The world changed on September 11, but Austin Chick's second film, August, focuses on the moments right beforehand. Starring Josh Hartnett as a young start-up entrepreneur deluded by power trips, the movie moves along with a subtle pace, letting the natural drama emerge from a situation about to veer out of the control with the crash of the stock market. Chick's first feature, XX/XY, explored a three-way relationship; August, which opens in New York on Friday, explores the relationship between money and power during a key time in American history. Supporting performances from Rip Torn and David Bowie elevate the movie, while Howard A. Rodman's script keeps its conceits in check. Chick spoke with Cinematical about envisioning August's themes and working with his talented cast.

Cinematical: The film uses a very specific setting -- August 2001 -- immediately before 9/11. What interested you about that time?

Austin Chick: It captures a moment on the eve of change. If Howard (Rodman) and I were to move it to any other time, we would probably move it further back. The market really started crashing about eighteen months prior to when the movie is set. But I feel like there was still a certain amount of momentum in New York up until 9/11, this sense that things were going to turn around. The market had completely crashed, but there was still this crazy sense of decadence. All that really changed with 9/11.

Oswald's Ghost is the rare film whose power increases with distance. As I sat in the historic Texas Theatre last week, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested on the day President Kennedy was assassinated, and watched a special screening of the documentary, the suggestive rhythm of the editing and the understated urgency of the musical accompaniment lulled me into a false sense of security. I was deceived into thinking that I knew what kind of film it was and so, based on that assumption, I allowed the shaped narrative to lead me down a certain path, only to discover at the end that I had arrived at a very different destination than I expected.

Filmmaker Robert Stone says that he was initially inspired by the furor that erupted after the release of Oliver Stone's JFK in 1991. Why were people so wrapped up emotionally in what had happened so many years before? How had that pivotal event changed the nation? Ten years later, he saw parallels in how the nation responded to 9/11 and started what he calls his own "journey" to discover why America has remained obsessed with the JFK assassination, to the point that he calls it a "theology."

That being said, Stone does not take the approach I had anticipated. After an opening fusillade of opinions issued by experts, he dives right into the events leading up to November 22, 1963, laying them out one by one in distinct, logical order as though he had an organized sheaf of papers he was slapping down on a table. The drama is inherently captivating; no matter how many times you've seen news footage and photographs from the days in question, it still feels like you're dragged against your will into a nightmare.

War films continue to be the buzz of Hollywood -- even though some with hugely-powerful casts aren't doing well -- like, oh, Lions for Lambs. But why stop there? Norman Mailer just passed away, and he happened to write the critically-acclaimed war novel The Naked and the Dead, so why not take another pass at the film in memory of him? (The original stab came about in 1958, although it didn't even begin to touch the acclaim of the novel.) Now The Hollywood Reporter has posted that John Mailer, son of Norman, has secured the film rights to the novel, and he plans to produce it along with Evanly Schindler and Maurizio Marchiori of Tar Art.

Based on Mailer's own experiences during World War II, The Naked and the Dead is about a platoon of rifleman stationed in the South Pacific. Using the mythical island of Anopopei, Mailer describes how the platoon and 6,000-man force gets ready to take the island from the Japanese to help the US advance into the Philippines. The invasion is weaved with background vignettes on a number of the men, while Mailer also discusses the conflicts between the officers and the men. So yeah, we've had lots and lots of war movies lately, but not all of them come from critically-acclaimed material. If it's done well, will The Naked and the Dead thrive, or will it just become a victim of an over-saturated market of cinematic war?

The seemingly unkillable Norman Mailer is dead of renal failure. He was 84. As well they should do, most obituaries are noting Mailer's nigh-Nobel worthy body of work--his supreme novel of World War II, for instance, The Naked and the Dead, filmed in a heavily bowdlerized version by Raoul Walsh. Mailer's less known work as an actor and director needs to be memorialized separately. As a larger than life personality, given to public brawls, with his noble battered oversized profile worthy of any senator or any prize-fighter, Mailer was made for cinema. Milos Forman used that big silhouette of Mailer's to play the architect Stanford White in Ragtime. Paralyzingly boring avant garde director Matthew Barney co-starred Mailer as Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2. (1999). The TV film version of Mailer's famous bio of murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song made Tommy Lee Jones a star. So Barney, last seen on screen filleting Bjork with Japanese whale-flensing knives, seems to have hired Mailer as an allusion to Gilmore's belief that he was a descendant of the famed magician.

Some of the longer obits mention the kind of Mailer misbehavior that broke out, whenever there was a camera near. Most infamous is Mailer's chomping on Rip Torn's ear on the set of his 1970 film Maidstone, after Torn came at him with a hammer. Here's the footage of that famous bout, complete with swanky French subtitles. We're hearing less about Wild 90, where Mailer got into the face of a Doberman Pinscher and outbarked him. I think he was the first actor to have done this, but it's something you see frequently on screen today, whenever some actor wants to show that he's tougher than a dog. Pauline Kael later summed up by saying that on film Mailer "tried to will a work of art into existence, without going through the steps of making it."

Less seen, even, than Mailer's directoral efforts is the 1979 Hegedus/Pennybaker Town Bloody Hall, a documentary version of Mailer's stark bollocky crazy book-lengh essay Prisoner of Sex, in which Mailer clashes antlers with a tag-team of feminist all-stars, including Germaine Greer, Village Voice poet Jill Johnston, Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag. Also obscure is the English version of Mailer's An American Dream, risibly AKA'd as See You in Hell Darling with Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh and Aug 1966 Playmate of the Month Susan Denberg as Ruta the German maid. Some of these films were shown at The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, which played at Lincoln Center in NYC this summer; here's Michael Chaiken's interview with Mailer about his films. And perhaps A.O. Scott's positive review of the retrospective gave the old self-promoter some pleasure.