In early 2002, I got a phone call from CBS News executive producer Susan Zirinsky, asking me if I would be interested in helping her with a project she was trying to throw together in just a few weeks. I’ve known Susan for a long time — she was the inspiration for the Holly Hunter character in “Broadcast News”, but I knew her as just plain “Z,” a legendary and tireless news producer who had seemingly been everywhere with everyone, twice. I worked for her in the early ’80s when I was a lowly production secretary in the CBS News Washington bureau, and had later worked for her as the writer for “48 Hours.” It’s impossible to say “No” to Z. So I said “Sure.”

The project was the documentary “9/11” — to my mind, the definitive account of what happened on that awful day. It was created by two French brothers, Jules and Gideon Naudet, who were working with a young fireman named James Hanlon (seen with them on the left) to document life at a New York City firehouse when the planes struck the World Trade Center. The Naudets followed the firefighters into the buildings, and captured the only footage from inside the towers after the attack. CBS hired Robert DeNiro to introduce and act as host for the film — that’s where I came in, to write his material — and the resulting two-hour film was shown on CBS without commercial interruption on the six-month anniversary of the attacks: March 11, 2002.

The Naudets searched for another project after that, and finally, this Sunday, they will premiere their followup: “In God’s Name,” also on CBS, also executive produced by Zirinsky. The Naudets spoke about the new film to Bill McGarvey of Busted Halo:

On the morning of September 11, 2001 French filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet—who had been working for three months on a documentary on firemen—found themselves filming inside the World Trade Towers as they collapsed. The events they captured on film that morning became the basis for their Emmy and Peabody Award winning documentary 9/11. According to Jules, their first-hand experience of that tragedy became the “first step in a journey that would take us around the world searching for answers to the meaning of life.”

That journey is chronicled in In God’s Name, which is the Naudets’ first film since 9/11. In God’s Name (Sunday, December 23, CBS, 9:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT) follows the personal lives and beliefs of 12 diverse religious leaders from around the globe who represent more than four billion faithful.

The 12 leaders featured are:

o Alexy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church
o Amma (Sri Mata Amritanandamayi), a Hindu spiritual leader
o Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Roman Catholic Church
o The Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists
o Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a prominent Shiite Muslim leader
o Bishop Mark Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and President of the Lutheran World Federation
o Michihisa Kitashirakawa, Jingu Daiguji (High Priest) of the Shinto Grand Ise Shrine
o Yona Metzger, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
o Dr. Frank Page, President of the Southern Baptist Convention
o Imam Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar and a prominent Sunni Muslim leader
o Joginder Singh Vedanti, Jathedar Sri Akal Takht, the Sikhs’ highest authority
o Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England

Just a few days after meeting Pope Benedict at the Vatican, Jules Naudet spoke with Busted Halo about the making of this groundbreaking documentary.

BustedHalo: More than anything else In God’s Name feels like an extensive journey of global faith-seeking.

Jules Naudet: Oh definitely. It really started as a personal journey in a way, and it started on September 11th as I was filming that morning in the lobby of One World Trade Center and me hearing this giant roar from above that I would learn later was the tower next door actually collapsing literally on top of us. I ran for my life and at some point I just stopped and got ready to die, in a way. And all these questions—which I guess are normal questions when you are faced with your own mortality—I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here? What is it all about?’—these very existentialist questions that I had never faced before.

BH: Existentialist questions…hmmm, well you are French, right?

JN: Yeah. [laughter] I was very fortunate in my childhood with a family that loved me and all that, and so I never had to confront such violence and it really took me by surprise, to be honest. Surviving that day and continuing to work—these questions were nagging me and were in the back of my head, and talking about it with my brother for a couple of years—but what should we do about it? And since we’re documentary filmmakers we said let’s go on a journey to find answers to these questions. And who better to start with than these amazing spiritual beacons and through that to try to show faith in a different way than we see on the news—we only see extremes on the news. What we wanted was to do something that would show the similarities, even though at the beginning we were a little bit unsure of what we were going to encounter. It was a leap of faith, if I may say, in a way. We knew that there was a danger in making a documentary like this—it should not be a theology lesson because it would turn people off and that was not the idea. The idea was to find a common ground that everyone could relate to with these amazing religious leaders who might seem a bit intimidating at first. The way to do that was to basically follow them in their daily life. I think when you see Pope Benedict in his office, when you see him watching TV or playing the piano; when you see the chief rabbi of Israel walking his kid to school; when you see the Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah playing with his grandkids; the Dalai Lama meditating in the morning—I think you might not be of the same faith, you might not be of the same culture, but when you look at them like this you can say, ‘I relate to him as a father, as a grandfather, as a husband, and as someone who seeks—just like them—that connection with the divine.

There’s much more at the BH link. Read and ponder. And tune in Sunday night. It promises to be a fascinating film.