Too Soon For WTC Film?

Oliver Stoner's long-awaited "World Trade Center" opens next week, shortly before the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

Amid the buzz the film is generating is a school of thought that it's still too soon for such an effort.

But Jon Bernthal, who plays hero Port Authority Police Officer Chris Amoroso, says the opposite. He feels, if anything, it's high time this type of movie was made.

On The Early Show plaza in New York Friday, Bernthal told Russ Mitchell, "I don't think it's too early. … I think we, as Americans, need to go see these guys' story. I think these people need to be celebrated. They need to be memorialized. And I think the movie really celebrates the resolve of this city.

"Whatever good did come out of that day and how we as a nation came together, that's what the movie celebrates, and I don't think it's too early for that. I think it needs to be seen."

"WTC" is about a team of five PAPD officers who head into the burning towers in an attempt to save lives, only to get buried under the rubble of the collapsing buildings.

Amoroso went above and beyond the call of duty on 9/11, and Bernthal says heroes like Amoroso deserve their due on the big screen.

"I looked at (his role) as sort of a responsibility, or a duty to Chris and his family," Bernthal said. "You know, Chris was in the building that day. He saved a woman. He cut his ear, and then he was on his way out, where he saw his friends. And he made the decision, he insisted, to go back in.

"These guys, they saw this terrible inferno, this hell, and they decided to go back in, and they decided to go in. And it's something that should be celebrated. I'm really excited and pleased with the movie. And I think it does exactly that."

Working with Stone, the young actor said, was "just an honor. He's one of the greatest film makers this country's ever had. It was an honor to be a part of this movie. I think the movie managed to be really about the resolve of this city and this country. And there's nothing political about it. And it really memorializes and honors" the day's heroes.

Bernthal is a busy man. He stars in the new CBS comedy, "The Class" this fall, playing a man in his late 20s who still lives at home with his mother.

He took a circuitous route to the point when he might be a household name soon.

Bernthal attended Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., then studied at The Moscow Art Theatre School in Russia, where he also played baseball in the European Professional Baseball Federation.

While in Moscow, he was noticed by the director of Harvard University's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at the American Repertory Theatre, and was invited to obtain his Master's in Fine Arts, where he graduated in 2002.

"To be sort of a knucklehead kid from (Washington) D.C., and then to be able to tell my old man I was going to Harvard, it was a good thing for me!" he recalled to Mitchell.