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Oliver Stone's Dallas

Director Oliver Stone put Dallas on the map as a desirable Hollywood film shoot location in the late 1980s and 1990s with Talk Radio, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Any Given Sunday. He’s also the subject of my book The Oliver Stone Experience and has been a friend for 15 years.

Texas Theatre honchos Jason Reimer and Barak Epstein invited Stone to attend a mini-retrospective earlier this month titled “4 Days in Dallas with Oliver Stone,” which screened his Dallas movies Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK. Natural Born Killers was also part of the lineup; it wasn’t shot in Dallas, but celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. While he was in town, Stone fit in visits to Dealey Plaza, the Sixth Floor Museum, and the municipal archives beneath City Hall where records related to the Kennedy assassination are kept.

The centerpiece of the weekend was the Oct. 4 screening of 1991’s JFK at the same theater where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, and where Stone re-created the arrest with Gary Oldman portraying Oswald. I sat with Stone in the back of the theater, a row behind one of the two seats Oswald occupied on November 22, 1963. When police onscreen spotted Oswald circa 1963 and demanded his surrender, they seemed to be addressing the assembled audience in 2024: a through-the-looking-glass moment.

After the screening, Stone spoke to me onstage about researching and making the movie as well as his personal experience of the assassination and its aftermath. He was 17, and spent the day “watching the coverage, like everybody else.” He didn’t begin seriously questioning the official version of historical events until after the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, when he read that some individuals involved in the crime had connections to the federal government. “Through the 1970s, I began to educate myself,” he said. Stone became fascinated by alternatives to the “lone gunman” and “magic bullet” theories in the late 1980s, when he was sent a nonfiction book as possible adaptation material: On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, who, as the district attorney of New Orleans in 1960s, brought the only criminal trial related to the president’s murder.

Image Oliver Stone in front of the Texas Theatre marquee. Peter Salsbury “I really thought ‘this is a great thriller,’” Stone said of Garrison’s book. “I hadn’t done the research. I just believed what I was seeing [as I read] was…a potentially great movie.” While writing the script with Zachary Sklar, Stone melded Garrison’s book with Jim Marrs’ Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, and added information he’d gleaned while visiting the film’s primary locations of Dallas, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. He read the Warren Commission Report and books that questioned it. He talked to historians and former and current officials.

Stone had previously explained in my book, as well as in many interviews, that he made Garrison the main character of JFK because he presented the criminal case against alleged conspirators to kill Kennedy. Stone believed him to be a perfect vehicle to present additional information and other theories about what happened. He admitted that Garrison lost because he “had a weak case” against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), but added that Shaw “was lying” to investigators and the jury about his connections to the New Orleans criminals and hustlers, anti-Castro Cubans, and members of right-wing paramilitary groups, all of whom loathed Kennedy.

Stone told Dallas Morning News writer Sarah Hepola that reading Garrison’s book while filming Born on the Fourth of July in Dallas may have sparked his decision to make JFK. “I never really made that connection [before], but I’m sure someone took me to see Dealey Plaza for the first time,” he said. “When you see it, you realize what a jewel box it is. How small. You don’t realize that from pictures. It’s a perfect ambush site.”

Various Hollywood and independent directors chose to shoot in Dallas before Stone came to town, resulting in films such as Logan’s Run, Robocop, the 1962 adaptation of the musical Stage Fair, and the horror film Phantom of the Paradise (which will receive a 50th anniversary screening this month at its primary filming location, the Majestic Theater). But it wasn’t until Stone chose Dallas as the location of his claustrophobic 1988 drama Talk Radio—based on star Eric Bogosian’s play, and filmed around the city and on soundstages at Las Colinas—that Dallas hosted a production that felt like possible Academy Awards material, helmed by a director who’d already won multiple Oscars (for Platoon, his 1986 film based on his experience as an infantryman in Vietnam, and his follow-up Wall Street, which got Michael Douglas a statuette as Best Actor).

Released at Christmas despite Stone’s objections (“it was so depressing!”) Talk Radio was a box office disappointment that got no awards traction. But his next project, 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, about paraplegic war activist Ron Kovic, was a hit that was nominated for eight Oscars and won two (for directing and editing). Born was the movie Stone had wanted to make first in Dallas, mainly because nonunion crews would stretch its budget, but he had to wait eight months until his star Tom Cruise finished making Rain Main. He ended up doing Talk Radio as a time killer and—he said during a post-screening discussion—a way to try different directorial techniques and learn about the city.

For Born, the Elmwood neighborhood of Oak Cliff doubled for Kovic’s hometown of Massapequa, Long Island. Dallas was also briefly home to Syracuse University (faked at Southern Methodist University) and the Miami Convention Center (actually Dallas’ convention center with different signage and some trucked-in palm trees). JFK was the second Stone production to let Dallas be Dallas, and it brought a new level of real-world specificity to its action and dialogue, immersing itself deeply in Dallas’ identity. Where Talk Radio was electrifying for local viewers because of the abundance of recognizable locations and references (a gargoyle-ish rock-and-roller played by Michael Wincott gives a shout-out to “the girls at Valley View Mall!”) Stone’s immense, densely packed JFK—a combination courtroom thriller, detective story, and muckraking work of agitprop–went much further, making the layout of downtown and other parts of Dallas integral to the tale. It weaved in references to actual Texas politicians, institutions, and corporations—including “General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas,” cited by Donald Sutherland’s Mr. X as one cog of the military-industrial complex that stopped the United States from pulling out of Vietnam before combat troops could be introduced.

Three of the four screenings were sellouts, which seemed to surprise Stone, and the audiences lined up for good seats well in advance. At the JFK screening, Sutherland’s mammoth exposition dump and star Kevin Costner’s tearful final summation earned rounds of applause.

Stone attended a book signing before JFK, during which he inscribed copies of his memoir Chasing the Light, the JFK screenplay, and The Oliver Stone Experience as well as artifacts related to his filmography and its subjects. He signed a poster for his first directorial effort, the early-’70s horror film Seizure, and November 23, 1963 editions of Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald.

The last time Stone spent serious time in Dallas was 1999, when Jerry Jones let him use the old Texas Stadium to shoot parts of his football epic Any Given Sunday. To my surprise, he said yes to a last-minute offer by city of Dallas archivist John Slate to peruse Dallas Police Department documents and photos from the days following the assassination, including crime scene photos of the book depository and the spot where Oswald shot officer J.D. Tippit in Oak Cliff, arrest sheets, fingerprints, and mugshots of Oswald and his killer Jack Ruby.

The only time when Stone could fit in a visit was a Saturday morning when the archives were officially closed, so Slate met us on a street corner near City Hall. He drove us into the parking garage and escorted us into the guts of the building, a sequence of events that would’ve fit right into the shadow world of JFK. Slate and assistant city archivist Kristi Nedderman had laid out some of the archives’ holdings on a long table. The two alternated showing Stone certain items with their own commentary and letting him sit quietly and flip through materials, which are kept in protective sleeves, at his own pace. (Copies can be viewed online here.)

Slate said the archives began in the late 1980s as a part of the city secretary’s office. The “original stash” of the JFK records was rediscovered in the police department “around 1989. We already had the bulk of the records, and although I don’t know all the details, right after [Stone] finished filming there or during the time he was filming there in 1990 and early 1991, the City Council got rather excited about whether they had done due diligence to take care of whatever was in city departments related to JFK,” Slate said. “A City Council resolution was passed in early ‘92 that all departments were directed to send JFK-related materials to the municipal archives.”

The JFK collection now contains more than 11,400 items that took two years to catalog, annotate and preserve, under the direction of Slate’s predecessor, Cindy Smolovick.

Slate told me he’d heard about the Texas Theatre screening series only a few days before it was scheduled to begin. He did not expect a yes from Stone on such short notice, but felt obligated to make the offer because “it’s fair to say that Oliver Stone was a direct influence on the development of the archives [in the 1990s] and the premiere collection in our archives, which is the JFK materials.”

-Matt Zoller Seitz, "Oliver Stone's Dallas," D magazine, Oct 10 2024

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As a former archivist myself, I've wondered where Oliver was going to donate his archives. I always suspected it would be his alma mater, New York University (Tisch School of the Arts) where he's been honored and also served as artistic director of the Asia campus. Today it was announced he's donated his archive to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences: "Oliver Stone papers: Production records, scripts, correspondence, and photographs from filmmaker Oliver Stone, including materials from Platoon (1986), The Doors (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Nixon (1995); Gift of Oliver Stone."

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30 Minutes on Talk Radio

Barry Champlain, the main character of 1988’s “Talk Radio,” is a Dallas-based, left-wing “shock jock” whose rants are little arias of outrage. Sometimes a caller who’s obviously suffering will bring out his humanity for a moment, but his default mode is scorched-earth combativeness. It would be misleading to call him a “provocateur” because the word is elegant and Barry is not, and because Barry doesn’t provoke; he attacks, and continues attacking even after his adversary has folded. Sometimes when a caller tries to take a piece out of him, Barry will not just verbally beat them down but cut off their audio feed without telling the audience he’s done so and then rip into them for another few seconds, which makes it seem as if the person that used to be on the other end of the phone line was stunned into silence by his words. He’s a virtuoso of rage, and that’s more than enough to make him a local star and get a national radio syndicate interested in picking up the show.

But Barry can’t turn the rage off. He directs it at his coworkers, his supervisors, his romantic partners (currently his producer Laura, played by Leslie Hope) and himself. I know a lot of people who gave this movie a try but had to turn it off because Barry was too much to take. I get it. Even when you agree with him, he’s miserable and angry. Exciting, too, but not in a healthy way.

Star Eric Bogosian created Barry Champlain for the stage in a same-named play that debuted on Broadway in the late 1980s, where it was seen by film producer Ed Pressman. Pressman called one of his regular collaborators, director Oliver Stone, who’d had a three-film winning streak with “Salvador,” “Platoon” and “Wall Street” but had recently been told that his next movie, the antiwar drama “Born on the Fourth of July,” would be delayed eight months while his star Tom Cruise finished making “Rain Man” with Dustin Hoffman. Stone filled his schedule gap with “Talk Radio” and combined Bogosan’s play with elements from the nonfiction book “Talked to Death,” about the murder of Alan Berg, a Denver-based, Jewish talk radio host with progressive politics, by a member of a neo-Nazi terrorist group.

Everything about the movie feels unstable and potentially explosive, so much so that when Barry launches into his most paranoid and unhinged monologue yet, cursing the world itself and attacking his listeners for listening to him, and the main set seems to rotate slowly around Barry, it’s as if somebody is winding up a timer attached to a bomb. Although Stone didn’t create the character, Barry is a consummate Oliver Stone hero, a creature of nearly mythological force, shouting prophecies and curses at a burning world. When a right-wing listener sends him a dead rat wrapped in a Nazi flag, Barry’s reaction is a mix of fear, disgust, and wonderment, as if he’s realized that if he’s pissing off these kinds of people this much, he must be great at his job.

This aspect of Barry’s story is why I became obsessed with “Talk Radio” 36 years ago after seeing it in a Dallas theater. He was an antihero in the tradition of so many ‘70s film protagonists: somebody you weren’t supposed to like, but to find interesting, even when he was at his most loathsome.

