“I’ve had a lot of good cooperation from former CIA agents. “I’ve been told the CIA uses The Looming Tower in their training, but officially they aren’t happy about it because it points out that 9/11 could have been stopped,” Wright explains of pertinent intel the CIA withheld from the FBI. While Wright, for both the book and the series, had much cooperation from the FBI, the CIA was another story. 11 attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. The Looming Tower tracks the rising threat of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda while shining a light on the rivalry between the FBI and the CIA that inadvertently set the path for the tragic Sept. 'Looming Tower's' Muslim-American Hero on 9/11 Lessons for Trump White House “It’s my hope that the viewers will come to trust and see this as an honest rendition, as best as we can do, of the events that led to 9/11, the mistakes we made and the changes that occurred in our country because of it.” “Because it’s such a tragedy, you don’t want to seem like you are capitalizing in the grief that so many people suffered because of it,” he says. The Looming Tower is a dramatic retelling of the events leading up to 9/11 and is based on Wright’s meticulously written book - so much so that when the series opens in 1998, the timeline matches up to nearly 300 pages into Wright’s story.įor Wright, capturing the right tone was key. “Not just financial, but when you are dealing with intelligence agencies, you have some rather formidable challenges.”

“Hulu gave us the kind of commitment that we were looking for,” Wright explains of the straight-to-series order. The next step was interviewing showrunners, and after landing on Oscar-nominated screenwriter Dan Futterman ( Capote, Foxcatcher) after their first meeting, they went out and pitched the project. I came to trust him, and that’s what I wanted - someone I felt could handle and negotiate these really difficult moral questions.”

“He’s a documentarian, and he understands the importance of truth,” says Wright of the collaboration with Gibney, an executive producer on the series and the director of the pilot. They met with filmmaker Alex Gibney, who had already adapted Wright’s one-man show, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and Going Clear for HBO.

So when he found out that Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who’s portrayed by Tahar Rahim in the series, was also fielding offers, the pair decided to control their own narrative.

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright