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"Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America's Forever Wars," featuring a vital discussion with America's foremost director of films on the Vietnam War - Oliver Stone.

To mark Veteran's Day, the fifth anniversary of the Quincy institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University and the Quincy Institute invited Stone aboard the USS Midway in front of 250 guests to discuss how America's relationship with war influenced his work over the past 30 years.

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World War III may be inevitable

Iconic director Oliver Stone is not optimistic.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, and nearly 35 years since his film "Platoon" debuted, America is still hopelessly enamored with violence, and Washington, encouraged by the tandem power centers of Wall Street and the media, is still engineered for war.

“Our country is sabotaging itself. Why do we keep going back” in search of a necessary enemy? He asked. “We track a pattern of intervention, there is a repetition” that will eventually lead us to another world war.

Grim thoughts, given in a conversation moderated by (Ret.) Col. Greg Daddis, Iraq War veteran and director of the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University. Daddis is also USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History (Thursday’s event was held on the USS Midway museum) and a board member at the Quincy Institute, which partnered in the event.

Stone’s own experiences as a 20-year-old Army infantryman during the most tumultuous years in Vietnam (and politically, socially, back home in the U.S.) — 1967-1968 — formed the basis for Platoon, which won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director in 1987 and is considered one of the most important and viscerally impactful Vietnam War films in Hollywood history. It is the first in his Vietnam War trilogy, which includes "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), and "Heaven and Earth" (1993).

As a young man inspired by the tales of mythological Odysseus and a father who had served in World War II, he was driven to war by wanderlust and the frenetic unfocused energy youth. His time in combat there, in his words, took the scales from his eyes and upon returning to an “country he no longer knew” set him on a course of discovery, his mind and creativity coalescing around a burning skepticism of the government, social convention, and conformity.

This is all detailed in his excellent 2020 autobiography, “Chasing the Light” which charts Stone’s youth, his time in Vietnam, and his screenwriting/directing career though “Platoon.”

He didn’t directly mention the recent elections or the current conflict in Ukraine on Thursday night, but insisted that the “strong compulsion” to use war not only as a driver of industry but as the first tool in the box for resolving foreign disputes, still fueled Washington policy. Despite all of the failures of the last 50 years, “it’s impossible to break that lock” that war has on the collective psyche, he said. Even “Platoon” which is a searing indictment of the what he calls the Three Lies of the military and war, has failed to turn the society against interventionism.

“No film is going to change people if you don’t want to be changed,” he said, charging that military recruitment had actually gone up after the film was released.

In recent years, Stone has courted controversy with his series of interviews with Vladimir Putin and his questioning of the Washington/Western narrative of that war. The only mention he made to that was that “I have been passionately driven and for that I’ve paid a price,” and criticized censorship (his 2016 documentary "Ukraine on Fire" had been initially banned on You Tube and then reinstated).

“Free speech is a right, not a privilege” he said, to applause from the room. Of the current political dynamic, he lamented that the “neocons are here from the last administration as well as this administration, they are not going away."

“We’ve made one mistake after another on foreign affairs, there is no reason why we cannot be partners with Russia and China. We don’t need a war.”

Unfortunately, the country’s love for was is “a religion,” he said. All one can do is keep resisting it. His entire life after Vietnam seems to have sprung from that adage. “Be a rebel, and that’s the best way to be.”

-Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, "Oliver Stone: World War III may be inevitable," Responsible Statecraft, Nov 16 2024

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On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Academy Award-winning writer and director Oliver Stone. He discusses and reflects on the 9/11 attacks 20 years on, from the heroism of the first responders to the rush to go to war by the Bush administration, the reasons why 9/11 happened and how they were ignored by Americans, the War on Terror and US imperialism, why he defends President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and opposes the hysteria from the media over the withdrawal, the Wall Street crash of 2008, and much more!

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Trump, Putin and a Sydney ‘love-child’ 

Oliver Stone is an American film and documentary director, producer and screenwriter. His work includes Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, JFK and Any Given Sunday. I spoke with him on Thursday.

Fitz: Mr Stone, I’m not going to waste too much of your time by burbling compliments. Let me just record my deepest admiration for almost your entire body of work.

OS: Thank you, Peter.

Fitz: In your long and storied career, have you had much to do with Australia or Australians?

OS: I’ve been there, I don’t know, a dozen times, often to open my films. Before that, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, I would go to Sydney on R&Rs, which were quite exciting.