The parts of the movie that I didn’t like and that frankly didn’t think was necessary or interesting were the flashbacks to Barry’s rise to success and the corresponding disintegration of his relationship with his wife Ellen (Ellen Greene), which are tied into a subplot about Barry swallowing his pride over destroying the relationship and asking Ellen to come to Dallas and counsel him the weekend before the show is supposed to go national. Ellen’s ease with diving into the old dynamic (even after Laura answers the phone when Ellen calls, and Barry lies and claims she’s his secretary) didn’t seem plausible to me back in 1988. When Ellen called into the show in the present-day part of the story, throwing a life preserver to a man drowning in a sea of his own bile, I think I might’ve rolled my eyes, because it seemed like more grownup version of a male fantasy of a woman getting turned on by a man’s hatefulness. Barry used and abused her at every stage. I never saw anything I recognized as real love flowing from Barry to Ellen, only from Ellen to Barry.

Did you already figure out that I was 19 when I saw “Talk Radio” for the first time and had yet to begin my first long relationship with a woman? Well, that’s why I didn’t get it. Angry young men are drawn to films like this, perhaps more so than other types of viewers, because they center the antihero and put you inside his head at least part of the time, and while they aren’t forcing you to identify with them, they make it pretty easy. But this movie is more subtle, I think, which probably seems like a strange assertion considering how unrelentingly intense it is.

Stone gets criticized for being less interested in female characters than male ones, and having a misogynistic streak. Setting aside the particulars of why I think this is complicated (i.e. not entirely fair or unfair) I don’t think it applies to “Talk Radio” at all. It’s observing a dynamic that’s real. There are a lot of guys like Barry who take their partners for granted or just plain use them (women can do this, too) and there are absolutely a lot of female partners of dynamic/abrasive men who spend their lives lugging a fire extinguisher under one arm in case their man flips out and starts trying to burn things down. (Sometimes you see a relationship like this where the typical gender roles are flipped. Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones in “Blue Sky,” for instance. Or my mother and stepfather.)

The Barry-Ellen relationship rings progressively more true to me the older I get and the more experience I have as a significant other—and, frankly, as a human being who has spent a lot of time observing other relationships and has gotten to the point where I can spot codependency from the other side of a room before a couple has even been introduced to me. Barry and Ellen are codependent in a complicated, real way. That’s why they don’t struggle before slipping into old patterns.

At one point, Ellen calls into Barry’s show and lies down on a black table in an unused studio as if she’s waiting for a lover to walk in and get busy. It’s theatrical–not a complaint, just an observation–and I wonder if that’s why I thought it was reductive or silly on first viewing. It’s closer to a kind of expressionism or symbolic choreography, like the kind you see in the staging of plays or dance numbers, where people pose in a way that embodies an idea or metaphor.

This is a brilliant movie, one that not only gets better and richer the more often I revisit it, but that’s filled with truths about the human condition, not just the media or America or sociology or history. You can see yourself represented in it, whether it’s as Barry, Ellen, another character at the radio station, or one of Barry’s listeners, who love him even when they hate him, and the reverse, and spend way too much time wondering if he’ll save or destroy himself, or if that’s out of their hands, and Barry’s.

-Matt Zoller Seitz, "30 Minutes On: Talk Radio," RogerEbert.com, October 11, 2024

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The making of Oliver Stone, the Unmaking of Hollywood

When I think about Oliver Stone, I imagine a gambler at a craps table who bets every chip he’s got, every time, and usually comes out a winner. And, his gain is ours as well, for he has gambled everything on making some of the best films of our generation.

Check out Stone’s oeuvre, and you will be shocked at how many movies he has made; how many of his you have seen but didn’t know were his. The first Oliver Stone movie ever I saw (but I didn’t know until recently that it was his film) was The Hand with Michael Caine. I saw the film on TV when I was 6 or 7. It is about a cartoonist whose hand is cut off in a car accident, and the hand returns to haunt him and others. I couldn’t sleep for a week. I was constantly looking under my bed to see if a severed hand was there waiting to attack me.

Stone’s just-released memoir, Chasing The Light, reads like a movie script, for Stone’s life and career have indeed been worthy of the big screen. As we learn through riveting prose, the story of the boy Oliver Stone could have been written by Charles Dickens, but Stone is more David Copperfield than his namesake, Oliver Twist. Stone is placed in a boarding school during high school, removed from the parents he adores. His loneliness only increases when he is told over the phone at age 15 that his parents are divorcing and that his mother has moved back to France without even so much as a goodbye. He then learns shortly thereafter that his father has lost his fortune, and with it, Oliver’s inheritance. By his own admission, Stone has yet to fully get over this trauma.

Oliver then had to begin life anew, and to forge his own path, ultimately to the silver screen. It is that lonely journey we learn about in Chasing The Light.

The book opens with Stone’s recounting of his making the movie Salvador (one of my favorites) in Mexico on a shoe-string budget with a cast of characters, including James Woods with whom Stone has remained friends. But it is the excitement of creating a film with so little backing, and with such a great risk of failure, that excites Stone, and also the reader of his memoir. The results are stunning, with Stone succeeding at making what I believe to be the defining Hollywood movie about Reagan’s vicious war in Central America.

It is in this section of the book that Stone writes some of my favorite lines of the book:

The truth is, no matter how great my satisfactions in the later part of my life, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much excitement or adrenaline as when I had no money. A friend who came from the underclass of England once told me, ‘The only thing money can’t buy is poverty.’ Maybe he really meant ‘happiness,’ but the point is, money gives you an edge, and without it, you become, like it or not, more human. It is, in its way, like being back in the infantry with a worm’s-eye view of a world where everything, whether a hot shower or a hot meal, is hugely appreciated.

I have to imagine that, somewhere, there is a sled or other such object for which Oliver pines, reminding him of simpler days, when he was the object of his parents’ love and affection, and when life seemed more certain.

But, as things turned out, Oliver would come to eschew certainty and comfort at every turn. For example, when he was a freshman at Yale, he quit school to volunteer for the US war in Vietnam. To me, it is this which makes Oliver the stand-out individual he is. While cowards like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton would hide behind the ivy walls to avoid service, Oliver went out of his way to sign up to fight. He would become a highly decorated soldier, earning a number of awards, including the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

In the end, as we learn in his semi-autobiographical film, Platoon, which would win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the war in Vietnam would be a disillusioning experience for Stone. He would learn, as so many others did, that the US was not really fighting for democracy in that far-flung country, and that it was instead brutalizing a poor peasant society trying to shed the yoke of French, and then US, empire.

Platoon was the first Oliver Stone movie I saw on the big screen. I was 17 at the time, and I saw it with my very right-wing father. That movie blew my mind. The scene in which the Charlie Sheen character stops his fellow comrades from raping a Vietnamese girl shook my world. I had no idea until that moment that that sort of thing happened in war, and certainly not by US servicemen. That film, along with Salvador, would help to radicalize me and to make me the person I am today. But what makes Platoon great, I think, is that it captured in a dramatic fashion the cruelty as well as the fog of war. After seeing it, I talked to my boss at the sporting goods store I was working at about it. He was a Vietnam veteran himself, and he readily stated that Platoon was the greatest Vietnam War movie ever made because it told the story of the war so truthfully. This is the highest praise one could receive for such a work.

There is much more to say about Oliver Stone and his memoir. The book is a gripping read, and it is made all the more compelling by Stone’s incredible honesty about himself as a person; about his feelings, including embarrassing feelings that most people would leave to the therapy couch; and about his triumphs and failures. Oliver Stone, first and foremost, is an amazing human being, and to learn about him in his own words, with all his humor and candor, is a delight.

-Dan Kovalik, "The Making of Oliver Stone, The Unmaking of Hollywood," July 24 2020

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How many Vietnams have we had? Are we in the middle of another one? It's a war that should have been dealt with, atoned for, remembered. [...]

You came back from Vietnam and I believe you still have shrapnel in your body from that experience?

Yeah. Yeah. It does go off on X-rays and stuff once in awhile. No, it's fine. I recovered from all that. I reconciled. I remember it as a learning experience. I was very young. Very young. You don't see the world the same way as when you were 21. [...]

I remember when I was interviewing you for the book, I asked you, do you still go to the shooting range? And you were like, no.

No.

It's not a thing you do.

No.

You have no interest in seeking [violence] out. You seem very meditative every time I've talked to you.

Thank you. That is probably Le-Ly [Hayslip]'s influence since 1993. She took me back [to Vietnam] and I understand the Vietnamese side of it and what we did to them. So my empathy is worldwide.

-Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Oliver Stone, 4 Days in Dallas at the Dallas Theatre, Natural Born Killers Q&A, Oct 3 2024

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"I had two very powerful parents. Usually one is weaker than the other - no, they were both equal and they fought to the end. So I'm the child of conflict...I wish, in some ways, that they were weaker. I do wish that they'd been more vulnerable, because I grew up under pressure to be the best, to succeed. The love of Mom was withdrawn many times. It would be there, but it would be withdrawn. As a result, it was an uncertainty. My dad was not the type of person who was a giving person in that regard: emotionally. In that era, men didn't share as much with their sons as men do in this era. I've taken [precautions]. With my own son, I'm very touchy-feely. I try to be because my dad would never [or] very rarely hold me or touch me. So there was that kind of thing of uncertainty. It's important to understand that you can be very privileged living in Manhattan but you can be very deprived." -Oliver Stone in a promotional interview for U Turn, Oct 26 1997

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On the Oscars

Did you watch the last Oscars ceremony?

No, I didn't. I'm sorry. I'm not interested in the movie business, really, anymore. A little bit - I'll pay attention. I'll make another one if I can, but it's part of the past. It's really part of the past and it was beautiful. The parade went by, but the parade changes and it takes new forms.

-Oliver Stone at the Millennium Documentary Film Festival, May 24 2024

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"Documentaries are less stress"

The following one-on-one interview with Mr. Stone was conducted in Brussels. As the guest of honor during the Millenium Documentary Film Festival Brussels—which runs from March 15 until March 22—to present his documentaries “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” (2021) and “Nuclear Now” (2022), and a masterclass as well, I got to sit down with him in a Brussels hotel for a conversation on his craft that he knows inside out. With his approval, this interview didn’t focus on his two documentaries, but rather dealt with general topics and his work as a filmmaker.

Mr. Stone, after your last feature film, “Snowden” [2016], you changed your modus operandi and became a documentary filmmaker. Why did you do that?

Documentaries are different. When you make documentaries, they’re not consuming your life. You don’t have to build the sets, you don’t have to hire actors or paint walls. You don’t have to think about a hundred different things. That also means you’re no longer creating an artificial world. A documentary is something real, you have witnesses, people who went through it or who were around when it happened. So the preparation for a documentary is very different; it’s a living environment parallel to you and you’re joining it. My documentaries are a lot about political ideas and about the country, so it’s something entirely different. Making a documentary means much less work, much less money and much less stress. It’s simpler to be a documentarian.

Several of your films are based on true events, and “JFK” [1991] and “Snowden” are documentary-like features. Were they maybe your most difficult films to make?

