Paul Haggis: "The wonderful thing about Clint is you can never second guess how he is going to react to anything."

Oscar winning screenwriter/director Paul Haggis talks about working with Clint Eastwood on Flags of our Father and Letters from Iwo Jima, racism and Crash. London, 2006

You provoked controversy among the Christian right in America with your screenplay for Million Dollar Baby and here you are now doing a film about race relations. You have said before that you're drawn to material that is political and volatile. Why take such risks at a time when so many people are playing safe?

"Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly. I like to write about things about which I have no answers, questions that trouble me. These things trouble me. You want to dig in and find out what something means to you. And if you do that, I think you have to take risks. I also guess I'm a bit of a contrarian. I left television when everyone was rushing to it. When Jerry Bruckheimer was going 'My God! Television! It's taking over!' I was going, 'You know what? I think I'll go into independent film.' I guess I've never been interested in taking the path that everyone else takes.”

From what you said, I suppose people shouldn’t look to your work for answers.

“I don't think it's the job of filmmakers to give anybody answers. I do think, though, that a good film makes you ask questions of yourself as you leave the theatre. The ones that are a total experience in themselves, where you leave the theatre going, "Yeah, nice film," I think are failures.”

Do you have a political background? I know that you're involved with organisations such as Artists for Peace and Justice, and The Centre for the Advancement of Non-Violence.

"I can't say I'm overly political. I'm just as concerned as the next citizen and feel that if you're concerned you have a responsibility to do something about that. So, you know, we're just doing little things here in Los Angeles to make actors, writers and directors a little more aware of what our country is doing in our name. If we can each do our little bit then maybe, eventually, something will happen.”

We've mentioned taking risks. When you were writing Crash, did you ever ask yourself whether you had the right to put the kinds of words that you do into the mouths of your racially diverse cast of characters?

"Oh completely. Every day we sat down I said, "Bobby [Moresco, co-writer], what the hell are we doing? We're two white guys. We're going to be killed. We don't have any right to say these things, do we?" He'd say "Well, if it's true, no matter how ugly that truth is, yes." I actually think that it was kind of ballsy for Bobby and me to do this. Because, you know, you write a story about the LA experience and usually it's all from our perspective.”

One of the bravest scenes for me was the one where the black couple, played by Thandie Newton and Terrence Howard, talk about black identity. Did that feel particularly risky for you?

“Absolutely. But, oddly, it's the black community that really embraced this film more than any other. And those were the ones I was most worried about. The white liberal community, whenever you talked to somebody, they’d say, 'What are you talking about? We don't have this problem. We've solved all this nonsense. Why are you bringing this up?' But I was most worried about the black reaction to it.”

Tell me about Matt Dillon’s racist cop. He’s a fascinating character because his racism is not inherited but stems from his love for the way his father’s been treated. His hatred for black people come from his love for his father.

“The inspiration for that character came from hate mail I received while working on a show called Family Law. It was about a mixed-race divorce and the letter writer said: ‘Why is it that it’s always the white people that are the villains and the black people that are the heroes? Let me tell you about my dad …’ He told me the story Matt Dillon tells about his father. I thought: ‘Wow, isn’t that interesting? You have a good man , and because something happens to him, his son learns the opposite lesson that his father was trying to teach.’ So if you think a racist father begets a racist son, who begets a racist son – it’s not necessarily so.”

Was there anything that was off limits? You don't have any Jewish or any Arab characters in the film, for instance.

“No, there was nothing off limits. I didn't have a graph and say, 'OK, I'll have two Asians, two Jews, and two Arabs.’ I didn't do that. I just followed the characters. We started with the two carjackers, because I knew them. They jacked my car [a Porsche] and I created a life for them over 10 years in my head. So I knew who they were. They were now my protagonists. They were my Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and I knew what they were going to do. So I started with them and I said, 'Well, who do they bump in to?' I said, 'They bump into me and my wife, an affluent white couple.’ I fictionalised us, took it home, and said 'Well what did we do?' Well we changed our locks at two o'clock in the morning, because they had our house keys. The guy who had come, what if he had been Hispanic and what if he had looked like a gangbanger? Would I have felt safe? I had to admit that I wouldn't have felt safe and I was so deeply troubled by that, so shamefully, that I said, 'Ooh, ooh, I want to do something.' So I just kept following the characters and when they bumped into people, I wrote about them."

