back-and-totheleft

[back-and-totheleft]

Natural Born Filmmaker

Veteran. Agitator. Provocateur. Bully. Conspiracy nut. Patriot. These are just some of the labels used over the years to describe Oliver Stone. (Subtle isn’t one of them.) He has spent his filmmaking career charting the currents that propelled America in the post-war era: war, greed, sensationalism, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Stone embraces myth then cuts it up to reveal a truth at its heart. Whether it’s the dark side of the counterculture (The Doors), the moment America entered the media age of paranoia and punditry (JFK), the ambition—and folly—that comes with being the leader of the most powerful country in the world (Nixon), or the corporatization of America (Wall Street, Any Given Sunday), Stone has used film to chronicle the dreams, fears, and disillusionments that marked the last half of the 20th century as the most creative—and destructive—in U.S. history. (Is it really a surprise that Stone’s latest movie is about the defining moment of the 21st century?)

So, what’s all the fuss? Why does the phrase “An Oliver Stone Film” make people tense up and prepare to dismiss Stone’s latest as the work of an irresponsible attention-seeker? It’s not just Stone’s provocateur identity that rankles. It’s his unwillingness to adhere to Hollywood conventions. When he tackles true-life subjects like Nixon or the JFK assassination he is respectful but not reverential. For Stone, to be reverential toward history is to simplify it, put it into its place. Stone understands that the Richard Attenborrough approach to biopics (Young Winston, Gandhi) turns the past into a Sunday school lesson, orderly and good for the soul. Stone prefers to mainline history and entertainment into your system. Fact and speculation crash into each other until they create a truth that illuminates what you thought you knew into something new, cleansed of myth, profound.

Stone didn’t make his first “Oliver Stone” movie until 1986; in the first phase of his career, he was one of Hollywood’s most successful—and notorious—screenwriters. His scripts for Scarface (1983), and Year of the Dragon (1985) showed he had a gift for punchy, populist story structure. His Oscar-winning script for Midnight Express (1978) was attacked for taking liberties with real events to jack up the film’s already unbearable tension. Even then Stone knew that in successful films, emotional truth trumps fact.

His first two directorial efforts, Seizure (1974) and The Hand (1981), are the works of a man who is torn between avant-garde experimentation and exploitation gusto. It would take Stone’s third film, Salvador, for him to announce himself as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. He’s become the point man for the Baby Boom’s collective memory— and the poet laureate for the portion of that generation that didn’t get deferments. To consider his body of work is to see how we’ve processed the past 50 years of American history and culture. His movies aren’t about what happened as what we believe happened, and how we feel about it. He knows you have to grab viewers by the throat to get their attention. Like D.W Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, Stone understands that film, more than any other art form, is best at conveying the emotional spectrum of the human experience, whether its a rock concert, the movement on the floor of the stock exchange, or the gladiatorial battle of football. Stone sees life as spectacle and spectacle as entertainment.

Salvador (1986). Released in April of ’86, Stone’s agit-prop docudrama about Reagan’s disastrous military policies in Central America should’ve been a hand grenade rolled into multiplexes. It barely made a sound. But those who saw it knew it was the start of something special; it ushered in a resurgence in topical filmmaking that had helped define the New Hollywood 15 years earlier, at a time when earnest and efficient political movies (1983’s Under Fire, 1984’s The Killing Fields) were overshadowed by powder-wigged period pieces and mass-appeal blockbusters. Stone knew that audiences needed to be shaken out of their Reagan-era complacency. Salvador did that. By telling the misadventures of Richard Boyle (James Woods), an amoral journalist looking to hustle his way into respectability, and Dr. Rock (James Belushi), Boyle’s piggish “friend” who’s looking for a good time, Stone creates his own version of Gonzo journalism disguised as a grungy road movie. It’s Hunter S. Thompson by way of Costa-Gavras or John Frankenheimer: Fear and Loathing in El Salvador.

The film’s heart is a career-defining performance by Woods. Manic, impassioned, sleazy, the actor may be portraying the real life Richard Boyle, but the characterization is really a takeoff on Oliver Stone, the crusading young filmmaker determined to say what no one else wants to hear. In Boyle, Stone sees a man driven to capture the Truth at the cost of everything else, even his own safety. In contrast to the “hero’s journey” structure of many Stone films, where the protagonist starts out an idealistic youth and loses his innocence, only to have it restored with a wised-up sense of how the world operates, Salvador begins in amorality, with the world’s sleaziest “good guy” at the center.

In a way Stone is right to dispense with any pretense Boyle has lost his “innocence.” Stone knows that in order to function as a journalist in the shadow of authoritarian regimes like El Salvador’s you must keep your moral compass to yourself. Stone sees a world where leftist guerillas are branded “terrorists” by a U.S.-sanctioned right-wing militaristic government in the name of fighting “communists.” He sees politics are a series of compromises; therefore, taking an amoral stance is a means of keeping one’s sanity. It isn’t until Boyle starts hustling for a good cause that he discovers his idealism. By the end of the movie Boyle’s experiences in the hell of El Salvador, like Stone’s tours in Vietnam, have allowed him to achieve a small form of salvation.

All of this would be a drag if Stone didn’t possess the instincts of a sensational filmmaker. Salvador’s dialogue is coarse and funny. (“Where else can you get a virgin to sit on your face for seven bucks, two virgins for twelve.”) While Boyle and Dr. Rock are vulgar scoundrels, they have human frailties and needs, and as the title suggests, they are not beyond redemption. In the film’s most celebrated scene, Boyle, a lapsed Catholic, goes to confession after a 32-year absence. His reason? To ask God’s forgiveness for leading a wicked life so he can marry the peasant woman (Elpidia Carillo) who’s inspired him to reform, sort of. (Boyle can’t just promise to give up booze and pot; he has to carve out exemptions.) This outwardly simple, dialogue-and-performance driven moment—just two men in a booth, one of them hidden behind a screen—marks the start of Boyle’s tilt away from self-interest. We are literally seeing a man discover what it means to know right from wrong.

Stone’s visual style is just as bluntly elegant. The first film in Stone’s 12-year, 11-movie relationship with ace cinematographer Robert Richardson, Salvador displays a grit and immediacy that must’ve been a shock to audiences grown accustomed to the Laszlo Kovacses and Dean Cundeys of the ’80s. Richardson’s camera is everywhere at once. It sees but it doesn’t linger. The scenes of street life in El Salvador have a jagged yet fluid sense of motion. Richardson doesn’t objectify the locations, but he sees the beauty amidst the ruins.

Stone knows that his story is charged with pulp sensationalism; he uses it to give the story momentum. But although the threat of violence hangs over nearly every scene, the violence itself never feels like a showman’s trick. In dramatizing the internationally notorious incident in which four nuns on a humanitarian mission were raped and murdered by government thugs, Stone displays extraordinary sensitivity to suffering. The camera keeps its distance but somehow makes you feel the horror from the victims’ points of view. The lack of stylization is what makes the scene so devastating. It’s not just a mass killing; it’s a crime against humanity.

Platoon (1986). From its opening epigraph by Ecclesiastes (“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth!”), to the arrival of new recruits in a world not covered in basic training, to the loading of fresh body bags (a scene that Scorsese would echo in Gangs of New York as new immigrants sign up to fight in the Civil War), all accompanied by Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Stings” (remember when that piece of music still had the power to haunt?), Platoon wasn’t just about what it meant to fight in Vietnam. It was about what it meant to live in Vietnam, and to live with Vietnam.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket showed the geographical and cultural factors that separated the first rock ‘n’ roll war from all other wars. They showed that the Vietnam grunt’s existential dread was all of a piece with the era’s drugs and psychedelic rock. But Platoon was something new. To watch Platoon is to understand for the first time in a war movie the disorienting nature of jungle warfare. Stone saw things from a grunt’s-eye view. The result was a series of firsthand dispatches from a man who knew that war is more than a rite of passage, and that to survive it is both a miracle and a curse. (It would take Steven Spielberg creating Saving Private Ryan for us to understand that optimism in the wake of The Good War was also a miracle.)

Stone remembers everything. He gets the details just right. He has very little patience with the way movies sentimentalize camaraderie among the men during wartime. He knows it comes and goes. (This doesn’t mean Stone isn’t guilty of sentimentality in his movies. We’ll see that he’s also guilty of nostalgia in his later movies, too.) Stone understands that friendship amongst men during a pressure-cooker situation like Vietnam is fragile. He knows your newest friend might not make it. He also understands the divisions that occur within a platoon—how loyalties form and fracture along ideological, racial and cultural lines.

Stone illustrates this in a terrific sequence where the soldiers hang out during downtime. Most of the white soldiers hole up in the barracks, drinking beer and playing cards, listening to country music (“Okie From Muskogee”) and venting their resentment of the “gooks.” The majority of the black soldiers hang out in a hooch, trying to unwind by smoking dope and listening to the soothing sounds of Motown. There’s a wonderful moment when Chris (Charlie Sheen) is accepted by the black soldiers; as they dance and sing along to The Miracles’ “Tracks Of My Tears,” the moment achieves the clarity of an idealized memory. This, Stone tells us was how it was—and how it should be.

That idyllic moment doesn’t last. It’s followed by a brutal firefight that leads to the movie’s most indelible sequence: a My Lai-like massacre of a peaceful peasant village that is being used by the NVA as a storage facility. The villagers really don’t have a choice in allowing their homes to be used to store weapons, but the platoon treats their explanation as an excuse. Fueled by adrenaline and grief, they see the villagers as ungrateful and impossible to understand; the civilians’ constant pleading sounds like they’re speaking in tongues. Even the usually level-headed Chris vents his frustrations by shooting at the feet of a grinning, mentally disabled man because he “won’t fucking listen.” Bunny (Kevin Dillon), fueled by memories of John Wayne and Audie Murphy, acts out his own hero fantasies by bashing the grinning man’s head in. By the end of the sequence the soldiers have torched the village. This is not just a large-scale version of burning the evidence at a crime scene; it’s the culmination of a series of catastrophic personal choices. What Stone makes clear is that wartime atrocities like these are usually not committed by inherently evil people; they are the result of a series of moral compromises, each one bigger than the last.

Platoon is the first Stone film to feature characters that aren’t merely antagonists, but opposites. Chris’ two mentors–Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), a sensitive, worn-down leader who uses drugs to keep his demons at bay (and his humanity intact), and Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), a battle-scarred leader who has been in so many skirmishes that he’s almost immortal–come to represent Good vs. Evil, Peace vs. War, Love vs. Hate. They become apparitions of what war does to men. Critics would accuse Stone of dealing in absolutes by reducing his subjects to iconography. Maybe, but Stone is a filmmaker before he’s anything else, and he uses this characters-as-representatives-of-contrasting-ideals technique to powerful effect throughout his movies, whether it’s John F. Kennedy and Anthony Hopkins’ Richard Nixon representing the bright and dark sides of political leadership, or Colin Farrell’s Alexander and Hopkins’ Ptolemy representing the recklessness and hesitation that separates a born leader from a good soldier. Stone may dance with the devil, but there’s always a moral center to his movies, and morality plays require a degree of abstraction. In Platoon Stone creates his first indelible movie image as Sgt. Elias, running for his life from enemy soldiers, reaches out, arms raised up to Heaven, for a rescue helicopter that’s already taken off. It’s an image that’s almost otherworldly. It’s poetry. And its power originates in Stone’s decision to conceive his story and characters in mythic terms.

Wall Street (1987). Unlike most directors who, after becoming an “overnight” success, take time off to contemplate their next career move, Stone immediately jumped into his next film. It was a smart decision. Stone moved away (temporarily) from the theater of war to the battleground of the go-go materialism of the 1980s. Released in December of 1987, just weeks after the stock market crash, Wall Street is a sensationally entertaining morality play. And in the character of Gordon Gekko, Stone creates the first in a long line of characters that would become a part of pop culture. As played by Michael Douglas, Gekko is seductive, ruthless, Machiavellian in his ability to manipulate, a corporate raider whose amorality is not so much a necessity but a badge of honor. Gekko’s famous “Greed is good” line is more than a catchphrase or a punchline. It defines the new work ethic in America. It pinpoints a sect of society where class and race distinctions are secondary to who has the most money. (This is not to make light of the fact that the cast of Wall Street is all white, but the predominant color of the movie is green.) Gekko says, “I make nothing. I own.” Yes, but for how long? What’s the point of accumulating assets if they’re going to depreciate?

Narratively, the movie is like one of those Executive Suite confections of the 1950s. Stone, a graduate of NYU’s film school, doesn’t challenge Hollywood conventions; he reproduces them in his own voice. In Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a hungry stockbroker angling to enter the upper ranks of corporate raiders, Stone creates a classic innocent who is ripe for corruption. Sheen, with his fabled real life hedonistic exploits, at first seemed a perfect casting choice, but he comes off as aloof and seems a little out of his depth. Stone’s script compounds Sheen’s misfortune by making Bud too generic—too emblematic of a certain type of 1980s American male. (He’s like Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton writ large.) His “loss of innocence” is schematic rather than organic; he’s not a person, he’s a movie hero hitting the beats you expect movie heroes to hit.

