2. ‘25th Hour’ and ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ | Mission Accomplished

0:02It didn't take long for the American government to respond to the attacks of September 11th. Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes. That's President George W. Bush addressing the nation on October 7, 2001, the day U.S. and British troops began airstrikes in Afghanistan. Their targets? Training camps belonging to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who'd orchestrated the 9-11 attacks. The U.S. also set its sights on the local Taliban government, which was believed to have harbored al-Qaeda. The Taliban will pay a price. In his address, Bush sent a message to the rest of the world.

0:45You were either with us or you were against us. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril. Bush made it clear that the U.S. was going to respond with force. During a visit to Ground Zero, he'd stood on the rubble with a bullhorn, surrounded by firefighters and first responders. America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. At one point, somebody in the crowd yelled, We can't hear you.

1:29I can hear you!

1:37I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. By now, you can probably guess my feelings about Bush. But this really was a remarkable moment. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. The roar you're hearing? That was being echoed across the country.

2:01Bush knew that millions of Americans wanted to hit back at the terrorists. And when he launched those strikes on the Taliban, he got a lot of public support. One poll by CBS and the New York Times found that nearly 90 % of respondents approved of the fighting in Afghanistan. Still, for a country that was already on edge, the strikes were another shock to the system. First came the 9-11 attacks, and then, before we'd even had time to process what had just happened, the country was suddenly in the middle of a war. A war with no clear endgame. And the years ahead would be full of battles, both the literal kind and the emotional kind, as Americans dealt with their feelings of rage and fear.

2:41In this episode, we're going to look at two films that plug you directly into that time. The first is 25th Hour, directed by Spike Lee. It stars Edward Norton as Monty, a drug dealer who's about to go to prison, and who's spending his last night of freedom in Manhattan. It's a city where everyone is confused, pissed off, or both. No one quite knows how to feel about anything anymore. But they agree on one thing. That they don't feel good.

3:12In 25th Hour's most famous scene, Monty stands in front of a mirror and lets loose at everybody in New York City. Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. This whole rant, it's five minutes long. Let the fires rage. Let it burn to fucking ash. and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place. While 25th Hour deals with the emotional fallout of 9-11, Jonathan Demme's 2004 drama The Manchurian Candidate deals with the political fallout. It stars Denzel Washington as a veteran who becomes unraveled after he discovers a vast conspiracy, one that involves a war-obsessed U.S. senator, played by a truly fierce Meryl Streep.

3:52I will do whatever is necessary to protect America. from anyone who opposes her. One thing I've learned while talking to people for this show is that everybody has a movie that brings to mind the months and years after 9-11, even if it's not about 9-11. Maybe that movie is Children of Men. Maybe it's Signs. Or maybe it's Donnie Darko, like we talked about in our last episode. Manchurian Candidate and 25th Hour are two of my 9-11 movies. I know that's a weird term, but those two movies bring me back to what it was like to be an American and The New Yorker. in the early 2000s. These movies aren't allegories for the attacks or anything like that.

4:31Instead, they're dealing with the here and now of a strange time that, even decades later, is impossible to describe. There was definitely a palpable disassociation that everybody was going through. That's Daniel Pine, one of the screenwriters of The Manchurian Candidate. Like, what is happening? What is going on in the world? And what are we building toward? What is this war that we're getting enmeshed in? What are we building toward? That's a question a lot of people were asking in the early 2000s. And none of the answers seemed promising. Make no mistake, the American people are terrified. They know something's coming.

5:12They can feel it. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery. And this is Mission Accomplished. Episode 2, 25th Hour and the Manchurian Candidate.

6:04On the morning of September 11th, 2001, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto was in Detroit, working on the movie 8 Mile. Prieto, who was born in Mexico City, had recently shot the 2000 drama Amores Peros, a film that made a lot of people in Hollywood want to work with him. And 8 Mile would be his first movie shot in the United States. And I was, I remember in the production office when we got the news and it was the assistant director. I was sharing an office with the ADs and he's the one who said, whoa, an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center. Wow. And we all thought, you know, an accident.