Why did you wait a decade before you started writing the screenplay? You have said that 9/11 focused it for you.

“Well it did. I never actually set out to write this. I never thought there was a movie in this. I just kept asking myself different questions. Then, after 9/11, I have a black friend, he's a writer, who said, and he hated admitting this, but he felt kind of good about all these Arabs and Muslims who were now being searched on the aeroplanes, because now it was someone else's turn. I went 'Ooh, that's interesting.’ So that was one of the kicking-off points and I started to investigate it more, because I wanted it to be universal. I was interested in the deeper responsibility, the more human aspects of our fears, than the sociological aspect of it. So that was where it started.”

To what extent does the fact that LA is such a car-based society, a point which is central to the way Crash works, determine the way people there view and interact with each other?

“Very much. We are all strangers to each other. But it's not just Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it's the world now. Every time you step out of the urban centre you lose contact with anyone who looks different than you do, because we can now choose where our walled communities are. And we all do this. Every single ethnic group decides that they want to live within their own communities, whether it be Little Ethiopia, Little Italy, or wherever.”

How much do you think the racial dynamics in LA impress themselves on the way different ethnic groups are represented in Hollywood films?

“Well it depends who you talk to. If you talk to most white critics, or most white writers, directors, or producers, they'll tell you, 'It's fair [laughs], it's representational, and we're doing our best to do a bit more.' You talk to someone who's Latino or Hispanic, or a lot of black actors, and you find out different.”

Were you at all responding to the stereotypical images that we often see on screen? Was that in your mind when you were writing the screenplay?

“No, I try not to think about other films when I'm writing or directing. I guess the images that I have are pretty clear, from small instances of racism I've seen on studio lots to the LA riots. We have these riots and then [gasps ironically] we're all horrified, shocked, horrified. It's as if we live in Casablanca, you know? And then a year later we go, 'Thank God we have cured this problem,' [Laughs] and we've done nothing. Then three years later we wonder why people are still unhappy. Gosh, why? We just love to live in a state of delusion. That’s why I write about Los Angeles. It’s a lovely city. The weather’s great, you drive convertibles, there’s palm trees, beautiful women, and fabulous restaurants. But scratch that surface, and you find it’s different.”

Is the scene where a white producer tells a black television director, played by Terrence Howard, that a character is not being black enough in a scene something that you have witnessed?

“Yeah, I hadn't seen that particular scene but I'd heard about it happening. I'd seen other things like that. For example, I was on a studio lot not too long ago and I saw two white producers of a television series talking to a black director, and as I walked towards them on the studio lot, I noticed that one of the white producers was telling a joke. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but as I came a couple of steps closer, I noticed that it was a racist joke. He was telling the joke to the black director as if to say, 'See, we can do this now. We're all the same. It's a level playing field.' And before I got close enough to say, 'No you can't, you asshole,' the punch line came and the black director sort of half laughed, slapped the guy on the shoulder, and tried to walk back to the stage. Meanwhile you see the white producers walking away feeling very good about themselves and thinking, 'See, we've overcome this race problem.' [Laughs] That I found fascinating. I just asked myself, what piece of that man's soul did he just chew off and swallow to get next week's assignment? You know, just to live, just to work as an artist, or to feed the family?”

For me Crash is one of the most upfront treatments of racism in an American metropolis since Do the Right Thing. Did that make it difficult to finance?

“Oh it was terrible. No one wanted to do it. First of all I was an unknown director. I had directed for television but that's actually worse. It would have been better if I had been a complete unknown. Also, it's very hard to tell the tone of the movie from the script, because it could have come off as really preachy, or rather the characters preaching and being didactic, and the film could come off that way, which I didn't want to do. I wanted to lampoon these characters who were saying these great, wonderful things. So we took it out of the studios, no one wanted it, and we took it to quite a few financiers, and they liked the script but didn't want to do it with me as the director. And then, finally, we found Bob Yari and Cathy Schulman, and they said, 'Yeah, we'll put up a little bit of money, to get it cast.' So it took us a year and a half to get the right cast that worked for them so they'd put more of the money up. All the actors worked for nothing. We all waived our fees.”

