Is it too soon for a film about 9/11? United 93 director Paul Greengrass says emphatically that no, it isn’t.
“The debate [over 9/11] is going on all around us, in newspapers and magazines, in bookshops, television stations and radio stations,” Greengrass says. “I think it’s time that filmmakers were allowed to join that discussion.”
British-born Greengrass is well known for his politically minded films, including 2002’s Bloody Sunday, but is best known in the United States for The Bourne Supremacy and upcoming Bourne Ultimatum films.
Greengrass is aware of the sensitive nature of United 93, which explores the chronology of the terrorist attacks of September 11 through both the air traffic controllers behind the scenes and the passengers of the fourth hijacked plane, and their decision to wrestle control away from the terrorists. He believes, however, that the underlying issues the film explores are more important than making a “safe” film.
“By a quirk of fate, UA93 was the last flight in the air. By the time the hijack had occurred and the terrorists had taken over that airplane, 9/11 was over. The towers had been hit a half-hour before; the Pentagon was either struck or seconds away from being struck. What that meant is that that ordinary group of men and women were the first people to inhabit our world — a post 9/11 world.”
Greengrass says he also wanted his film to demonstrate clearly the stakes of 9/11, which he says extend beyond the attack on the United States.
“I think there were two hijacks that occurred on 9/11,” he says. “The first one I think we know all too well — the hijack of the planes, the innocent people who were there, the destruction that happened that day. But the second hijack is the hijack of a religion. A group of ideologically minded young men taking selected passages of the Koran, ignoring the thousands years of traditions of tolerance and awareness and reading it into a closed system of belief, hijacked the religion on the basis that theirs was the only true interpretation of Islam, and used it as justification to kill innocent people, in order to terrorize and colonize the rest of the religion.”
United 93 expounds this ideological and political belief on more than one occasion, but steers clear of the easy dramatic target — the U.S. government — choosing instead to focus on the human element.
Greengrass concludes that, “In the end, it seems to me that the true meaning of United 93 is the reality of hard choices, the extraordinary human courage required to face hard choices and how difficult hard choices are when there are no good outcomes.”
