popular thinking

UNITED 93: THE REVIEW AND INTERVIEW

Sometimes your job makes you do things you wouldn't normally do. Like, say, go see a movie that takes a docudrama look at reliving Sept. 11, 2001, through United Airlines Flight 93.
"Hey, honey, what do you want to do Friday night?"
"How about a Sept. 11 movie!"
Um, no. But your job requires you to see it, so you do, and you sit through the entire film with this pit in your stomach that fills with dread. It's not a popcorn movie (not that that stopped one so-called critic from munching on a sandwich and potato chips during our screening -- egads). But director Paul Greengrass managed to avoid the schlock and cheese, instead showing an honorable if difficult portrait of the people who had to deal directly and indirectly with the horrors of that morning four-and-a-half years ago. I wasn't familiar with Greengrass' previous work (well, I knew of it but hadn't seen it) outside of The Bourne Supremacy when we sat down for a chat last week. We had a good talk.
I wanted to know if Greengrass believed that Sept. 11 would spawn a genre of movies much like the Holocaust, in that filmmakers would continue to probe the horror for years to come.
He didn't quite agree.
"I think the analogy that's best is Vietnam films, because it was a great national tragedy that needed to be processed," Greengrass told me.

Other things he told me:
"American culture would be the poorer, by a wide, wide margin if Universal and other studios didn't allow filmmakers to make these films...not just this film. Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Syriana. We're engaged in a golden period of social filmmaking."
As for directing the real-life FAA and military personnel:
"How could you say to a military person who was there on that fateful morning anything but do what you did?"
"You don't blame anybody because you can see that they were doing their best."
On seeking the truth:
"I think if you polled your people there'd still be some who believe United 93 was shot down by the military."

For the rest of our interview, read my story from Tuesday's Boston Herald:
The writer and director of “United 93” (opening Friday) knows what you’re thinking.
“People will come to this movie wondering, ‘Who are you? Why? How could you do this? Will this film justify this?’ ” Paul Greengrass told the Herald last week.
His film dramatically and thoroughly re-enacts the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, zeroing in on United Airlines Flight 93, the only hijacked plane that did not reach its intended target.
Greengrass, 50, may have directed “The Bourne Supremacy” but he made his mark with real-life dramatizations of political terrorism in Northern Ireland with “Bloody Sunday” (2002) and “Omagh” (2004).
“Political violence is deeply, deeply destructive, and it requires us to respond,” he said. “We want to pretend that it didn’t happen, that our lives can go on.”
They can, but we shouldn’t forget what happened, and art should be part of the conversation, he said.
“Films should ask the question: Why? What is the meaning of these terrible events?” he said.