How difficult was it finding a cast? I know that Don Cheadle played a major role in bringing people onboard.

"Don was great. Don was the first person onboard. I was terrified taking this film to Don. For one, I didn't know him; I didn't know any of these actors. He was the first African-American actor who read the script, and also I have so much respect for him. So when he came to sit in my living room, I had no idea what he was going to say. He might have just come to say, 'Listen, I just want to say what a racist bastard you are, and I want to say it to your face.' He didn't. He sat down and said, 'I want to do the movie.' I said, 'Great. What role?' He said, 'I don't care, any role.' He actually went back and forth between the role of the television director and the police detective for six months. Every week he'd phone and go, 'You know what? I changed my mind.' [Laughs] He finally made up his mind six months later. We asked him to produce the film with us largely because I knew he'd bring a credibility that I didn't have. People look at him and they know he's associated with quality films. Also, actors want to act with Don Cheadle. He's an actor magnet. He's like Sean Penn."

Will Smith claimed a little while ago that he was not allowed to kiss Cameron Diaz in the romantic comedy Hitch, only the Cuban-American actress Eva Mendes. You keep to this configuration in Crash, by giving Don Cheadle's character a Latino lover (played by Jennifer Esposito), although you do comment on the prejudice that still exists in America towards mixed race relationships. Nonetheless, did you at any point consider breaking the taboo and giving Don a white partner?

“Yeah. Actually no, I didn't, because I knew where I was going with that plot. I wanted him to say she's white to his mum, just to piss her off [Laughs], and that to drive Jennifer's character over the edge. Again, I didn't really do anything for effect. I just followed the characters and took them wherever they wanted to go.”

Where do you find your common ground with Clint Eastwood because politically you come from different ends of the spectrum?

“The wonderful thing about Clint is you can never second guess how he is going to react to anything. I sent him this project, the third thing we're doing together, Death And Dishonour, about Iraq, it's a really difficult story, a true story, and I thought he could have called me up and said, 'You Commie bastard. What are you getting me into now?' But he didn't. He called up and said, 'Wow, difficult material. Hard story.' I said 'Yeah, but it's the truth.' He said 'Yeah, I think we should tell it.' So, you know, I really admire him. People think they know who Clint Eastwood is but they just don't know.”

You’ve also a written a film that he’s directing called Flags of Our Fathers, about the raising of the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, which sounds very patriotic.

“Clint didn’t want to make, as he put it, ‘a bullshit John Wayne movie.’ It’s a difficult film about war. It’s going to honour the men, but it’s not going come down and say: ‘Yes, we should go to war. It’s an honourable thing.’ It was a brutal, brutal battle and the toll it took on those men’s lives was something that we don’t shirk.”


© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu: "You see these borders getting worse and worse between human beings, cultures, nations and neighbourhoods."

Babel: One world, dissonant voices.
London, 2006



Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu could have done almost anything he liked after Amores Perros. The director's astounding debut film - three stories set in Mexico City, all connected by one car crash - saw the former DJ and commercials director hailed as a major talent. He could probably have gone to Hollywood there and then. But instead of being sucked into America's mainstream movie-making machinery, he took Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro to Memphis and immersed them in 21 Grams, an unremittingly grim story about grief, religious fundamentalism and redemption.

21 Grams felt like an anguished howl of pain. "It was very personal to me," Inarritu says when we meet in London. "I lost a kid with my wife and that was one of the things I wanted to explore." The film, like Amores Perros, was informed by this 43-year-old father of two's belief that "to arrive at the light you have to go through a very painful or dark process". Life is a "list of losses", he elaborates. "When you are born, you lose the security in your mother's womb. You lose your friends. You lose your hair. You lose your father. You lose your job. You lose your health. You know that you will lose your life. I think it's how you confront those losses that matters." That sounds awfully pessimistic, I say. "Oscar Wilde said a pessimist was an optimist well informed," he laughs. "I think that's how I feel."