They are difficult in the sense that you have to check everything and authenticate it. Obviously, fantasy gives you a lot more freedom: if you’re doing films like “Natural Born Killers” [1994], “U Turn” [1997] or “Savages” [2012], those are fictional. They give you more freedom, and you can f*ck around. When you’re doing “JFK” [1991], you really have to pay attention. There’s so much out there, and the film is so difficult to authenticate because it’s not like a book. The dialogue is difficult because those are real people and you don’t know what they really said. So you’re taking dramatic liberties.

When you did “Snowden,” you met Edward Snowden in unusual circumstances. What was he like?

He was very straightforward; he remindend me of a very bright boy scout. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do drugs. He’s quiet, shy, polite and pleasent. He had one woman in his life at that time. He’s a serious man; I was very impressed with him and he’s not a celebrity type attention seeker. Not at all. Some people said that I made him a white knight in the movie, but they don’t know who he really is. If they knew him, they’d realize he is very sincere, very articulate, and he really believed that his oath was to the constitution—which it is—and not to the NSA or to the CIA. He was a whistleblower at twenty-nine, so I wanted to know and explore how and why he did that at such a young age.

What film or filmmaker gave you the passion to become a filmmaker?

I went to the New York Film School and the message came from Martin Scorsese who was a teacher. I had done a short film of fourteen minutes, “Last Year in Viet Nam” [1971] and he liked it. He praised it and took it to class. That didn’t happen too often; short films were mostly criticized. That was the method; it was like a Chinese commune where you showed your work to the class and everyone went bla bla bla. But this time he threw it in the class and said, ‘This is a filmmaker.’ And he said, ‘Keep it personal.’ That’s what you have to do, keep it personal. That was very good. I felt very inspired by that and then I just kept going.

So then you began making personal films, and with “Midnight Express” [1978] and “Salvador” [1986], for example—not to mention your Vietnam War trilogy—you immediately put yourself on the map with message films. That reminds me of the films Stanley Kramer or Fred Zinnemann did, for example. Is that an accurate comparison?

That’s a tough question to answer, whether they are personal or not. You don’t know how Stanley Kramer really felt. He was an emotional man with a great conscience, and you know he was passionate about nuclear war; so he did “On the Beach” [1959] with that passion. And you know he wanted to be funny when he did a comedy [“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” 1963] with a lot of car crashes. He wasn’t funny, but he did make a point. “Judgement at Nuremberg” [1961] was about justice, bringing justice to the Nazis and America did the Nuremberg trials—the one good thing they did. And even then, it was compromised, but still he made the point of the Holocaust very clear. So I think we owe him because of the many films he did. They were motivated by passion. They weren’t motivated by politics, I don’t think so. It was in his heart. Of course, my interpretation of him may be different than critics who say, ‘He was just a producer.’ But I saw an early film he did with Frank Sinatra, “Not as a Stranger” [1955], and that was a very interesting film. Sinatra was great; he played the second doctor and Robert Mitchum was the first doctor who starts a relationship with a nurse who gives him the money to finish school. He uses her and then dumps her. But she comes back and plays a very good scene… But you asked a tough question. Zinnemann, I don’t relate to him the same way you do. I don’t. I knew him, I met him, but I don’t regard him in the same way. Kramer was special, although he made some stinkers too [laughs]. He also did a beautiful movie, “The Secret of Santa Vittoria” [196] with Anna Magnani, beautifully scripted, beautifully done. Anthony Quinn plays the major of this Italian town and nobody trusts him. He’s a layabout and Anna Magnani is his angry wife. That was a great movie and he should have gotten more credit for it, right?

Did it ever happen to you that you should have gotten more credit for a film you did?

Yeah. “Snowden” [2016]. I couldn’t finance it in the U.S. We moved the production to Germany because we thought we might be at risk in the United States. We had no idea what the NSA might or could do. So we financed it abroad, and that’s very disturbing: you make a film about an American and it’s not possible to finance it in the U.S.

Generally speaking, has it been easy for you to be an independent filmmaker and make most of your films without the financial support of the major studios?

I can’t rely on the studios, so I have always been independent. I bounce around with different independents. A lot of my films are owned by bankrupt corporations and sell-of assets. I work a lot with guys who get bankrupt [laughs]. I have been both ways and when I work with studios, the experience can be good. “Wall Street” [1987] was good, but the second Wall Street [“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” 2010] was not because that was made by [executive] Tom Rothman. He acted like a head and would tell you what to do. It’s a whole different attitude. We give studios the power, we entitle them—every filmmaker in some way has a relationship with the studios so he’s always thinking about them because he’s gotta deliver his film and they have the money. Sometimes you’re the slave of that money, and sometimes… f*ck ’em [laughs]. Some filmmakers are always fighting against the studios; it’s a tedious relationship because it’s a slave relationship. Unless you prefer independent. But then, of course, you have to go to them for distribution.

Alain Parker once told me he always wanted a production deal and at the same time a distribution deal, otherwise you have to go shopping with your film. Did you ever have to do that?

Of course. A lot. With “Nuclear Now” we were invited to Cannes where you can get a lot of publicity, but they wanted to hold the film for America in October, and by that time it was not noticed. But it’s okay; that’s the business and I get tired of promotion anyway. Besides, documentaries don’t need that. You just throw them out there and f*ck ’em. You know what I mean; you have to be a showman and you have to care. A showman cares about the results. To go through that again, watching box office, counting numbers,… all that stuff is pretty tiring.

Have you always been able to cast the actors that you wanted?

No, but I had pretty much freedom. I mean, it’s always a deal pressure kind of thing. They mention a few names and things happen. There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but somehow you have to be the master cook [laughs].

Does that mean you have to compromise?

Always. But you don’t have to say yes. I never say yes to an actor overnight. I have never done that. I have made mistakes, but I have never said yes to an actor right away.

When you write a screenplay, do you have certain actors in mind?

Yes, but that’s more elusive because by the time you go through the casting process, you have seen different interpretations and you may prefer an actor’s interpretation to your own. I had many actors reading for me—that helps—or I have them read on tape with a casting director and then I see the tape. You don’t have to be there always. Sometimes if you’re in the room, you’re the gorilla, you know.

In your films you always have a great cast of supporting actors, such as Sylvia Miles, Millie Perkins, Haing S. Ngor, Paul Sovino, E.G. Marshall, Eli Wallach, Madeline Kahn… Mel Brooks recently said that ‘Madeline Kahn was maybe the single best comedian that ever lived.’

Casting your supporting actors is always very special. Most of what you’re doing is picking supporting actors. The main actors line up on money deals; it’s a money situation with agents and lawyers. Whereas the supporting actors, that’s a different story, that’s really where the casting process kicks in.

How closely do you collaborate with your casting directors?

A lot because he or she will make suggestions and knows who is out there working or not. You don’t know and you can’t remember everything. Sometimes you have a thought in mind, like, ‘I want a Cary Grant type for this.’

You have a long and rewarding career as a filmmaker, with a string of highlights. Is there a secret, or is it always a challenge?

Well, it’s been okay. Is it a challenge? I would say yes. It’s a challenge to stay relevant, it’s a challenge to be interested in society but that naturally comes to me. My ideas may not be popular at the moment, but they are fresh—at least, to me, they are. I don’t talk like most directors, and I can’t stand most directors’ irresponsibility about political situations. Most directors want to be friends with everybody and avoid all controversy. But that’s not the way you should speak. You should speak your mind. But then you risk ostracism.

Did you ever have any problems with your actors?

Yeah sure. Some got drunk, some were uncommunicative and stubborn, some dropped out. Bill Paxton, for example, dropped out of “U Turn” [1997] and was replaced by Sean Penn because he didn’t understand his character.

How important are your three Oscars to you?

They look good in the corner. Memories. I think I’ve passed the level of merit. I see myself as a better filmmaker, although others may not agree. But the Oscars, it’s a game, you know. Oscar chasing is like high school politics where they want to be president of the class. I don’t like any of that.

You worked with a lot of great actors and big stars. Have you ever been starstruck?

Yes. When I was forty, I won an Oscar for [directing] “Platoon” [1986]. Liz Taylor presented me the Oscar on stage and then she kissed me. She was my sweetheart, my dream girl, during the 1950s and 1960s, so that was a special moment for me.

-Q&A at the Millenium Documentary Film Festival Brussels, March 15, 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

On W. and bar brawls

It's midafternoon when we meet in Manhattan, but Oliver Stone looks sleepy. He's been rushing to complete a final edit of his new film 'W.' – his take on the picaresque life of former Yale classmate George W. Bush – in time for a pre-election release, on October 17, 2008. Already, though, the Internet is abuzz about a Stone biopic of a sitting president. That's in part because of a very funny summer trailer, with Josh Brolin as W and James Cromwell as Bush Sr. (Best line: "Who do you think you are? A Kennedy?")

"I think if the movie's good," says Stone, 62, sipping a Starbucks coffee, "we can look at Bush and laugh at him – this guy who wore cowboy boots, who mispronounced the English language, who didn't read a lot – but also realize it says a lot about the American people. I tried to turn the lens of satire on ourselves. In the end, hopefully, you'll realize the joke's on us."

When you decided to make a film about George W. Bush, did the lack of historical distance from the subject give you pause? Yes and no. I was fascinated by W the moment he got into office. He's the opposite of what I saw our generation as becoming. There's also a quality of myth to his story, something Capra-esque. It's 'The Great Gatsby,' but in reverse, because he started off known.

During your research, did you find anything that changed your opinion of him? I don't want to be the judge of any man. I'll judge a president in terms of his policies. In 'W.,' much of the dialogue comes directly from him. And we didn't set out to demean or hurt him. I don't think that's a proper motive for a film. We try to re-create human beings with respect for virtues and defects both. People have said to me, "Why don't you do a movie about the Iraq war?" I always say, I went to Vietnam. Iraq isn't my generation's war. The only thing I could contribute is perhaps trying to understand the mind-set that drove us to war.

Critics hailed 'World Trade Center' as being "mature" because they expected another type of movie from you. Is 'W.' more in the spirit of your earlier, more deliberately provocative work? Well, it's human to be paradoxical. I like 'W.' as a kind of wild Salvador-like ride through the mind of the American male in his full power. 'W.' feels like a new kind of species.

The film has a comic tone. I wonder if Bush – unlike, say, Nixon, another of your subjects – simply didn't rise to the level of a tragic figure? Let's face it: George W. was a lot more fun than Dick Nixon. Nixon was not known for his charm. Whereas W, he's more of a soufflé. He's a lighter president. There are tragic consequences of his actions, but the spirit with which he did these things can be perceived by some as funny and entertaining. It's a uniquely American, cowboy way of looking at the world. With Nixon there was so much self-loathing, and he was really prone to vilify himself. There was so much guilt. But the evidence from W is there is no guilt. That press conference was amazing. We shot it in the movie: "Mr. President, what mistakes have you made since 9/11?" And his response wasn't a sort of mind block. It really was: "I don't get the question. I didn't make mistakes. I did the right thing." I've never seen him doubt. That's why, as a character, he's not really tragic. Because to be tragic, you need to be capable of changing.