Stone doesn’t idealize his protagonist; the montage of Bud acquiring his dream apartment, scored to Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody),” reveals the director’s barbed sense of humor. But he does insulate him against our scorn; Bud hustles the world to avoid facing his own inadequacies, and when he finally attains The Good Life, he doesn’t really seem to enjoy his perks. But he’s such a cipher that his moral crisis remains abstract. When he stands alone in his bachelor pad, stares at Manhattan’s nighttime skyline, and asks himself, “Who am I?” we’re supposed to recognize it as a man’s first inkling that he might be selling his soul. But it’s a hollow moment because we never believed there was a soul to sell.

Sheen fares better in the working-class scenes where Bud interacts with his union leader father, Carl, played by Martin Sheen in a nifty bit of meta-casting. Martin Sheen in an Oliver Stone movie has a double-edged connotation since Sheen’s Apocalypse Now character, assassin and narrator Capt. Willard, hovers over the Charlie Sheen-narrated Platoon. (The slapstick parody Hot Shots! Part Deux turns the Sheens’ war film lineage into a sight gag: as Sheen’s Rambo-esque hero travels up a Conradian jungle river, he passes his dad’s Apocalypse Now patrol boat headed the other way, and as father and son cross paths, they salute each other and declare, in unison, “I loved you in Wall Street.”) The scenes revealing Bud’s blue-collar roots have the snap of early Elia Kazan films like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But that’s also their problem. Stone makes everything black-and-white—working class nobility vs. yuppie corporate management. There’s no suggestion that one extreme shades into the other—that in real life, these opposing social strata are united by a willingness to compromise their values for money.

That said, Stone’s iconic approach is still unsettling because of its evangelical fervor. Wall Street is a condemnation and a warning, a morality play about a society in decay. The film’s legacy is that it captured the moment when America learned that the key to success—bouncing back—is being able to spin bad experiences into part of your character, part of what makes you stronger.

Talk Radio (1988). The “little” movie that Stone squeezed in during the pre-production of Born on the Fourth of July is often omitted from discussion of his filmography. An adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s one-man play, Talk Radio may look like a throwaway, but it’s a major achievement. Stone uses Bogosian’s corrosive insights into the hypocrisies of American culture as a jumping off point to wonder if it is really possible, in a free society, to say whatever is on your mind, no matter whom you might offend. The answer is yes, but at a price.

In the wake of Phil Donahue and Howard Stern, Bogosian’s Barry Champlain, the combative voice of the Dallas airwaves (“The Man You Love To Love!”), engages in verbal warfare as he confronts the shut-ins, conspiracy nuts, neo-Nazis, and sexual deviants who are always on the lookout for that one person who embodies their own view of what’s wrong with the world. That person is Champlain, a wound-up agitator who engages the people on the fringe of society to feed his own demons. Night after night, prowling the studio like a caged animal, Barry says exactly what he wants to say, the sponsors or program manager (or himself) be damned. He turns confrontation into a performance. Barry, like Stone, believes that debating—engaging his audience—is the truest form of communication. Verbal conflict sustains him when he’s not on the air. It’s also what’s driving him mad.

The majority of the movie takes place in the radio studio. Attempts to “open up” the play are confined to an extended flashback sequence that’s interesting but unnecessary. We don’t need Barry’s back story to understand his actions or feelings because Stone has already defined them through composition, camera movement, sound design and music. As Barry stalks around his studio, eyes darting back and forth while some network guys watch to see if they really want to syndicate his show nationally, the claustrophobic setting becomes even more intimate, as if we were watching—and listening—to “The Barry Champlain Show.” Depending on Barry’s caller—for instance, a serial rapist who wants help—Barry is framed to look small, vulnerable even. When he’s discussing the finer points of The Turner Diaries with a neo-Nazi he looms large, as if he’s in control. Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson visualize Barry’s growing isolation and paranoia through the use of reflections. When Barry’s supportive ex-wife Ellen (Ellen Greene) calls into Barry’s show at a crucial moment late in the movie, pretending to be a Ms. Lonelyheart because he seems to be losing it on the air, the scene is almost unbearable in its intimacy. A series of beautifully timed close-ups and reflections on the studio glass window lets us see them relive their marriage in one brief, devastating conversation. Ellen throws Barry a life preserver by admitting she still has feelings for him, but he refuses to take it. He’d rather drown.

The movie climaxes with one of the greatest monologues in movie history. Seated at his console alone, Barry rails against the world—and himself. He says:

“I mean who the hell are you anyways, you audience? Yes, the world is a terrible place. Yes, cancer and garbage disposals are going to get you. Yes, a war is coming. You’re fascinated by the gory details. You’re happiest when others are in pain. I’m providing a public service. Your fears in your own lives have become your entertainment. Next month, millions of people are going to be listening to this show and you have nothing to talk about. Marvelous technology is at our disposal, and instead of reaching new heights we’re going to see how far down we can go. The only thing you believe in is me. Who are you if you don’t have me? I come in here every night. I make my case. I make my point. I say what I believe in. I tell you what you are. I have to. I have no choice. I come in here every night. I tear into you. I abuse you. I insult you. You just keep coming back for me. I don’t need your fear and stupidity. If one person out there has any idea what I’m talking about I…”

It’s an amazing moment given a powerful visual punch by having the radio-studio set start to slowly, almost unknowingly, rotate as Barry remains stationary. Barry lashes out at the world while he’s in the middle of it, unable to distinguish his fears from his callers’ loneliness. Stone and Bogosian see a society where talk hasn’t become cheap but beside the point. Why bother talking—listening—if no one can ever understand you?

Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Before World Trade Center, Born on the Fourth of July was Oliver Stone’s most aggressively patriotic movie—a fact that confounded detractors who’d pegged him as a muckraker whose interest favored flaws over virtues. But Stone’s iconography-laden compositions didn’t work at cross-purposes with his critical impulse, they granted it fuller expression; they looked through national myth and saw harsh reality, just like the film’s hero, Ron Kovic. By dramatizing the story of Kovic—an all-American kid who enlisted in the Marines in order to go to Vietnam to fight communism, only to return a broken man, physically and emotionally, spending years dulling his pain with booze, drugs, and rage before finding meaning in his military service by becoming an anti-war protester—Stone pinpoints the moment when a generation’s blind faith in the rightness of America’s military actions turned into doubt and skepticism.

Stone, co-writing with Kovic, uses American iconography to cover a key 20-year period—1956 to 1976, from the optimism of Eisenhower to the fallout of Nixon—that saw a seismic change in the way people felt about the purpose of going to war. After Vietnam, a portion of Americans would forever question the necessity of sending soldiers into harm’s way simply because their government assured them it was a “just cause.” (Or, would they?) The opening credits sequence is like a series of Norman Rockwell paintings made flesh. Baseball, 4th of July parades and fireworks, kids playing war, are given a slo-mo grandeur that allows them to become a collective memory of America at its best.

With Born on the Fourth of July, Stone fashions a biographical movie that’s interested in evoking a mood. It is the beginning of Stone moving away from intimate, one-person-against-the-system moviemaking to more conceptual forms of story structure. Starting with Born on the Fourth of July, continuing with The Doors and culminating with JFK, Stone freed himself from accepted standards of editing and pacing, and he became more inclined to locate the intimate story at the center of culture-changing events. This isn’t just a narrative that aims to cover a man’s life from birth to death. It’s biopic as absolution.

Stone and Richardson aim to create a sense of simultaneous objectivity and subjectivity. They filter the film’s visuals through the American flag, using red, white and blue as a constant color scheme. The Vietnam sequences, shot through dustbowl-red filters, are choreographed differently from the jungle combat of Platoon. You still can’t see the enemy, but the difference this time is that you can’t even see the men on your side. After Kovic becomes paralyzed, the camera is almost always at wheelchair level, yet it distances itself from him so that we can observe the world around Kovic. In a mid-movie student protest that erupts into violence, the camera swirls around the action, taking in the brutality from the margins. Scenes like this, or a dinner table confrontation, force us to wonder: Were families really this divided by war? Did war, assassinations, and social unrest occur during such a short period of time? Can it happen again?

The Vietnam sequences are mirrored late in the movie during an extended Mexico sequence where Kovic loses himself in booze, prostitutes and despair. The sequence reaches a moment of absurd comedy when Kovic and a fellow wheelchair-bound veteran named Charlie (Willem Dafoe), who’ve alienated everyone in the local villa, are left by the side of the road to find their way home. The scene shows that Kovic isn’t just paralyzed physically, but emotionally. The movie’s most draining chapter chronicles Kovic’s stay in the VA Hospital. Employing clinically cold white lighting, the sequence taps into the universal feeling of impotence that occurs when you are forced to trust overworked and underfunded caregivers. (There’s a great moment where Kovic is working out in the hospital and Don McLean’s “American Pie” creeps onto the soundtrack, McLean’s sunny voice serving as ironic counterpoint to Kovic’s suffering.)

At the center of the movie is a rigorous and moving performance by Tom Cruise. Cruise’s fabled work ethic is evident in the homecoming scenes as he navigates his wheelchair through the hallways and doorways of the childhood house where he was once a sterling example of athletic grace. In the early all-American scenes, he embodies the naïveté and drive of youth. His face becomes a monument to the innocence of the early ’60s. Stone takes Cruise’s ability to project American pride—the source of his gung-ho performance in Top Gun—and turns it over to reveal the anger that goes with that pride. Cruise’s opposite is Jerry Levine’s Steve Boyer, a slightly smug college kid who was hip enough to know that Vietnam wasn’t for him. He stayed on Long Island to operate a thriving business. Ron sees in Steve an alternative life he could’ve had. Steve sees it too. When Steve finds Ron drunk and combative at a local bar, there’s a fleeting moment where Steve realizes his luck and Ron realizes his loss. Cruise’s work in the Vietnam scenes is less effective. He lacks authority and seems a little overwhelmed. He doesn’t seem to be a natural born leader (though the film suggests that he would learn to be a leader through his anti-war protests).

The film’s most badly judged scene is a late night argument between Ron and his mother (Caroline Kava). She’s already been set up as a strict Catholic who instilled in her son a sense of guilt that was a key component of him wanting to go to Vietnam. When Ron confronts her about the ugliness he’s seen and done, she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t “get it.” The scene becomes an overheated shouting match. It’s intense and real, but it doesn’t know when to quit.

Stone mirrors this scene to better effect when Ron goes to Georgia to visit the family of a fellow Marine he accidentally shot and killed in an ambush. (The film suggests that this emotionally traumatic incident led to Ron getting wounded.) Critics who are surprised by Stone’s nonjudgmental approach to middle America in World Trade Center have a poor memory. They need only look at this scene to see Stone’s empathy for middle and rural America. He knows that it’s young men from these forgotten communities who are sent to war. Ron confesses his sin to the family because he hopes they will understand him. The coldness of Ron’s mother is offset by the warmth and forgiveness of the fallen soldier’s mother, played by Jayne Haynes in a remarkable one-scene performance. (Ron is not completely absolved. The dead Marine’s wife can’t forgive him, but she tells him, “Maybe the Lord can”—and Ron accepts this.)

The film’s emotional epiphany comes when Stone vividly recreates the 1972 Republican National Convention where Ron and his fellow anti-war protesters storm the floor to vent their anger at the American government. Stone and Richardson let the colors go wild as red, white and blue flood the screen. There’s a sense of fulfillment as Kovic discovers that the most patriotic thing you can do for America is question it.

The Doors (1991). Although the prospect of Stone taking on one of the most decadent bands in rock history seemed like a no-brainer, his follow-up to Born on the Fourth of July was greeted with bafflement and derision. Maybe it’s because The Doors isn’t a straightforward rock biopic; it’s an actual rock ‘n’ roll movie, steeped in drugs, rebellion and self-destruction. Stone uses the music of The Doors and the life of lead singer Jim Morrison as a pretext to explore the moment when music, politics, and a new rebel-youth culture were ever-so-briefly interconnected.

Stone understands that the mythologizing of the Sixties has blotted out the darkness that was all of a piece of the counterculture. For John F. Kennedy to exist there had to be Richard Nixon. Woodstock had to have Altamont. The yippie pranksterism of Abbie Hoffman was twinned with the nihilism of Charles Manson. And The Beach Boys needed The Doors. Dreamy, sensual, improvisational, The Doors’ music could not have existed during any other time. Songs like “Light My Fire,” “L.A. Woman,” and “People Are Strange” are memorable because they combine pop sensibilities with trance-out moodiness. The band’s albums don’t hold up from start to finish; they’re too delicate; with the exception of their self-titled debut, Doors albums consist of moments of sustained brilliance amidst the filler. Stone’s impression of the band’s career excises the filler. The Doors is like a greatest-hits collection of the band’s—and Jim’s—most memorable moments. Like rock ‘n’ roll, the film is excessive. It’s a trip.

Like Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors is not interested in covering a man’s life from beginning to end. It’s only interested in the end. The movie begins at the end, with Morrison (Val Kilmer) spending three nights in the studio recording An American Prayer, then flashes back to his time at UCLA Film School, where he spent his free time writing and composing poetry and songs. As played by Kilmer, Morrison always seems to be in a daze, as if not fully conscious of his surroundings. But he also has feelers, picking up the slightest bit of criticism then discarding it. It’s a remarkable performance—strange, funny, and a little dangerous. Kilmer’s decision to sing Morrison’s vocals instead of lip-synching is crucial to the movie’s effectiveness, because it’s in the musical performances that Morrison is most alive and attuned to his inner wild child.