This is nowhere more evident than in the director's new film. Babel concludes what is now an informal trilogy - though only in the sense that the films all concern parents and children, he says. Global rather than local, like Amores Perros, or spiritual like 21 Grams, Babel, Inarritu says, grew out of his need to talk about the world as he has experienced it since moving to LA - four days before 9/11 - and during his subsequent travels. The film is dark stuff, predictably, with only the slightest hint of light piercing the existential gloom. But it was something he felt compelled to make, despite the various appeals made to his vanity, his ego, his wallet and his creativity by screenplays coming from Hollywood. "If I had chosen them I knew it would be the wrong decision," he says. "For me, making a film is such a difficult thing, that it's better for me if it is a personal thing.

"I have the great privilege to be in a world where I can express my own fears, my own anxieties, and whatever moves me in my work. So, my life and my films are not very separated. I cannot hire my life to be telling something that I don't care about. It was a moral kind of decision to make this film. I needed to vomit a lot of things out that really bother me because of opening the newspapers, or that I experienced by myself, things that make me angry."

The coincidence of 9/11 with Inarritu's move to LA plunged the film-maker into depression. It's not easy being Mexican in the States at the best of times, but Inarritu also has a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance. In the atmosphere of paranoia and "aggravated nationalism" that followed the attacks, he found himself being regarded as "suspicious" and "dangerous". It was "a difficult and intense phase", he says. "Living as an immigrant, as a Mexican, in the US creates a lot of questions, a lot of emotions, a lot of feelings, a lot of anxiety."

He thought about the archetypes and the stereotypes and the preconceptions that we all have about one another, which trap us and alienate us, and prevent proper communication. He thought about how these are exploited by politicians to justify policy, and perpetuated through the media. "It's so sad when you see Fox News in the United States, because they completely spoil and poison any culture or any news," he says. "They ban images. They haven't shown one single coffin or one single video of what is going on in Iraq right now."

Travelling abroad, he says, "you can see these borders getting worse and worse and worse, between human beings, between cultures, between nations, between neighbourhoods. That's something I wanted to talk about."

He started work on Babel with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón's scriptwriter/director brother, Carlos, and then called in Guillermo Arriaga (who wrote Amores Perros and 21 Grams) when Cuarón switched to another project. Arriaga came up with five stories, two of which - about Moroccan children, and an American couple - survived. Inarritu himself supplied stories about a Mexican nanny looking after North American siblings, because he wanted to address the subject of immigration and the tensions along the US-Mexico border, and about a deaf-mute Japanese girl trying to cope with loneliness, her mother's suicide and her burgeoning sexuality.

When he started the multi-lingual film, which takes us from California to the Moroccan desert, to Mexico and Japan, Inarritu thought he was making something about the differences between people. Gradually, though, he discovered he was actually making a film about the things which, he believes, make us all the same. A much more positive outlook, you might think. But it really depends on whether you are someone who sees the cup as half empty or half full.

In the film, an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), grieving over the death of a child, are struck by further tragedy when the wife is accidentally shot on a tourist bus in Morocco. As she fights for her life in a poor village, the US government treats the shooting as a terrorist attack, turning it into an international incident. Meanwhile, the couple's children in America are fighting for their own lives in the desert after being taken to a wedding in Mexico by their nanny, only to find themselves caught up in a border incident as they try to re-enter the US. Later, the gun used in the shooting is traced back to the father of the girl in Tokyo, who gifted it to a guide after a hunting trip. Each story ends with a kind of moment of grace as people connect, or reconnect, through touch.

"I think that as human beings what makes us happy is very different and depends on races and cultures. But what makes us sad and miserable is exactly what we share," says Inarritu. "That thing is basically the impossibility of love: the impossibility to be touched by love, the impossibility to touch with love and express it. In this film those connections between characters are about that."

The paradox is that politics and prejudice, religion and culture, drive us apart. The proposed US-Mexico border wall is a tragic example of this, he says. It won't stop people dreaming of a better life. "It will just put more people in danger and they will have to risk their lives a little harder. There will be more security that will threaten the lives of all these humble people. They will not be stopped by a fence."

