Jonathan Olley
	Paul Greengrass with cast members on the set of Universal Pictures' unflinching drama United 93: "Some people won't want to see it, they don't want to go back there, and that's to be respected and understood. But I think there are a lot of us who believe that 9/11 is absolutely vital in shaping our world today."

Paul Greengrass is not a celebrity director, a Spielberg or Eastwood whose face is instantly recognizable. And yet he appears in TV commercials for "United 93," so he can help audiences understand what his movie is and, more importantly, what it is not.

It has no Tom Cruise or WB hunk uttering Todd Beamer's famous words, "Let's roll." No models turned actresses pretending to be flight attendants. No tie-ins, giveaways or any of the usual promotional tools.

"United 93" has 50-year-old Greengrass, who was in Philadelphia earlier this week and whose morning and early afternoon were booked solid with interviews, with no stop for lunch. From Philadelphia, he was catching a train for New York and the Tribeca Film Festival, where the drama made its world premiere.

Talking by phone, he said he wants audiences to know he's not made a big-budget Hollywood movie (his was roughly $17 million) and that he had cooperation from the families of all 40 passengers and crew who refused to allow the hijackers of Flight 93 reach their intended target in Washington, D.C.

They fought back with the weapons at their disposal -- phones that brought information from an already changed world, boiling water, fire extinguisher, silverware and a beverage cart, plus smarts, strength, courage, cooperation and patriotism. Flight 93 plunged to the ground in a field near Shanksville, Somerset County, killing all aboard. Ten percent of the opening weekend gross will be donated to the Flight 93 National Memorial there.

"We're a mature democracy, it seems to me, and the post 9/11 debate has been going in every newspaper and television station, in your newspaper, every radio station, Internet, books, magazines. I think it's time filmmakers were allowed to join that conversation," Greengrass said.

The director, who thrilled audiences with "The Bourne Supremacy," is well aware that an AMC Loews theater in New York yanked the preview for the movie when it prompted tears and objections that it was too soon. That's the opposite of what some family members told him.

"They expressed a markedly different view and not, 'Is it too soon?' It's like it's high time -- how come it's taken so long? And that's the danger in this; their perspective on this is very different."

Still, he realizes not all moviegoers share that opinion.

"Some people won't want to see it, they don't want to go back there, and that's to be respected and understood. But I think there are a lot of us who believe that 9/11 is absolutely vital in shaping our world today.

"It continues to drive everything that happens, and if we're going to make wise choices going forward, we've got to be prepared to look at what happened and address it. Otherwise, we're just going to leave the debate to conspiracy theorists," some of whom still believe the military shot down Flight 93, all evidence to the contrary.

Greengrass kept the families and friends of passengers and crew informed every step of the way. They were interviewed in person and sent a full cast list, plus a photo of the actor portraying their loved one, along with biweekly newsletters. The director also recorded a video message for the families and later arranged for private previews of the film.

Many asked Greengrass to portray the tragic event as a "collective experience," not something that happened just to a handful of people.

Moviegoers will see the passengers whose stories became most familiar, but they also will watch actors playing Donald and Jean Peterson, a married couple headed to Yosemite National Park; Toshiya Kuge, a 20-year-old returning to school in Japan; retiree Hilda Marcin, whose daughters were planning a surprise 80th birthday party for December 2001; and the others heading from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco on what seemed a beautiful morning to fly.

Families had another request. "They wanted it to feel real, not to duck the central violence of it, the reality of what they faced," Greengrass said.

"Their view is that the phrase 'Never Forget' was in danger of becoming an empty slogan. If we airbrush the fear and terror out of 9/11, then we're not going to learn the lessons of it. ... They wanted this film to stand as a warning, to help educate people," particularly young adults who had lived through 9/11 but had been a bit too young to grasp what had happened.

"This event does not belong to the past, as we know only too well in London," said the British-born Greengrass. "We had bombings there last year," killing 56, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 left 191 people dead.

"This problem remains with us, and I think that was something that motivated everybody in this film, not just the families but the aviation professionals, the air-traffic controllers and the military controllers that we reached out to, and they agreed to take part in and perform in front of the cameras those roles because they believed that it would be important to create a record of what occurred."

Greengrass points to their participation as evidence that the movie is not gratuitous. "I mean, Ben Sliney was in charge of the entire civil aviation system and he agreed to take part and re-enact what he did that day," his first day on the job at the FAA's operations command center in Herndon, Va.

Commercial airline pilot JJ Johnson was cast as Flight 93's Captain Jason M. Dahl, two of the actresses portraying flight attendants had worked for United Airlines in that capacity and others from Herndon, Newark and the Northeast Air Defense Sector play themselves.

Writer-director Greengrass aimed for a "believable truth" about what happened that Tuesday, based on interviews, flight recordings, public records, final phone calls and improvisation on the part of the cast, rooted in their research and rehearsal.

A Boeing 757 bound for the scrap heap was dismantled and shipped to Pinewood Studios outside of London. It was reconstructed in pull-apart sections -- cockpit, first class and coach cabins -- and the actors sat in their assigned seats and reenacted the flight.

"We improvised based on the known events. And all the time we were engaged in a debate about how believable it was," says Greengrass, who had been editing "Bloody Sunday" about the deadly 1972 clash in Northern Ireland, when the terrorists struck.

Early reviews have called the movie "brilliant," "first-rate" and "haunting." While the family cooperation provides a "foundation of legitimacy," Greengrass knows the audience will make up its own mind.

"Does this have a strong sense of moral purpose? Is it done with gratuitousness? Does it meet the challenge of making a film that dignifies this event and expands our understanding of it? If it does those things, I think people will feel that it was worth doing."