Mr Jimeno, who was trapped in the concrete rubble for 13 hours, is a robust Colombian New Yorker who went into the twin towers that morning after the first plane had hit, in order to rescue those trapped. He considers himself lucky. He escaped with serious injuries to his legs and now wears a brace, but these were minor compared to the suffering of others. He admits ruefully that he is even better off than his rescuers who inhaled large quantities of toxic fumes and particles of concrete, and are still suffering today.

Sporting his New York-New Jersey Port Authority Police Department badge, Mr Jimeno spoke passionately of Oliver Stone's telling of his story. "I was flipping a burger May 2005, Memorial Day weekend, when they told us that Oliver Stone was going to be the director � we were floored. We knew at that moment that this had the potential to be a great film, because, whether you love or hate this man (and I love him), he stands up for what he believes in. He's not going to let political correctness dictate what he is going to do."

"He promised me he would do the film in the spirit of comraderie, about men who lost their lives, and convey the positive messages. After we saw the completed version, I walked out and gave him a big hug and kiss and told him you kept your word to me, that you did good for America, that you did good for the world. I hope people will see Oliver as a talented director who believes in something and goes forward with it, and stop sharpening their blades and go cut someone else up because he did good for the world on this project."

The sharpening of blades has not been forthcoming from the US critics at least who have, almost without exception, praised World Trade Center as nothing short of exceptional. "I think we dodged the bullet, and I mean closely," explained Oliver Stone. "It was a minefield that could have blown up in our face. We had political considerations in New York; I think the producers spent hours and hours in meetings with all kinds of groups � widows' groups, political groups."

And yet this is not a movie with a political agenda: there is next to no background detail, not one mention of Al-Qaida and the death toll is reduced to a footnote in the closing titles. In this sense, Stone is playing safe � and perhaps wisely so. But he sees it more as a choice of focus. "The beauty of this to me," he said, "and the originality, was that it was apolitical, a microcosmic story, going into Noah's ark, the whole human race getting sucked down and then out of the belly of this whale, so to speak, come back these two men. Only 20 survivors. An amazing ratio. And these two had a coherent story. It was a chance to do something very rare. What I'm saying is that this is an artifact of history. These two men are very special."

Maybe so. But if there was one director you might have expected to come up with a 9/11 conspiracy theory movie, it would surely be Oliver Stone. Of all Mr Stone's films this seems the least politically engaged, despite it's subject being one of the most important political events of our time. The recent Harvey Keitel docudrama, The Path to 9/11, which used the 9/11 Commission Report as one of its sources, was received with great hostility in the US, partly because it criticised the Bush and Clinton administrations' failure to prevent 9/11 and partly because some considered it factually unreliable. Perhaps we do not yet have the distance to make a truly challenging big-screen drama out of the ruins of that day.

"You know, it's hard for us to be journalists," admits Mr. Stone. "We're dramatists. We just can't chase the news. Every year since 2001 there's been another couple of books describing what really went on. In the Iraq bombing, the war on terror, the constitutional infringements that we've seen. For the J.F.K. film, it was 30 years and maybe 20 top researchers, private citizens that had done all that work on Kennedy. That's what made that film possible. Every year I've learned something new. It's time soon to address this situation. Hopefully a film will do so before the 2008 election in the same vein that Michael Moore's film addressed the national security fear. It's time. There's not much time. We're in a hurry."

The thought of Oliver Stone making such a film is indeed mouthwatering. He has always been an anti-Establishment figure, while remaining ardently American. A Vietnam veteran, he personifies what it means to be American today. "I've been through the J.F.K. assassination, through Vietnam, through Watergate, through the Oklahoma bombing, through the 2000 election - that was a bad one, that was a nightmare." And what of post-9/11? "I really feel that if the President had a little more sense of history and had been a little more mature � an Eisenhower, a Roosevelt, even a Kennedy � there would have been a more moderated response to this. We wouldn't have lost our head, in a sense, as a nation."

If not quite pro-Bush, World Trade Center is certainly laced with patriotic zeal. Does he feel that America needs to hear this positive story of survival against the odds right now? "This is a memorial. A memorial's function is just to remember. And believe it or not, America has many people have already forgotten 9/11. They're living with the consequences of it which are nightmarish, but not that day itself and the raw feelings of that day. They ought to put up a memorial at that place, and I hope that this movie is another form of memorial."

And one of only twenty survivors, Will Jimeno claims that the film is as fitting a memorial as he could wish for. "At the end of the film, we walked out with a lot of honour and � the most important thing � faith, hope and love. That's when I walked over and gave Oliver a hug and a kiss. And I feel bad for anybody who doesn't walk out with those emotions because then I don't know what you are seeking in life, because those things are there. It happened on 9/11, it happened here in London, it happened in Spain, it happened in India. I keep using the Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke's quote: All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men and women to stand by and do nothing.' There were good men and women on 9/11; Oliver has shown you. And from our experience, everybody throughout the world can gain if they are confronted with a tragedy � we can overcome it if these people did it. These people did it. I talked about the little girl in Turkey � that helped me live; I saw Jesus; I talked about getting my leg cut off. All these experiences, Oliver has taken and brought them to you from real people."

The viewer should decide whether these experiences truly come alive in the film or whether they feel like the sort of thing that Hollywood trots out on a regular basis. But as a testament to the unextinguishable human spirit, Mr Jimeno is a living phenomenon. Maybe the world needs stories like his, miracles like him.