You met him in 1998 when he was governor of Texas. What were your impressions? He had asked to see me. I was curious. It was a pleasant enough chat. He reminded me we'd been at Yale together [they didn't know each other there], and we talked about Vietnam a little bit. He's very charismatic. He knows body language. I don't think he reads so much as he reads you.

You hear that a lot, that he is no good at speeches, but has charisma one-on-one. Well, you know, Hitler was magnetic, too. [Laughs] I would say that in terms of impressiveness – and other people have said this, too – W can be in the room and you won't notice him. He's like a junior chamber of commerce salesman. He doesn't stand out, except that he's president. He creeps up on you. Whereas Clinton is tall, stately. Reagan was handsome. George H.W. is a very handsome man. Bush is probably closer to Truman in his physical appearance. He isn't the guy who overwhelms you.

Do you hope the film will impact the election? No, I really don't expect it to. The movie is about W.

As a fellow Vietnam vet, what do you think of McCain? I'd rather not comment on that. People have strong feelings.

How about Obama? I support him. I think we need change. Whether he can do it is a whole other issue. I thought the 2000 election was so key. I got really bummed out after that. I left the country for about three years to do Alexander. [Laughs] I just didn't want to be here. And the war in Iraq – for a Vietnam veteran, I can't tell you how difficult that was, to see leaders doing the same things as during Vietnam.

Recently you joined Venezuela president Hugo Chavez as he met with FARC rebels in Colombia, to try to negotiate the release of some hostages. How did you get involved? I was there for Mr. Chavez. [Stone is doing a documentary on U.S. relations with Latin America.] With the hostages, we came very close. There were a lot of political shenanigans going on, and I was told Bush made a couple calls to Colombia. But it was great being down there. Chavez is an incredible guy. It's just not fair, the way he's been portrayed.

He's been criticized lately for what's been described as a power grab. Is that legitimate? The constitutional amendment – the "grab for power" – seems different if you know what he was up against. There's been a coup d'état and an oil strike, both fomented by the United States. I'd say he's reacted with tremendous restraint. He has the right to try to change his term limits, the same way Michael Bloomberg has the right to do that in New York. And when Chavez's amendment was voted down by a very small minority, he backed off right away. It's a very difficult situation, and a lot is at stake: the entire South American region, really, which America has always used as its backyard. Chavez represents a new form of regional control, and he's been a symbol for Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia. America has lost control of the region, and now Colombia is the only foothold we have, and we support that regime with antidrug money, so-called, and we created tremendous paramilitaries. We've created huge death rates. This is a dirty story. I'm not saying the FARC is not responsible, too. But there is a civil war.

When you met with the FARC, were you ever worried for your safety? No, not really. I was more worried about the Colombian military. They have American spying equipment, so it's very easy to get spotted. And judging from the collateral damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, you don't want to be close to one of those Predators when they go off. I'm always more scared about my own government doing something. When you read about these renditions and what they do to people and even the way they treat you at an airport if they don't trust you – it's very scary, to be American and to be treated by other Americans in this high-handed way.

When was the last time you were arrested? A few years ago. But that doesn't matter. I see this happen all the time. In the South, while we were filming W., there was that brawl at a bar, right? Brolin got arrested with six, seven others. I was there that night. The cops were insane! They were mad men with guns.

What happened exactly? Well, I saw Jeffrey Wright [who plays Colin Powell] being arrested. I guarantee you, that man was not drunk, and he was not disorderly. There was a white bartender who had taken a dislike to him a few days prior. And Jeffrey is a tough guy, in the sense that he's proud, the way Denzel Washington is proud, and he's not going to take shit from anybody. He was escorted out of the bar and treated in a rough manner by these policemen. That's when Josh and his group went out to protect him. The cops said, "Step back, sir!" One time. Josh said, "Sir, why are you arresting him?" And then, boom! Maced him in the eyes. They tasered Jeffrey twice, once in cuffs. And they beat up my assistant. They threw him on the ground and cuffed him. He did nothing. And they cuffed two girls. One of them had a bruise on her head. These people were really rough. [The Shreveport, Louisiana, police chief has said he found no violations by his officers.]

You were out there, too? No, I stayed in the bar because, frankly, they told me to stay inside. I would have been arrested. I would have been out there to protest in a second. But no protest was going to stop these men.

When was the last time you were in a fight? A physical fight? Not a verbal fight? Probably in my 20s. A long time ago. I was making a movie, and somebody got out of line with a machete. Tried to kill me.

Can you say more? No, I don't want to. The movie was called Seizure. And the guy with the machete was drunk. I'm not a great pugilist. I won't back down from a fight, but I'm not looking for one either. I don't believe in violence. I hate violence. I've seen enough of it, and that's why I mentioned these policemen. They're so scared. The smell of fear – you know it right away. I'll remember fear the rest of my life from Vietnam. You smell it, and you've got to slow everything down: Be cautious, be cool, don't panic. It's grace under pressure, as much as you can, because it can get really scary fast. Look at 9/11. People lost their minds right away.

Is that a misconception about you, this sort of air of machismo? Machismo? That's good. I love sports. I had a ranch. I loved riding, I loved horses. But I gave all that up. Bush doesn't ride horses, you know? He doesn't like horses.

Huh. A cowboy without a horse. What do you see him doing after he gets out of office? He'll do the presidential thing: speeches, open his library, perhaps consult. His father made a fortune with the Carlyle Group, which is a highly nebulous business. There's a lot of influence peddling in the Bush family dynasty. The other way W could go – and this would be an interesting thing – would be a Dostoyevsky-type reversal, where, at the age of 70 or 80, he might have another rebirth of consciousness. I'm not saying what exactly that would be. I'm just saying he may change. That would be the biggest shock of all.

-Mark Binelli, "Oliver Stone Talks W, Colombian Rebels, and Bar Brawls," Men's Journal, Dec 4 2017

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone vs. the Empire

Oliver Stone has the same gripe with Barack Obama as he did with George W. Bush—namely, they both stand for American Empire, and he does not.

Stone is a three-time Oscar winner, has made over 60 films, including “Platoon,” “Wall Street,” “JFK,” “Nixon,” and “W.”, and is generally regarded as one of the legends of his trade.

In his new book and Showtime series, The Untold History Of The United States (co-authored with Professor Peter Kuznick of American University), Stone highlights what he feels are neglected figures and choices in the American journey. In conversation, Oliver Stone is amiable, keeping an open mind to views that differ from his own, but never willing to back down when he thinks you are wrong.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with him at the Soho Grand hotel in New York, where we discussed his new book and series, the difference between Pro-Empire Liberals and Anti-Empire Liberals, uniting the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, which direction our nation will go over the next four years, sex scenes in “Nixon,” and whether Harry Truman was more like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin.

John Buffalo Mailer: When I read Untold History, I get the sense that you are suggesting it was not all that long ago that the country went off track. You start off the Showtime series with the testing of the A-bomb, then go straight through to today. Henry Wallace is one of the standout figures in this book. Had he won the nomination for vice president instead of Truman in ’44, the world would be a very different place. Is it still possible to conceive of America if Wallace had won?

Oliver Stone: I think that’s the whole point of undertaking something like this, which is to show repeated occurrences in which there are pivot points where history could have been different, where the United States could have acted differently. It’s like a baseball player at the plate, bases loaded, and he whiffs it. Strikes out. But as a good pro athlete, you know you can get to the plate again and have another opportunity. That’s the way you have to look at it.

So there is not only the Wallace moment, but there is a wonderful moment with Kennedy in ’62 after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Definite moves towards ending the Cold War with Khrushchev. It ends with Kennedy’s assassination. There’s a great moment with Gorbachev in January ’89 with Bush I. He’s being offered the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War. All that fear all those years of Communism, and where was the peace we fought for? Out the window. Who’s our new enemy? Bush said it was the Drug War. The first target is Manuel Noriega in Panama. So Noriega becomes the enemy of the week. We need a better enemy than him, don’t we? So eventually it shifts over to Hussein in Iraq because he invades Kuwait. Which is a great story, we go into it in detail in the book. It’s again, false information that leads to a war, the first Iraq War.

Then you have the 2001 moment, 9/11. A band of terrorists does what it does. The band is not that big, but it’s treated by George Bush 43 as if it’s Hitler all over again coming to start World War III. It’s over-hyped. Another huge dose of false intelligence which leads to invading a country, Iraq again. And it’s supported by liberals.

And then of course the Obama moment, whether or not to increase the troop levels in Afghanistan. There was great hope that Obama would move off that agenda. Those moments of hope do exist, and they will come back again, I hope, and you’ll live to see them in your lifetime.

JBM: I hope so. But I can’t think of a mainstream political figure like Henry Wallace. The closest I can think of is Ralph Nader.

OS: There seems to be a divide between pro-empire liberals and anti-empire liberals. Think back to the Anti-Imperialist League in Chicago at the turn of the century, the great American liberals, including Mark Twain, turning against the annexation of Cuba and the Philippines, and think of liberals today who really say, “Enough! We need to contract these 800 plus bases we have around the World.” These liberals have to stay committed, but it’s so much harder when they’re attacked by the pro-empire types. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are apparently comfortable with empire, so it’s truly become a bipartisan foreign policy—most Americans now support the concept of being an empire, global policemen with a given right to intervene.

JBM: I would say your book makes a pretty clear argument that Obama is a pro-empire liberal.

OS: Obama has clearly stated we are the indispensable nation. Why? I don’t agree with that. That’s campaign rhetoric saying we are appointed by somebody as indispensable. You’re talking Obama-God. There’s a god that apparently has disposed himself to make us indispensable.

I don’t think that Obama is a confrontationalist by nature. I mean, there’s a man who seems to get along and go along, and went far. I do like his strength, but he doesn’t have the character, it seems, to challenge received opinion.

JBM: I’m hard pressed to find another Democratic president who in four years has accomplished more than Obama has.

OS: You can say that. But at the same time, he’s gone along with the national-security state that was established by Bush, and in some ways enhanced it. Which was against all the things he stood for. He was a constitutional lawyer! He didn’t at all enforce what I would consider to be the law. He’s put the president above the law. He continues eavesdropping on a massive level. He continues the concept of illegal detention. Unfortunately, Guantanamo and the various prisons have continued. It’s not a pretty picture of law. By being a Democrat and black, he’s done the worst thing possible: he’s taken what was an exceptional mistake by Bush and turned it into a continual text. It’s going to be harder and harder to turn back. The foundation had been laid; he’s tightening the screws.

JBM: The book reads like a narrative. You’ve succeeded in making it exciting. I could see kids getting turned on to American history through this.

OS: I love history. Today our kids have lower scores in history than they do in math and science, as bad as their math and science scores are! And I think part of the reason is, history to them is boring. And the reason it’s boring is because they already know the story, because it always ends up a Disney movie with the U.S. coming out okay and being good. This is no juicy horror show. Darkness is sanitized out by the country’s education boards scared of political controversy. They cut out daring, challenging history. The Texas school board has a lot of power in this country. So does California, apparently, because they both buy the most textbooks.

