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Oliver Stone’s 9/11

When I heard Oliver Stone was going to make a 9/11 movie, I wondered what approach he'd take. Turns out he tipped his hand in a panel discussion one month after the attacks:

"This is the time for a bullet of a film about terrorism, like 'The Battle of Algiers' "—Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie about the conflict between the French and F.L.N. terrorist cells in Algeria, in which the director's sympathies lie with the terrorists. "You show the Arab side and the American side in a chase film with a 'French Connection' urgency, where you track people by satellite, like in 'Enemy of the State.' My movie would have the C.I.A. guys and the F.B.I. guys, but they blow it. They're a bunch of drunks from World War II who haven't recovered from the disasters of the sixties—the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. My movie would show the new heroes of security, the people who really get the job done, who know where the secrets are."

And who would that be?

His eyes roamed, searching and sad. "I don't know yet."

--The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town, October 2001

[Thanks to threebie McK]

RELATED: Defamer got a sneak peek at the script.

PHOTO CREDITS: JFK poster, Nixon poster, plane & towers