Rebuilding brick, mortar and soul after 9/11

For years after he lost his younger brother Mike in the World Trade Center attacks, Brian Lyons would find himself in a strange position. He’d be standing in the backyard of his brother’s home and would hear Mike’s widow, Elaine, calling from inside.

“ ‘Mike, is that you?’ she would say. ‘Are you here?’ Because I sound like him and I have the same gestures as him,” Lyons explained. “For a while I’d try to talk lower or change my voice. But she’d still think it was him.”

Lyons is sitting in a diner just blocks from ground zero, where nearly 10 years ago, his brother, a firefighter from an elite unit in the South Bronx, ran into a burning tower and never came out.

The aftermath was a nightmare for Lyons, his wife and their young daughters. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and, for several years, put on a heady cocktail of medication.

Many people in Lyons’ situation might move away, or at least avoid ground zero. But Lyons is a construction worker, and he has spent nearly every day since the attacks there, first as part of the rescue and clean-up effort, then heading a team rebuilding the site.

“At the beginning, when we were down lower [in the site], some guys would just leave the job. They couldn’t … take it,” Lyons recalled, in his hard-bitten Queens accent that indulges the occasional profanity. “I guess I had chances to go too. But it never felt right to leave.”

Lyons is one of five people featured in “Rebirth,” a gripping documentary from first-time director Jim Whitaker about the effects of Sept. 11. The movie opens in theaters Friday in Los Angeles, ahead of an anniversary-day airing on Showtime.

Though most talking-head documentaries offer a snapshot of their subjects, who are asked to recall moments that happened long ago, Whitaker attempts something more ambitious and more patient: Each year, from 2002 to 2009, he would fly to New York and interview his subjects one-on-one about their lives, their memories and their feelings. As a result, “Rebirth” allows the viewer to live with the victims over a long period — privy to their raw, initial pain, their incremental progress, their inevitable setbacks and transformations.

As Lyons sits in the diner, an orange construction vest on his back and a blue hard hat in his hand, it’s a crystalline late summer Tuesday, just as it was when the planes hit the towers. Across from him is another “Rebirth” subject, Tim Brown, a former firefighter who lost his best friend and dozens of other colleagues and confidantes in the attacks.

When Brown moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the newly created Department of Homeland Security shortly after Sept. 11, he recalls in the film, he was asked whether he missed his friends in New York. His response: Not really. “They’re all dead.”

Brown spent years, he says in the diner, “being lost, totally lost, just emotionally and as a person.” A few years ago he decided to start talking to others affected by the attacks. “I dove back in with both feet. It’s been exhausting but it’s also healthy,” he said. “I recently began talking with the wife of one of the pilots who was killed that day. And it’s good, we get it. We get what it means to cry at the drop of a hat,” he said, his eyes welling up.

The film began with an odd kernel of an idea. Whitaker, a veteran Hollywood producer who had spent years working with Ron Howard, had attended a wedding on the East Coast shortly after Sept. 11. There, he saw some Wall Street traders — macho, Master-of-the-Universe types — crying in the corner. He was moved but didn’t think much of it. Shortly after, he was driving by ground zero and imagined that, one day, all the charred wreckage would be gone and something new would sprout up. He decided to make a movie that would capture the efforts to rebuild the site.

Founding a nonprofit called Project Rebirth, Whitaker befriended government officials and schmoozed real-estate moguls in the hope of gaining access to the site. Soon, a plan was born. He would mount 14 cameras on buildings in lower Manhattan from various vantage points, he explained this week as he stood on a roof of a building a few blocks northeast of the site and demonstrated how one of those cameras worked. Each camera would snap a still photograph every five minutes, every day. After a period of years, he would compress those images into a time-lapse video montage.

Not long after, he decided he wanted the film to be about people too. So he set about finding subjects touched by the attacks who’d be willing to sit with him for hours, sometimes even days, to talk about their lives.

In addition to Brown and Lyons, he located Ling Young, a feisty middle-age woman who was trapped high up in one of the World Trade Center towers and suffered severe burns; Nick Chirls, a teenager who lost his mother that day; and Tanya Villanueva Tepper, a 34-year-old whose fiance, a firefighter, was killed in one of the towers. (Four other subjects were interviewed but are not featured in the film; their stories will become part of a permanent exhibition at a ground zero museum.)

As the years wore on and Whitaker began assembling the photographic images, which evidenced bursts of movement followed by months of inactivity, he saw an interesting symmetry. “I started to realize that the progress of the site was converging with the story of the people,” he said. “You move forward and then stop, and then you move forward again and then stop.” (He wound up using the images interstitially in the film.)

The interview process wasn’t always easy for the subjects. “It’s like you go through a divorce and on the fifth or the seventh anniversary someone wants to sit down and say, ‘Remember the time your wife threw golf clubs at you five years ago or seven years ago? Can you talk about that?’” Lyons said. “But it did become a kind of therapy, because I wasn’t really doing that for a while.”

At the end of the film, there is hope — the title, after all, is “Rebirth.” Villanueva Tepper moved to Florida, married and has two children. She said by phone from Miami this week that “I still have my triggers and I still have my waves of grief, but it’s more private, and it doesn’t stop me as much from having joy.” Lyons said he’s in a better place too. “Capturing Bin Laden helped. Because my brother’s dead but Bin Laden is floating at the bottom of the … ocean,” he said. “And bringing the building out of the ground has helped.”

Brown has watched his late best friend’s daughter, born months after Sept. 11 and named for her dad, grow up asking about her father, which he says brings him happiness. But there are less positive emotions too, and talking to the subjects is a reminder that, for all the talk of closure and progress, grief doesn’t disappear and fear and anger are just below the surface.

“There was a famous fire in New York in the ‘70s that every firefighter died in,” Brown said. “Some of them five years later, some 10 years later, some 20 years later. But everybody died. I think that’s how it’s going to go with this. I have a spot in my lung that they’re watching,” he continued. “I’m OK now, but who knows how I’ll be in two or three years?”

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com