Stone rushes through the typical rock movie bio scenes of the band forming, rehearsing and achieving success because he’s not really interested. (There’s only one rehearsal session before they start playing packed nightclubs on the Sunset Strip.) He wants to get at what drove the band to make such decadent music, and how that music was a part of its time. The movie doesn’t really come to life until The Doors perform “The End” at the Whiskey a Go-Go. With its snake-rattle rhythms and Oedipal imagery, “The End” is shocking enough to get the band thrown off stage. The song’s death-trip grandeur syncs up with a generation that’s striving for change, but also oblivion. The performance of the song is given extra meaning because of its connection to the end-of-the-world opening of Apocalypse Now. “The End” is not only a song associated with Vietnam, it is Vietnam.

The production design favors Native American red and leather-pants black. Robert Richardson’s camerawork is fluid, free-associative, as if the viewer was an angel looking down from Heaven. An extended party sequence at Andy Warhol’s Factory is a marvel of timing and staging as one Pop Art gag follows another, creating a dizzying fun house atmosphere. (The scene is goosed along by the use of The Velvet Underground’s love letter to oblivion, “Heroin.”) Morrison’s love affair with death is made flesh by the creation of a Bergman-esque Death figure (played by Stone’s old friend and sometime writing partner Richard Rutowski). Death follows Morrison everywhere; the closer he gets to The End, the more prominent he becomes. The movie’s highlight is the recreation of the infamous 1969 Miami concert that got Morrison brought up on obscenity charges. Stone pulls out all the stops as he turns a rock concert into the death knell for a generation exhausted from its own freedom. (Altamont is just months away.) Lewdness, profanity, fear, Indians taking leave of Morrison’s body: the Miami concert is really the best (and worst) performance of Morrison’s life. The sequence climaxes with Morrison leading a conga line, with Death on his ass, in a back-and-forth performance of “Dead Cats, Dead Rats.” It’s the end of the world and it looks like the greatest party ever.

What the film lacks is any sense of consideration or detachment. Stone sees Morrison as a misunderstood man of his time; he’s claimed he wanted to show that Morrison’s behavior was separate from the music. This is true in the abstract—as the band was falling apart, they created some of their best recordings—but the movie never really dramatizes it. (Some more scenes of The Doors rehearsing would’ve helped.) There’s no sense that Morrison brought about his own annihilation. Stone seems to buy into Morrison’s belief that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, so it’s no surprise that he’s not interested in the lives traumatized by Morrison’s self-destructive behavior. The Doors didn’t need to be judgmental, but it should have considered Morrison’s massive ego and how it correlated with the supposed “no rules, no limits” ethos of that era.

Stone’s near-total embrace of subjectivity has an upside, though: it allows us to be immersed in the era’s transgressive attitudes, the sense of total freedom that makes a scene like Morrison’s night of wild sex with a journalist (Kathleen Quinlan), fueled by wine and ritualistic mutilation, appropriate in its excessiveness. There’s a hilarious scene where we see Morrison and his girlfriend Pam (Meg Ryan) try to have a “normal” Thanksgiving dinner. The evening degenerates into slapstick violence as the duck burns and Pam pulls a knife on Jim. It’s like an early sketch of the sitcom-hell sequence from Stone’s Natural Born Killers. (The scene is given a comic-ironic counterpoint by the song “Love Me Two Times” playing in the background.) Scenes like these show Stone’s gift for screw-loose filmmaking.

But Stone’s hero worship eventually paints him into a corner. His blind faith in Morrison as an artist doesn’t allow him to fully acknowledge Morrison’s flaws. Stone’s inability to see that a visionary’s personal failings can also be a part of what fuels his creativity is what separates The Doors, a good biopic, from Nixon, a great one. (It’s also what led to some of the more problematic story points in Alexander.) Stone’s romantic attachment to Morrison and his music is justified, but at a price. The Doors is a cautionary tale about excess with too much excess and not enough caution.

-by Aaron Aradillas, "Natural Born Filmmaker," Slant magazine, August 24, 200

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone & ADL settle their differences

Filmmaker Oliver Stone and the Anti-Defamation League have laid their differences to rest.

Stone on Wednesday sent a letter to the League's national director Abraham Foxman who then issued a statement welcoming Stone's second apology for his comments that had led the League to call him anti-Semitic.

"I believe he now understands the issues and where he was wrong, and this puts an end to the matter," said Foxman.

According to him, Stone had said: "I do agree that it was wrong of me to say that Israel or the pro-Israel lobby is to blame for America's flawed foreign policy. Of course that's not true and I apologize that my inappropriately glib remark has played into that negative stereotype."

Stone also clearly spoke out against anti-Semitism: "I want you to know that I am categorically opposed to anti-Semitism – and all other racist ideologies," Foxman recounted Stone's comment.

Below is the full text of the apology letter that Oliver Stone sent to Foxman:

Dear Mr. Foxman:

I have seen the reports today that you have issued a statement criticizing my apology - for my poor choices of words and the unfortunate and coarse way they were presented by the Times of London - as being insufficient. To be sure, there is a great deal more I could have said, but in an effort to be concise and direct, my apology did not address every element of what I said in the Sunday Times.

I want you to know that I am categorically opposed to anti-Semitism - and all other racist ideologies. I am half-Jewish and therefore personally repelled by anti-Semitism, but moreover, I consider it an important part of my life's work to call attention to the atrocities caused by racist and fascist regimes and policies.

To the specific point of your statement today, I do agree that it was wrong of me to say that Israel or the pro-Israel lobby is to blame for America's flawed foreign policy. Of course that's not true and I apologize that my inappropriately glib remark has played into that negative stereotype.

I do, of course, have strong feelings about the way the United States and Israel have conducted their foreign policies, and I have been openly critical toward both. But I am also a Vietnam Vet and have been proud to serve my country. As I am sure you will concur, disagreeing with our policy or Israel's at any moment in time, makes me neither anti-American nor an anti-Semite. I will, however, be more careful and precise with my words on these matters in the future.

Respectfully,

Oliver Stone

-Georg Szalai, "Oliver Stone, ADL Settle Their Differences," The Hollywood Reporter, July 28, 2010

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone keeps it candid at Master Class

After returning home from serving in the Vietnam War in 1968, director Oliver Stone found himself unable to deal with reality. He called himself “another person” after his experiences. Out in the field of battle, the wet biome of Vietnam jungles proved too difficult of an environment to pen his thoughts, so he relied on memory in order to process his experiences into a screenplay.

The first draft, titled “Break,” was an abstract impression of the war — the main character dies in the first quarter of the film, travels to the Egyptian underworld and magically ends up in prison. But following 18 years and some major revisions, Stone would turn “Break” into the visceral 1987 Best Picture winner “Platoon” — a tall task by the standards of 1980s cinema.

“There’s been so many war films since 1986. It’s almost like (science fiction) now. It seems relatively easy to make these explosions and have these men running around under fire,” Stone said. “Believe me. Back then, it was really difficult to do this. It was seen as groundbreaking… The Vietnam thing had certainly never sunk into the American public… When they saw this film, I think it really shook them. It wasn’t ‘Apocalypse Now.’ It wasn’t ‘Deer Hunter…’ It was something else — unsettling — and that’s what I’ve been doing since then.”

On Nov. 13, the three-time Academy Award winner joined a Chapman audience in the Folino Theater following a screening of “Platoon.” He was introduced by Stephen Galloway, the dean of Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, as one of the few directors whose personality stamps his work. Throughout their conversation, Stone brought a wealth of filmmaking wisdom, an honest outlook on his past and a cornucopia of blunt assertions regarding media propaganda, foreign politics and American history.

Prior to completing his abstract war screenplay, Stone was arrested in San Diego for smuggling marijuana from Vietnam before being bailed out by a lawyer his father had hired. He made his way back to New York for a proper homecoming but little clarity on his future.

“All I knew how to do was kill people and to camp out in the jungle… I wanted to further my education,” Stone said.

Stone had previously dropped out of Yale before the war, where he was classmates with George W. Bush, or as Stone likes to call him, “the dope who ran this country into the ground.” He would later film “W.” about the 43rd president. With a fresh start, Stone enrolled in New York University where he took an introductory film class from director Martin Scorsese.

Following talking on his writing process, his regrets and an excerpt from his book (Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game), Stone acknowledged his reputation amongst viewers and critics who consume the violence in his films.

“That’s what they always say about me, ‘I’m crude, or I’m vulgar and I’m not subtle.’ I think there’s a theater of cruelty. You have to show them. You have to shock them. People get awards for not showing… but sometimes you just gotta show (John) Kennedy’s fucking corpse and what they did to him and the holes they put in him.” — Oliver Stone, three-time Academy Award-winning director, referring to his film "JFK"

Stone is best known for his films “Platoon,” “JFK,” “Nixon,” “Snowden” and much more.

He also provided advice on how to bring out authentic performances from actors who may not have the same connection to the subject matter as he does — the key being pressure.

“You have to bring pressure on the person who’s not living that life unless he’s totally dedicated to method acting,” Stone said. “You gotta get them to a level where he understands the intensity of that experience… You put the idea in their hearts that they’re going to this place.”

Questions were opened to the audience for a Q&A session, during which Stone spoke on his views of American history. His ideations have manifested into films such as “Nixon,” “World Trade Center,” “Wall Street,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Snowden.”

“American history is full of lies… That’s what’s depressing. People forget that they’ve been lied to, and they just move on and they buy the next lie,” Stone said. “We’ve got to change that paradigm. We’ve got to change the way we think and address this government. Governments lie.”

When asked about off-the-record moments from “The Putin Interviews” — a four-part documentary series in which Stone interviews Vladimir Putin — Stone claimed that the Russian president is modest and misunderstood. He said that Americans need to understand that the Russian people also have a love for their country and want sovereignty to control their fate.

“Of those who are interested in knowing who this so-called villain is, it’s important you know who he is and how he thinks and how he behaves…” Stone said. “People in the United States, because they hate him so much from the propaganda, have turned their eyes away. They don’t even want to listen. This is horrible. This is what causes so many problems in the world. We have to listen. We have to empathize… The only way to preserve peace is to understand each other.”

A later question about the documentary “Navalny” — centered on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny — prompted Stone to respond, “I know the Navaly story, and I know what propaganda is. He’s an American hero — a Western hero. We’ll leave it at that.”

The evening was capped off with a message from Galloway, who said that no matter whether he agrees or disagrees with Stone’s declarations, he admires his courage for voicing his opinions with the world against him.

Freshman television writing and production major Ross Corman-O’Reilly attended the event because of Stone’s cinematic legacy and his love of the film “JFK.”

“This was the best master class I’ve been to. It was so off the walls. It was great to see Stone. I respect him very much as a filmmaker.” — Ross Corman-O'Reilly, freshman television writing and production major Junior film studies major Karthik Davuluri describes the evening as the Master Class he’s been waiting for.

“He’s made some legendary movies. We don’t get a lot of directors who are from that era. He’s a truly unique guest to get, and I was really interested in learning about his perspective on film and politics and how he combines the two… I really thought this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing hearing his perspective on everything. He’s a casual guy who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks and speak his mind even if it is controversial, which is something I’ve been waiting to see from a Master Class.” — Karthik Davuluri, junior film studies major

-Nicholas De Lucca, "Oliver Stone keeps it candid at Master Class," The Panther, Nov 22 2023

[back-and-totheleft]

The World is Yours

On December 9, 1983, Brian De Palma’s Scarface— which reimagined a 1932 Howard Hawks gangster film as a blood-and-neon opera about the rise and fall of Cuban-born Miami cocaine kingpin Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino— opened to decent but unspectacular box office and decidedly mixed reviews. Leonard Maltin hated it. Roger Ebert loved it. According to People magazine’s 1983 report on the New York and L.A. premieres, Cher was a fan– “It was a great example of how the American dream can go to s—,” she told the magazine– but Kurt Vonnegut tapped out after about 30 minutes, around the time one of Tony’s associates gets carved up with a chainsaw.

De Palma’s film has been lodged like a bullet fragment in pop culture’s brainpan ever since. It made Michelle Pfeiffer a star; it inspired real-life drug lords and provided generations of rappers with a mythic framework for grandiose criminality both real and imagined, even though Tony Montana ends up face down in his own fountain; it sold (this is a rough, anecdotal estimate) approximately ten billion dorm posters. It’s a movie inseparable from its cultural and aesthetic context but someone is always trying to reboot or remake it, or retell it as a story about The Penguin; so far an actual Scarface 2 has not materialized, although actors Robert Loggia and Steven Bauer came back to voice their Scarface characters in Scarface: The World Is Yours, a 2006 video game for Playstation 2, Xbox and Windows platforms, in which players could unlock “Rage Mode” and mow down their enemies as an invulnerable Tony Montana.

Film critic Glenn Kenny’s new book The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface charts the movie’s path from development to cultural ubiquity; like Kenny’s superb Goodfellas history Made Men from a few years back, it’s simultaneously brisk and exhaustive, built in this case around interviews with seemingly every living person involved with the production, except Pacino himself, who’s presumably saved his Scarface memories for his own forthcoming memoir. Pacino still emerges as an indelible and mercurial character, as do the many other players responsible for putting Scarface onscreen.

