Twenty Years of ’25th Hour,’ a Film That “Gets Bigger in Stature Every Year”

Spike Lee felt insulted. In the weeks and months following the the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Hollywood engaged in a comprehensive sanitization process, cutting out glimpses of the World Trade Center from upcoming New York-set movies like Zoolander and Mr. Deeds, as well as a trailer for the first Spider-Man.. “Like it never existed,” Lee tells GQ over the phone. “Like New Yorkers or Americans aren’t strong enough to see the image of the World Trade Center anymore, which I thought was fucking ridiculous. I thought that was weak.”

In January of 2002, Lee had begun reading the script for what would eventually become his 14th film: 25th Hour,  a drama that future Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff had adapted from his novel published the previous year. The film follows Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), an Upper East Side drug-dealer, on the day before he must report for a seven-year stint at an upstate penitentiary. In his final hours, he shares a steak dinner with his father (Brian Cox), meets his two best friends, Jacob and Frank (Phillip Seymour-Hoffman and Barry Pepper), and girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) at a club for one last big night, and then ties up loose ends with his nefarious business partners. Moved by Monty’s regrets and reconciliations, and living in the aftermath of catastrophe, Lee began thinking bigger. “This grieving, post-9/11 New York City could be a character in this film,” he thought. “I always felt art should reflect what’s happening at the time. I was not going to run from that stuff. Hell no.”

At first, Benioff was skeptical of that plan. He’d written the book and the first several drafts of his script before the attacks, and “didn’t want to be involved with anything that might seem to be exploiting a tragedy that took thousands of lives,” he says in an email. But Lee didn’t want to explicitly address the attacks; instead, he dexterously infused the city’s quiet, shaken mood into this 24-hour morality tale, contextualizing Monty’s decisions and self-reckoning with the visceral attitudes and imagery attached to that fateful day, like the Tribute in Light beams, FDNY memorials, and newspaper headlines. “Spike handled a difficult topic adroitly—he took on the [city’s] reality with all its dread and defiance,” Benioff says. “A lesser filmmaker would have cheapened it.”

Twenty years after its release, 25th Hour remains the best and most accurate depiction of a post-9/11 New York City—a time capsule exuding the city’s love-hate relationship with itself and the wounds it combatted every day, which Lee exemplified in one of the most memorable scenes of the 21st century. It also continued to affirm the director’s bold vision for connecting character and place, and his innate desire to share unvarnished depictions of his hometown. “This was about the soul of New York City,” Lee says. “I made this film for New Yorkers and I think they understand this is about them—this is for them.”

The idea for 25th Hour emerged from Benioff’s failed 1995 novel Wag, “which was rejected by every publisher in America,” he writes. Once he’d digested several editors’ critiques, which argued that his story was misshapen and bloated, he resolved to write a shorter book that would span “weeks, or days, or hours,” instead of decades. He’d already written a story in that vein in college, effectively the penultimate scene of 25th Hour, about a character asking his friends to beat him up on the East River Esplanade so he looks ugly when he enters prison. “I decided I wanted to see what the previous day had been like for these friends,” Benioff says.