BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Watching the attacks on September 11th, 2001, novelist, screenwriter and New Yorker staff writer, Lawrence Wright, observed with horror that it looked like a movie. Then he had a further thought. It looks like my movie! In his 1998 film, The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, Muslim extremists carry out a series of terrorist attacks in New York City. In a desperate attempt to impose order, the U.S. government secretly detains and tortures suspects and suspends scores of civil liberties. [FILM CLIP]

DENZEL WASHINGTON: What if what they really want is for us to herd children into stadiums like we're doing and put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders - bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that, and everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over, and they've won. They've already won. [END FILM CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Whether they've won is an idea that has been bandied about ever since 2001, but who thought of it in 1998? Eight years later and five years after September 11th, Lawrence Wright published The Looming Tower. Built around 600 interviews with those closest to al Qaeda, it documents al Qaeda's real-life success at creating a world not unlike the one he depicted – one could say even predicted – in The Siege. He joins us now. Lawrence, welcome to the show.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Thank you, Brooke. It's good to be with you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So here's a question that you probably haven't gotten for eight years, but -

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: - where did the idea for The Siege come from?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Well, Linda Obst, who was the producer, had been talking to me about doing a movie about a woman in the CIA. That was her idea. And the problem was that the cold war was over, and how were you going to do a CIA story? And then I realized that the CIA does have a real-life antagonist, and it's the FBI. And what were they fighting over? They were fighting over who was going to control counterterrorism in the U.S. And so that was where the original germ of the idea rose. [FILM CLIP]

ANNETTE BENING: Hey, we're on the same team here, Agent Hubbard.

DENZEL WASHINGTON: Who exactly is "we" on this particular team? I'll tell you what, Elise. You send me an official interagency request for cooperation. Then I'll give you copies of everything we come up with. How's that? CIA has no charter to operate domestically, which puts you in violation of federal law. [END FILM CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, as a much younger man, you had lived for a while in Cairo. What about your experience fed into this?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: I was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and I had to get a job for two years of alternative service. And I wanted to get out of the country, and so I went to the U.N., and I made an application. They said, well, no, we don't do that, but here's a list of American institutions abroad. And one of them had an office directly across the street. It was the American University in Cairo. I didn't realize that we had no diplomatic relations at all, and there were only 200 Americans in the entire country at that time, and they were trying to keep a university afloat. And so it turned out to be an amazingly fateful walk across the street for me. I loved Egypt. I had a wonderful time. But I drew upon those experiences when I wrote The Siege. And then, when 9/11 happened, the fact that I had lived in an Arab world and spoke some Arabic and was familiar and actually fond of that culture, you know, really came into play.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was your experience when you watched the towers fall on TV?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Well, you know, it took a little while for it to sink in, because I had the same experience everybody did of, you know, how cinematic this whole event is, and then the kind of sickening private realization that, you know, that a lot of this was stuff we had in The Siege, you know, and the Army and the troops in the streets of New York and things like that were scenes that were, you know, gallingly familiar to me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the question is how you could have been so prophetic. [FILM CLIP] WO

MAN: I'm sure everyone here knows the traditional model of the terrorist network. One cell controls all others. Cut off the head, the body will wither. Unfortunately, the old wisdom no longer applies. The new paradigm is each cell operates independent of the other. Cut off one head, another rises up in its place. [END FILM CLIP]

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: All of this was predictable. I'm not a prophet. I interviewed members of the counterterrorist squad in New York and the FBI, and I guess the movie reflected their anxiety about what would happen. I'd looked at what had happened in other incidents, like in Panama, when we invaded Panama, and we rounded people up and put them in stadiums. So you see that scene in The Siege. And the question of torture and civil liberties – the whole premise of the movie is what would happen if terrorism came to our shores? You know, what kind of country would we become? So it was a what-if type of movie, and, unfortunately, things played out pretty much according to plan. As a reporter, whether I'm, you know, writing a movie or an article or a book, I just try to get close to people who know, and spend as much time as I can with them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But are you a reporter when you're interviewing people in preparation for a movie?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. I guess I'm reality-based, and I feel more comfortable when I feel like what I'm writing is actually what would happen. It's true that people often times are dazzled by Hollywood, and it makes it easier when they think it's going to be fiction in one way or another than when they think, oh, my God, every word that's going to come out of my mouth is going to be in print and I might get in trouble with my boss, and so on. You know, people always have those concerns. But, you know, when you enter the world of fiction, and especially the world of Hollywood, the only difference [LAUGHS] is that you often are going to get people that want you to pay them for, you know, their time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Looming Tower is exhaustively researched, and it's been much praised for that, but it's also celebrated for its narrative momentum. It's a real page-turner. What lessons did you apply from your work as a screenwriter or as a novelist to your reporting?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Faced with a huge amount of material, and very complicated stuff, I realized that, more than in any of my other writing, this book was going to need strong characters and great scenes. And if you have a great character, you can load him up like a donkey, you know, with all this information, and then you can enter into the scene. And then you can stop, and you can take your time, and you can explain. And that's the way movies are constructed, and I think it's true for most strong narrative writing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this weekend at the New Yorker Festival, you're performing a one-man show --

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: [LAUGHS] Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- about your al Qaeda reporting. And you begin by juxtaposing TV images of real terrorist attacks with scenes from The Siege.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Yeah. It's a new departure for me. Although I love theater, and I have written plays, but I'd never written one for me to perform in, you know, it was provocative. It was really intriguing to me. And I thought that would be an interesting way of telling a story, just to be able to sit in front of an audience and relate these events in a more intimate and personal way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What's next? Are you going to do it on skates?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: [LAUGHS] I think I need to write a musical comedy, Brooke. Terrorism is not a beat that I want to be on all of my life. But there's no doubt that we're going to be living with these kinds of problems for a long time, so I guess that I'll always be attached to this problem. And yet, there's a part of me that is – I really do have a [LAUGHING] musical comedy I'd love to write. [LAUGHS] I've been fantasizing. In some of those nights in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan I would consider, I don't have to be here. A lot of these things, Brooke, they just come to you. You know, an idea is the most precious thing you ever get. And they come to you in these packages, and they say, hey, look, I'm a novel, or I'm a nonfiction book, or whatever. And sometimes you discover that they might be more than one thing. But right now, I'm waiting for the next message, and I haven't gotten it yet.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Lawrence Wright, thank you very much.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: It was a great pleasure, Brooke. Thanks.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Lawrence Wright is the author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and a staff writer for The New Yorker. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]