One of those is the no-less-mercurial producer Martin Bregman. Bregman starts out as a theatrical agent whose early clients include up-and-comers like Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen; he discovers Pacino onstage in a 1968 production of Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx and becomes his manager. In the late ‘70s Bregman also works with a screenwriter named Oliver Stone, who’s written a script called Platoon about his experience in Vietnam; Stone and Bregman end up developing an adaptation of fellow vet Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July as a vehicle for Pacino. When that project collapses, so does Bregman’s relationship with Pacino, and they don’t speak for years, until Pacino walks out of a screening of the original 1932 Hawks film and calls Bregman on the phone, saying “Look at Scarface– I think there may be a character there for me to play.”

The following excerpt from Kenny’s book picks up there, as Stone signs on to Scarface and begins researching the cocaine business—a world Stone is already intimately familiar with as a customer. —ALEX PAPPADEMAS

Oliver Stone had to travel a long way before becoming “Oliver Stone,” the prolific, outspoken, provocative Hollywood agitator. The man whose cultural gravitational pull is such that a friend of mine called his book on the man The Oliver Stone Experience was a scion of Wall Street affluence, a soldier in Vietnam, a student at NYU’s film school who worked under Martin Scorsese, and, by the time producer Marty Bregman brought him on the Scarface project, the director of two films.

Horror films, as a matter of fact. The first, Seizure, produced in Canada in 1974, starred Jonathan Frid, then known as the sex-symbol vampire Barnabas Collins on the supernatural network soap opera Dark Shadows, as a writer tormented by figures out of his nightmares come to life. The second, 1981’s The Hand, was a gloss on The Beast with Five Fingers in which Michael Caine’s pathologically jealous writer loses his hand in an auto accident, and believes that hand is still around, with a life of his own, killing anyone who ticks him off. Neither made much impact on release, but both are fascinating artifacts, not least due to the pathologies they treat, pathologies that reflected Stone’s own conflicts at the time. When I interviewed him in 2022, one of the first things I asked was if, upon meeting Brian De Palma, he sensed an affinity with this director who’d also worked in horror. Not quite, as it turns out.

“Well, Brian had been a very successful horror director. I had not. And that was screwed into my psyche by Bregman, and you can believe that. The Hand, according to him, was ‘a disaster,’ blah, blah, blah. But you can look at The Hand, it’s certainly a psychologically interesting film. But it had not done business. And I was dead in the water, as a director. And Bregman used that, of course. I wanted to direct, badly. I had written and directed and I wanted to continue doing that. But I knew that this was not going to be my film, because I didn’t have the experience to do something this size.

“To the contrary, I learned a lot on the film. I was down on my luck, and I had just done The Hand, and it had been ridiculed. And I was on cocaine. I was doing cocaine, and I was really an addict, without knowing it.”

In a sense, Stone reunited with Bregman because he had to. Stone, Pacino, and Bregman had all fallen out with each other over the collapse of Born on the Fourth of July. As far as Stone was concerned, between that and Bregman’s inability to get Platoon made after teasing him with the possibility, he might as well never work under his aegis again. But in the wake of the failure of The Hand, he was in a state. “I never wanted to work with Marty again, after that. It was just so difficult. It’s what they call ‘masochism,’ to work for Marty. You have to really suffer. I’m sure you can tell that. Ask any other writer, they know what’s in store for them if they go with Marty: endless re-writes. So, I had to go through that process. It’s a process. And out of that process, I said I didn’t want to be with him again. “And then, my bookie called me up after I had hit bottom again—how many times have I hit bottom? Marty called me and wanted me to do it. I didn’t want to do a Mafia story. No interest. Thank you. And then, he called me back a few weeks later. He said: ‘Lumet has another idea, and here it is—about the cocaine trade.’ That was interesting, and that made it different.” On Scarface, Pacino and Bregman were definitely running the show, from where Stone sat. “Once Al said, ‘I’m excited by it,’ then Marty would go to work and he would do his number— which was get the screenplay together for Al,” Stone said. “Because Marty, at that time, was an independent producer. He had tremendous success from Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. And Marty also had another client, Alan Alda, who was really making a bundle of success—real big money—for Marty. So, that was his financial base. He put together Scarface, really literally, with his own blood. And he was Scarface, in a sense, in the making of that film; he was ruthless in getting it done.” Not that it represented a particularly tough sell on Bregman’s part, at least initially.

“Of course, gangster films are easier to make, in the system. So, he had the cooperation—on that film—of [executive] Ned Tanen and the whole Universal group that had financed Alan Alda. So, they went with him, but it soured quickly because Scarface was a hell of a hard number to pull off—many difficulties and way over budget. I think twice the distance. Six months, as I remember. It was scheduled for three months. That’s outrageous. In those days, too. It’s always been outrageous to go that far over budget, and there was a lot of pissed-off people, including Tanen.

“So, one of the things Marty did was just keep Universal at bay. He was constantly promising them anything—‘God will come and solve these problems’—keeping them at bay, keeping them away from Al. He always used to say Al was a monster and would blow up if you ever confronted him. And he kept that as a weapon, to defend the enterprise. But he had difficulties inside the enterprise because, frankly, it was in a very difficult shape. The thing was, there was not a lot of communications. And the assistant director had to be fired after a certain point, Jerry Ziesmer. That’s the ‘usual sacrificial victim,’ right away.

“The pressure on me was enormous because I didn’t want to cut the film, because I thought it worked as a whole, and I did get pressure, but I don’t remember exactly giving in to it. I think we kind of struggled our way through it. We just doubled the budget, and we doubled the time, and Universal kept betting on Bregman, I think because of Alan Alda’s success and his past success with Pacino. But they were kind of pissed off. I don’t remember it being a very happy film that opened. “After the film was over, I had a huge fight with Bregman over the cut, and I never talked to him again, for years. I saw him in the ’90s before he died, and we made up. But Marty was a tough character. He was a handsome gangster-type who grew up in the Lower East Side, and loyalty was the most important thing. And if you crossed him, if he felt like you’d been disloyal, he treated you like a gangster. He’d want to kill you. So, the situation was very difficult because he wanted to control the film. He was a control freak.”

Bregman did not look over Stone’s shoulder much while Stone researched and wrote the screenplay, first in collaboration with Lumet. “Sidney was Al’s favorite director,” Stone recalled. “The moment he told Marty he wanted to do Scarface, they went to Sidney. Sidney liked the idea, he liked Al very much, Sidney had been involved with me on Platoon. He’d wanted to make it for ten minutes or something like that, and then he passed. Because he was an older man and he didn’t want to go to that degree of exertion. He was very interested in politics, Sidney. He certainly wanted to keep Scarface in its political atmosphere of that time. With the Mariel boatlift, with the relations between Cuba and the US, and the other side of the equation: the coke war.

“That’s what interested Sidney. Sidney wanted to probe the relationship of the CIA and the DEA to what really was going on in the drug trade and if the United States was involved. And of course, it’s a dirty story. It’s hard to prove. But you know what? It led, ultimately, to the funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the Iran/Contra scandal. It led, ultimately, to the Contra hearings and the accusations—which are accurate—of the CIA turning the other eye to the smuggling in Los Angeles. It was a dirty story. In Sidney’s conception the film would explore this, but Bregman did not want to go there.” In order to write, Stone had to get off the cocaine he’d been using to lift his spirits after the failure of The Hand. This would prove tricky, as his initial research on the cocaine trade would put him in rather close proximity to, well, the cocaine trade.

“I did all the research for Scarface on cocaine, in and out of the country. It was quite interesting because I understood that world better than if I had not done it. Al, on the contrary, had never done anything like that. He’d never even done cocaine. So, he didn’t know. Marty took me down to Miami, and he introduced me to a dozen people who were very helpful. And then, I expanded my contacts from there, outward.

“I talked to several police departments, and I tried to get as close to the gangsters as I could; but that wasn’t so easy. I talked to defense lawyers, of course, who were very important to contact. I went to Bimini to actually confront what was the trade, the nightly trade, going into Miami on cigarette boats. And also, prior to that, I’d been to South America, in Peru. I’d been there on another thing that I had been working on, years before, with a very knowledgeable journalist. This was not the El Salvador guy on whom I based my film Salvador; this is another thing completely. I had been in that world, and I’d been ingesting the material. So, I knew a lot in the sense of the feeling of it and the fear of being in that world.” It was from that fear that Stone conceived the film’s notorious chainsaw scene.

“When I was in Bimini, I was found out. I was with my ex-wife and we were pretending to be Hollywood screenwriters, which we were; I was. But they thought, because I knew a lot of people from Miami and I mentioned a name at this late night—we were coked down in the hotel room with three gangsters. Mid-level people, not high-level. They were the ‘shippers.’ They were the people who were doing the work of shipping it on cigarette boats into Miami. There was a hotel in Bimini, it was very famous. These shippers were all staying there and there was a lot of boats every night, shipping out all night. You’d hear the cigarette boats going. It was a trade. And this was the grunt work, the shipping via cigarette boat. But I could tell the scale of it.

“The characters that we grew came from that period. They were people who were killed with chainsaws. And some of these crimes were gruesome. They’d scrawl on the wall of the person they killed, they’d scrawl in blood ���Chivato’—or something like that—like ‘Traitor.’ Or cut people’s eyeballs out. All kinds of gruesome shit. So sitting in a hotel room and feeling ‘found out’ by a group of them was something I tried to get into the film. “This was a multibillion-dollar business. Talking to the prosecutors in South Florida—there were three or four different divisions trying to handle it. There was this bureaucratic overlap. It was Fort Lauderdale. It was Miami. It was the US Attorney’s Office. There was Miami Beach. There was Miami. It was a mess. And the cops were all over the place. Different police departments had different rates of success. We talked to all of them. And we got a varied picture of it. “So, this was serious; and, as you know, it’s the period when Escobar started to get really big, going into the ’90s. And it was a great business to be in because you could get away with it so much. It started to change about the time we were making the movie there. And Miami was very paranoid about us being there. In fact, we lasted—and I don’t know exactly—I’d say close to two weeks we lasted, in Miami, before they threw us out. Because they didn’t want to be associated with that stuff.”

Having gotten uncomfortably close to “that stuff,” Stone decamped to Paris to write. He presumed cocaine would be more difficult to get a hold of in the City of Lights than it had been in these other climes. “It was a hard thing to get off of, yeah. But I knew I had to make a break because it wasn’t working for me and my writing was being hurt. So, I moved to Paris deliberately, after the research was over. I cut off everybody I knew. Getting out of the country to a country where there was not much of it, there—in France, in the winter—it was perfect. And of course, I did have family there, so it was a re-entry to an old world that I knew. And I got off it, and I came back to the States, and I was clean. I was able to do it—that is to say I could socialize on it, but I didn’t need it anymore.

“The thing is: cocaine doesn’t work. That’s clear. And I made it very clear to myself. But I have to say: in the movie, it’s all relative. Tony is basically saying, through the movie: ‘They should legalize this stuff. That’s the only way to beat it. They’re not going to cut it down by outlawing it.’ Like everything else, when the United States goes to war on something—war on drugs—it becomes like a ‘Vietnam.’ It’s a mess. We don’t know how to regulate anything.

“Tony Montana is the ultimate, ultimate free-market proponent. Sort of the Milton Friedman of cocaine economics. And he saw the picture correctly. He saw the hypocrisy. That’s what he hated, the hypocrisy. And then, of course, after so much cocaine usage, he becomes tinted with paranoia and he ends up turning on his friends. But for a while there, it was some great business. If he’d just kept his marbles, he would have been able to go all the way and probably retire as a millionaire and get into hedge funds or something. And by the way, there is a link because when I did my film Wall Street, I was going up to New York, down to Miami, there was a lot of traffic in cocaine coming to New York from there, at that point, about ’85. A lot of people were using cocaine—young people—and they’re making big money. So, there was a lot of that similarity exploding in Wall Street, the environment.” Back home from Paris, things did not proceed as planned. “Sidney reacted badly to my first draft, which was pretty close to the final draft—it was violent and vulgar, all those things—and it was too much for Sidney. He would have gone somewhere else. But Marty cut him off quickly. It was ruthless. He just said: ‘Goodbye. It’s not going to work.’ So, right away, he went to Brian because I think he was thinking of Brian, in the back of his head, because Brian had already been involved. On some level.” De Palma was amenable to Stone’s approach.

“There are two styles to screenwriting. One is to be like [Stone’s one-time mentor and Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter] Robert Bolt, where you put everything on paper. The other style is more American, where you put it on paper but it’s impressionistic and you direct it, and it becomes—you work on it in the direction. And I’m of both styles. Putting it all on paper is extremely difficult because there’s so many variations on the theme. So, I’ve been both ways. I worked with people like that and I worked with people who are a little looser. Brian’s a little looser. He’s not a stickler in the ways Marty or Al were.” He could take what was impressionistic in Stone’s script and run with it.

Stone stayed close to the production, starting with the casting process. He clashed with Bregman over the conception of Elvira, which Stone saw as an ideal role for Glenn Close. “I could never have directed a film with Marty,” Stone recalled with some amusement.

“De Palma was much ‘looser’ than I was at the time, in the sense that he had a little more experience, and he could put up with Marty’s control freak nature. Marty would be in every casting session. He didn’t even have casting sessions with actresses without Brian being there. I saw those. He’d line up fifteen, twenty blondes in the hallway—because he really felt responsible for the Elvira character. He really wanted her to be his ‘dream blonde,’ I guess. And I think he found it in Michelle Pfeiffer. I had a fight with him—I realize, now, how stupid it was—but I was defending Elvira as Glenn Close’s role. And Marty didn’t think she was right, visually. And my point was that Close was a very good actress. Michelle was not as experienced and had to struggle to make things work, and sometimes, I had to change the nature of the role, to make it fit Michelle. But ultimately she was the right choice.”