I ask Inarritu whether putting two blonde American kids in the same situation as desperate Mexican migrants was his way of trying to make bigots empathise with people they normally just regard as negative statistics. "It's a paradox," he says. "It seems that maybe I want to just get closer to people who agree to build that wall to make them feel in a human perspective, not in news and magazine terms, so that they can just think about that. One thousand people die in those conditions, including kids. And if they get closer to that story in a human way, and can just see that angle, maybe they can change a little bit their minds. Or they can think about whether a fence is really the answer to these problems. I think these American kids, just by the juxtaposition of images, will make them feel more the impact in it, and see that kids are kids, no matter whether they are blonde or Mexican. It's kids, you know? So, yeah, I think that can be effective."

Babel earned Inarritu the best director award at Cannes in May. It performed spectacularly when it opened in limited release in America, but rather more sluggishly nationwide. Critically, the film has been furiously debated. Some reviewers have called it a masterpiece, others a pretentious folly, deep and meaningful or well-made, but possibly signifying nothing. Some have dubbed it this year's Crash - which, depending on your view of that film, is either a good or bad thing.

I liked Paul Haggis's multi-Oscar winner, but Babel is an altogether subtler, more ambitious film, in which Inarritu draws on all his considerable resources as a film-maker to empathetically reveal not only the barriers that keep us apart, but also the ties that bind us together as a species. In a world that is in danger of collapsing around us like the biblical Tower of Babel, this surely cannot be a bad thing.

"If you see a film about human beings and not about Moroccans or Mexicans or Americans, if you see human beings and you forget about the languages and you just see a film, then I feel I succeeded," says Inarritu.





© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

Ken Loach: "We could have made a whole film of brutal acts and gone on for 24 hours."

Ken Loach and Paul Laverty create a stir with Palme d'Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

Cannes, 2006

This is the second film you have made about Ireland, the first being Hidden Agenda. Why Ireland again and why this particular period?

(KL) "Paul has a long family connection to Ireland and I've been interested in this subject for a long time, and I think we both felt that those years of 1920-21, 1922, were pivotal. Those were the crucial years because they defined everything that had gone before and everything that came after. So not only was it the central story for British-Irish history, it also was a classic account of a colony struggling for independence, of an army of occupation dealing with a civilian population, and equally important, of when there is a possibility of independence, what kind of society do you construct? Because there was a leadership struggle to decide, what kind of society can we build? And Damien actually says, ‘I hope this Ireland we're fighting for is worth it.' What was that Ireland? So those three things apply over and over again in many different situations."

Both brothers, Damien and Teddy, would be labelled terrorists today, wouldn't they?

(PL) "This is a fascinating question when you think about it, isn't it? The notion of terrorists and how it's been defined and how it's been constructed, because if anyone took an objective view from a human rights point of view of how many innocent people have been killed, by far the majority have been killed by state terrorism. That shouldn't really be contentious but it's almost impossible to say. But look at Columbia just now, look what's happening in Iraq. All you have to do is look at the history of Latin America and Central America, which I had lived through and I had seen - it was actually financed by states. Now it's been defined as Bush's ‘war on terror'. It's really quite fascinating how they got away with it and I think it really shows a lack of critical thinking.

"But going back to your question in relation to the brothers, this is why we were very keen to place it just after that vital election in 1918. It was the last all Ireland, all British election; Sinn Fein won 72 out of 105 seats, they had a democratic mandate for complete independence from the British Empire, they set up a parliament in consequence of their mandate, Lord French banned that parliament, when they complained they were put in prison, when they wrote about it they banned their newspapers, so what do they do in those circumstances? All peaceful methods were actually barred to them. There was violence perpetrated against those people who tried to follow the democratic wishes. So out of that came the war of independence. But it's fascinating that the people who opposed the British state are always deemed to be the terrorists. I think it's worth unravelling and going back and examining that."

What is the human cost of violent revolution?