JBM: When “Platoon” came out, the effect it had on my generation was that everyone grew up thinking Vietnam was a bad war, that we had no business being there. But the script got flipped when we were attacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. Suddenly the Afghans and Iraqis are the new Vietcong and it’s okay to go invade sovereign countries again, in fact it’s necessary. We’ve now lived through a decade of war, had a generation come up on it, and they don’t seem to see anything wrong with us now moving our troops into the South Pacific and promoting the American Empire there.

OS: We’re basically deploying ships and troops, in Japan and Australia, too, controlling the sea lanes. It’s not about bayonets and guns. What it is, is a commitment to military treaties and alliances, with NATO, with the South Asian nations that may feel threatened by China. It’s easy to feel threatened. Although China is an interesting story, because you can never tell what would happen. China has one base abroad, and yet they’re one of our biggest creditors.

JBM: After reading Untold History, I don’t know if I want to liken Truman to W. or to Sarah Palin.

OS: More to W. because I think he’s the wrong man at the wrong time, with a limited imagination. Very little empathy. I can’t take Palin seriously.

JBM: But no one took Truman seriously until he was suddenly the president of the United States.

OS: That’s true, Truman did get in by appointment. America has gotten Truman all wrong. They have glorified a guy who shouldn’t be glorified. David McCullough has a lot to do with that. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It was made into a hit HBO film. As we show in chapter 3, there’s nothing accurate about it and there’s a lot of history left out.

JBM: Can you envision a third party that would be able to unite the Tea Party and Occupy?

OS: And Labor.

JBM: If you could find the party that represents both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, I think labor would be included, along with well over half the country.

OS: Well, wisdom says you would have to form a third party, and third parties have historic difficulties. Although, Ross Perot came very close, with 17 percent of the vote.

JBM: Michael Bloomberg is an independent. If he ran on his independent party, I imagine he’d make a little more noise than say Ralph Nader, or any of the candidates who ran on the third-party tickets this past election, who I can’t name.

OS: Jill Stein.

JBM: The one. The one who got a little bit of press. Perhaps the Republican Party is ready to restructure on a populist platform.

OS: It’s also possible that the real liberals, the liberals who are anti-empire, will start to come out of the shadows. We have to encourage this. I think a compassionate leader can emerge. Maybe it’s someone who reads the book, sees these movies, believes in them. Believes that there’s another direction for America.

JBM: I could see so many movies out of the stories in here. Are you more inspired to make those movies now, or less? Sean Penn as Henry Wallace?

OS: It was so difficult after “Nixon” to do another movie of that nature because it failed at the box office. I love that movie, “Nixon,” though.

JBM: Commercially “Nixon” failed? How about in DVDs?

OS: Over time, yeah, it’s been appreciated. It’s hard to take three hours and 11 minutes of politicking in dark rooms with white people in horrible suits and bad haircuts, and actually make a good movie!

(Laughter)

JBM: And make it sexy.

OS: It’s not sexy.

JBM: There’s one sexy moment.

OS: There is?

JBM: When she hikes up her skirt a little bit…

OS: Ahhh!

JBM: And we wonder, “Is he going to go for it? Is Oliver going to show us Richard Nixon getting down?”

(Laughter)

OS: I did what I wanted to do with my life. But I think Untold History is the best I can do as a dramatist. The Greeks used to consider historians and dramatists as not that far apart. I mean, history—it’s a story. Homer heard about the Trojan War and concocted this history called The Iliad. He was a dramatist. Memory is civilization. It’s the thread of that memory that keeps us together as societies. History is drama. As I said earlier, the history that is taught in school is boring, ’cause they take the juicy parts out.

JBM: Have you ever considered the possibility of running for office?

OS: It’d be interesting to see all the bile and slander pour out. Don’t know if I’d survive it, such things often bring out the worst in human nature. It even to some degree corroded Henry Wallace’s spirit after the 1948 smear campaign, in fact, it can destroy a soul. How did your father react to his Don Quixote quest?

JBM: After my father [Norman Mailer] ran for Mayor of New York, his respect for the stamina of politicians went up significantly. But he was serious about his run. This was no joke to him. He actually thought they were going to win. So he was crushed a little by that defeat. But as he always did, after a day or two, he went back to work and moved on to the next adventure.

OS: Well, your dad was a very strong individual, that I know, no one quite like Norman on those metal legs, yelling at me for rushing him to finish the sequel to “The Castle in the Forest…”

JBM: He was yelling at you because he knew you were right, and he knew he didn’t have time to finish the sequel. Although he did bring research into the hospital with him before he died. But to go back to his campaign, one of the tactics he implemented was to embrace all the controversial things he had done in his life and position them as lessons that had made him a better man. He promoted the notion that his foibles and follies and downright gaffes had imbued him with a profound empathy for just about every kind of person and that his checkered past therefore made him more qualified to hold office, not less. I imagine, were you to run for high office, you would have to embrace a similar set of operating guidelines for the campaign.

OS: Well, certainly there’d be a lot to “get out of the way,” having not or ever having been a puritan. (Laughs) This aspect of marketing yourself is exhausting. But challenges provoke me. A quest like that could consume an entire third act—and only having one left, it’d come at a huge price. This Untold History has already taken a toll. I’d be giving up the chance of writing that one more movie, book, play that we always believe will make the difference. That’s what the third act is always about, isn’t it? Making it all come together in the end. But, thumbs up or down, it’d still be unfinished business.

-John Buffalo Mailer interviews Oliver Stone, The American Conservative, Jan 30 2013

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"I didn't enjoy what they pictured me [as]. They pictured me as a lunatic. [In] my interviews, I tended to be incendiary, because I sometimes couldn't articulate what I felt in a way that was acceptable. You know me. You know I said a lot of things that sounded awful. So you live and learn."

-Oliver Stone on his promotional press during Natural Born Killers, Oct 3 2024 at the Dallas Theatre [x]

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone talks ‘JFK’ and his trio of Dallas films that capture the city

In the space of three years, Oliver Stone made three films in Dallas, an unusual number for any director but especially one not from Texas. “I know, I’m from New York!” Stone said with a laugh, when I connected with him over Zoom.

The films are quite different, but each captures a facet of the city. The late-night claustrophobia of Talk Radio (1988) is a maze of reflective glass with the neon skyline in the window. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) uses the sun-dappled streets of Oak Cliff to tell a very American story of idealism curdling to betrayal. And of course there is JFK (1991), Stone’s feverish spin on that fateful day in 1963 and New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s doomed crusade to make sense of it.

Stone is coming to Texas Theatre to screen and discuss those movies — in addition to his warped serial-killers-in-love classic, Natural Born Killers, celebrating its 30th anniversary — for a mini-festival called “4 Days in Dallas With Oliver Stone” running Oct. 3-6. He’ll be talking with Dallas-based journalist Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture critic and one of the preeminent Stone experts, having written a collection of conversations and essays about the director called The Oliver Stone Experience.

It’s hard to imagine better movie programming than watching JFK with Oliver Stone in the theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was caught. I spoke with the director about filming in Dallas, the lone-gunman theory and what Jerry Jones gave him.

Let’s start with your first Dallas film, Talk Radio. How did it wind up being shot here?

We were trying to make Born on the Fourth of July, but it was a big cookie to bite. It was too expensive, it was about a paraplegic and the studios considered it a downer. Tom Cruise and I came together to make that happen, but Tom was doing Rain Man, and we had to wait. [Producer] Ed Pressman saw this play in New York with Eric Bogosian called Talk Radio. The play was powerful. I said, maybe we should take a couple of months, and I’ll shoot it while we’re waiting for Tom.

It essentially gave you a chance to get to know Dallas.

That’s right. Because we had a limited amount of money for Born on the Fourth of July, which was a very big production, and Texas was very attractive. It’s a right-to-work state, and the Texas Film Commission came after us aggressively. Come to Dallas, see our beautiful new studio out in Las Colinas. And Dallas had so many talented extras.

Let’s start with your first Dallas film, Talk Radio. How did it wind up being shot here?

[Real-life Vietnam vet and film protagonist] Ron Kovic grew up in Massapequa, Long Island, but Long Island was being developed, so it didn’t have the kind of emptiness, the open-space skies I found in Dallas. There was a neighborhood that really turned out well, [the Elmwood section of] Oak Cliff. They gave us a whole street.

Texas was good to us. I hated the hospital we shot in, though. We moved into an abandoned hospital, and that was probably the hardest two weeks I’ve ever shot. Those scenes based on the Veterans Hospital in the Bronx are very depressing, but it was necessary, because that’s the truth, of course.

You were reading Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins while you were shooting Born on the Fourth of July. So was it filming in Dallas that sparked the fascination that led to JFK?

I never really made that connection, but I’m sure someone took me to see Dealey Plaza for the first time. When you see it, you realize what a jewel box it is. How small. You don’t realize that from pictures. It’s a perfect ambush site.

Dallas spent decades in denial about the Kennedy assassination. The Sixth Floor Museum didn’t open until 1989, shortly before you shot the film. And the movie JFK blows the doors off history, creating that feeling that something just isn’t right. How hard was it to get permission to shoot in Dealey Plaza?

There was a big fight. A lot of politicking behind the scenes. And Dealey Plaza was our first day of shooting. Can you imagine? With all those cars and the bang-bang echoing through the city. They closed off Stemmons Freeway and gave us the whole square. It turned into quite a circus.

That movie was a nightmare in terms of work. I had to be totally focused and ignore distractions. The Washington Post ripped off a first draft of the script, and we were already on the [sixth] draft, and they came out with a Sunday piece months before the movie opened, ripping us to shreds. I didn’t realize the opposition to the film until I got into it, which is somewhat like what happened to [New Orleans DA and the film’s protagonist Jim] Garrison.

I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole on JFK’s assassination, but friends who have will tell me: The conspiracies are fun, but at the end of the day, it’s just a lone gunman. They often cite Vincent Bugliosi’s book. What are your thoughts on Reclaiming History?

It’s ridiculous. It’s like citing Gerald Posner’s book [Case Closed]. The best refutation is from Jim DiEugenio, who went into Bugliosi’s book detail by detail [Reclaiming Parkland]. It’s sad that people don’t bother to read the rebuttals.

I went back to all this material in 2021 with the documentary JFK Revisited. It’s very clear that Oswald was known to the CIA. I don’t want to get into all the arguments here, but that documentary is worth seeing.

For a non-Dallas filmmaker, you’ve tackled some very essential Dallas stories. You came back to make the football film Any Given Sunday.

We were having a huge fight with the NFL. We couldn’t get stadiums, and we couldn’t get the jerseys or uniforms. We had to create our own parallel world. Thank God, Jerry Jones was a real gentleman, and he said, you’re welcome to use my stadium. Or maybe he said the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

No, it’s his. [Laughter.] So when you come to town, will you go to Dealey Plaza?

Oh, well, sure.

-Sarah Hepola, "Oliver Stone talks ‘JFK’ and his trio of Dallas films that capture the city," The Dallas Morning News, Oct 2 2024

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On training

There's one scene in that movie I was always dying to ask you about, I'm going to ask you now. There's a scene with Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen, and he's a fresh guy, he's a newbie in the Platoon, and he grabs them, and he takes his backpack, and he starts taking out of his backpack things that he thinks are irrelevant to him. And it's this sort of veteran trying to help out the younger guy. And I've always wanted to ask this, was that true to your life? Did someone do that for you with your backpack when you got to Vietnam?

