He was prepping the film in the early summer of 2001 (though a New York Times piece reported it was actually filmed during that time), fashioning it as a fairly straightforward if busy drama.
Barry pepper 25th hour movie#
This movie captures the vibe of the city in the aftermath of that horrific event in way that feels more compelling, more wounding (and wounded), more spot-on than any recreations of that day’s tragedy possibly could.Īs Lee said when he and the film’s star, Edward Norton, appeared on the Charlie Rose Show right after the film’s release in 2003, he shared an agent with Benioff and was passed the script. Every movie is a documentary of the time in which it was made. But it’s a New York story through and through, and for Lee, that meant threading in what the city had gone through. A morality tale about paying for the consequences of your deeds, Lee’s take on David Benioff’s 1991 novel (the author and future Game of Thrones co-showrunner wrote the screenplay) could have left it at: Do the crime, do the time. It’s the one that we find ourselves going back to more than the disaster procedurals of United 93 and World Trade Center, the maudlin melodramas that often treated the event like mournful background Muzak (looking at you, Reign Over Me), even the docs that kept replaying the footage of the planes, the panic, the clouds of dust enveloping downtown after the dual collapses. There’s nothing in that above bare-bones synopsis to suggest that the story of a drug dealer who got caught has anything to do with what happened on September 11th, 2001.Īnd yet, as we look back on the worst terrorist attack on American soil that happened 20 years ago today, it’s Lee’s movie - and his movie alone - that’s arguably stood the test of time. Follow that up with, “Also it’s not only the best film to tackle 9/11, it’s the only one that deals with the subject that still matters,” and they might give you a look that suggests they think you’ve completely lost it, assuming they haven’t slunk out of the room. But he’s planning on sucking it up, keeping his head down and paying for his sins.ĭescribe Spike Lee’s 25th Hour to people who’ve never seen or heard of the movie, and they’ll politely nod, maybe mention that it sounds like an intense drama. Monty could run, or alternately, take “the bullet train,” as someone calls putting a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger. He’s got one last day to say goodbye: to his two best friends, a stock broker and a teacher to his girlfriend, Naturelle to his father to Doyle, his loyal rescue dog and to freedom. Now, this slick-looking player, with the sharp goatee and nice leather jacket, is getting ready to go upstate and do a seven-year bid.
He’s an Irish-American fireman’s kid from Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood who got into a ritzy Manhattan private school, got himself mixed up with drugs and gangsters, got rich, and got busted. A guy named Monty Brogan is going to prison.
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