Fitz: In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?

OS: [Pause.] Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, “Hello, I’m your daughter.” That turned into some few days, naturally, trying to get to know this sincere young woman who’d lost touch with her mother. Eventually, we sorted it out with a DNA test, and she was not my daughter.

Fitz: Moving on! Having watched all 12 episodes of your documentary Untold American History, I was absorbed by your theme that what we think is actually happening in the world isn’t what’s really happening – a theme that runs through all your work. Is it fair to say that it was specifically your experience in the Vietnam War that made you see the world entirely differently?

OS: The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not. So my military experience pretty much started to repeat itself. I would get into a subject matter, such as a JFK film, and the deeper I went, the more it became apparent that there was a lot of lying going on. So yeah, I had a deep suspicion, a deep distrust of the official narrative. We all should know by now that governments often lie to cover their arse.

Fitz: I loved your film on JFK and your documentary on his assassination asserting it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who shot him. But given your experience with Australia, I’m hoping you won’t mind if I put this next question in Australian vernacular?

OS: Go on.

Fitz: So who the f--- did kill JFK?

OS: [Pause.] I don’t know, but you can start with the CIA and its great interest in Kennedy in the Cuban operations, and how Kennedy – by not going through with the desire of the warrior class to attack Cuba in 1962, after the Bay of Pigs debacle – really made serious enemies. There were people who really thought he was a traitor. We kept hearing the word “traitor” used by certain of these people, some of whom worked with the CIA; in fact, there are several suspects inside that agency who we’d like to know more about.

We can start at the top with Allen Dulles, the CIA director who was fired by Kennedy. And there are other suspects from the CIA, but it’s certainly not the whole organisation. No, it’s always about some key men who operated on their own terms because they had been given so much leeway by president Eisenhower over the previous eight years. They had operated “off the shelf” – that was part of their charter. In 1947, under the National Security Act, they were given that vague right to do so on a covert basis as the president saw fit. That part of their charter was a huge mistake. Hundreds of covert operations have followed.

Fitz: Through your whole career, you’ve taken turns that nobody saw coming, with one of your most recent being your advocacy of nuclear power in your documentary Nuclear Now. I would have positioned you as a strong liberal, but the position you take in this documentary is we need to go back to nuclear which, at least here in Australia, aligns with some notably shrill conservative voices.

OS: Nuclear energy was one of the great discoveries of the last century, actually the late 19th century, and it was developed. Of course, it was given a stimulus by WWII and the chase for the atomic bomb, but people have not understood and they haven’t distinguished between a bomb and the uses of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. To make nuclear energy, you only need approximately 2 per cent enriched uranium, as opposed to approximately 95 per cent enriched for a bomb; there’s a huge difference in making and producing that kind of energy. So nuclear energy is very usable, it’s been proven safe for many usages over the years, and we should be employing more and more of it in the mix with hydro and renewable energy to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

Fitz: We both hope you live for another 30 years and can keep working for 27 of them. But is it fair to say you’d rather live, surely, next to a wind farm than even a small nuclear facility in your backyard?

OS: I’d have no fear. Because there’s going to be a lot of new small SMRs – small modular reactors – built for many purposes, and with updated safety measures. It’s the next step, especially for the Americans who are developing that form of it. The Russians and Chinese are way ahead of us in nuclear development. They’ve been doing it consistently, whereas we stopped building in the 1970s after the Three Mile Island supposed disaster. No one died, and no serious radiation was released. This was a shame because it was so misunderstood and hyped as a disaster. America can’t build a nuclear reactor any more on that scale as we did from the 1950s to the ’70s. We gave up, but now we’ve started building again to some degree with scientists and researchers, with more than 50 different companies pursuing original research, including small divisions at Westinghouse and General Electric. But these are smaller reactors. Meanwhile, the world, especially the less developed regions, are going to need a lot of nuclear energy, a lot. We’re going to need not just a little, we need a lot.

Fitz: Another surprising turn that you took, at least for me, were your interviews with Vladimir Putin, in The Putin Interviews. I take your point that he’s not just a cartoon character dictator, but a man of flesh and blood beset by forces that are around him, navigating the best he can. Nevertheless, are you shocked, as I’m shocked, by the brutality in the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin at the base of it?