6:39What an unfortunate accident. But it soon became clear that this was something much bigger. It was pretty traumatizing because I had moved shortly before that to the U.S. So it really felt weird to be there at that time, you know, and be away from my family and my daughters, my wife. They were all in L.A. and I was all paranoid. Not long after finishing 8 Mile, Prieto started working on his next American film. One that would take him to New York City, where the aftermath of 9-11 was visible everywhere you went. That movie was 25th Hour. It was based on a novel by David Benioff, who'd also written the screenplay, and who'd later go on to be one of the showrunners of Game of Thrones.

7:2125th Hour is the story of Monty, a convicted dealer who's about to go to federal prison for seven years. Monty plans on spending his final moments of freedom with his two best friends and his girlfriend, but everyone is uneasy and unhappy, and their relationships have all become strained. Benioff's novel came out in early 2001, and he worked on his script before the September 11th attacks. But after the towers fell, director Spike Lee decided to make 9-11 a part of 25th Hour. This was a New York movie made by a New York filmmaker. As Lee notes in this interview with Hollywood.com, the city had changed.

7:58How could he not address it? New York I'm dealing with in my film, which I deal with all my films that take place here, in 25th Hour is the crippled, somewhat crippled, somewhat wounded, recovering city. At that point, mentioning 9-11 on screen in any way was a risky move. For the most part, Hollywood responded to the September 11th attacks the way the rest of the country did, with a mix of confusion and panic.

8:33In the weeks after 9-11, some big movies were delayed. Like Collateral Damage, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a widower, out for revenge against a terrorist bomber. Warner Brothers pushed Collateral Damage back a few months, and even pulled the trailer from theaters for a bit. And you can see why. The trailer promises lots of explosions and violence, things that likely would have made some moviegoers uncomfortable in the fall of 2001. What's the difference between you and I? The difference is, I'm just going to kill you. Other movies would have entire sequences reshot. Like Men in Black 2, which originally featured an action scene set at the World Trade Center.

9:12And a few other films, including Zoolander and Serendipity, had the towers erased from the city skyline entirely. The worry was that seeing the World Trade Center on screen would upset moviegoers, or at the very least, take them out of the movie. It was a jittery time. But Lee wasn't nervous. In fact, he was disappointed that other filmmakers had cut the World Trade Center from their movies. In Lee's words, those directors had decided to, quote, punk out. And if there's one thing Spike Lee has never been accused of, it's punking out. He obviously didn't want to offend viewers, but he knew they could handle 9-11 being part of 25th Hour.

9:56The movie was originally supposed to star Tobey Maguire as Monty. After he dropped out, Lee turned to an actor who'd wanted to work with the director for years, Edward Norton. The two had recently hung out after attending the Concert for New York City, a post-9-11 fundraiser in October 2001. If you'll let me take a very quick diversion here, that concert, which was held at Madison Square Garden, was a massive undertaking. The show ran nearly five hours long and featured some of the biggest stars in the world. Paul McCartney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay-Z. But the concert for New York City also highlights the unpredictable mood of the city at the time.

10:34It took place barely a month after the towers had fallen and the garden was full of firefighters and police officers and their families. Everyone was on edge and everybody needed a release. So the crowd went wild when Saturday Night Live star Will Ferrell showed up as George W. Bush and talked about the airstrikes in Afghanistan. And why are we going to do this? I can do anything I want. My approval rating is like 106 % right now. Richard Gere got some big cheers, too, at least for a while. The crowd turned against the actor when he suggested that the national mood, scared, angry, bent on revenge, could be used for something different than war.

11:15We could take that energy and turn it into something else. We can turn it into compassion, into love, into understanding.

11:28That's apparently unpopular right now. My point is, emotions were running high in the city. And they were just as strong a few months later, when Spike Lee and Edward Norton decided to make 25th Hour. They'd be joined by a great ensemble cast, including some longtime New Yorkers. That includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jacob, a private school teacher who's one of Monty's buddies, and Rosario Dawson as Naturel, his girlfriend, who Monty suspects of turning him into the feds. In the film, these characters all hang with Monty during his final moments of freedom. 25th Hour plays with time, cutting between Monty's present and his past.

