Thunderous Applause for 9/11 Film Preview

The first plane is seen only as a shadow zooming across a skyscraper. The second we hear about only because a policeman learns of it on the phone from his wife.

Instead of showing the now familiar sight of two planes slamming into the twin towers on Sept. 11, this is the way director Oliver Stone announces the attacks in his yet-to-be-released film, “World Trade Center.”

Stone attended a preview of the opening scenes of his high-profile historical thriller, which were received with thunderous applause by a packed audience at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday night.

The 20 minutes of footage ended with actor Nicolas Cage, playing a Port Authority Police sergeant named John McLoughlin, leading his men into one of the towers.

At the sound of a thunderous roar, Cage looks up to see debris and a mushrooming cloud of dust and ash hurtling at him and his men.

The screen goes white. Then, seconds later, we see two terrified eyes staring out from the blackness. It is Cage. Then the screen goes dark.

Stone, in Cannes to be feted on the 20th anniversary of his Vietnam War saga, “Platoon,” told the audience that the footage of “World Trade Center” was “incomplete.” He went on to compare the heroism portrayed in his latest film with that depicted in the earlier one.

“I think I speak for Charlie [Sheen] and Willem [Dafoe] and Tom [Berenger] when I say that ‘Platoon’ changed our lives completely,” the director said. “We’ve never been the same....

“In the same vein, I would say that, for me, the struggle ... has been to try and make these stories about people who really see it with their own eyes and their ears, whether they were in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq or rubble of the World Trade Center.”

Paramount Pictures is scheduled to release the film in August.