Oliver Stone, the Oscar winning film-maker and occasional bete noire of the American establishment, has announced plans for a film based on the September 11 attacks in New York.

Paramount Pictures is providing financial backing for the project, which will become the first film based explicitly on the atrocity to reach a mainstream audience when it is released next year.

Stone - whose idiosyncratic rewrites of Vietnam and other pieces of recent US history have seen him garner acclaim and opprobrium in roughly equal measure over his 30-year Hollywood career - revealed that the untitled film will follow the ordeal of two police officers who became trapped in the wreckage of the collapsed twin towers.

Nicolas Cage, who won Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, will star as Port Authority Police Sergeant John McLoughlin, who spent 24 hours beneath the Ground Zero rubble with fellow officer William J Jimeno.

BACKGROUND

• World Trade Center

• World Trade Center - Sunday Times review

• Ground Zero, the film set

• Relatives back Stone's 9/11 plot

• Coming soon: 9/11, The Movie

BACKGROUND

• United 93

Oliver Stone on World Trade Center

What was it like to be carried alive from the ruins on September 11?

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Stone, who has won Oscars for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, said that the film would be "an exploration of heroism in our country".

"But it's international at the same time in its humanity," he added.

The film is being made with the explicit backing of the two police officers, who have sold the rights to their story for the screenplay. The script has been written by newcomer Andrea Berloff.

"I feel someone had to tell the story of the people who were in the Trade Centre before and after it collapsed," said Sgt McLoughlin. "It needs to be told how this horrific tragedy brought Americans and the world together to help those in need."

Sgt Jimeno added: "I have all the confidence in the world that having one of the world's greatest directors - Oliver Stone, who has served his country and knows the price of freedom - this film will be one that will live on for generations to come."

Variety, the Hollywood trade paper, said that rival studio Columbia was also planning its first blockbuster based on the terrorist attacks four years ago, with a movie called 102 Minutes.

The title of the film, written by Shattered Glass script-writer Billy Ray, refers to the time between the first plane hitting the tower and its subsequent collapse.

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