OS: I’m sorry, there has been a great deal of awful new propaganda about Russia ever since the turn of this century. It’s coming from a neoconservative Washington, which is seeking to destroy the so-called Russian Empire and use it as a rich base of natural resources to be exploited by the West. We’ve made Putin into the major villain of our time because he’s invaded Ukraine, whereas the United States – with NATO – illegally invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria with impunity. This is a war that’s been very misunderstood, especially the stakes. If you remember correctly, the United States staged a coup in Ukraine in 2014, which exiled the elected president and brought in a vehement and strongly anti-Russian government. They have a long history in Eastern Europe of fighting Russia. Donbas, which is the eastern, Russian-minority part of Ukraine, never joined this new government, nor did Crimea, and they were identified as “terrorists” by the government. The Russians, however, saw them as “separatists” who wanted no part of this unelected government.

While pretending to follow a peace process in Minsk I and Minsk II, the US and European Union betrayed Russia, significantly building up the Ukrainian army from 2016 on. One hundred thousand of these troops were poised to retake Donbas in February 2022. At the same time, the Ukrainian government was making quite a bit of noise about getting nuclear weapons into Ukraine. This was a huge issue for the Russians because, as you may remember, Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush negotiated in the 1980s and ’90s for a new, peaceful Europe. East Germany was reunited with West Germany on the basis that NATO would not move beyond Germany one inch to the east. That vow was broken repeatedly by the United States. NATO, with our blessing, added 13 countries to its treaty, and grew into a monster on the borders of Russia in a major movement to supposedly “contain” Russia.

There’s no point going into the history of this enormous violation to Russian national security, but it would be similar to Mexico or Canada suddenly declaring they have put a hostile army on the Mexican or Canadian border of the United States, and were, with nuclear weapons, minutes from all our major industrial centres. Nor should it be forgotten that it was the United States who reignited the Cold War in 2002 when Bush abruptly abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. So, between using NATO to expand and breaking several other nuclear agreements, the United States and NATO began the process of encircling Russia, which became increasingly suspicious of the motives of the West.

To put it in another way, if Putin had not reacted to the build-up on his borders by invading Donbas and annexing Crimea (which occurred, interestingly, without violence, because most of the population was pro-Russian), he would have lost the trust of the Russian people, who were not blind to what was going on. That’s when Putin, after giving us several warnings about the West crossing Russian red lines, reacted and sent some 120,000 Russian troops into Donbas, which had already become a bloody war by 2022 with some 7000 to 8000 “separatists” murdered by the illegal Kyiv gangster government. It was certainly not in Putin’s interest to destroy the Donbas. To the contrary, he wants to have it back in the Russian sphere of interest and keep it productive, which it once was. So one wonders where all this alleged brutality propaganda is coming from? Motive is necessary, and perhaps when this war is over, there’ll be a more rational reporting of the news.

Fitz: We can talk about this one for three hours, and I’d love to, but I’m aware of your time restrictions. Do you just despair for the current state of the movie industry with the endless Marvel franchise stuff?

OS: I don’t despair because there’s always good movies made, and there are ways to make them. I despair at the lack of depth of the theatrical movie in the United States, because the distribution system rewards essentially only blockbusters and crucifies the less lucrative releases. As a result, it’s very hard for independent and less popular productions to get made and distributed, which is a great loss to the art of cinema. It’s not just a circus business.

Fitz: Of all your movies, the scene that I most loved is in Any Given Sunday, with Al Pacino’s as the ageing Coach D’Amato talking to his team before the big NFL match: “We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time. Now I can’t do it for you. I’m too old … but the inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch!” It’s a classic. When you shot it, and Al Pacino delivered it, did you recognise it at the time as that, or only when you saw it at the cinema?

OS: We never know what’s going to hit or not, or connect with an audience. You never know. Yes, that happened to be taken up, and it’s been used by numerous coaches across the country, and possibly on some Australian rugby teams, as a model for rah-rah speeches.

But, nonetheless, that movie called for it, not only because the team was losing, but also because the actor, Al Pacino, was in a mental hole too. He was having problems with ageing. If you remember, the movie is based on his being edged out of his NFL club, which goes on all the time. People get too old. So there was a lot of personal identification with it. At that point, I had been in the movie business a long time. And there were new executives coming in and a lot of them were women. And so that Cameron Diaz character, the team owner, was based in large part on a couple of the cut-throat executives I met in the film business who were young women in their 20s and 30s.

That’s not to say there weren’t cut-throat young men also emerging from colleges and entering the film business without much love or understanding of cinema.

