"In the five years since, we've so politicized 9/11 that we've lost track of what originally happened," the director said.

Stone's new film, with the simple but iconic title "World Trade Center" (opening nationwide Wednesday), gets back to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

It tells of 36 hours in the lives of two men, New York/New Jersey Port Authority cops John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña). They and their PAPD colleagues entered the World Trade

Center to try to evacuate the people inside. They were in the underground concourse between the towers when the first tower collapsed.

Sgt. McLoughlin rushed his men to an elevator shaft, the strongest part of the building. McLoughlin and Jimeno survived the towers' collapse, though pinned in the rubble for hours, bleeding internally and on the verge of death. Rescue workers found them and dug them out, two of only 20 people pulled out of Ground Zero alive. (They were Nos. 18 and 19.)

The movie also tells the story of two wives, Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal), waiting with the rest of the nation, glued to the TV set looking for hopeful news amid the terrorist attacks.

It's a movie the Jimenos weren't sure would ever be made.

"Making a movie never, ever entered our minds," Allison Jimeno said in an interview at a press event in a Seattle hotel. "We couldn't ever imagine a film about our story."

Will Jimeno said he and McLoughlin "really wanted to do a book. . . . You can only do so much in a two-hour film." But a Philadelphia newspaper reporter they knew asked the cops to meet an agent, who hooked them up with producer Debra Hill (who died in March 2005), who ultimately connected them with screenwriter Andrea Berloff.

The Jimenos were impressed by Berloff's approach, to focus on the Jimenos and McLoughlins within the scope of the World Trade Center's collapse, and to highlight the rescue workers who pulled the two cops from the rubble.

"We did this to tell the story, because we're only vehicles showing people what happened that day," Will Jimeno said. "This story's not about Will and John. This story's about everybody around us, and the lessons that we learned from that day so that dark day doesn't stay dark."

"The film really only goes into what John and Will saw, what they felt, what they experienced, as well as Donna and myself," Allison Jimeno said. "If we didn't see it or feel it, it's not there. . . . [The audience] will see the good and remember that good, and remember how we all felt united."

Stone said that goodness -- the heroism of the police and firefighters who went into the burning towers, the rescue workers who looked for survivors, and the families who waited for news -- is what he wanted to capture on film.

"I vowed to stay inside those people," Stone said. "I pledged an oath of loyalty, or fealty. I said, RI'm going to do this movie,' but within the confines, we're going to play with it."

To "play with it," Stone means to take some dramatic license re-creating conversations and compressing a day's events into two hours. But there was no need to exaggerate the events of 9/11, Stone said.

Stone cited the true story of one rescue worker, David Karnes, an ex-Marine in Connecticut who put on his old uniform, drove to Ground Zero and slipped behind police barricades to help. Karnes' story is completely true, but Stone said test audiences thought Karnes (played by Michael Shannon) was fictional -- so Stone added a title card to the movie's epilogue to stress Karnes was really there.

"It wasn't like we had to make it up," he said, though when viewers see the label "a true story" at the movie's beginning, "you have to take that in the metaphorical sense."

Will Jimeno -- who walks with a limp from his injuries and wears a shirt with a Port Authority PD logo and the number 37 (the number of PAPD officers who died in the towers) -- said the truth in "World Trade Center" is not just metaphorical.

"The film's 95 percent accurate," Jimeno said. "There's the 5 percent [the filmmakers] need to do in their realm to bring it to the audience."

Jimeno was on set for most of the four-month shoot, pointing out details ranging from police procedure to the number of rocks lodged in his mouth when he was rescued.

"There would have been mistakes that were unintentional if there was nobody there," Jimeno said, adding that he was impressed that Stone heeded his advice. "I said to Oliver, RI'm a regular joe, I'm an average guy, and I still am in awe that you, a three-time Oscar-winning director, not only listen but act,' " Jimeno said. "It mind-boggles me."

Peña, who was cast after his role as a Mexican-American locksmith in the Oscar-winning "Crash," did his research for portraying Jimeno by living with the Jimeno family in New Jersey for a week.

"You have to see where the guy's coming from," Peña said.

"There's one line, RMy whole life, I just wanted to be a cop.' You read that in a newspaper or a book, you just go, ROK, buddy,' " Peña said, rolling his eyes to convey skepticism. "When I meet him, before I even ask him any questions, the second thing out of his mouth, after Rhey, how you doing?' and small talk, is RI just gotta tell you, man, all my life I wanted to be a cop.' I thought, RI gotta do more research.' "

"Michael wasn't Will Jimeno," Jimeno said. "Michael embodied my love for my job, my teammates and my family. . . . Acting, to me, is pretending, and he knew how to pretend really good."

When Gyllenhaal met Allison Jimeno, the actress said she didn't prod for details about what Allison did on 9/11.

"I did feel a responsibility to honor Allison and what she went through," Gyllenhaal said, "but I could also see a way in which knowing too much about exactly what her memory of that day was could be limiting. I thought the best way to honor her, and the way to best do my job, was to not try to re-create the memory but to try to live it myself, as honestly and as vulnerably as I could."

Part of that vulnerability centers on the fact that Allison Jimeno was 6 months pregnant on 9/11. Gyllenhaal, who had never been pregnant when she filmed the movie, tried to imagine pregnancy "in more ethereal ways. I thought, RI'm going through this not with one heart but with two hearts.' " Gyllenhaal is now pregnant (she and fiancé Peter Sarsgaard are expecting their first child this fall), and knowing what she knows now, she said, "when I see it again at the premiere, I might have some criticisms of myself."

Gyllenhaal -- who shies from talking politics after being excoriated last year for suggesting the United States government might be "responsible in some way" for the 9/11 attacks -- said acting in "World Trade Center" has "allowed me to feel again about 9/11."

"Almost everything we see or hear something that mentions 9/11 over the last five years has had some kind of a political agenda," Gyllenhaal said. "It makes it difficult to be vulnerable enough around the subject to really feel all the things that, I think, we need to let ourselves feel in order to heal from it. . . .

"The thing about the movie that's so amazing and unusual is that somehow Oliver really has avoided that," Gyllenhaal said. "I don't think he avoided it out of a fear of politics. I think he avoided it because it really is the only way to reach people on that subject anymore."

Stone said he worked to keep politics out of "World Trade Center," but he said that's been the case in most of his films.

" 'Nixon' was attacked by the right wing before they saw it, but in fact it's very empathetic to the character, the humanity, of Nixon," he said. " 'JFK' is neither left nor right. It's a question mark. . . . My problem is that I've been politically outspoken in between the movies, and [critics] confuse that with the movies."

"What are they gonna turn political?" asked Will Jimeno. After all, "9/11 even moved Oliver Stone to do the right thing."

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Contact Sean P. Means at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

Read Sean P. Means' review of "World Trade Center" Wednesday on the cover of Utah Living.