Looming LARGE
Lawrence Wright wrote The Looming Tower, which spawned a TV show. He talks to Jane Mulkerrins
“Iknew that writing The Looming Tower was probably the most important thing that I would ever do with my professional life,” says Lawrence Wright. That is no small claim, considering that
70-year-old Wright, a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, is also the man behind the explosive book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which formed the basis for a hugely successful 2015 documentary on the controversial Church of Scientology.
But it does explain why it took a decade to get The Looming Tower to screen. The bestseller involved five years of research and more than
600 interviews with members of the intelligence services and counterterrorist experts. “It felt like a mission, but it was also a hell of a story, and I knew that I had something very important to say. I didn’t know, for a long time, why I was so resistant to [adapting] it,” Wright admits. “But I knew I wanted it to be right.”
Now, 10 years after the book won him the Pulitzer Prize, Wright’s dense, detailed, definitive tome on the road to 9/11 has finally been adapted for television.
He has, once again, teamed up with Alex Gibney, director of Going Clear, to produce the
10-part miniseries starring Jeff Daniels, Peter Sarsgaard, Tahar Rahim and Michael Stuhlbarg, which highlights the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, and the subsequent inaction, which failed to prevent the deadly terrorist attacks on 9/11. “They are at war with each other,” says Texas-born Wright, when we meet in Los Angeles ahead of the show’s US premiere. “The CIA has an obligation to collect intelligence, and they are jealous of that information; the FBI has an obligation to take that intelligence, use it to trace criminals, arrest them and put them on trial.”
“There is nothing that the CIA hates more than having all this intelligence be produced in a trial,” he continues. “The antagonisms that spill out from those two different missions will never really go away.”
The CIA, he reports, was reluctant to help with his research for The Looming Tower, and was unco-operative in the production of the series too. “I always believe that it is a mistake not to get your perspective across if you believe in it. Then you have the opportunity to tell your story,” he reasons. With Zero Dark Thirty, the Oscarnominated 2012 film about the intelligence