12:11Before filming began, Lee told Prieto he wanted each section of 25th Hour to look and feel unique. And the cinematographer was more than up to the challenge. So I wanted to come up with a look for each one of those things, which was perfect for me. It was how do I represent time is short? You know, how do I make it feel like there's a final day for the main character before going to jail, right? So time is short and time is precious. For scenes set in the present, Prieto decided to use a camera shutter technique that would make Monty's world look all the more urgent. So it makes each frame a little bit more sharp in a way or less motion blur for each frame.

12:53So it gives a little bit of a staccato feel to all that section. And because he was shooting on film, Prieto was able to develop those scenes so they came back looking slightly grainy. For me, that was a 9-11 element of it, which was sort of the dirtiness or the ashes in the air. Before shooting got underway, Prieto and Lee traveled around New York. Despite everything the city had been through, the people they saw were in a pretty upbeat mood. Though that's at least partly because of Lee. He's so loved in Brooklyn and New York that wherever we went, it was, hey man, Spike, what about them Knicks?

13:32You know, it was always, there was excitement. Still, Prieto knew that, in some ways, he was very much an outsider. I didn't have that sense of loss that so many people from there had. For me, it was a sense of maybe of wonder, of, wow, I can't believe that these buildings were here and these lives were lost.

13:59That sense of absence would be conveyed by 25th Hour's dramatic opening credit sequence, one that would bring Prieto right next to ground zero. In early 2002, nearly 100 spotlights had been placed in downtown Manhattan. When the lights were projected into the sky, they created two giant blue beams that stood where the towers once were. The lights stayed on for just a few hours each night, and Prieto only had one evening to film them. So it really felt like we were in the middle of this historical moment. And that was, to me, very powerful and moving. Very moving. Then we had to really rush to get to all the different places before they shut the lights off.

14:43He and the rest of the crew would have to do a lot of rushing around to make 25th Hour. The film will be shot in less than 40 days in the summer of 2002. And though the movie was being made by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, proof that in the early 2000s, big studios were still willing to take big risks 25th Hour had a modest budget of just$15 million That meant the cast had to be willing to take pay cuts Including Barry Pepper Who plays Monty's friend Francis An obnoxious Wall Street hustler Who lives in a swank downtown apartment That's the setting for 25th Hour's most pointed scene about 9-11 It starts with Pepper and Hoffman's characters Shooting the shit and opening some beers Then they walk over to a giant glass window Where it's revealed that Ground Zero now a vast flat construction site, is right below them.

15:32The New York Times says the air's bad down here. Oh, yeah? Well, fuck the Times. I read the Post.

15:41EPA says it's fine. Hoffman's character then asks, are you going to move? Fuck that, man. As much good money as I pay for this place? Hell no. Tell you what, Bin Laden could drop another one right next door. I ain't moving.

16:04That moment sums up how a lot of New Yorkers felt at that time. Stubborn, angry, and kind of stupidly cocky. And by the way, I'm allowed to say that because I was born in New York City. But what really hit me when I saw this scene back in 2002 was the sight of Ground Zero itself. A lot of New Yorkers, including me, had tried to keep a respectful distance from downtown Manhattan. If you didn't have to be there, you just kind of quietly walked around it. But in 25th Hour, Lee forces you to confront the reality of 9-11, whether you wanted to or not. When I saw the film in a Manhattan theater full of New Yorkers on opening weekend, nobody moved or made a noise for a long while after seeing Ground Zero on the screen.

16:48I was so immersed in the technical challenge of it that I wasn't so aware of the magnitude of the shot, of the emotional impact, you know, of the shot. It was only until I was actually rolling the camera and seeing, oh shit, is the camera going to be reflected? No, I think it's okay, no reflection, okay, good, okay, I think we got it, I think we got it. Then after that, I realized, wow, look at what we're filming.

17:23As memorable as that Ground Zero scene was, the moment that most people remember from 25th Hour takes place a little bit earlier in the film. It's that long rant from Edward Norton's character, Monty. He's just a few hours away from going to prison. He's angry at the world, at himself, and even at his own friends and family. So Monty stands in front of a bathroom mirror, stares bitterly at his reflection, and rips into the entire city. Everyone gets taken down. From the rich... Fuck the Wall Street brokers, self-styled masters of the universe. ...to the poor. Fuck the panhandlers grubbing for money and smiling at me behind my back.

