A tribute to 9/11 heroes

When news of the disaster broke, a group of five officers - including McLoughlin and Jimeno - dashed into the first crumbling tower in a bid to save the lives of those trapped inside. Three of them never returned.

"These guys rushed in to the World Trade Center to do their duty, and they didn't even know it was a terrorist attack," Stone says. "They assumed it was, because John [McLoughlin] had been through the 1993 bombing [of the World Trade Center], but there's no discussion of why the attacks happened in the movie. You don't see the planes hit; this is not a political movie.

"In fact, I've done a football movie, I've done a financial movie, a love story, spiritual discovery, biographies and yet in America they always say I'm 'political', but that's part of the contention, that I am a conspiracy theorist, a blowhard, fraudulent, a liar. I mean, I've been accused of everything."

Everything, that is, but cowardice. Stone is a combat vet who volunteered for Vietnam and even his cinematic failings stem from a willingness to cast caution to the wind. Consider his most recent release, Alexander; even the most vociferous critics (and there were many) could not deny the film's ambition.

For Stone remains a master storyteller, particularly when recreating the archetypal hero's journey. And in John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two of the last men pulled alive from the WTC rubble, he has two colossal American heroes.

Stone reiterates: "This movie is nothing more honest than a tale of two men who lived through that day. It's brief, it's very to the point: two towers, two men. They are buried in the middle of those towers for 24 hours and we deal with the relationship between them; it's what keeps them alive.

"They were pushed to the edge of death and beyond. Imagine being crushed by a million tonnes of concrete. It's like being Prometheus, too; one of the Titans. They just go into the earth, they're buried in the rubble, they survive and they come out of Hades."

As well as the relationship between the two men, the movie also focuses on the unbearable stress placed on their families - the wives are played by Maria Bello (Donna McLoughlin) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Allison Jimeno) - who suffered their own tortuous journey during their husbands' entombment.

"We also examine, through the guys' desire to live, what they're living for," Stone says. "So we have side stories with the families, the children and sometimes the parents. Through their relationship we understand what brings the families together.

"We play around with that, so there are different moods. It's not just 'men in a hole', there are different textures, soft, domestic relationships between men and women.

"The challenge for me is to show a natural world and, at the same time, to reach for deeper levels beyond the natural world, to see these American working-class heroes faced with extinction and how they handle it. Frankly, I'm astounded at how tough they were, I am amazed."

As with Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth and JFK, Stone has discovered amazingly tough guys embedded in tumultuous tales, and has worked alongside them as he brings their stories to life. Will Jimeno is a constant presence on the World Trade Center set, offering Stone his counsel on everything from port authority procedures to the details of his imprisonment beneath the rubble.

"God truly was looking down on Sarge and me," says Jimeno, "because somehow the gaps in the rubble pinning us were just right to create a kind of cross-ventilation. I took time to make my peace with God, just in case. I thanked Him for 33 great years and for letting me become a police officer. We were pinned there for hours, and once we survived the debris and the falling fireballs, we had bullets screaming at us."

One of Jimeno's colleagues had fallen nearby, and as the heat from falling fireballs intensified, his handgun overheated, discharging all 15 rounds from the magazine. "At that point I said, 'Will, you're definitely going to make it. You've been crushed, almost burned up - and now shot at. If none of those things killed you, you simply aren't meant to die today.'"

After spending almost 24 hours buried alive, both men were rescued by the US Marines; McLoughlin was the last man pulled alive from the collapsed towers.

"It took them almost three hours to dig me out," says Jimeno. "I think my body just shut the pain off, but once they got the concrete off me, then I really started to feel it. And it took about eight hours to dig Sergeant McLoughlin out. When I was on the basket going up the hole, I said, 'John, just hold on, they're getting you out.'"

Jimeno is now looking forward to seeing Stone's interpretation of his heroic tale, and he believes that the movie, along with all the 9/11 projects (such as Flight 93, which focuses on the doomed United Airlines flight that was bound for the Pentagon, and Reign O'er Me, the Adam Sandler-starring family drama), will serve a cathartic function. "This is important," he says, "not least for the families of all those who died that day. And it is important we don't forget; films like Oliver's will help us remember."