Once shooting started, Bregman let Pacino do his thing. “Brian had no choice because Al was a force. And Al was tough. Al wouldn’t get going—and I said in my book: ‘I don’t think Al will get going for the first seven takes.’ It was just generally the formula, and I couldn’t believe it because you don’t know how much time that wastes. A day has got so many hours and if you can’t get the first five, six, seven takes, you’re really fucked. You’re not getting many setups every day. And I could see this was coming, and it did go that way. But Brian was not a motivator. He was not. Brian was, as you might say, impersonal maybe. “Al was outside time. And I can’t tell you I understood his thinking. I understood his brilliance. I understood the things he was doing. And his screenplay ideas were always very—I always listened to him. I never belittled him like—Marty would belittle him and say: ‘Al was out of his mind. Forget it.’ You have to think about it, though. He’s saying that maybe it doesn’t sound right, but there’s something there. You have to think about that. “There was one time, Al went a little bit crazy when he heard Brian’s comment about ‘The actors are taking over this insane asylum’ or something like that. And he did go nuts on that. I think he disappeared for a few hours into his trailer. Jesus. One thing after another. It was a nightmare. I wouldn’t want that on one of my films. It would never happen that way, but it can get out of hand. So, Brian’s seen a lot. Yeah.”

Nevertheless, Stone sometimes found De Palma’s way of working confounding. “I don’t understand Brian. He’s very obtuse. He doesn’t give his emotions away. He certainly had a sardonic sense of humor. Very sardonic, very cynical, it’s funny. He’s very funny. All I can say is he didn’t seem to enjoy himself, at any time, in the movie. Except when he was shooting up something and having a tremendous time. But he didn’t seem to enjoy the process of people. He didn’t seem to like people as much as I would.

“On weekends, usually the director’s available because the film is an ongoing, seven-day-a-week affair, but he would actually, literally, cut off Bregman and would not answer his phone calls. So, here we are. And Bregman says: I can’t reach the motherfucker.’ And Brian’s rented a big house and he had a staff and they’re telling Bregman he can’t be disturbed, he’s asleep. He’d be asleep all weekend. So, he’s a strange guy. But he had a divorce going on.” Indeed he did, from the actress Nancy Allen. Apparently one source of strain was that De Palma would not cast Allen in the Elvira role.

Briefly putting himself in Bregman’s shoes, Stone reflected, “How could you fire De Palma when you’re in the middle of this mess that’s going on? But Marty’s certainly pulling his hair out: ‘What can I do to speed this guy up? I’ll call him on weekends. We’ll have a meeting.’ And he won’t even talk to you on the weekends. You can understand then Marty’s frustration. So, you get to the set Monday morning. You finally see your fucking director, and you can’t really say ‘You’ve got to speed it up.’ You’ve got to talk to them in certain ways. It’s very hard to motivate two people like Brian, who’s into his own world, and Al, who’s into his own world. So, you have these two obstacles. I wouldn’t want to have been the producer on that movie. I would have probably lost all my hair and ended up three hundred pounds or something, eating doughnuts all the whole time. I would have liked to see Scott Rudin fucking make that picture.” (Rudin was a famously prolific theater and film producer known for his prodigious temper; the accusations against him were such that while he’s still alive, he’s taking an indefinite hiatus from work. Apparently in addition to being a shouter, he was a thrower of objects. Hence Stone’s curiosity. What Would Scott Throw?) De Palma recalls asking Stone to leave the set on more than one occasion. From his perspective today, he’s not unsympathetic to Stone’s situation. The guy wanted to direct, had directed, and was now relegated to the writer’s chair but still hadn’t divested himself of the desire. And time would prove him a director of some distinction. But on the set of Scarface, De Palma had two primary collaborators cum bosses—Pacino and Bregman—and hence was likely to process Stone’s unsolicited suggestions as so much static.

But Stone insists he was not banished from the set as such. “He asked me to leave the set maybe three or four times in the course of the shoot. Like for the day, I’d leave for the day. I’d go back to where I was staying, and I’d work. Then Bregman may want me back and Pacino wanted me back. There was no way I was going to leave that set. I was stuck. Frankly, at the end, I was getting tired. It was just too much. Six months is a long time, and especially out of my life at the time. There were other things I wanted to do.”

Nevertheless, Stone had a passionate attachment to the film and worried over the finished product. In Matt Zoller Seitz’s book The Oliver Stone Experience, one of the full-page illustrations is a letter that Stone sent to Bregman during the editing process of Scarface. Dated August 11, 1983, here are two paragraphs:

[…] the film is more important than any single one of us and right now I am convinced there are some major problems, especially in the middle. As a result it just doesn’t work—not on the level you or I expected. In parts it’s downright embarrassing. Unless we fix it now—while we still can—we will be hiding from disaster, not taking it by the horns now. I think still the picture could be good, not great—but good. Right now it’s not even that.

I’ve given my initial impressions to Brian but in the intervening 36 hours I’ve been unable to sleep and have jotted down various other notes I didn’t cover with him so I am sending him a copy of these notes. I am dealing I think only with things that can be fixed, not with things that cannot be changed because they were directed that way. Nor am I going into the many fine things there are in the movie.

Looking back now, Stone allows that he was likely more privy to the shooting and editing processes than a writer arguably ought to have been. In his book he goes into some detail about the differing factions weighing in on how the film ultimately ought to play. He portrays himself as something of a willing pawn of Pacino. He told me, “The reason I saw the cut was only because Al was so alarmed that he brought my attention to it and he wanted me to go. Marty didn’t want me to go. He didn’t want me to see the film, as a lot of people know—it’s the writer! You don’t want the writer to see the bones of the film. Right? Now, I think a writer can bring a lot to the rehearsals and to the film as a whole. Brian had me in the rehearsals, that’s true; but he didn’t have many rehearsals. He was never an actor’s director, that way. He didn’t believe that much in talking things out about characters, or much rehearsal.” But on the set De Palma rolled with Pacino’s requests for numerous takes. “That's a crazy way to work,” Stone insists. “But you don’t tell the actor what to do. The actor doesn’t tell the director what to do. The producer does what he’s supposed to. It’s a strange system, and I guess in the old days it might’ve worked because they all agreed on the idea that they’d have a thirty-day schedule. But this was not agreed to at all. There was no consensus. I saw the ‘rough cut’ and I went back to Al, and I shared my thinking with him and then, of course, all hell broke loose because that’s what Bregman did not want me to talk to Pacino about.

“So, Brian turned on me. Marty and Brian would not talk to me. They were furious because I had let loose the monster, who, of course, was personified in Al. Marty always put the onus on Al. He always made him into the monster, made him worse than he was. Now, Al could be a monster, but he was also very bright. Al had a great sense of drama and a great sense of what was working and what was not working. So, I think it’s wrong to ignore him. I think he’s very important to the process.

“Anyway, it did improve after I saw it. But I didn’t talk to any of them about it again. Even Al didn’t call me, which was hurtful because I had been loyal to Al. I feel divided because a director and a writer are supposed to be combined. And I’d been in a situation where the writer ends up working for the actor and I know exactly what happened in that sense, because the writer and the actor—when they combine—it becomes a number for the director. So, the director has to be in charge of the writing and directing. He has to have that under his control, and in certain respects he has to be his own producer. It’s an impossible situation. Brian was able to put up with it because of the way he works.”

Stone has made his peace with what Scarface is. “When Brian’s making a gangster film, he wants it to be big. He wants it to be like a Sergio Leone kind of gangster film. He wants it stylistic. He wants big scenes, a lot of suits, a lot of clothes, a lot of costumes, jewelry. I get it. I didn’t perhaps get it as much as I did now. And I like the result. I liked the movie. But you realize at the time I was working off a more realistic palette because I’d been there. And Brian didn’t really have that realism in him. Or interest in it. He wasn’t that interested in it. I would take him to certain places in Miami and show him the atmosphere, and that’s what he loved—he loved the clubs, and all of that. But the realism of the business, how deals were made, how money was counted, all of that, he’s not that interested in it.”

Ultimately, he looks at Scarface as Bregman’s film; when wrapping up our conversation, he said, “Scarface became Bregman’s ‘big one.’ It became his ‘big number.’ It was his film. And he became famous for it. He did other successful films. But I don’t think he ever did anything else that matched it, not even Carlito’s Way.”

-Excerpted from The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface by Glenn Kenny © 2024 in GQ.

[back-and-totheleft]

Hubris Inc.

Not every child of the sixties was a flower child. At Yale in 1965, when George W. Bush was a young pledge at DKE, the fraternity to which his war-hero father had belonged, Oliver Stone was about to throw away the staid future his investment-banker father had planned for him. The two didn’t know each other, and they were hurtling on different trajectories. While Bush was learning the nicknames of his new frat brothers, Stone was burrowing into his foxhole of postadolescent alienation. “I was 19, and I said, ‘Look, I can’t make it, I can’t go to Yale, I don’t belong in these groups, I don’t belong here,” recalls Stone, who is in a back booth at the Royalton Hotel, looking weary from the exertions of finishing his new movie, W., which comes out next week. He’s a large man, but even so, his fleshy, Mayan-obelisk head looks too big for his body.

Stone dropped out of Yale, and the voyage he embarked on was both outward—to Vietnam and later Mexico, standard stops on the sixties itinerary—and inward. “I wanted to get rid of the ego,” he says. Bush’s trip out of the sixties could not have been more different, but he, too, had something he was running from. “Losing the ego is one reason born-agains are born again. It’s a key of Christianity, Evangelicism,” says Stone. “George Bush is broken, now you take the persona of Jesus.”

The dreams of the sixties often started in unhappy families. Though on opposite sides of the culture war, Bush and Stone were, fundamentally, questioners of the same authority—their fathers. (Stone’s was an aide-de-camp to Eisenhower and a staunch Republican who had a highly successful Wall Street career.) But the world these children of the greatest generation wanted to inherit was not the same one that their elders wanted to pass along. Instead, they chose to Easy-Ride their own paths to adulthood.

With W., Stone intends a kind of semi-comic Citizen Kane of the current administration, flashing back to find the source of the troubles of the past eight years in W.’s youthful hurts—family damage that changed the world. Releasing the film now, in the middle of a campaign in which the president’s failures are topic A, but the president himself seems out of the picture, requires an Oliver Stone–size hubris. We’ve seen this horror show on television—we know the punch lines, the motivations, the backstory. Will people really want to sit through two more hours of a Bush presidency? Stone is more than conscious of the risk. “It may miss completely,” he says, with real nervousness.

But Stone has always worked to force himself into the center of the national discourse. And W. has been a headlong, five-month race to catch up with history. “When we started,” he says, “no one wanted this movie. ‘Who’s interested in Bush?’ was the idea. ‘We hate the guy,’ or ‘He’s gone in January.’ And I kept arguing, ‘You have no idea how important the guy is in the culture.’ ”

W. is essentially the story of a son’s turning the tables on a disapproving father. “I think it’s very hard to be a first son who’s a black sheep, who’s a failure,” says Stone. “All his life, that is a traumatic, emotional thing.” The elder Bush, as played by James Cromwell, is a remote, scolding presence (with little of the silver-foot-in-the-mouth comic logorrhea of the real 41), convinced of his own rectitude, constantly reminding W. (Josh Brolin) that he’s no Jeb. “You’re a Bush. Act like one,” he says in an early scene, after ticking off a list of his firstborn’s many failures.

The fulcrum of the movie, the moment when W. measures himself against his father, is the 1992 election, when Bush Sr. taps his eldest—Jeb was unavailable, Poppy explains, twisting the knife—to run his campaign. “That ’92 election scarred Bush—both Bushes, the whole family,” says Stone. “And when they lost, people could say Bush didn’t seal the deal in Iraq, he waffled on taxes. And the son said, ‘It will never happen to me, I will never be as weak as my father.’ ”

Stone’s own damage is much more operatic. While he certainly has Daddy issues, it’s safe to say that Mommy (still living in New York) was the one who really fucked him up. A glamorous, elusive, free-spending Frenchwoman who had numerous affairs, she eventually left for good when Stone was away at boarding school—though not before teaching him how to masturbate (“I don’t remember that she touched my person,” he once told an interviewer).

An only child, Stone was simultaneously obsessed over and neglected, the center of a world whose center did not hold, and he was propelled out of his adolescence a prodigiously talented, prodigiously damaged seeker. There’s autobiography just below the surface in all of his movies. It’s a species of boundless baby-boom narcissism—he has remade his private damage into what he put forth as the American story.

Josh Brolin as George W. Bush and Toby Jones as Karl Rove in W.Photo: Sidney Ray Baldwin/Courtesy of Lionsgate While Stone rejected much of his father’s belief system, and even had to be bailed out of jail just as W. is in the movie, he’s made peace with his father’s memory. “I never had to be stronger than him because he was strong,” Stone says. “My father was a man who was blunt—he made many enemies by what he said. He used to tell me, ‘Don’t ever tell the truth, kiddo, you’ll get into trouble.’ ”

Stone is a man of the left, but much like Norman Mailer, he’s always been too bombastic, too egotistical, too enamored of his own masculinity to be fully accepted by those who share his views. W. is not likely to change many of these minds. He insists that, regarding his portrayal of W., his large thumb is not on the scale. “You can make up your own mind,” he says. A more vexing question is verisimilitude. Stone’s films have annexed territory previously the province of journalism and history, which is why debates over factual accuracy (as with JFK) have dogged his career. Stone now seems exhausted by these battles. “All the scenes are necessitated by real events that occurred,” he says with a sigh. “There is a list of annotations we can give you.”

