, and I felt the moral force of what she was saying.”

Did you also get the families together?

“Oh yeah, absolutely. And continually. All the way across production and all the way to today. The other crucial issue when you meet families is to say, ‘Let me make my film but you will see it first. And if you don’t like it, of course you will say so publicly. And then the film will be destroyed. And rightly so.’ So you make yourself accountable to them, you know?”

How did you choose who would be heroic?

“There were no problems. In the end what you do is you sit together, collectively, as a group, and come up with rules. And the rules were to have a group of actors interacting with professional people. So, in the air traffic control, it was air traffic controllers and actors, in the military environment it was military personnel, and in the aeroplane flight attendants and pilots. They were real, trained, that’s what their jobs were, and you collectively discuss all the issues, searchingly and at length, and you set out at the outset saying, ‘We cannot know the truth, all we can do is be faithful to known facts, which are quite considerable. We know, broadly speaking, what happened, and we know a lot of the detail. But the choices that we make about what we don’t know, we will all discuss and we will all have reasons for them. Then we must trust that the aggregate of all of those choices, discussed, represents the best that we can do, given that we can never recreate the past.’ You can’t, you never can, it’s a piece of cinema. But you do that on the basis that it will speak to us today. That’s all you can do. Audiences will judge for themselves whether it feels believable and if it’s an insight that pushes back the political ownership of 9/11 from either side and creates this space where you can recognise common humanity, true meaning, in an event that speaks to us today. This event, this violent confrontation in a sealed, hi-tech aeroplane, guzzling gasoline, does that speak to us today? It does to me. It’s where we are, isn’t it?”

Is it difficult not to demonise people when you make a film like this?

“When I made Bloody Sunday, one of the things that film did was play very strongly in Britain, because people saw it for what it was: a truthful and honest attempt to explore what it was honestly like in the early years of the Troubles, without ducking the fact that tremendous mistakes were made and on that day murder was committed. But you didn’t feel that those soldiers were psychopathic monsters turning up to shoot innocent people. You felt what they were: trained soldiers in the middle of a counter-terrorism campaign, who had been told to go to a place to draw a line in the sand, and the build up of tension between the demonstration and the counter-demonstration, military activity created this ballet that in the end marched everybody over the edge. But it didn’t duck responsibility for who did what. And in a sense it’s the same with this film. You have to in some way craft a film that is dispassionate and compassionate so that you understand that you condemn, obviously, the horrendous violence took places on that aeroplane, but yet you understand that those young men are driven by a devout and blind sense of the rightness of their cause. I always used to say to my actors, ‘This is the line Bob Dylan never wrote when he wrote ‘God on our Side’”, because those guys thought they had God on their side.”

How difficult was it working without a script?

“Well we had a document. It wasn’t a formal screenplay in that sense but it probably had more words in it than the normal screenplay. It was 90-pages long, it was actually a prose document, but it was broken down scene by scene, so that we understood at each point where in the story we were. It had some pieces of dialogue in it but not very much. The reasons being that on the one hand, if you’re in, say, an air traffic control environment and an aeroplane drops its transponder, well there’s no point me writing dialogue for what an air traffic controller does at that point because those guys are trained for it all their lives. You just have to create the scenario and then they do what they do. In the aeroplane, of course, it was different, because in the aeroplane you’re mining elemental fear, basically, and there’s a certain point where you, as a director, if you want to express complex, collective eddies and shoals of emotion that race around in a group from individual to individual, that what you’re really addressing is the complexity of the group dynamics than being interested in the specifics of what people say. So what you were trying to do in that is divide off the groupings. You had the stewardesses at one end, the young men at the other, because that’s likely how it would work.”

At the end the film becomes a kind of metaphor, it seems to me, for the human condition, that it’s humanity clawing at humanity, and we’re all headed for disaster if we don’t find a solution to this problem. Was that your intention?

“Well I used to say to the actors, and I’m sure they’ll probably remember, ‘When you get out of your seats to engage in that last seven minutes of violence, you are those men and women then, fighting for your lives and fighting to get home.’ We all collectively felt quite sure that none of them were fighting for a cause or for politics. They were fighting for their lives and they were fighting to get home, and that, incidentally, is what the families felt. But somewhere along the line, as that struggle unfolds, I used to say, ‘I want to feel that you are still those individuals then, but you are us now, all of us now, and all of us tomorrow.’”

And does that go for the terrorists as well because they all seem equalised as human beings in this tragic moment?

“I wouldn’t say equalised. It depends what you mean by equal. Morally, no. But these images of a bloody struggle for the controls of a plane that’s plunging to the earth is an image that speaks to where we’re going if we’re not very careful. But not moral equivalence. I don’t believe in moral equivalence."

©Stephen Applebaum, 2006