(KL) "Well you can count the cost in many ways. First of all trying to establish a peaceful independent country the cost was brutal oppression by the British. And then once that has happened, it is inevitable that people will resist, because they always do. So I guess the cost is the exposure of the hypocrisy of empires in this case. You can count it in all kinds of ways but it just exposes the hypocrisy of empires, in this case the British Empire, which claimed to be exporting civilisation and tolerance but was actually exporting violence, brutality and oppression."

There was a critic on British TV yesterday who said that while he really liked the film he felt we had to be careful not to glorify the IRA.

[Loach bursts into laughter] "Oh God preserve us! God preserve us! It is amazing! It is amazing!"

But do you differentiate between the IRA of the 1920s and the IRA who years later carried out bombing campaigns in London, Birmingham, and so on?

(KL) "I think this is an outrageous question and an outrageous point to make. The brutality is on record. We could have made a whole film of brutal acts and gone on for twenty-four hours. I mean just imagine it: they slit a man's throat, they tie him to a cart, they drag him for a mile and kill him. They beat a man's skull in. A woman comes to the door with a child in her arms, they shoot the mother. I mean how much brutality do you have to show for someone to actually take it and say, ‘Yes, we did that', without trying to get a sort of dagger in underneath?

"The IRA of the 60s and 70s was a product of the despicable treaty that the British imposed at the point of a gun. If the British hadn't imposed partition, there would be no Provisional IRA. The entire responsibility lies with the British state. The entire responsibility. Everything that has emerged has been a protest, sometimes a violent protest, sometimes an aberrant protest, but nevertheless a protest, from the brutality of the British and the brutality of the British Empire embodied in bastards like Churchill, who not only sent the troops into Ireland, he sent the troops against Welsh miners in his own country when they wanted a decent wage. So I mean we should have no tolerance at all for these questions that try to indicate that somehow the resistance to British brutality is not acceptable."

Post-9/11 most resistance is now classified as terrorism, isn't it?

(PL) "Actually, it's funny how the language and the psychology hasn't changed very much. There was that great phrase by Churchill, talking about Ireland, ‘We have terror by the throat'. It doesn't really change very much."

Do you think the movement from a struggle for freedom to civil war is an almost unavoidable process?

(KL) "No, I think if people were to accept a democratic decision that people take, and were not to occupy them and were not to oppress them, civil war is not inevitable. Doesn't history tell us that? It comes from the denial of democracy, not the assertion of democracy. People don't go out onto the streets to vote. They go to vote and then they are denied the democratic will and then there's violence. That's the way it seems to me."

Is it easier for you to talk about the present through the past?

(KL) "I think we have to rescue the past. You know, it's the old, much-quoted saying, ‘The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' We have to rescue the past."

I really like the way you combine the political and the personal and show how we got to where we are, whereas I was a bit troubled by something like United 93, because that doesn't contextualise the event and its power almost makes it seem obscene to ask questions about the reasons for 9/11. So what responsibility do you think filmmakers have when they are dealing with historical subject matter, and especially events which are still having repercussions today?

(PL) "I suppose, because there's a thousand different ways to tell this particular story, I mean you could have told the story from the point of view of a young Tan and that would have been fascinating. You know, a demobbed soldier, brutalised after the First World War, unemployed, given money and sent over to terrorise. That was a systematic and planned decision that came from the British cabinet. There's a fascinating story to be told there. But the one that we thought was most interesting to us, and gave us more possibility to examine many ideas that were current at the time, was through a flying column, because you've got different classes within that group. You've got young farm lads, young farmers' sons with different interests from the farm labourers, you've got artisans, and, actually, I discovered, the Cork medical faculty was very Republican, and there was actually three young medical students with a flying column, and a voice like Dan, played by Liam Cunningham, a railroad worker who had lived through the 1913 lockouts, who had seen what Irish capitalists had done to the urban worker, through that they've all got different points of view and their vision of Ireland is all very, very different.

"So, though a flying column, it gave us a chance to echo, reflect and mix up all these contradictions, so you feel that you're being truthful to the times really. So we felt a massive responsibility to be accurate with that. I'm not saying that every single voice was Socialist, but some were, and many were not. Many were confused, like Steady Boy Murphy, who cannot deal with it. So we tried to touch on and paint a mosaic of many different voices."

