Oliver Stone (second from left) with Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger at the 20th anniversary of Platoon

Inside a flimsy temporary office on a dusty movie lot, a young man sits in front of a computer, showing off a three-dimensional rendering of the collapse of the World Trade Center. It was assembled by merging the blueprints for the twin towers ? the before-picture, you might say ? with a vast collection of measurements, including some taken with infrared laser scans from an airplane 5,000 feet above Lower Manhattan, just days after 9/11.

With a few clicks, Ron Frankel, who is the title pre-visualisation supervisor for Oliver Stone?s new 9/11 film, begins to illustrate the circuitous path that five Port Authority police officers took into the trade center?s subterranean concourse, until the towers above them fell, killing all but two ? Will Jimeno and Sgt. John McLoughlin.

Only a movie budgeted as mass entertainment, though, could harness costly information to reconstruct the point of view of two severely injured and bewildered men, who didn?t even know the twin towers had been flattened until rescuers lifted them to the surface many hours later.

Their story, and those of their families, their rescuers and the three men killed alongside them, is the subject of Stone?s World Trade Center, which Paramount plans to release (in the US) on August 9.

Nicolas Cage, who plays the taciturn Sergeant McLoughlin, says the movie is not meant to entertain. ?I see it as storytelling which depicts history,? he says. ?This is what happened. Look at it. ?Yeah, I remember that.? Generation after generation goes by, they?ll have United 93, World Trade Center, to recall that history.?

Whether Stone set out to make a historical drama or a dramatic history isn?t entirely clear. There are many people who have been driven crazy by some of Stone?s more controversial films, JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon chief among them. But in several interviews, sounding variously weary, wounded and either self-deprecating or defensive, Stone spoke as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him.

?I stopped,? he says simply. ?I stopped.?

His new film, he says, just might go over as well in Kansas as in Boston, or, for that matter, in Paris or Madrid. ?This is not a political film,? he insists. ?Why can?t I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time??

He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on September 11. ?It seems to me that the event was mythologised by both political sides, into something that they used for political gain,? he says. ?And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.?

?We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them,? he continues. ?How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could?ve fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out.?

By contrast Paul Haggis (Crash director) is directing the adaptation of Richard Clarke?s book on the causes of 9/11, Against All Enemies, for producer John Calley and Columbia Pictures. Asked if that weren?t the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, Stone first scoffs: ?I couldn?t do it. I?d be burned alive.?

Stone says he particularly owes his producers for taking a chance on him at a time when he had gone cold in Hollywood after a string of commercial and critical disappointments culminating in the epic Alexander in 2004. ?They believed in me at a time when other people did not, frankly,? he says. ?Alexander was cold-turkeyed in this town, I think unfairly, but it was, and I took a hit. Nobody?s your friend, nobody wants to talk to you.?

Stone came forward asking to direct World Trade Center just about a year ago. He decided it would require a different approach from, say, JFK. The Kennedy assassination was 40 years ago, and look at the heat there, a tremendous amount of heat,? he says.

?I was trying to do my best to give an alternative version of what I thought might have happened, but it wasn?t understood. It was taken very literally. Platoon, I went back to a Vietnam that I saw quite literally, but it was a twisted time in our history. This ? this is a fresh wound, and it had to be cauterised in a certain way. This is a very specific story. The details are the details are the details.?

Michael Pena and Nicolas Cage as Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin in World Trade Center

Reality can be as gushingly sentimental as the sappiest movie, Stone acknowledges, especially when the storytellers are uniformed officers in New York who lived through 9/11. And particularly when it comes to Jimeno and McLoughlin, who have struggled with the awkwardness of being singled out as heroes when so many others died similarly doing their duty, and when so many more rescued them.

?You could argue the guys don?t do much, they get pinned, so what,? Stone says. ?There will be those type of people. I say there is heroism. Here you see this image of these poor men approaching the tower, with no equipment, just their bodies, and they don?t know what the hell they?re doing, and they?re going up into this inferno, they?re like babies. You feel saddened, you feel sorry for them. They don?t have a chance.?

Cage says he once mentioned to Stone that their audience had lived through 9/11: ?That it?s not like Platoon, where most of us don?t know what it?s like to be in the jungle.? ?He said, ?Well what?s your point??? Cage says. ?And my point is that we all walk into buildings every day, and we were there, and we saw it on TV, so this is going to be very cathartic and a little bit hard for people.?

?It?s not about the World Trade Center, really. It?s about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive,? Stone says. ?I did it for a reason. I did it because emotionally it hit me. I loved the simplicity and modesty of this movie.?

?I hope the movie does well,? he adds, ?even if they say ?in spite of Oliver Stone?.?