Fitz: But did you have any experience in a dressing room with a coach saying stuff like that in your background? Or anything where a coach had spoken like that?

OS: I played tackle football in elementary school, but the speech was created for the film.

Fitz: You wrote that?

OS: Yeah. Because I believe football most embodies warfare – you win or you lose. It’s tough, gritty, people get hurt, and key decisions have to be made. And you have to recognise that, often, the outcome is a matter of inches.

Fitz: Allow me to say, as somebody who was sort of raised in dressing rooms like that, across several countries, it is extraordinary to me how well you captured it. We’ve all heard the theme of that speech a hundred times, except our coaches were never quite so eloquent as that. I mean, that was extraordinary!

OS: Thank you, that’s what movies are made for, I believe. Movies are bigger than life. And those are the kinds of movies that I especially like. Unfortunately, so many movies now are smaller than life. Times change. I miss the old movies, the spectacular shows.

Fitz: Last question, if I may. Most of us in Australia don’t understand Trump. We sort of understand how he might have been elected once, but after everything that happened, finishing with January 6, we cannot understand how Americans could look at him and go, “Yeah, let’s have four more years of that.”

OS: And if you look at the Biden administration, you can say the same thing. It has gotten America into three wars, if you really think about it: (1) Ukraine, which is really a proxy war to weaken or destroy Russia, which is the most extreme strategy any American president has ever attempted; (2) the Middle East war continued in Israel, with America’s full support of Israel; and (3) now we’re bombing Yemen ourselves.

Biden is a simple-minded, old-fashioned Cold Warrior of the first degree. As mad as [WWII US Air Force] General Curtis LeMay was in his way. He’s extremely dangerous. Trump might not be a solution to this madness, but he’s nothing compared to Biden or to the damage that George W. Bush did to my country by declaring the “War on Terror”, which was wholly unnecessary. He provoked this new world that we’re living in of extreme violence and militarism.

From Bush, it grows to where we are now in a most dangerous position. Obama, then Trump, now Biden, have provoked China as well by declaring a “pivot to Asia” and sending American marines and so forth to Australia, building up the Pacific Fleet … The US is brokering a major war in the Pacific. This is a very incendiary position. I hardly see what’s so wonderful about Biden.

Fitz: He is not Trump, is the first thing that’s wonderful about Biden!

OS: That’s your way of putting it, but I don’t think you fully understand that Biden has truly split the world into two scared camps and abides by the outdated imperial notion that the US can still dominate the world. It cannot. It must accept a multipolar world that can exist economically without war.

Fitz: OK, thanks. It has been one of the privileges of my professional life to speak to you and I seriously thank you.

-Peter FitzSimons, "Trump, Putin and a Sydney ‘love-child’ … I’d chat to Oliver Stone on any given Sunday," The Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 11 2024

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Aussie love child

In February, I was thrilled to interview the great cinematic impresario and political activist of global standing Oliver Stone. When I asked what the most formative period of his life was, he replied: OS: “The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not.” When he mentioned that he had often come to Australia on R&R from Vietnam, I asked the obvious. Fitz: “In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?” OS: [Pause.] “Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, ‘Hello, I’m your daughter.’ ” In the end, it wasn’t. But I loved the story.

-Peter FitzSimons, "The best bits of Fitz. My best chats of 2024," The Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 15 2024

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How to film a conversation

So what about visual language?

I'd say it starts in the script. You and I are talking. Everything we are saying essentially is very interesting, to us in this moment in the first dimension because we are fascinated by the unpredictability of what's going to happen. But visually this is very static, probably a boring image— two people talking in profile at each other. How to make this interesting is a big challenge. I would go about it minutely.

I would first of all try to figure out, well the lighting’s not bad, but try to get some decent light going. And also we have some views out the windows [sweeping views of a trademark Technicolor California sunset over the Pacific Ocean| Obviously, we have some sculpture, we have an office, there’s things to play off of.

But ultimately if it is going to work, we're gonna have to get to the words and the words would interpret for us. | would probably cut away to some of the concepts that are being illustrated. I might shoot, I could shoot this way [pointing into my face], I could shoot over, I could shoot into, I could shoot your lips, your eyes, your nose, the way of your habits, your manner of talking. I could pull back to a wide and have the whole room and have that effect, bouncing off. Some tight singles or else overs. I also have a choice. I could shoot low, shoot high, I could shoot over the shoulder, I could cut across the axis and shoot across your shoulders that way [pointing in another direction]. So | could combine a shot of you this way, this way, and then I have it cut this way and that way. I could do a split screen. What I’m trying to say is that I've given you about fifty options of how to shoot this very normally conventional scene.