But fact-checking W.—which is certainly more moderate than, say, the typical Paul Krugman column about the president—misses the point. And real or imagined, there are some wonderful scenes and performances. The gang is all here, tweaked to a point just south of satire. Thandie Newton plays Condi Rice with a sycophancy that’s almost canine. Scott Glenn’s Rumsfeld is underwhelming, but that may be because the man himself is so ostentatiously Dr. Strangelovean that no actor could ever measure up. Karl Rove (Toby Jones) is amusingly overdrawn, an evil dwarf behind owl glasses, whispering in the president’s ear. “Don’t get cute, Turdblossom, this is serious,” says W., when Rove—really, what Stone has made him is an arch-Republican Truman Capote—cracks wise. “There’s possibly a kind of homoerotic impulse in the way Rove picked up on Bush,” says Stone, putting forth his Brokeback Mountain theory of the administration. “They were opposites. Bush was entitled, he was rich, and he had an air of confidence.” The president, dimly aware that he’s being played by Rove and Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), is careful to keep them in their place, listening to their arguments, then pointedly ignoring them. “I’m the decider,” W. insists. It’s a desiccated idea of leadership, a parody of the strong father.

Stone emphasizes Bush’s vast hungers—long after he’s ceased mainlining bourbon, he’s scarfing sandwiches in staff meetings and choking on pretzels. There’s a heavy load of contempt in the portrayal: To Stone, Bush is a substance-abuse simpleton. “I don’t think Bush was an alcoholic; I think he is a man of excess and recklessness. Norman Mailer said that he was a dry drunk. It’s a little harsh, but the truth is that the habits did not change.”

Stone himself is a man of large appetites. “I understand excess,” he says (reading some of his accounts makes you think of Caligula with a social conscience). Yet he seems to see his own excess as heroic, part of a journey of self-awareness, which also included a good deal of therapy. He is a proud man, and part of that pride must come from the fact that he’s faced his own darkness, understood his own damage, turned his pain into something valuable. For Stone, the ultimate tragedy of Bush is rooted in the sixties sin of not being able to look inward, thus fucking up his American story, along with everyone else’s. As in Easy Rider, he blew it.

-John Homans, "Hubris Inc," New York magazine, Oct 9 2008

[back-and-totheleft]

Drugs in the sun

Matt: I’ve talking with Academy Award winning director Oliver Stone – the man responsible for such films as Platoon, Wall Street, Born On The Fourth Of July, JFK and Any Given Sunday. His new film, Savages, is now in Australian cinemas and so I say hello to Mr Oliver Stone, how’s it going?

Oliver: Hi Matt, I’m fine. And yourself?

Matt: I’m very well. Don Winslow’s book was first published only two years ago and now here it is as a major motion picture. How did you first get involved with this project?

Oliver: I bought the book cold with my own money. It was different. I’d never read anything quite as unique and it had no clichés. It was about the contemporary drug landscape of California and Mexico. On top of that, Don added the story of these three young people who are taking on the older generation. It becomes quite complex and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Matt: As a filmmaker, you mentioned that you read this book. Do you read a lot of books trying to look for that next possible movie?

Oliver: Not really. My agent rarely sends me things unless he truly believes in them. He said you should read this and that it’s really different. I read it, bought it right away and then worked with Don Winslow and Shane Salerno on-and-off for about a year to come up with the script. It had a lot of sex, drugs and violence that would scare most of the studios away but we did get a buyer and we ended up making the film.

Matt: So how does it go working with Don? It’s his novel and I’m sure he was very attached to it.

Oliver: In the film world, the film director/co-writer becomes the next step. It is painful for a writer but Don was a mature man and we agreed on most of everything while disagreeing on a few other things.

Matt: You mentioned the violence and sex that’s in the movie and I know it’s always a delicate balancing act trying to get films past the censors with an appropriate rating. What was your thought process at the start about you wanted to illustrate the story’s violence on screen?

Oliver: In my opinion, it comes down to the tension of the piece. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is as long as you keep the audience wondering what will happen next. You wonder “who are these people?” and form relationships with your characters, whether you like them or not.

Telling a story that was honest to the spirit of this time was essential. I didn’t know these three young actors. They were all fresh to me – Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch. The three older actors I had in my mind when we were writing the script because they were so defined – Benecio Del Toro as the henchman, Salma Hayek as her boss and John Travolta in a surprising turn as an over-the-hill Drug Enforcement Agent who is actually smarter than he seems.

Matt: Let’s talk about the cast and for me, the star performance came from Salma Hayek. You sense her vulnerability but she’s such a vicious, calculating, manipulating character. Was she easy to get on this project?

Oliver: She was my first choice and she was happy to do it because she liked the material. Benecio, Salma and Blake changed their roles the most through their personality. It is how the filmmaking process goes – I work with the actors and I learn from accommodating them.

This movie came alive for me and I’ll remember it for a long time. It certainly fits the “beach mode” and I thought maybe the Australians might like the homage to beach life.

Matt: It does look great and I love the way you’ve used film as opposed to digital.

Oliver: Yes. There’s a huge difference still – at least 25% in terms of resolution, depth and grit. There’s nothing quite like film.

Matt: I realise you had Jennifer Lawrence originally on board for the Blake Lively role but she dropped out to do The Hunger Games. Does changing an actor like that dramatically alter the film? Do have to rethink certain scenes or other actors because of that fact?

Oliver: Oh yes, that was a big thing. She was certainly smart because The Hunger Games was already a famous book. It was a good move for her. Blake Lively has a different sort of personality from Jennifer but I liked them both. With Blake, she took this in a different director and we did rewrites with her in mind.

Matt: For me, the film didn’t seem to be trying to preach too much in terms of the war on drugs. It’s more of an entertaining, “who’s really in control” kind of story. Was that the intention? Or is there an underlying point here that I didn’t quite catch?

Oliver: No, you’re right. This is a film about power. It’s about the relationships between people and how they change. It’s also about how you don’t know who you’re really dealing with sometimes.

A good example is the character of Aaron Johnson. I won’t say where he goes to but he starts the movie as a peace-loving man who wants to make a deal with the cartel. Blake Lively is similar. She’s very much a “beach bunny” but where she ends up in the end is very interesting. It’s very much a surprise ending.

Matt: Yeah, the ending is interesting. We probably better not talk about it too much because we don’t want to give it away but is that how it played out in the book or did you change it?

Oliver: No, it wasn’t in the book. There were many different elements in the film that take the best from the book for movie purposes and runs from there.

Matt: You obviously had the content of Don’s book but you do any of your own research on the marijuana business, the drug cartels and the corruption within the DEA?

Oliver: Yeah but I didn’t have to look too far. I went down to Mexico with Benecio and hung out with some heavyweights. We spent time with an agent who’d been with the DEA for 30 years who helped us enormously. We also hung out with a lot of independent growers here in California where marijuana is legal under state law. They have some great yields and they grow their product very scientifically with good technology.

Matt: I’m curious about what it was like down in Mexico. Was it a drug cartel that you were with?

Oliver: Yes. It’s a different approach down there though. Mexican weed is created at a very cheap price and it’s very impure. California is different in that it’s not a very big market but it’s more of a connoisseurs market – like a wine.

Hanging out in Mexico, I can’t tell you too much who but there were some enormous lunches on incredible estates. The difference between wealthy and poor is shocking in Mexico.

Matt: You’ve been making movies now for over 30 years. Are you still as passionate and energised by the industry as when you first started out?

Oliver: I think each movie is its own world and I adopt the approach of an actor in the sense that I enter into the subject for that period of time. Whether it be one year or two, I sort of become that and leave a small piece of myself behind.

When I come back to the world, the business has changed a little. There are new studios heads and people have moved around but I think what most people respect is a story. It doesn’t matter who young or ancient you are, there’s a collective consciousness about great stories.

Matt: I guess I’ll finish up by asking about The Untold History Of The United States. It sounds like a fascinating project. What can you tell us about it?

Oliver: Thank you. You’re very well informed and I appreciate it. It’s my latest project and I’ve been working on it off-and-on as a documentary for about 4.5 years with Peter Kuznick of the American University. It’s starts in the 1940s and goes through until now and goes through things we were not told in school about history. It looks at history upside down in a sense.

It’s about what children really don’t know and the mythologies that are allowed to grow. In typical Oliver Stone fashion, I’m trying to make people rethink what they assume to be.

Matt: It sounds great and I can’t wait to see that as well but in the meantime, Savages in now in theatres in Australia. Oliver Stone, thank you so much for speaking with me.

Oliver: Thank you Matt, you were very kind.

-Matthew Toomey interviews Oliver Stone, The Film Pie, Oct 17 2012

[back-and-totheleft]

"Stop this nonsense"

Ever-honest director and author Oliver Stone stopped by HuffPost Live on Tuesday to discuss Barack Obama's presidency, climate change and his new book and documentary series, "The Untold History of the United States."

Stone is an equal opportunity critic, arguing that neither Obama nor Mitt Romney tackled climate change in a substantive way. "I was a little disappointed at the third debate when neither of them talked about climate control and the nature of the situation on Earth," Stone said. "I think there's kind of a weird statement coming right after … this is a punishment … Mother Nature cannot be ignored. That's all I thought about."

American exceptionalism is among Stone's "There's this attitude that we 'deserve' to be in charge," Stone said. "I don't believe in that … We act as if we have this right of kingship -- we act as tyrants."

"We learn the history of the victors," Peter Kuznick, a history professor at American University and partner of Oliver Stone said. "We learn this triumphant version of history, that the United States is the shining city on the hill."

Despite his criticisms of the Obama administration, Stone freely admitted that he had already pre-voted in support of the president's reelection. The filmmaker's main reasons for casting his ballot in Obama's favor were based on the president's ability to think rationally and perform "brilliantly" in the context of debates.

Though both Stone and Kuznick predicted that Obama would win, Stone humored HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski with a guess at what a Romney presidency would look like. "It certainly means more militarism … there's no talk of cutting back," Stone forecasted.

Stone, an ardent advocate of marijuana legalization, argued that "there is nothing harmful in marijuana" and had a clear message for anti-pot politicians: "Stop this nonsense."

When asked if the project's political tenor made it difficult to finance and produce, Stone said that while "The Untold History of the United States" is "love work," the series and book are "the most cumbersome project I've ever been involved with."

Getting the ten-hour series on television was a sizable task, Stone said, arguing that while PBS or other public stations may have once shown such a program, "they're so politicized they can't say anything -- they're scared of their own shadow." Instead, Stone argues PBS has settled for making "this Pro-American experience type stuff, where it has to be about America and America has to be the point of making the movie."

President George W. Bush also made it into the segment, albeit only as a playful aside. "I was in Bush's class [at Yale], so that tells you a bit about what we were taught at the time," Stone quipped.

-Kia Makarechi, "Oliver Stone: Sandy Is 'Punishment' For Obama & Romney's Silence On Climate Change," Huffington Post, Oct 3 2012

[back-and-totheleft]

"If I were Morgan, I wouldn't take that money"

George Clooney can rest easy - he's evidently one of the few film-makers working today that controversial director Oliver Stone doesn't have a problem with…

"I liked 'Michael Clayton', 'Syriana'," says Stone, referring to two of Clooney's recent political dramas, "but most stuff is deeply conservative."

"Even when James Cameron made that superb film 'Avatar', he was making as clear a statement as I have ever seen about the US military being the bad guy, and he said, "I don't make political films like Oliver Stone. I had no intention of criticising the empire.' Well, James, excuse me, what are you smoking? I love you as a film-maker, but don't play that game.

"My job is drama. I have to tell a story with tension and make it exciting to watch, but if I'm dealing with political content, I don't want to get on the wrong side of history, and I won't."

I mention I've just come from watching the latest America-takes-on-evil blockbuster 'Olympus Has Fallen', starring Morgan Freeman with its Korean enemies, and a big White House-based battle for victory. Stone sighs.

"Morgan Freeman sadly should not… I would not take the money if I were Morgan, whom I respect, for espousing a false enemy." And he's on a roll.

Churchill and Roosevelt's meeting changed the direction of World War II, told by Stone in his new 10-part documentary series telling 'The Untold Story' of the 20th century.

"By the way, a recent James Bond film was ridiculous too. They made Cuba the home of chemical warfare and it becomes a whole issue when they go to Cuba. And, in another film, Mr Stallone, who is an equal opportunity offender, managed to make a film that made $100m, saying that Chavez was a bad guy with a red beret.

"This is very dangerous toxic material that you're putting into the body politic. It's like you're polluting the waters. I hope to god there is some justice in this world to bring back to these film-makers some sense of what they did."

While all this money has been made in Hollywood, Stone has not been idle. Instead, he's put his back into a 10-part documentary series, telling the "untold" story of 20th century US politics. It's been a five-year labour of love, to "re-examine what you thought you knew".

Stone has apparently been longtime infuriated by what is being taught. "It's in my daughter's text books… the US successfully ended WWII with the bomb, and the Japanese had to be defeated that way. because they would never surrender."