Oh, very much so, yeah. I was over packed. Although we were trained, and we went over there, when you get actually get there in the jungle, you still have a lot to learn. A lot. And I was obviously over packed, and it's so hard, when you're cutting point for eight, nine hours a day, or six hours a day with a machete, you can't carry that kind of weight.

-Anthony Scaramucci interviews Oliver Stone, SALT Talks, Dec 23 2020

[back-and-totheleft]

The XYZs of W.

Oliver Stone says he believes first lady Laura Bush, secretary of state Condoleeza Rice and presidential advisor Karen Hughes play like “a trinity of Macbeth witches” in the life of George W. Bush,” in the sense that they are totally enablers.” But Stone’s new film “W.” leaves that conclusion to the viewer. “The film foregrounds Bush, and everyone else is shown more or less as we already see them,” he told me Wednesday in an e-mail exchange.

“Rice has no record that we were able to find where she contradicts either Rumsfeld or Cheney, or even does much really to help Powell. She doesn’t seem to do much to bring alternative points of view to Bush’s attention. But an enabler? Yes. If she had threatened him, perhaps she wouldn’t have had the job.”

And Laura Bush would not have had her job either, Stone believes, “had she been more critical of him.”

The Oscar-winning director of “Platoon,” “JFK” and “Nixon” (1995) devoted a great deal of time researching the development of the President’s character, working with his screenwriter, Stanley Weiser. In the end, he said, “this is centrally the story of a man, more than a formal, broad history.”

Stone believes the President’s life falls into three acts, which his film focuses on, while not following such subjects as his elections or 9/11. “Act One is his youth, intermingled with Act Three, his Presidency, and that interconnects with Act Two, his successful middle years. I think overall the most fascinating thing about this incredible President is that he lives up to the American concept of the second chance, and that the second act of his life seems to redeem the first act. The twist on it, to me, is the third act, which becomes a sinister coda to the inauthenticity of his existence.”

Stone was so stung by criticism of his alternative assassination explanation in “JFK” that he edited a massive book attempting to document it. Telling Bush’s story, he stays fairly close to the generally perceived facts, while adding psychological undercurrents such as Bush’s “muscular response to his father as a weak man, and his muscular response to any kind of threat.”

And Laura Bush? “I think the more obvious cliché would be that she was the nagging wife about the drinking, but she doesn’t seem to have been. There is no real evidence of that except Bush saying at one point that it was either him or the Jack Daniels that would have to go. Therefore, we went with the idea that she would forgive him, and that would enable him even more. She would be totally psychologically the supportive wife. Detached? Absolutely. Wouldn’t you be if you had to always play a role like that in your husband’s life?

“In the end,” he said, “she is almost the ultimate perfect first lady. I don’t think there’s been someone like her around since Bess Truman. She seems to make no mistakes, which is eerie.”

Bush’s lack of attention to detail, he says, is underlined in a scene where he is briefed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Looking at a document, he says, “Only three pages! Good.”

I asked Stone: “Born into a patrician family, educated at Andover and Yale, Bush frequently makes elementary grammatical errors, such as using ‘is’ before a plural. How do you account for this?”

“Perhaps a reading disability, or ADD,” he said. “I’m not sure. No one can be in this case, unless he undergoes some kind of medical psychiatric examination, but he seems to be quite disdainful of ‘psychobabble.’ Certainly, his impatience clearly stretches into the way he talks and acts.”

In Act One, beginning with his youth at Yale and continuing during his early days in Texas, Bush is shown as a practicing alcoholic. Fraternity brothers pour Jack Daniels down his throat through a funnel. In scenes after he is “born again,” the film seems to show him continuing to drink beer, but Stone explains: “He’s drinking a known non-alcoholic beer. One of the brands we use is O’Doul’s.”

Did he find anything to back up Bush’s alleged cocaine use?

“I certainly believe that he used it from what accounts I’ve read, but no one inside that group seems to be willing to talk. Kitty Kelley chased it and so did J.H. Hatfield in Fortunate Son. We couldn’t prove it, and so why go there? We already expect minor details to be attacked by the members of the Administration in some way in the next few days. By his own admission, Bush established himself as a reckless young person, and that is the image we sought to create without undo malice.”

Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, is seen as expressing many doubts but no outspoken dissent.

“Jeffrey Wright [who plays Powell] studied it at length and we discussed it many times. Jeffrey is of the opinion, and I agree, that in the end he was ‘the good soldier,’ which is to say, you follow your commander and fall on your sword if need be. Ultimately, he was not, as a black man, able to resist the white man’s final authority. (Incidentally, you are aware of the fact that he shows up in the My Lai investigation as one of the officers who derailed the investigation in 1969).”

Where would you place Bush on the list of 43 presidents?

“I really can’t say, because I didn’t live through them all. But definitely his are the worst eight years of leadership and responsibility that I have seen in my 62 years. And that means he surpasses Harry Truman and Richard Nixon.”

-Roger Ebert, "The XYZs of W," Dec 14 2012

[back-and-totheleft]

"Oliver, he’s an accidental intellectual in a way, and a fucking genius director. Any chaos is very much within his own personal space. He takes references from everywhere: suddenly he’ll speak to you in French, or about some ancient Greek myth, but it’s all exquisitely relevant to what you’re doing. Oliver kind of reminds me of a bear with a splinter in his paw. There’s just something that he’s trying to get to, and it hurts him. I just loved that about him and desperately wanted to create whatever was necessary to get to that place.” -Thandiwe Newton on Oliver Stone, The Sunday Times, Sept 2008

[back-and-totheleft]

"There's really no other director that I can think of that's actually kind of walked the walk and talked the talk. Because he has, he comes at it with a different weight, and he gets a lot of respect, even from the cops. Because it's a very fine line between being a soldier in Vietnam and being a cop in the World Trade Center. Both are incredibly testing, challenging experiences where you figure out who you are. So many of us go through life not really knowing what we would do in that situation. Well, John McLaughlin knows and so does Oliver Stone." -Nicolas Cage on World Trade Center [x]

[back-and-totheleft]

Half Century After the Vietnam War

So let me just start off by asking you both about some of the ways you were shaped by your individual experiences in the war. You've spent a good part of your lives, since your experiences in that war, communicating the meaning of the war and I wonder - as we approach this 50th Anniversary - what is important still to say about the war to a world in which fewer and fewer people remember it? What work remains to be done now, before say the 75th Anniversary when - because I'm just the same age as both of you - when we are un unlikely to still be around to bear witness? So what is it that the world needs to know at this moment, that you think it's important to make sure is known before all the people who experience the war are gone from from the earth? 

Le-Ly Hayslip: In my generation, even though we fought against the Chinese for 1,000 years, against the French for 100 years and against the Americans for 20 years - we still haven't had a voice. The Vietnamese haven't given a voice to the other side. Most of the books talk about the war in Vietnam outside of somebody else, but not Vietnamese. So even though I'm uneducated - I'm a farmer - but I witness two wars. The French and the US War. And what I would like to share with the younger generation and the people in the world [is] that war is not something that we want to forget. Something that every young man and woman who join the military have to ask themselves: why? Why did I join the war? Why did I have to travel over the sea, or to the other half of the world to fight somebody I don't know. 

Vietnam...we did nothing to Americans or to the French. Why come and turn our country upside down and inside out? How many wars after that and still war today? Who suffering the most? Women and children. And I am the one of those and I want it to be rememberedd and to share. That is my voice. Thank you. 

Oliver, what thoughts do you have about what's important to communicate at this moment? 

Oliver Stone: I didn't set out consciously to make three movies about Vietnam. It just happened that way. One led to the other, led to the other - so Platoon was originally about my own experience in the 25th Infantry and the 1st Cavalry. Born the Fourth of July was about the experience of Ron Kovic who wrote a wonderful book. He was paralyzed in the war and it takes place in another - it's about before the war more, and after the war. Platoon is about just the jungle experience. 

So it expands and then when I read her - Le-Ly's - book Heaven and Earth. I was very moved, despite all the odds against it, because it is a Vietnamese story. At that point in time, there was just no interest in this country at all in Vietnamese stories. For a long time, by the way, it did affect everything. President Clinton recognized Vietnam and apologized in '94 or '95, I think, which was pretty late — many years after, about 20 years later.

To me, it's always been a struggle to communicate this war to Americans. They don't seem to want to recognize it. I had tremendous success with those other two films, but with Le-Ly's film, we ran into a wall. I think it's very hard for an American intellectual or American moviegoer to relate to a Vietnamese peasant, which she was. It was an extremely rigorous experience, set in a hierarchy that is Buddhist, centered on mother and father, and with a fair degree of wizardry. And of course, there's a tremendous belief in Buddhism and reincarnation, in many lives. I think that's at the heart of this story, and that's why it eludes many Americans. Although we believe in reincarnation, it’s not in the same way. She opened up my eyes to the way they see things, and that is one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me, and one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received from a foreign culture.

I only wish America had listened, instead of repeating the same mistakes. Of course, there's controversy, but we’ve repeated the same mistakes in Iraq — twice — in Afghanistan, and now in Ukraine. It’s the same mistake, over and over. You get tired of it. You know, by the time you die, you’ve seen everything; you’ve seen the same mistake five times. That's no fun, and it’s very difficult to change. I'm very happy that Harvard is doing this. I hope to God it has some effect on some future president or leader. 

Your work, both of you, demonstrates a commitment to believing in the power of personal narrative to influence the wider public's perceptions. It's significant you've both told very dramatic stories about your own lives - or based on your own lives. Could you say a bit about how, particularly when you were collaborating together, how you thought about putting the personal in the larger historical context and how you view your own story as a kind of engine for a wider impact in influencing the world? I'm a historian, but you all are real historians in the sense that you're telling your own histories. Whereas I've always come at history as a larger question of states and nations and whole societie. You tell these stories so powerfully, through the stories of individuals: through Chris Taylor and Ron Kovic and Le-Ly and her family and so forth.

Oliver: One of the tragedies for me of the war is that my hearing was affected, because there was too much artillery. So I'm not sure I heard everything, but sorry, if the short of it is - what would be the one sentence question? 

The one sentence question is really how you think about personal narrative as an engine of influence in a larger perception about history?

Well, Platoon is a perfect example because it was based on my infantry experiences. Some dramatic license was taken, but still, about 50% of it was based on that hardcore infantry life. I wanted to give a worm's eye view, which means really getting down where Le-Ly lived — down in the dirt. That’s what the infantry knew, and she was a peasant. She knew life from the bottom up. Her father and mother were very influential in her life, and so was superstition.

For me, Vietnam was an eye-opener because I didn't know anything before I went. I came back disillusioned. But through other people and through writing, especially Ron Kovic, I was able to get away from myself, which was important. It allowed me to live the experience through someone else, and there was nobody more intense than Kovic. It was an extremely important experience for me, and it altered my life.

Every time I make a movie, it's like I meet someone or encounter something that changes my worldview. I love that. I think it’s the way we live our lives. I think all of you know this experience because you all have your own "Everest" to climb, learning from each other.