(KL) "I think the other point you make is, what is the responsibility like in general terms? You can get very pompous about this, really, but I think it is that if you can ask the root questions, which is what we tried to do - we may have failed - but when you take an incident the interesting thing is to ask the questions that get to the bottom of it rather than just describing the event."

I think with 9/11 the problem is that the why hasn't really been addressed. People like Chomsky and Gore Vidal posed questions early on but they were shut out by the mainstream, and films like United 93 and, we're told, World Trade Centre, although we have yet to see the final film, essentially depoliticise what is a political event.

(KL) "Yes, I agree. I agree."

(PL) "But it doesn't only happen in films. It happens in the news agenda. It happens like Gordon Brown on January 15th saying we must stop apologising for the British Empire. It's all part of that same matrix. You know, this selection of facts to suit our politic."

Your next project is going to be a contemporary piece. Which is more difficult: making a historical drama or something set today?

(KL) "Well doing something set in the past is only a challenge for research and art direction and clothes. Everything else is the same. You're still battling with the light, you're still struggling against the clock, and everything else. But having done this, which is quite a large film, we wanted to do something short and sharp and contemporary."

(PL) "To have done this film in 35 days was amazing, really."

You have courts run by women in the film, which I think many of us didn't know existed. Also, you include scenes where the characters just debate issues, something you were widely criticised for doing in Land and Freedom.

(KL) "They were real the courts. And when the treaty was proposed, there were huge discussions within what they call the Republican Family, to decide what the opinion should be. But I think there is an important point here because in Britain there is a kind of heresy in film criticism which is that film can only deal in images and that verbal conflict and dialogue is not dramatic and cinematic, and I fundamentally disagree with that. I think certain things have to be expressed in language. The ideas that Paul was talking about you have to express and refine in language, because only language can carry the nuances. Images are too ambiguous. And it was a struggle for ideas, it was a struggle for political position, it was a struggle for class interest, and you find that in language. So there is a real issue here that film can deal with argument and ideas and conflict like that."

(PL) "Talking about the Republican courts, what was key, following the new parliament, when that was not recognised, was they were very creative and they said, ‘Okay, it's not just a war, we'll try and set up our own infrastructure. We will take control of our own courts.' All the local authorities started recognising the banned parliament so there was an attempt to build up an alternative power structure outside the British Empire, and women were key to that just as they were key to the safe houses and intelligence."

The actors said when they worked with you there was no script and they went along with the events in the film. Is that how it is?

(KL) "No, it's not like that at all. There is a script, which is a result of a long process, which Paul writes and is very precise. The only point, which is a really minor point, is that in order so that you feel it's really happening, rather than being very heavily rehearsed, is we shoot in sequence and they have the script as they go along. But they get the script. Ninety-five per cent of what they say are Paul's words. They sometimes feel they've improvised more because when we were shooting we improvised a lot more. It's just a technique and it's not a thing to make a big deal about."

(PL) "They've got to believe. When you see them in the eye if you don't believe that you don't believe anything and you've failed."

Ken, you are very good at creating intimacy within a broad historical context. How do you go about achieving that?

(KL) "Again this is something that is shared between us but I think if you choose fictional characters then you can choose an array of characters and relationships that have an in-built conflict and in-built tensions, and the story is really the working through of those tensions. But because they come from different positions, their history gives them different experiences and they reflect the wider tensions and the wider conflicts. I think if you remove that personal narrative you're just left with big political figures doing big political things and you lose that sense of lived history.

"One way of looking at the film, I think, that we were aware of is the relationship between the brothers, Teddy and Damien. Teddy, as he says, he's older, he was the man of action, he's dynamic; Damien was more reflective, he's a thinker, he's more academic, and Teddy has always been the stronger of the two. He says he was always the stronger of the two. But in the very last scene, when Damien is going to be executed and they face each other across the table, Teddy is losing power in the relationship and he's saying, ‘Please, will you tell us where the arms are? Will you go back home?' and Damien is the strong one. He looks him in the eye and says, ‘No.'"

Which of them do you prefer?