For Stone, it's all about the atom bomb, the dropping of which ended WWII. "Once you deal with the bomb, you can never come back, it's like opening Pandora's Box. Once you start to understand that the bomb was not necessary to drop, it opens up the next question… who started the cold war? What was the bomb about? Was it about the Russians, or really about the Japanese? I think it's like a good Agatha Christie."

Stone has been happy to tell what he considers the 'untold story' in many of his films, including 'Born on the Fourth of July', 'JFK' and 'Nixon', but this wasn't borne out of activism - in fact, if anything, it was the other way round.

"My advocacy comes from the films. I avoided activism after Vietnam, I wasn't sure about my positions, I was muddled. I always expressed interest in it, but I never understood emotionally how I was attached to the landscape. I had gone to Vietnam because of politics, but you don't put two and two together.

The average soldier goes to fight for his country, to fight communism, you don't think too much about that, you got a couple of medals, you feel good about yourself, you feel kind of lousy because you some people got killed who you didn't think should be killed. It comes from idealism.

"My life has evolved, my knowledge has deepened, I learned a lot in the past five years, I'm grateful for that. I knew a lot, but not like this."

Does increased knowledge equal deeper anger? He shakes his head.

"Anger can only take you so far, you can't keep it up, it wears you down. I think you need consistency, intellectual curiosity, stamina, all of these things come into play. Anger is not a working emotion, it's perhaps a deep-seated feeling of conscience."

And, with all the stories he tells in 10 chapters of documentary belying the myth that America has earned its position of message-bearing to the world, is he still a patriot? This time he nods.

"A patriot is willing to dissent from his country's majority with a vigilante viewpoint, and when it's wrong, it's wrong. So, yes. We stand for speaking out and being different and saying we have sold out to the conformity and fear, and the usual suspects."

If, as Stone sees it, there are people willing to uphold the myth for their own ends, to whom does he give credit for standing up and speaking out?

"Gorbachev… Kruschev… Kennedy doesn't get enough credit for saving the world, by saying no to the military. Kennedy had deep guts to say no, and I think he paid the price for it…"

Tempting as it is to follow Oliver Stone down a labyrinth of conspiracy, I'm keen to end positively, so I ask where his beacons of hope are to be found.

"Whenever I speak to kids in colleges, I think there's a bulb going off, and I hope there's a Martin Luther King out there, willing to speak out for good in this world. You always hope that you're going to hit that button. There are a lot of smart people. Lot of dumb people, but also smart people. You've got to root for evolution."

In the case of Mr Stallone and co, too? He chuckles.

"We should make Stallone watch our series with clockwork orange eyes."

-Caroline Frost, "Oliver Stone On His New History Series, How Kennedy 'Paid The Price' And Why Morgan Freeman Should 'Not Take The Money'," April 11 2013, Huffington Post UK

[back-and-totheleft]

From the other side

How can you stand keeping yourself in the war [through movies]?

Let's say, just...I couldn't finish the war until I'd gone back and experienced it from the other side, to see what they went through, because they were victims, in many ways, of what we did. [...] It was important for me to practice compassion by going back to Vietnam and trying to tell the story through the victim's eyes.

-Oliver Stone interviewed by Bruna Lombardi, 1993

[back-and-totheleft]

Vietnam at 50: The Legacies of War

We're here tonight to talk about the legacies of war and Oliver, in your book, you talk about the problem of ideology as a kind of motivating force. And, hopefully, I'm not going to sound like Sigmund Freud here, but I wanted to start with your dad. Louis Stone served as a lieutenant colonel in World War II. He was part of Eisenhower's staff in Paris and you write how, in 1945 after the war, he was already joining - as you say - the old struggle against Communism. How did your dad's experiences and his ideological anti-communism stance affect you growing up?

Oh, very much so! It was an interesting journey he had, because he came out of the Depression with his brothers and his sister - and of course their ideas went to the left, because there was so much poverty in the United States. And he liked Roosevelt at first, that's what's interesting!

But then he became a Wall Street broker, so he saw it from the other side from 1935 on, and he liked Russia, because we'd no dispute with Russia. He didn't really understand the ideological hatred of Russia in this country, but during the war is when he changed. Well, actually, you said Paris, but he was also in Berlin, so he saw the postwar occupation and he saw the whole problem with the treasury bills: the US dollar and the money that they had to print. There was a lot of stealing and a lot of black markets and he blamed the Russians for a lot of that. Now, that may or may not be true, but certainly a lot of American guys were also doing the black market a lot, so there was a lot of corruption. 

But as that war ended, and as the United States became more and more conscious of the Russian threat, so-called - you know, we made NATO to resist this potential invasion of Europe, which made no sense because the Russians were exhausted financially and militarily, but anyway - so he joined the band, because I guess that's one way to get ahead. He was on Wall Street and pretty much everybody had to be, if not a Republican, everybody had to be a Cold Warrior. It was a mandate, like [when] we had to wear masks during Covid. It was, "You have to feel this way." I remember many of his friends were liberal Jews from the 1930s and he liked them very much, but he could no longer have that kind of relationship with them, because they were out of style.

Well, you wrote [that] he felt that he still had to feed the military industrial state.

That didn't come up actually until later. I never heard that expression until Eisenhower left office. That was in 1964 or three - no, I'm sorry, 1960 - when Eisenhower made that speech. Of course, Eisenhower had done more to build up the bomb than anybody. But yet he said at the very end, as if he had a guilt complex, he said the most dangerous thing in American society - the most dangerous, he said - was the military industrial complex. I remember his exact words: that [it] is going to infect all our state houses, the whole country. He knew something was off, but he had contributed so much to it that...you understand. It's a strange speech. You watch it many times. I put it in my movie on Jack Kennedy. It is a very significant statement, because it is an old man who had been president for two terms, telling us - warning us - that there is something amiss in America and it's very serious.

Here at the Quincy Institute, you've certainly felt the pulse, and that pulse has never ceased. And it's amazing to me how strong that complex has remained. It seems to be immune to any kind of logic or attack, and the power of money continues and continues. It's just impossible to break that lock. We can talk about ways to do it. I'm sure you've thought about ways to do it.

I'm hoping at the end that you're going to give us, like, the top three ways to solve it. [laughter] If we drop it down a little bit, you also say about your father that that civilian life could not match the intoxicating time of World War II.

My father instilled in me the fear of the Russians, because when I was 10 years old, he's telling me, "They're in our schools! They're in our state house! They're all over the place! They're in journalism!" Which was a lot of nonsense. It was just people who were more liberal than he was. It was a lot of fear and, of course, that was added to by McCarthy and the whole Red Scare. But the Red Scare had come out of the old Red Scare of 1919, so it's a history in America that occurs repeatedly. 

I say that because, in my lifetime now, the Russian thing never materialized. We spent a fortune on the Cold War and, as you know, Ronald Reagan, the arch foe of Soviet communism, ended up making a deal with Gorbachev. So it shows you how history changes, because then we go for a period where it seems that we're out of that fear. It was a horrifying place to be.

So it's really interesting that this is how you're growing up, and then you're at Yale in 1964. You negotiate with the dean to take a year off to teach with a Catholic group in Vietnam. Did you think about ideology differently? Did you look at the Cold War differently, having gone to Vietnam?

No. I was a naive young man and I went along with the flow. I wasn't a genius or anything like that. I used to have arguments with a schoolmate of mine who was pro Castro. I would have vehement arguments with him! It's very funny, because he went the other way later.

And you went the other.

But no, I had to have my eyes awakened by experience. It's the only way it could work.

Did you think about the Vietnamese in a certain way while you were there, before you went as a soldier, or were you just kind of there?

No. I was there as a teacher originally, so I was teaching them. It was a very hectic job, very difficult, because I had huge classes and papers to correct. It was two semesters of hell but I learned a lot about the society. And Le-Ly Hayslip, who's here today - 

Le-Ly, do you want to stand up so we can recognize you?This is Le-Ly Hayslip, who lived in Vietnam and wrote this phenomenal memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, which Oliver then directed as a movie. And if there's one thing you do tonight before you leave, please say hello to Le-Ly. She's phenomenal.

She permitted me to do the third installment of my Vietnam saga, which is about her and - what I can call it, honestly - what the peasants were going through outside the cities. This was about the real people of Vietnam, the agricultural side that was pressured from both sides: the bombings from the Americans and the pressure from the VC, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese. It was a horrible place to be in the middle of and they suffered greatly. Estimates by Robert McNamara were as high as 3.5, 4 million Vietnamese were killed during that war. That's a huge amount for a country smaller than Europe.

So after your experience teaching there, you volunteer for the draft in 1967, and you write, "I was in a rush to get to the front lines before the war was over." Thinking back, what was the appeal? What were you hoping to achieve there?

Well, you have to be 18, 19 years old to remember that period in your life, which is very hard when you're older. But it was complex. I couldn't deal with a lot of things. I was frustrated. I didn't know things. I didn't feel like my education was complete. I had been to Vietnam, but I still was confused about what was going on, because I didn't understand all the politics. Of course, I was on my father's side, because you always listen to your father if you're a good boy, which I tried to be and [I thought] the Communists were bad. 

But then in that period, I went back because I didn't feel like I knew enough, that I wasn't complete. I didn't want to be a fraud. I wrote that book - which came out in 1997 - called A Child's Night Dream, which is a pretty honest book about being 19 years old. It's a very interesting look at the world from a 19 year old mentality, and you can understand why 19 year olds go to war, and why they're often the victims of war. Any of you who've had children who were confused at that age know what I'm talking about. It's a byproduct of our society which, in many ways, is spiritually bereft.

So Oliver directs the second film in the trilogy, Born on the 4th of July. It's based on a book written by Ron Kovic, and Ron Kovic writes in Born on the 4th of July, "like Mickey Mantle, John Wayne and The Sands of Iwo Jima, [the Marines] became my heroes." And you say he was a true believer. Did you also get a sense that military service would kind of help, maybe even turn you into a man?

They all did, but they [the military] still do that advertising, you know, become a man.

Be careful now, the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot Commander is here, so I don't want to get told off [laughter].

I know! I told him, "I don't want to go, I don't want to go." [laughter]

So, seriously, this is how good the Marine Corps Recruiting Commander is - Brigadier General Ryans is here - he literally, as Oliver Stone was walking up onto the ship, was trying to recruit Oliver and said he was going to give him a waiver [laughter]. 

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 '67-68. September '67, I arrived. The Tet Offensive falls in January '68 and it's a bloody year. A lot of people get killed. The whole thing turns when Johnson, in March of '68, backs out of the war. He says he's not going to run again. We knew it was over. If you were infantry, you knew it. Infantry is very smart. They may not be the most educated people, but they know what's going on, and they figured it out right away, "Who's going to get killed for this?" So it wasn't like it's pictured in the movies most of the time.

I want to ask about that because I think this is really interesting. Looking back as a director on your younger self, did you see the gaps between what was on the big screen [and the reality]? 

Oh, yeah. We laughed at The Green Berets. It was shown outdoors, actually, at Dầu Tiếng. I saw it [there] and it was hilarious. We were laughing our heads off because it didn't look like anything we saw in combat. And John, to be honest, was a little old and fat, but what the hell, he was John Wayne.

No, it turned sour: that whole thing was a different thing. I didn't have the answers. I just came home and I was completely messed up, as many people were. But I made my way back gradually. Thank God my first wife really helped me a lot. Educating myself helped me a lot. I went to NYU Film School and made it gradually back. It took some time. It took some time. It's not like you're dramatic, it's just that you're confused, and I had to learn more. 

I learned, over the next ten years, a lot about America. I went to educate myself more. And when I met that professor you mentioned, Professor Kuznik, when I was in my late 40s - that's when I really studied history again, because he was a history professor for 30 years, so he led me in this study of American history. That motivated me to do this Untold History of the United States, 12 chapters, of which I really am proud. Because it goes from 1898 - when we first become interventionists in Cuba, the Philippines in that McKinley era - and then all the way through Obama. It ends in 2013 but we tracked a pattern of intervention, and it's an astounding story of repetition of the same problem. Whatever they say, there is a repetition.

I wonder if it relates to something you said earlier, that this is confusing as a young kid. You write in Chasing the Light that clearly [combat is] a frightening experience but it's also exciting, right? How do you explain that?

At 19, you're not thinking about dying. It's just something to be avoided. You see the guys that are dead and it's shocking, yes, but are you really considering all the spiritual values of that death and what it means to his family, to the future generation? You're not really thinking about that. You're thinking about, "Jesus Christ, fuck, I'm lucky!" You're not thinking like that. 

The interesting thing was I had a lot of sergeants who came out of World War II. They were grizzled veterans and most of them figured out ways to stay out of the field. They would stay back. But they were all canny veterans and they ran the PXs. They made a lot of money, by the way. There was a lot of corruption going on. A lot of corruption. Oh man. Le-Ly can tell you. Out of the PX, they were selling everything they could, and the Vietnamese were reselling them. It was a money war. There was a lot of money. A lot of people made big money, especially the Vietnamese. They're very smart. Very smart. What was I going to say?

We were talking about this kind of weird place where it's both frightening and exciting.

It's exciting. It's exciting to survive and exciting to kill, which happened. And to see them, to actually see them. Because you never really saw them that much. 