18:02Fuck the squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job. Nobody has spared Monty's wrath. He attacks Italians, Jews, and Puerto Ricans, the police, and the church. Monty even goes after Jesus Christ. I mean, it's just pure rage. But it's also kind of weirdly affectionate. After all, part of loving New York is also hating New York. And it's not even clear if Monty means everything he's saying. He just needs a target for his anger. A lot of targets. Including, finally, himself. No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and you threw it away, you dumb fuck! Monty's rant was a key part of Benioff's novel, and Lee had to push hard with Disney to get it in the film.

18:51It's a good thing he did, because it's hard to imagine 25th Hour without that moment. If the Ground Zero scene represents the somberness and sadness that had gripped the city after 9-11, Monty's rant shows all the volatility that was right under the surface. But the movie ends with another long speech, this one way more hopeful. As Monty's driven to prison by his father, played by Brian Cox, His dad tells him that he can still escape, that he can flee to a different city, change his identity, and even raise a family. And when he's old, Monty's dad says, Monty can tell his kids how lucky they are to be alive.

19:27He can remind them, This life came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening. That's the way a lot of us felt in the early 2000s.

19:44Everybody across the city and across the country had been reminded that their fates were out of their hands, that their lives were a gift. The question now, not just for Monty, but for the audience, was, what do you do with that gift going forward? The fact that 25th Hour was willing to ask that kind of question is why, even now, people keep rediscovering this movie. It wasn't a huge hit at the time, but it's a film that shows that anything can be rebuilt, no matter how damaged, whether they happen to be buildings, cities, or even our own lives. We need, you know, the tools to help us deal with these traumas.

20:22And I think art hopefully is one of those tools. And I hope that 25th Hour has been that for New Yorkers. That's Rodrigo Prieto again. I should probably point out that he and I were talking just a few months after the Los Angeles wildfires of early 2025. I must add that now I'm going through something in a way similar in my personal life because I lived in the Pacific Palisades. My house didn't burn down, but my neighborhood did. When you were mentioning that notion of seeing ground zero and remembering what that was and at that moment where it's just basically, you know, they're still cleaning up the debris and starting to, you know, prepare for a construction of something.

21:04Who knows what that was going to be? that's where the palaces are at now. Reminders of the fires are everywhere in the form of empty lots and burnt structures. So it's poignant for me that we're discussing this when I'm personally going through something similar, that trauma, right, of the destruction of a place that you've been at, you know, for years, you know. So anyway, it's interesting that right now this has come back, and talking about 25th Hour, so I thank you. We'll be right back.

21:49By the time 25th Hour came out in the fall of 2002, it was clear America was heading toward another foreign war, this time in Iraq. The two countries had a fraught history, to say the least. America was one of several nations to take part in a bombing campaign over Iraq in 1991, back when George H.W. Bush was president. That endeavor, which was a huge victory for the U.S., was known as Operation Desert Storm. Now, more than a decade later, some in the new Bush administration believed Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, had ties to al-Qaeda, and that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs.

22:31Here's George W. Bush in September 2002, making his case against Hussein to the American public. For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made, not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction. Okay, so there were a couple of problems with all this. First off, a lot of intelligence experts questioned the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And the government wasn't providing a lot of evidence that Iraq was manufacturing WMDs. That didn't stop members of the Bush administration, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, from trying to scare Americans into backing the so-called War on Terror.

23:13Here's Cheney on Face the Nation in March 2003, going to extremes to justify America invading Iraq. And we now are faced with the prospect of a terrorist using perhaps a nuclear weapon against us. And we know as a result of 9-11 that we are multiple. Now, if you happen to be a history professor, and by the way, I am not, you're probably ready to drive off the road right now in frustration, because I am really simplifying the whole geopolitical climate of the early 2000s. But I got to get through this section fast. There's an underrated Denzel Washington movie to talk about.

23:48Anyway, by early 2003, it was clear Bush had set his sights on Iraq. That February, he sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to address the United Nations Security Council. so he could lay out the case for war. Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him. A lot of Americans weren't buying that argument. There was huge pushback against the invasion of Iraq, which some people believed was just a way for the U.S. to gain control of the country's oil supply. There were protests around the world, like this one in New York City, which attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.