As for how we discovered each other, Le-Ly sent me her book, which had been very well-reviewed in the New York Times, a source I trusted at that time. Her agent was tough, but I bought the book. I couldn't do it right away, so I optioned it. Meanwhile, she wrote another book, a second one, which was longer. I bought both of them. It’s quite a story — if you read it all, it’s like an 8-hour movie. The challenge was condensing it into a hard-hitting two-and-a-half-hour film, or about two hours and twenty minutes. We condensed a lot of it.

Your question was about how we influenced each other. She influenced me because Buddhism requires you to think about all the suffering in the world, but they don’t make a big deal about it. It's not like our Christian religion, which does make a big deal about suffering. I mean, that’s why we have the crucifix and the cross. There are huge differences between East and West in this regard, and you have to be aware of that. Le-Ly is very tough. There’s a scene in San Diego where she encounters a Christian priest and speaks very innocently, in her peasant way, about what God is. She doesn’t understand the Western emphasis on suffering. For her, in the Buddhist routine, suffering is just a part of life, so why is it singled out?

All these questions arise. She is a Buddhist, and I became a Buddhist. I’ve studied Buddhism and have been meditating for years. What impresses me is the focus on things you don’t see—non-material things. It’s about how we grow, what we’ve achieved, and what our lives mean. These are very important questions, and they come up often in Le Ly’s worldview and that of all Buddhists. 

Did you learn things from your collaboration with Oliver? Were there perspectives that were new to you, or that shifted any of your views about the experience of war?

As you know, I only had a third-grade education at the village level, so what did I know about writing books? What did I know about anything? 

You seem to have learned quite a bit about it, quite efficiently. 

Well, the only thing I can say is that I just tell the story of what I saw. A lot of people get pressed down and have no chance to tell their story, but I was able to come to the United States—a country of free speech, free religion, and free thinking, where you are free to be who you are. Here, you can change one life or the whole world, if you want to. I learned one thing in America: if you put your mind to it, nothing is impossible.

Even a simple farm girl like me, coming to this country, was able to change one person's life. If I can do that, I can change many lives, and that’s what my book does. My husband was a Southern Baptist, and he would not accept Buddhism. He would not let any of our kids go to the temple. But I fought until the day he died, and I’m still talking about it today. I would not go into his church. I wouldn’t have a baptism in a church. I am Buddhist, and I will stay Buddhist until the day I die.

That’s how I see it in this country—you can say anything, do anything, if you’re willing to. That is my free will. Whatever I told in my book, or in the movie, or tonight—it’s from my heart. Whatever comes to mind, I share that. All I know, from my third-grade education, is if I had the education they have, I’d be writing a book every year. I know so many stories. But my English is limited, and writing books is difficult for me. Thankfully, people helped. I had a co-writer, Jay Wurts, who helped make it happen.

And there’s some other remarkable work you've done as well. Tell us a bit about your work with the East-West Foundation and your determination to help Vietnam and bring peace to the world more generally. Well, I just shared this with the group of people in the other building. When Americans came to Vietnam in the 1960s, I asked my sister’s boyfriend, "Why are the Americans here?" He said, "We came to Vietnam to help. We can give you freedom, and we can fight against the communists." I didn’t understand any of that. When South Vietnamese soldiers came to my village, they said the same thing: "We’re here to fight communists, save your village, and give you peace and freedom." But the Viet Cong said the same thing!

Nobody asked us, the villagers, what we wanted. If they had, we would have said, "Go home! Leave us alone so we can survive!" But nobody asked.

When I was able to take veterans back to Vietnam in 1988, I saw healing happen. I saw veterans meet with North Vietnamese, with their former enemies, and apologize: "I’m sorry I burned down your house, destroyed your village, killed your father, and raped your mother."

They confessed, and that’s where the healing began. This is what I believe: human beings, under one God, can come together and heal themselves. No doctor, no God can heal you—each individual must heal themselves. So, in 1988, after that trip, I set up a nonprofit foundation called East Meets West. I told the veterans, "If you cared about Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, now is your chance to come back and help. Vietnam needs your help, and by helping, you can heal yourself."

The veterans responded. One of them signed the first check to the East Meets West Foundation so we could build the first clean water well. It was a joint effort—U.S. veterans working together with North Vietnamese, with Viet Cong, with villagers—everyone. In just three months, they finished the well, and we had a grand opening. That’s how it started. He used his own money to build the well, and I funded everything to set it up.

We've been working there for almost 40 years now, from A to Z. We met Jack Fennie, a billionaire who gave our foundation $38 million. He brought in Bill Gates and other big donors, and together we rebuilt Vietnam over the last 35 years.

So, you two have been collaborators not just in making films, but also in philanthropic work.

Oliver: Le-Ly is a great hustler, as you can see. If you saw the movie, you saw her in the streets selling cigarettes. She’s still hustling, still doing fundraising. 

Le-Ly: What can you do? You’re not supposed to brag about it, but I say I’ve been a fundraiser all my life. I’m used to it. Back then, I was selling cigarettes and Coca-Cola to GIs, and I’m still at it!

So I watched Platoon and Heaven and Earth this weekend to get ready for this panel - to refresh my mind - and I I did it all within like a day and a half, the two of them. And I was struck by how we are as a society - civilization, whatever, here in the United States - very taken up with war stories. We have Ambrose Bierce from the Civil War. We have Hemingway. we have Phil Clay from the Middle Eastern War. We have um Norman Moore. We tell war stories. We're fascinated by war stories, and you together and individually have delivered some of the most powerful war stories around. Do you think that these stories that you have told are generalizable? Do you think that there are aspects of war that are specific only to the Vietnam War, or do you think that you're talking about all war, in some sense, when you tell your stories personally?

Oliver: I think all war is the most destructive thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Nothing survives it—everything is affected, including the survivors. Even the people who win get coarsened by war. They become arrogant, thinking they’re better than others. It just doesn’t work, in any way. War is a complete disaster.

Our politicians in America have forgotten that war is no good. They’ve fallen into this idea of the military-industrial economy, seeing it as a way to make money. We’re captured by money. Eisenhower’s speech is still one of the most effective warnings about this issue. And Kennedy, bless his soul, continued that fight—and paid for it.

As her mother says, every cemetery is filled with people who were once enemies, and now they’re all friends. War just doesn’t work. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Le-Ly: Gentlemen, no man on this Earth exists without coming from a mother—Mother Earth. A woman represents that world, and every child, every man, every woman belongs to Mother Earth. Just as every man is born from a woman, he must understand that. How could you, if your child or any child is in an accident, try so hard to save them—doing everything for that one life—yet still send your children, grandchildren, husbands, or brothers to war to be killed? For what? If you try so hard to save one little baby, why not try to save the whole world—every man and woman? In Buddhism, and as my father taught me in his songs...

Oliver: And I know you're an expert scholar on the Civil War. Oh, I’m sorry—have you finished? Le-Ly: No, it’s fine. 

Oliver: Definitely no. I was just saying, in response to your original question, I don’t think there’s a difference between the Civil War, Vietnam War, Iraq War, or Ukraine War. War is war. It always levels everything—destroys. And while it gives people the incentive to rebuild, if you're doing it for economic profit, it’s not good. It’s bad karma.

Let me ask you about another element, though, which I think is portrayed so powerfully in Born on the Fourth of July. That’s the way Ron Kovic, as a young teenager, is swept up in the ideology of heroism—of being John Wayne, proving his manhood by going to war. But then, of course, his entire sense of manhood, his life, and even his legs are destroyed by the war. That whole mythology of heroism is so powerfully undermined in his story.

Let me ask you about another element, though, which I think is portrayed so powerfully in Born on the Fourth of July. That’s the way Ron Kovic, as a young teenager, is swept up in the ideology of heroism—of being John Wayne, proving his manhood by going to war. But then, of course, his entire sense of manhood, his life, and even his legs are destroyed by the war. That whole mythology of heroism is so powerfully undermined in his story.  And in your view of history, is there heroism in what you’ve witnessed of war? Is there a kind of upside-down heroism? I was thinking about this, and I wondered—maybe you are the hero in Heaven and Earth. But what do you think of this concept that’s so seductive, the idea of heroism that draws people toward war?

Le-Ly: You have a family, a house, a husband, and two or three children. If someone breaks into your house with a gun, either you or your husband will stand up and fight to protect your family. In that moment, you’re the hero. In Vietnam, we knew we were saving our country. We were protecting our grandfather’s graveyard, our beautiful rice paddies, our ponds, our coconut trees, our ducks, chickens, pigs, cows, and water buffalo. We were saving our beautiful mountains and deep seas—that’s all we knew. We didn’t know anything about who signed contracts between the White House and our president back in the 1940s or 50s.

We just protected what was ours, so we could pass it down, generation after generation. Anyone who stands up to protect their piece of land is a hero. It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, what color their skin is, or what they believe in—they have to protect their people. In Vietnam, as someone who wasn’t educated, I believe only Vietnamese should control and take care of Vietnam. When the Chinese came, we fought them for a thousand years. The French came, and we fought them for a hundred years. We fought the Americans for twenty years. Nothing changes. That’s why we call those who fought heroes.

That’s why I made the documentary—to show that the women of Vietnam were heroes over twenty centuries.

So, what do you think about heroes? Or do you dismiss the idea as something delusional?

Oliver: Well, there are many heroes in life, and in a war film, you encounter heroism every day. You see it in the people working in the field—people are selfless in many ways, and they sacrifice a lot. The motivation of the North Vietnamese soldier was shocking to us because they were willing to die in ways we were not. It was their country, too, but still, it’s a big deal. Their zeal is ultimately what won the war.

Despite our body counts—millions of them dead—it didn’t matter. We didn’t understand where they kept coming from. During the Tet Offensive, we were clueless. What are they? Rabbits? Do they just keep multiplying? They outlasted us and suffered more in every single way. They endured disaster after disaster.

It was like a campaign where they refused to give up, much like if the South had won the Civil War. From that point of view, it’s as if we invaded the South, and to a Southerner who was deeply dedicated, it was their land. They’d be there long after we were gone.

Le-Ly: I just want to add one thing. To any young student here in the room: if anyone comes to invade this land, you would stand up and fight, just like the Vietnamese fought for their country. That’s how I teach my sons and my grandson. You have no right to get involved in someone else’s war, but if this country gives you education, gives you who you are today, you have to protect it. In Vietnam, we thought the same way. That’s something universal—anyone in any country should stand up and fight for their land.

So as this 50th Anniversary approaches, how do you feel about what you have been able to communicate to the wider public through your work writing and making films? What do you think still needs to be done and what is our responsibility, all of us here, to tell the right war story about Vietnam? What do we need to do? How can we take this moment and use it?

Le Ly: More books need to be written by both Vietnamese and Americans, from each of their perspectives. If people have their own points of view, they should share them honestly and truthfully—not as propaganda. That’s the first thing. Second, more movies, especially documentaries, should be made to give Vietnamese people a voice. Show the Vietnamese citizens, give them a face, a name, and something they can be proud of, so they know that their contributions to the country mattered, even if they died.

We need to keep doing this—every year, in every class, every time it's necessary—because we won’t always be here to share these stories. But there are many younger people now who are becoming good writers. Even though they were educated here, they need to go back to Vietnam and connect with the people from my generation and those before it.

