Greengrass Explores Everyday Courage Under Fire

In a recent interview with The Crimson, “United 93” director Paul Greengrass explains the emotional difficulty, yet spiritual necessity, of making a film about an event so painful for so many. He points to the fact that that the many people who made the film possible, “would not have come together in front of the camera to reenact what they did and interact with a group of unknown actors if they didn’t feel, as I know they do, that it was a necessary, though very painful, and ultimately inspiring, to look again at this event.”



The Harvard Crimson: Why did you choose to focus on Flight 93, as opposed to the towers or the Pentagon?

Paul Greengass: I always wanted the film to be a chronology for 9/11 so that when you sit through this film, you feel insight into the totality of the event. That’s why we’re in the air traffic system and the merchant control systems so that you can see it at eye level and...how, like us, they were blind...and struggled to grasp what was going on. Once I seized on that as my way in, it became a question of the plane.

The hijackers are the heart of 9/11. Flight 93 was the last plane in the air simply because of air traffic control problems at New York’s airports. But what that meant was by about half past nine, when that hijack had began, 9/11 was over. The towers were hit half an hour ago. And what that meant is that group of ordinary men and women, who got up that morning for a routine commuter flight, were the first people to live in our world, the post 9/11 world.

The other reason I wanted the hijack at the heart of it is because I think there were two hijackings on 9/11. The first as we all know very well is the hijack of the planes, the innocent people and the death and destruction that happened that day. But the second hijack is the hijack of a religion. A group of ideologically minded young men taking a few selected passages in the Qu’ran ignoring a thousand years of Islamic tradition...hijacking the religion on the basis that theirs is the only true interpretation and using it as justification to killing innocent people in order to terrorize the rest of the world.



THC: How do you think this film will contribute to the political debate?

PG: If you take the view that what’s happened in the last five years is a good thing and that it’s the right course of action...then you can look at United 93 as an indication for that. If you look at the last five years as a misjudgment and a mistake, you’ll look at this film as an indication as well.

I wanted this film to be a kind of Rorschach test, an inkblot, that you hold up and people project their hopes and fears and fantasies onto. But the true meaning of United 93 is neither of the things. It doesn’t confirm either. It just confirms the reality of hard choices, the extraordinary human courage to face hard choices and how difficult hard choices are when there are no good outcomes. If this film provokes discussion and thought, then it will have done its job. If it doesn’t, then I will have failed.

—Christopher C. Baker