-Oliver Stone on how he would film a conversation. From "The Wounded and The Living," by Steve Beck. Mondo 2000 magazine, Issue 17, 1997

[Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine.]

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"I'm not a historian and don't pretend to be"

Q. Talking about cruelty, we saw the cruelty of the Japanese army in Nagasaki – exhibits of the Nanjing Massacre, military sex slavery, and Unit 731 at the Oka Masaharu Museum.[9] The US too, even after its use of the atomic bomb, used cruel weapons such as Agent Orange, depleted uranium weapons, cluster bombs, and drones. The nature of war is cruel, but in the case of the US, it seems rampant. Is there any historical significance in this cruelty of the United States?

Stone: I do not believe that the United States was as cruel as Germany and Japan were. I mean I was in Vietnam; I saw Agent Orange dropped on us many times. I still do not know. Maybe I am going to be a victim of it. I do not think about it that much, but I know people have claimed they had been. We saw the results with the Vietnamese. Agent Orange was the cruelest we became. Although we developed mustard gas in WWI, we never used it. The atomic bomb and Agent Orange were the worst. When Obama talks about Syria and he says that the red line for Syria is chemical weapons, what a fucking hypocrite! Why doesn’t he look at our own history? He probably would not even admit that we used chemical weapons in Vietnam. And we made a big deal about Saddam Hussein’s having used chemical weapons when we were trying to justify invading Iraq. (Kuznick: But when Saddam used them against the Iranians, we initially ran interference for him at the UN, preempting a resolution explicitly condemning the Iraqi use. He was our ally. And after he used them against Iraq’s own Kurdish people at Halabjah in 1988, the U.S. increased aid to his vile regime.) So who makes money off this? Dow Chemical profited immensely in Vietnam, but the students drove their recruiters off campus. But cruelty, no; cruelty is not human nature. There are always cruel soldiers in every country in the world, people who are racist, people who are stupid. But as a policy, the United States. . . , take waterboarding. We do it, but we always back away from it, whereas you have to admit that the Germans and the Japanese wholeheartedly embraced cruelty for many years. If they had been winners in WWⅡ, we would be experiencing Unit 731 in Manchuria. [...]

Q: Japan faces debate over historical issues such as the Nanjing Massacre and military sex slavery, and when we try to deal with these issues honestly we are called anti-Japanese. Do you get such reaction too as being called anti-American or unpatriotic? How do you deal with such criticism?

Stone: I think the strongest credential I can put forward would be, number one, my service in the military in Vietnam, which is hard for them to get around. John McCain can bluster all he wants, but at the end of the day, he was a bomber; he bombed people from the air and he knows that. I do not understand the man’s mentality, how, after being in the prison camp like he was, he can still have such anger and hatred in his heart for the perceived enemies of the United States, possibly soon including China. McCain is what I would call an unreconstructed, un-evolved soldier; many of them exist. I, on the other hand, feel good about my mission…because I served honorably. To be honest, I mean it was not an honorable war, but I served honorably within the confines of my own understanding of the war. And at the end of the day, I became a warrior for peace, which is what I am now, not a warrior for more wars, so I feel strong about that.

And number two, I think what is very important for me is that I did not speak out until I had made roughly eighteen feature films. I spoke as a dramatist, which is my profession. I am not a historian, and I do not pretend to be. I do not have the grounding in it, but I do care about history and I can dramatize it well. Now as I speak out as a documentarian with a background of having made movies, I get criticized very often for nonsense reasons, rubbish reasons. The way they threw it at me was that I made up history, and it took me a while to understand it. Many dramatists have used history before me and I do not apologize for doing historical drama. I never once claimed that I was doing a documentary, and I was not doing a documentary, never, and they put words in my mouth. Anyway, that is why I feel that I can talk strongly without feeling shame.

-Oliver Stone, "“We Used Chemical Weapons in Vietnam”: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick Explain How Telling the Untold History Can Change the World for the Better," By Satoko Oka Norimatsu & Narusawa Muneo, Truthout, Oct 6 2013

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Director Oliver Stone leads lecture on impacts of Vietnam War 50 years later

During the Vietnam War, USS Midway’s below-deck hangar quartered iconic fighter jets like F-4 Phantoms and F-8 Crusaders. These days, the space is a showroom for the USS Midway Museum’s restored planes, helicopters, and flight simulators that help tell the story of the United States military’s proud tradition of aviation innovation.