So foregrounding Vietnamese voices is something you've emphasized a lot in our conversation, so that would be a really important measure. Oliver, what do you think? What needs to be done as we approach this 50th anniversary?

Oliver: Don't ask me—I'm very, very depressed about this. I'm the wrong person to ask. We made these three films, and they were effective to a degree. We recognized Vietnam, we gave them some money, and Americans moved toward reconciliation. But since 2000, we also entered into the War on Terror, essentially declaring war on 65 countries. Things have only gotten worse—much worse.

Our presidents and leadership have put us in deeper and deeper holes, fighting imaginary, paranoid enemies they choose to see because they know there's money in it. That’s how I see it. There’s no real reason to have fought these kinds of destructive wars, killing so many civilians over issues that have been driving this country crazy for decades.

It’s the reverse of the spirit of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Kennedy made the last great speech on peace. Now, I don't even hear the word peace promoted by any candidate. When they debate, it’s all about who can be tougher, who is willing to go all the way. It’s this constant macho buildup of aggression. This country is trapped in it.

We have to get out of this mindset. I look back to that period—the concept of peace and real liberalism—but it’s all been lost. The Democrats have become the war party. It’s shocking to me.

 So do you have any hope that film and your work can...?

Oliver: Film can make a small impact, it can tell some lessons. When people make a big deal about it, I appreciate it. Certainly, it's helped me. But I have very few illusions about the greed, hatred, and darkness in humanity.

Le Ly: When I mention films, books, and all that, I don't mean just about Vietnam—I mean around the world. Any country in war, every country that’s involved in war, should tell their side, give them a chance to share their voice, and show what their suffering is about.

We have a portrait of tremendous darkness in humanity, which you’ve just articulated. But there’s also hope, like Le-Ly suggests—that if we empower enough voices, that darkness can be pushed back. Empowering women is one of those ways to do it.

Oliver: However, look at Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Kamala Harris—they talk about war positively. They like the idea of it. So, let's not kid ourselves about women being a solution, because we can go back through history and see women like Golda Meir who were also advocates of war.

There are women, but what she's talking about is the collective power of women. And I agree. The collective power of femininity is more important. If men could be more feminized, I think that would help solve this basic tragic problem that goes all the way back to the Greeks and even earlier. I’ve just been reading a wonderful book by Madeline Miller about Achilles, which understands the Trojan War for what it really is. Please read it if you have a chance. Her book The Iliad is about the beginning of man, our written word in the West, and in the East, too, with the Indian epics. It’s all there.

But the problem now is that we’re nuclear. The risk is much larger. We could easily devastate our civilization. Forget economic rebuilding—after a nuclear disaster, it would be a monumental task. And I’m sure some people are already thinking about how to make money off it, because that’s the nature of man: how to rebuild, how to profit from disaster.

Mankind needs to understand that it doesn't matter how much money you have, how powerful you are, or what job you’ve done. None of it goes with you when you die. The only thing you take with you is wisdom and knowledge. When you pass on, you might wake up and think, "Why did I get all that money from selling weapons?" You can’t take it with you, and all you’re left with is bad karma to your grave. That's what I see.

So you have both told - separately and together - some very powerful war stories and you're saying that we need to tell a lot more in order to understand how we bring an end to war. So with that, let's head to questions and Tony is going to moderate the questions. [...] Essentially he's asking that there's actually a multiplicity of voices, not just one voice, from Vietnam. North and South is different. So are you likely to make a future movie that would bring in..?

Oliver: There’s no way another movie will be made about the Vietnamese experience—it’s very difficult, unless it’s a comedy. Making this movie was hard enough, and it didn’t even want to be made. It didn’t have a good box office result, so your question is unrealistic. It’s just not in the nature of the industry to give space to those stories. It’s really up to the Vietnamese to make those movies.

And as Le-Ly will tell you, they don’t put any money into those movies. So, you know, democracy is just a word, yeah…

Le-Ly: My sons are producers, and they work on big movies. Sometimes we receive good screenplays about Vietnam and the war. I forward them to him, and he forwards them to me. When I ask if he’ll produce it, he says no, because there’s no money in it. Unless someone comes with money to fund it, nobody wants to tell Vietnam’s story or produce a film about it.

Hi, I'm Anton. I'm a visiting professor in the department of government. There's a lot of young Harvard students here today, and I was wondering if you could both reflect on what there is to be hopeful about. I agree with you, Mr. Stone, that Americans don't commemorate Vietnam, or even want to think about it often, but is there something hopeful that you're seeing in a new generation of Americans? Thinking about the world, thinking about southeast Asia and whether - if you've been back to Vietnam, I'm sure you have - whether you see something emerging as well, in terms of a young new society in Vietnam that makes you hopeful. Maybe not. I could ask the question to both of you. 

Oliver: That's a good question. I have tremendous hope in the new generation, and I always look to them. I'm curious what they think. But the odds are against them. The American system is such that the schoolbooks kids get are controlled, analyzed, and sanitized. Most of the textbooks come out of either California or Texas, and those school boards have tremendous power. Then there's the media, which, in many ways, functions like government media. Much of it has been paid for, bought, or influenced, and it follows the government line.

American kids are paralyzed from the start unless they go to graduate schools or colleges and do their own research, which is what people like myself have done. But you have to be independent—you can't rely on textbooks or the media. So, to answer your question, it's not going to change. These young people will go to another war, they'll find another reason, and they won't remember history.

You know, after the Greeks, who were incredibly smart, they destroyed themselves with the Peloponnesian Wars—fighting among themselves. The fall of an empire always comes from within, never from without.

Le-Ly: One thing I want to add is that young students who come to places like this university, with professors and smart people to guide them, have a chance to understand life more deeply. They can be guided to make a living honestly and sincerely and give back to society. War takes so much—resources, human lives, bloodshed for thousands of years. Can we change that? Can they change that? A place like this can change them, but the U.S. government must invest in education, to help them understand war, peace, and how we can create a better world for our children and grandchildren to live in.

My name is Tyler. I wanted to ask about the cultural penetration of the Vietnam War and how it compares to where we are now. Vietnam has been very culturally influential in the United States. I see a lot of young faces here in the audience who don’t remember the war. I have a question for everyone on stage: Who remembers the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? The movies made about Vietnam shape our picture of it and help us continue to tell the story. Do you think it is likely that the war on terror and the war in Iraq will receive similar considerations and cultural penetration as the Vietnam era films, or are the dynamics too different to tell the same stories?

Oliver: I need your help. I'm sorry. 

He remarked on the power of film and other cultural products to shape our understanding of Vietnam, and will the same thing happen to our understanding of the wars of the 21st century in Iraq and Afghanistan? Will film and other cultural products be as influential in shaping how we understand those wars? 

Oliver: So, is film effective? Is that what he's asking? You're suggesting that film has been effective for Vietnam; will it be effective for these other wars? Film is indeed very effective, but since 2000, the films have often been excessively patriotic. The U.S. military is typically presented as being in the right.

If you remember, President Bush was largely motivated by Black Hawk Down to go into Iraq. The experience in Somalia from the '90s was dramatized in a way that many would consider pro-military. The Pentagon provides helicopters and material for films, but they don’t cooperate if your script contains critical lines. That's the reality of censorship, which has been around for a long time. I’ve been censored myself; I’ve never had any cooperation from them. They’re not interested in telling the truth to the new generation; they’re focused on preserving their jobs and promoting the company line.

Since 2000, war films have moved in a certain direction. For example, remember the film Pearl Harbor? It sanitized the events, just like the glorified depiction of the Benghazi story. Most films about the Iraq War haven’t been critical. There have been a few, like Green Zone, but many avoid crossing certain lines to avoid criticism from the press and media, which often doesn’t think independently.

We need to change the thinking and leadership in this country. We must return to the ideas of peace that Kennedy advocated for and help people understand the value of peace.

Le-Ly: As a Vietnamese, I come from a culture with 5,000 years of history and tradition, learning about Confucianism and Buddhism, which emphasize being good human beings. In our history books, we didn’t focus on the war; instead, we learned how to defend our country if it were invaded. This foundational teaching shaped us from a young age.

Many of my brothers and uncles learned differently in cities, but in rural Vietnam, the focus was on resilience and survival. Unfortunately, discussions about Vietnam often highlight negative aspects: the war, the refugee crisis, the term "red communism," and the killing fields. These portrayals don't reflect our desires; we just want to live peacefully.

The war destroyed our culture and our communities. It turned us against each other, like a green snake attacking its own. I see the impact of war in every culture, in every country. As a mother and grandmother, I believe in the importance of love and compassion for our children. We cannot continue moving from battlefield to battlefield without losing our humanity.

From 1955 to 1975, the pain my village endured was immense. We lost everything: our water buffalo, ducks, and chickens. City dwellers lost cars and houses, but we had only our land. We just wanted to be left alone to survive. The people in cities cannot thrive without the support of rural areas. It's essential to preserve farmland and allow people to live peacefully.

Hi, my name is Vivian. I am a student. I'm a senior at the college. Thank you, Mr. Stone for coming and for speaking with us. But my question is directed to Le-Ly. [speaks Vietnamese] I'll turn back to English now, but my question for you is: For many Vietnamese Americans and those in the diaspora, especially my age, getting family to talk about things that happened during the Vietnam War is not the easiest of conversations. It is something that is avoided. Unlike you, who has shared immense vulnerability today, getting them to share that same vulnerability is difficult. However, many of us also want to continue the tradition you have and the legacy you've left behind to share these stories. How do you recommend going about these conversations? How should we approach having these discussions?

Le-Ly: To me, for the younger generation like you: don’t fall in love, don’t get married. Instead, get a backpack and travel to third-world countries. Volunteer for one, two, or three years to learn how other cultures live, what they need, and how much suffering they endure. Recognize how much we waste here. Then, bring that knowledge back and make a change. You cannot learn what is out there from here; you have to go out there. One voice is very important. You might think that one person cannot make a difference, but one person can indeed create change. It’s not just about you; only you can do it.

There are endless stories that can come from the Vietnam War. They’re controversial, but they can also be turned into profit. You mentioned earlier the money-making machine of other war films, so I’m curious: are films about the Vietnam War also a money-making machine? How do they make money?

Oliver: Yes, they do make money, thank God, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to make the next one. Movies are a business, and that’s something that shouldn’t be overlooked.

One point I was trying to make is that many recent war movies are produced from a very patriotic perspective, which is also tied to their profitability. Since the 2000s, it’s gotten worse—much worse. The changes brought about by the Patriot Act and the sense of emergency pushed by George Bush and his group of neoconservatives have altered this country’s landscape forever. Citizens United also played a role, as suddenly you needed a billion dollars to run for office.

These changes started seriously in 2000, and for me, it was shocking to see how little debate there was—especially regarding the Patriot Act and how dissent is not allowed anymore. You can’t say certain things in this country without facing consequences. People have been voicing this concern for a decade now, and we have to be careful. That’s not a way to live life.

-A Half Century Voyage Beyond the Vietnam War with Oliver Stone and Le-Ly Heyslip, The Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, Sept 18 2024. (Transcript edited for clarity and length).