Stephen Daldry comes full circle on his 9/11 film

“Everyone has their 9/11 story,” says Stephen Daldry. “My personal one is not particularly traumatic.”

Perhaps not, but it is the beginning of a 10-year period that loops around to the opening of the Daldry-directed “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” in January. Back on Sept. 11, 2001, Daldry and producer Scott Rudin were in a London cutting room together, finishing up “The Hours.” As Daldry recalls, Rudin got a call just after the first plane hit the twin towers.

“We went downstairs to the common room and switched to the live footage,” Daldry says now. “Whatever work we were doing on ‘The Hours’ got put on hold. And in the days after, both Scotty and myself were trying to get back to New York. You couldn’t fly for about five days.”

Just over a month later, Daldry married New Yorker Lucy Sexton, noting to the Evening Standard that the attacks had helped galvanize him into action: “It was one of those moments when you have to decide and focus your life and take positive action when everything else seems to be falling apart.”

So when he was handed Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and Eric Roth’s script adaptation one day — which tell the story of a troubled young boy who tries to find meaning in his father’s Sept. 11 death in the World Trade Center — Daldry jumped right in, reading both the book and script in one day. He had an “immediate emotional response to both of them” and called Rudin to tell him he was on board as director.

“A lot of the stories I have told are about grief and loss, and this is about a catastrophic loss,” Daldry says. “It’s a loss that’s very public and one that everyone has very rich stories about. One has to be responsible to the original author’s book … and you have to be aware of the truth of the reality of what happened to thousands of people who lost loved ones.”

Yet now that “Extremely Loud” is complete — after dozens of script revisions, the excising of an entire subplot and rescoring the film — issues that have little to do with the actual subject matter are making it the subject of much debate. The ever-meticulous Daldry didn’t finish shooting until July and reportedly scheduled a reshoot of some scenes as late as a week before the film’s first scheduled screening. But Daldry insists the deadline of finishing before year’s end was his alone and not to be altered.

But with that deadline met, the film has still remained largely under wraps throughout the early part of award season and thus has failed to register on any award lists of significance — including the influential Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Golden Globes. That’s an unenviable position to be in during award season for any film, particularly one that has a solid laundry list of qualifications for notice: a star-making performance by a newcomer in 14-year-old Thomas Horn, emotionally wrenching historical context, and two Oscar winners (Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock) and a legendary veteran (Max Von Sydow) in supporting roles. All that aside, it’s an engrossing, epic adventure — young Odysseus in Manhattan — that will appeal to those yearning for narrative along with having their hearts twanged.

Daldry says he agrees with the strategy of holding back the film, though he chooses his words carefully: “You’ve got to be careful about what you chase in this world,” he says. “You’ve got to be careful about chasing awards. I can’t finish a film based on the award season. The awards have to be the cherry on the cake — they can’t be the cake themselves.”

With just three other full-length features to his name (2000’s “Billy Elliot,” 2002’s “The Hours” and 2008’s “The Reader”), Daldry’s cakes have all risen quite nicely, and each has given him the cherry on top with a directorial Oscar nomination. “Extremely Loud” seems set to continue that cycle, even with late positioning. Daldry does approach challenging, often family-based subjects with an almost literary hand, and as he proved in both “Elliot” and “Extremely Loud,” he has a facility for pulling performances out of untried young actors (Jamie Bell had no feature film credits before “Elliot”).

Daldry waves off any particular talent in that area. “Anybody can be good with children; it’s about being good with actors. We were never with a child on set — we were with our leading man. With a young person, you have to make sure they have determination. Thomas does give one of the most extraordinary screen performances by a young person ever. But I don’t think we ever treated him like a kid.”

And speaking of kids, there’s another New York milestone about to pass by Daldry just about two weeks after “Extremely Loud’s” Christmas Day release: “Billy Elliot” the musical, which earned him his second Tony Award in 2009, closes on Broadway on Sunday. Daldry, who comes across as a fairly cool, collected customer, isn’t any more perturbed by that than he is by the dust-up over “Extremely Loud’s” late screenings for award voters.

“I get very unsentimental about shows shutting,” he says. “It’s always sad when things close, but everything has to close. Let’s celebrate what we have done and what we have achieved. As they say, when one door closes, another opens.”

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