There is also space carved out of the vast hangar for special events. Last Thursday, San Diego State University’s Center for War and Society and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft hosted renowned American film director Oliver Stone to share a different story about our country's military history.

“Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America’s Forever Wars,” the title of Thursday’s talk by Stone, examined how the Vietnam War, and other wars before and after, shaped foreign policy and American society, and set the tone for so-called ��forever wars” the U.S. has found itself involved in since the end of Vietnam.

Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone leads the "Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America’s Forever Wars" lecture aboard USS Midway on Nov. 14, 2024Open the image full screen. Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone leads the "Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America’s Forever Wars" lecture aboard USS Midway on Nov. 14, 2024. (SDSU) Guided by questions from Gregory Daddis, director of the Center for War and Society and USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History, Stone began the talk with details of his early life, growing up a son to an Army Lieutenant Colonel who served on President Eisenhower’s staff in Paris, France and post-occupation Berlin, Germany during World War II, and how his father’s anti-communism stance influenced his own ideology.

“As the war ended and the U.S. became more conscious of the so-called Russian threat … He joined the band because I guess that’s one way to get ahead,” Stone said.

It wasn’t fear, so much, that pushed Stone to enlist in the Army during Vietnam. He talked about how he spent a year in South Vietnam as a teacher and left the country with more questions than answers.

“I didn’t feel like my education was complete. I was still confused about what was going on because I didn’t understand all of the politics … I went back because I didn’t feel that I knew enough. I didn’t want to be a fraud,” Stone recounted. “I felt like I had to go to this war to understand it. I had to go back. I had already seen a bit of it from the fringes, but I went right into the heart of it in ‘67.”

He also briefly discussed a period of several years following his return from war during which he struggled with, and eventually overcame, various mental health challenges, and how he settled on film school.

“You can get a college degree from watching movies? Why not?” Stone quipped.

Stone went on to direct a trilogy of Vietnam War-focused films that address the brutality and politics of the conflict, starting with “Platoon” in 1986. The film was based, in part, on Stone’s own experience on the frontlines, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

“Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) is based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic by the same title. Stone again won the Academy Award for Best Director.

The last film of the trio was “Heaven & Earth” (1993), based on the memoirs “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” and “Child of War, Woman of Peace” by Vietnamese-American writer Le Ly Hayslip, who was in attendance Thursday on USS Midway.

“No film is going to change people if they don’t want to be changed. A lot of people saw that movie and signed up. A lot of them went to the Iraq War … You can’t say that [it’s anti-war]. You can just say, ‘Here it is,’” he said.

Throughout the lecture, Stone spoke about the nation’s military-industrial complex and how it evolved and influenced U.S. action in different conflicts spanning the 20th century, and the aftermath of those conflicts on foreign policy.

One of Daddis’ final questions for Stone was about legacies, and what the most important legacy of the Vietnam War was.

“Obviously nothing. Nobody paid attention and we keep going back to war. We’ve made one mistake after another in foreign affairs. We’re not a very smart country diplomatically. Had we been cooler, we could’ve gotten along with everybody in this world, with one or two exceptions. There’s no reason why we can’t be partners with Russia and with China, and we could have economic competition. We don’t need a war,” Stone said.

“We as a nation continue to wrestle with the legacies of our long and divisive war in Vietnam, even 50 years on,” Daddis said. “So to have one of America's foremost film directors share his thoughts on that war with our students and community is truly special. It's vital for us to consider how popular culture and film shape our conceptions of war and of the militarized foreign policies we undertake. And because Stone is both a veteran and a director, he brings a unique view to how Americans consume stories about wars and the soldiers who fought in them.”

Stone’s lecture was the fourth in the Center for War and Society’s ongoing J. Fred and Susan Oliver Speaker Series. The lectures are intended to foster informed dialogue around the impact of a militarized U.S. foreign policy on society. Student involvement is a key to the sponsorship. Last Thursday, nearly 25 SDSU students attended the lecture alongside scholars, guests, guests and military-affiliated organizations.

This year’s lecture event was co-sponsored by the Quincy Institute, the Washington, D.C. thinktank whose mission is to “promote ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.”

-Rafael Avitabile, "Director Oliver Stone leads lecture on impacts of Vietnam War 50 years later," San Diego State University, Nov 19 2024

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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