(KL) "Well, you know, it's not a preference. It's the kind of struggle of person against person. It's the kind of working through of a sibling relationship. It's principle against pragmatism."

Some people have said that Damien is a fanatic or fundamentalist.

(KL) "I don't think he's a fanatic at all and I don't think he's fundamental. I think he's got quite a shrewd reading of history. You know there are such things as revolutionary times, where revolutions are possible, and they're very rare, you know? It doesn't happen very often. His reading of the situation is: this is the moment when things could change. Somebody says in as many words, ‘If this moment passes, never in our lifetime will we see it again.' I don't know if you will agree, you may not, but there was a sense that the door was just a little bit open."

So we should be on the side of Damien?

(PL) "It's very easy to look back. What we're very keen to do is be true to the time. The key event there was the threat from the British cabinet of ‘immediate and terrible war'. From their point of view and what they'd lived through, that was a real and genuine threat. I'm sure you know there is a great debate about how serious that threat was, and many historians think it was a real and serious threat. But what would you do in those circumstances? You're a young man, you're 20, you've seen friends tortured and murdered, and you're looking ahead and saying, ‘Right, will they invade and just absolutely wipe us out and many more besides?'

"There was great integrity, I think, in Teddy's point of view there - it was the [Michael] Collins argument - when he says, ‘Freedom will achieve freedom.' It's alright for us sitting here in Cannes, drinking gin and tonics, to say, ‘Nah, nah, I'm going to take on the British Empire.' And don't forget Teddy says as well, ‘You're part of a minority government, are you going to give the green light to Africa and India?' Those were really key, thoughtful, intelligent reflective points. But at the same time you can understand Damien when he says, like, ‘John Bull has his hands round your bollocks. You have the Attorney General who can veto everything. You will be a puppet government.' There was great truth in that as well. I think it's very finely balanced and I think it would be incredibly arrogant of us to say, ‘I would be on his side.' I think it's a lack of imagination to think how fucking terrible war is, really."

These aren't ideologists they're a grass roots response to what was happening.

(PL) "Some are confused. Some are frightened. Steady Boy can't deal with the [civil] war afterwards because he's been through the First World War and he can't shoot his friends. There was terrible confusion and people were mixed up. For young people, don't forget they're all under 30, most of them, the idea of being picked up by the British and being tortured was terrifying. So it's very easy to look back in hindsight and say we'd do this or that.

Which do you find easier to make, Ken, historical films such as this and Land and Freedom, or social issues films like Sweet Sixteen?

(KL) "These have a dimension that those don't have. The difference is this, I suppose: the pictures that are, I think, stories of everyday life, like the boy in Sweet Sixteen, you can simply tell their story, because the characters have a consciousness which is just very ordinary. They're not political, they just live their lives. But like in Spain, or Ireland at this point, because the conflict is so public and so great, in the course of the conflict, people get political. It politicises people. So then the added problem of doing a film like The Wind that Shakes the Barley is to absorb and do justice to that consciousness, which is politicised and can use arguments, and can be self aware in the way that characters in Sweet Sixteen are not self aware. They just see life at ground level. But these characters, like Dan and Damien and the others, they're beginning to see the whole picture. So the difficulty is trying to include that while moving the narrative forward."

Do you believe cinema can change people's consciousness?

(KL) "Well cinema could be like a library. You could have a documentary book, you can have a historical record, you can have a dramatisation, you can have a fantasy. It should be as wide as a library, really."

Do you think a British audience is ready for this story?

(KL) "British audiences, yes. British film critics are something else. They see the world like a horse with blinkers. The problem is getting past the critics to the audience."

(PL) "A question in one of today's papers was: ‘Were the Black and Tans really that bad?'"

(KL) "This is a serious, respected, newspaper reviewer. One of the most respected in the business."

(PL) "It's a matter of record, you know? They always like to portray it as the exception, as a few bad eggs, but they were sent there with the mission to terrorise and that is directly linked all the way back to the British cabinet, and there is minutes there to prove it. It would take two minutes to check it out. It's not contested. The Central Court was burned down. The library was burned down. A hundred creameries were burned down. Hundreds of civilians were killed. Many were tortured. It's quite amazing, really."

© 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