"The pictures are by Robert Clark, and were shot from the window of his studio in Brooklyn. Others shot the second plane hitting the tower, but I think there are elements in Clark's photographs that make them special. To me the wider shots not only give context to the tragedy, but also portray the normalcy of the day in every respect except at the Towers. I generally prefer tighter shots, but in this case I think the overall context of Manhattan makes a stronger image. And, the fact that Clark shot the pictures from his studio indicates how the events of 9/11 literally hit home. I find these images very compellingÑin fact, whenever I see them they force me to study them in great detail."
Film critics sees hundreds and if not thousands of films in their careers and in the UK we would spend each Monday and Tuesday watching the films being released some days later and would write up that week’s films reviews. The morning of Tuesday 11th September 2001 would be different.
The press screenings always started at 10.30am either at a private screening room or frequently at the studio’s own in-house cinema and on that morning we were all at 20th Century Fox who at the time had offices just off Oxford near Tottenham Court Road. As usual from around 10am we would arrive and often get coffee and on occasion some sort of breakfast before the film began. Many of the critics had ‘their’ seat – the late Phillip French who wrote for The Observer sat in the front row on the end by the central aisle, the late Alexander Walker usually sat about four rows back in the centre of the row and the Daily Mail’s Christopher Tookey would sit in the centre seat in the back row that looked down the central aisle.
1030am and we’re all settled note pads at the ready and the film began. The film finished and the credits began to roll but the first credit had barely reached the top of the screen when they disappeared and instead were replaced by what looked like news footage of the twin towers with smoke billowing from them.
Everyone was slightly puzzled. Was this a mid-credit scene? (not really a thing back then as this was before it had become a staple for companies like Marvel and Iron Man was still seven years away. Perhaps it was a trailer? But trailers were never part of the screenings for critics. The footage continued playing and a journalist’s voice was doing his best to explain what we were seeing. Still we were unsure of just why this footage was being shown to us but no one moved. We all sat there transfixed. And then it happened one of the tower’s collapsed to the shock of everyone. The person sat behind me blurted out, ‘F**king hell!’ and then said it again. And again. And again.
The sudden shocking realization that this was not some hitherto unseen footage from a future film but was live TV coverage Everyone was stunned, transfixed by the awful event and rigid with shock. We were no longer watching fictional events with actors
The explanation that this was a terrorist attack committed by two large passenger aircraft being flown into the towers suddenly took a grip amongst us. We were sat in central London and perhaps London would be next. Very quickly we began leaving Fox’s screening room everyone anxious, wary, still reeling from the real life horror.
Outside the screening room was a small reception area and unknown to us was a small camera crew who had wanted to do short interviews with us for marketing purposes and likely unaware of what we had all just seen. No one stayed. Everyone left and certainly for myself it was to get out of central London as quickly as possible.
When you spend so much of your working day watching and writing about films it’s easy to see how boundaries might blur when a films ends credits cuts to actual live news footage. And I still can’t remember what the film was that we had watched immediately before.
All of us left that screening room in a state of almost disbelief that something so appalling had happened and trying to process the enormity of it all. Over the following days, weeks and years as more footage has gone online the images still shock. The enormous number of films we have watched over the years and the imagery and scenes pales alongside the potency of the images of 9/11 and the real life events we saw that morning.
related feature : ‘Patriots Day’ – real life police officer talks about the shoot out with the Boston Marathon bombers
related feature : How the thriller ‘7500’ was shot only in a tiny cockpit……
