‘Windows on the World’ Star Edward James Olmos on Playing a 9/11 Survivor Without US Citizenship
The famed actor spoke at TheWrap’s Screening Series alongside his son, Michael, who directed the movie, and screenwriter Robert Mailer Anderson.
Edward James Olmos has appeared in many films that explore what it means to be Mexican in America, but “Windows on the World” is one that he believes is truly special.
“I’ve done some really great pieces of story that I’ve had great passion for, and this is right there with him. I can’t believe that we got this on the screen.”
The famed actor spoke at TheWrap’s Screening Series alongside his son, Michael, who directed the movie, and screenwriter Robert Mailer Anderson. “Windows on the World” tells the story of America’s migrant workers through 9/11, as Olmos plays an aging Mexican named Balthazar who travels to New York and becomes an undocumented worker at the World Trade Center’s famed restaurant, Windows on the World. When the towers are destroyed, Balthazar’s son, Fernando (Ryan Guzman), follows in his father’s footsteps in order to find out what happened to him.
Anderson first sold the script for the film to Miramax in 2004, but at the urging of his wife, he bought it back and struck out to get the film made on his own. Though it was first written more than 15 years ago, Anderson says that little about the script had to be changed to make it feel more politically relevant. In fact, he feels that the scenes where Fernando struggles through the borderland desert into the U.S. with a woman and her two daughters and one in which he is kicked out of a bar by a racist bartender are even more relevant in Trump’s America.
“We’re fighting cultural wars right now, and we have to create empathy and understanding,” Anderson said. “The current political climate has made a story like this more necessary.”