Our students read Karl Marlantes and what it's like to go to war and Karl writes that, "Combat is like crack cocaine, all the excitement highs with the crack cocaine costs."

Yeah, but Vietnam didn't have enough of that. The Civil War was better. If you could go through that war, you can imagine - that was really horrible, horrible, bloody. I think World War II was hard. Vietnam, in comparison, is a smaller war. My father used to make fun of it and said, "It's a police action." Well, Dad, it was a police action maybe from your point of view, but not from where I was. 

So what was your homecoming like? You write that - and this is really interesting, I think especially today - you write that you were terrified of the America you returned to. So what was your homecoming like?

Well, I was doing dope. You know, I was an E4. I didn't know officers. We never dealt with that level. My infantry unit was from the poorest parts of America and they went back to poor jobs, if jobs at all. Most of them had hard fates. They died young from overwork, or just got old because of the war. Some of them suicided. 

The Blacks - many of them couldn't get jobs. I went to Mississippi. I went to Tennessee. I saw them there. I went to the inner city of Chicago. It was tough. I talked for a class of people...that was what Platoon was about, and it wasn't about a lot of West Point people. A lot of officers got on me and I said, "It's not about the officer class." I didn't even know who my officers were! We saw them at a distance. But if you had any interaction with an officer, it was rare, because they wanted your butt in the field, and who was leading you in the field? Younger sergeants. The ones that were from my generation, but not the older sergeants, as I said, from Korea and World War II. They managed to stay out of the field as much as possible.

So looking back, do you see similarities between your dad reintegrating back home after World War II and yours? 

No. My father married a beautiful woman, my mother, in France. He picked her up on the street, actually [laughter] not what you're thinking! But he really didn't know her and he just liked her, and he went up to her on a bicycle and he bumped into her. He looked great in his American uniform, you know, 1944 or '45 Paris.  Anyway, so [when] he came back, he was an older man. He went in his 30s, so he was going back to Wall Street. 

Coming back, I was 20 years old, 21 years old. So what could I do? I had no job. I had no skills, except digging a foxhole and you know....it's not the same thing. Put it this way - you don't want to know. It's in the book. I went to jail on a federal smuggling charge right away, within ten days [of returning], here in San Diego. 

We got in the car and Oliver is like,"San Diego will always have a special place in my heart." [laughter]

San Diego was on the cutting edge of the drug war. It wasn't announced as a drug war. Nixon was coming in - this was December '68 - he was coming into office. He would come into office in March of '69, but the drug war was very much evident. You saw it in the jail. I don't know if it's still there - the county jail house or whatever they call it. I think [it held] 2,000 beds but it was 5,000 people in there. They were all black and all Hispanic. I think I was one of the few white people.

I got my eyes opened again. This was infantry. This was Vietnam. This is the war at home. Believe me, none of these people had been to Vietnam, very few of them. Why? Because they hadn't had an ounce, a dose, of patriotism in them. They had been struggling their whole lives. So it was a very "opening my eyes" kind of wake up, which unsettled me for a long time.

So how did going to NYU film school open your eyes as well?

Well, gradually. No, it was gradual. I wasn't, you know...hey, listen. I love movies. My mom took me all the time. My father liked good movies. So when you hear about this new thing called film school and you can get a college degree from watching movies - you know, why not? [laughter] Plus I got the GI Bill, which makes sense. So I went to NYU and gradually developed my talent and that took time. I like to write. I kept writing. 

I was telling a bunch of folks that I was reading Chasing the Light and I was 50 pages in, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so well written." I was like, "Duh, he's a screenwriter."

Yeah, I wanted to be a writer originally and I thought I could be, but my fate was different. 

If we can, let's talk a little bit about directing, specifically about war stories. Your fellow Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, has written about the challenges of telling a true war story. What challenges did you face as a director for a film like Platoon: in getting, as you say in your book, the real depiction of the nightmare war that you experienced?

You can't. It's not possible. I really don't think so. It would be the most boring movie in the world because people wouldn't understand the distances. A war movie has to have some excitement, so ideally you see the enemy, and you have to have that clash to make it work, to give it the juice. You've got to personalize it.

Now, that doesn't need to be so. I've seen other kinds of war movies from Eastern Europe - very, very flat and frankly, I don't think they would work so well with an American audience. We have television we grew up with and we're used to violence. We like that. We like it and that's going to be a problem you're going to have to deal with the rest of your life - our life - the love of violence in this country. A love of action. [In reality] the enemy can kill you when you can't even see them. They're out of your range.

I thought it was so fascinating - you say as a director, you have the power to decide who lives or dies, and clearly war is so much more unpredictable than that, so there's this challenge of capturing the randomness of war in a sense, right?

But that's with actors, remember. I wouldn't want to play the god role. I'm killing actors off, you know. [laughter] Just joking!

You don't see the enemy much [in real war]. When you do see him, it's suddenly the most surprising, weird thing. I mean, for example, one day - I didn't put this in the movie - I swear they had those giant anthills in the jungle, in the 25th Infantry near Dầu Tiếng. We were in a firefight and I'm behind the anthill and I have an M79. Anybody who knows what an M79 is, it's a worthless gun. I mean, it's a shotgun shaped thing but you need to fire at least 30 yards, 40 yards, 50 yards to get any explosion. It won't go off. 

So I pop up over the hill and somehow there's a Vietnamese guy looking at me right there, across the anthill. I go down. He goes down. "What the fuck did I just see?" [laughter] He was saying the same thing to himself. He was scared. That's the kind of stupidity and weirdness that you run into. Finally, when I got the courage - I didn't have a gun - to look around, he was gone. He split. Thank God.

Has your definition of a real war story changed over time? Your worldview has clearly widened since you were a young 19 year old in Vietnam. 

What American war film do you know that really works for you? Now, I understand there's been some good war films. It's more about character. Because when you get to the actual war, you see too much killing [done] too easy. The Marine pictures were great. [The Sands of] Iwo Jima is great. 

For example, Saving Private Ryan: I still cannot believe those American soldiers would go halfway across France to find a guy that they didn't have any knowledge or investment with. That is highly unlikely and that was fictionalized. The D-Day invasion seemed very, very rough for that particular area, almost too rough. I mean, everyone gets killed, it seems. The density of the fire is a little bit heavy, but that's the nature of a filmmaker. You want to make it better. You want to make it more dangerous, more violent, so it's not really as dramatic, in my opinion.

So is there a central argument for a film like Platoon and, if so, what is it?

Look. No film is going to change people if they don't want to be changed. A lot of people saw that movie and said, "I want to sign up." A lot of them went to the Iraq War. 

Same thing with Full Metal Jacket, right? It's an anti-war film, in a sense -

You can't say that. You can just say, "Here it is. Now realize what you're getting into." It's a bigger issue, though, why do we keep going back to war? After the war in Vietnam, I thought, "Maybe this is over. Maybe we're not going to be intervening in these countries anymore. Maybe." And certainly when Reagan makes a deal with Gorbachev, it seemed like, "Okay, the Cold War is off. Russia's back to where it should be." Unfortunately, too many people are invested in the war industries in this country. Too much money is at stake. We need an enemy. We need it. If we don't have it....it's the same argument [as] in '45. My father was an economist. We need an enemy, otherwise we're going to have a massive depression again. They were scared about going back to the '30s. They hated Roosevelt at that point, too. Everything turned, but they thought it was a full employment economy with a war. And, as a result, that kind of [mentality] set in and it's been there. It's still in the neoconservative circles. It's a Bible. They feel it. It's religious more than reason. It's an indoctrination of the soul.

Part of it, too, I wonder is - do you get a sense that we as Americans are uniquely susceptible to fear mongering? 

No. I think the English help us a lot [laughter]. I think the English are the most martial people I've ever seen. They really have a science of it, but everyone in the world to some degree has that warrior in him. 

Not everyone, but you know what I'm saying. There's always that element in society, but society exists to civilize that: to curb it, to restrain it. But it seems that we're getting closer to it all the time, where the advertisements on television are more realistic, more brutal, preparing for war. It seems to me that the American people have accepted too readily the proposition that Russia is out to get us. It hasn't ever been really debated. The people who debated representing the Russian point of view - many intellectuals, many academics - they don't get the time. They don't get the space. This was more and more evident during this Ukraine period. I was working with Stephen Cohen of NYU, who's one of the leading scholars of Russian history in America. He knows his stuff. He speaks Russian. He's been doing it for years and he couldn't even get a booking. He had to go on the offbeat radio shows, because he said the truth on CNN one time to somebody and they no longer booked him.

We know that that happened earlier, too, in the first Iraq war. There were people like Don A. Eubuen (sp?). You couldn't say these things. So there seems to be some corporate control of television, and the media that is pushing for war, and it's a very subtle thing. It's not necessarily a conspiracy, but it is a drive towards profit.

So, as someone in the business, do you feel that popular culture products like films also promote this neoliberal interventionist foreign policy? Like what products?

Films, as an example. Oh, sure. After 2001, which—oh, God forbid — the whole world changed. The whole world changed because all of a sudden it became alright to adopt a war posture at all times. It became alright. We have the right to do anything now, because they've done this to us, which was a very self-righteous point of view, represented by a guy I went to school with who was a real moron: George [W.] Bush. [laughter] I mean, he was in my class. He got the C's; I left.

[Laughter] He got the C's, and you left!

Well, he was entitled. He had a father. [laughter] Anyway, I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, we decided that our enemies were everywhere, that there’s no limit on this thing. We talked about 60-some countries and we went basically to war with the world, and it never changed. We never came back. As much as I’d hoped for better things with Obama, it never happened. He just kept going with the same Patriot Act. Read the Patriot Ac! It pisses me off. If you’re a real patriot, it should piss you off. And now, the censorship—all the censorship in the world—is going on. This is really sick. As several candidates have pointed out, free speech is our right, it's not a privilege. You hear some of these people like Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton tell you that it's a privilege we have to respect, a privilege to speak freely. No, it’s not for you to give us the right to speak freely. We have the right. Fuck you [laughter, applause]. I hate their presumption.

As we get a little closer to the end so we have some time for the audience, I’d like to talk briefly about legacies. What has been the most important legacy the Vietnam War has left for the United States, in your opinion?

Obviously nothing. Nobody paid attention and we kept going back to war. It's a repeat, a redux. Come on. We’ve made one mistake after the other in foreign affairs. We’re not a very smart country diplomatically. If we’d [have] been a little bit cooler, we could have gotten along with everybody in this world. Everybody, maybe except with one or two exceptions. There’s no reason why we can’t be partners with Russia and with China. We can have economic competition; we don’t need a war.

You brought this up earlier. I’m going to hold you to it now. How do we provoke Americans to think more critically about the use of military power overseas? That’s your job [laughter].

Wait, I’m going to pass the buck to Laura. Laura, that’s your job. 

What you’ve got to do is take risks. The risk-takers are going to push it to the level. The  neoconservatives are there in this administration, as well as in the last one. They’re not going away. They’re still around, those people, and they’re very dangerous because they think a certain way. They’re really indoctrinated. But they will eventually push this thing to where it hits home. Put a couple of missiles into America and we’ll see if people can handle it. That’s the only way. We have to experience it with our own. It won’t be a 9/11. It’ll be worse, I think.

Alright, so one final question before I've got a surprise for you. We have a lot of students in the audience tonight. Fred, Oliver's only guidance for the speaker series was - that he gave me a few years ago - was that it be student-centric, and we've tried to have that as our guiding light, which is why every table has got an SDSU student here with you.

It's interesting San Diego State is doing this thing and not UC [University of California] San Diego [cheers, applause]. 

So we actually have a couple of UC San Diego [alumni], so I apologize [laughter]. 

The state universities are always better. They do better. They're more open. They're more liberal [applause].

Looking back on your career - we have all these students in the audience - what is the one key lesson you’ve learned about the relationship between war and American society that you want to share with them? Let people talk. You should hear the other side before you go to war [applause]. We always censor it, and the press is one of the worst: the media in this country, the mainstream media. And thank God for the internet, there are other people saying other things. We’ve got to listen to them. You've got to look for that stuff, because you’re not going to get it from the top seven media companies. You're just not. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want controversy. They just want to sell you stuff.

All right, thank you [applause]. Before I turn it over to the audience, I’ve got a lightning round for you. Ready? What’s that?

I’ve got a lightning round. You ready? Best actor or actress you’ve ever worked with? No way [laughter]. No, I can’t say that because I’ve worked with a lot of talented people and I don’t want to single anybody out.

I’m sure you’re not going to say the worst one then right? All right, let me do this: who’s a really good one? Alright, I won't do it. Favorite movie that’s not your own? Oh, come on. I love movies. You’re talking several hundred movies. Why do I go to one? That’s what movie critics do: "Oh yeah, here are the ten best movies of the year." They bore me. They ruin movies for me. I like to discover, I like to see. There are so many good ones that are made that you never hear about. 

Okay. You’ve got to give me one here [laughter]. Best band to put on a movie soundtrack? Best what?

Best band to put on a movie soundtrack. Oh, it depends on the movie. Come, on you're asking me stupid questions [laughter]. For a professor of history, you're really asking stupid questions [laughter].

My colleague will agree with you on that one. All right, I think I’m going to turn it over to the audience now [laughter]. We have two students in the back, Katherine and Thomas. Raise your hands. We’ve got about 10 minutes or so to take Q&A from the audience. Does anyone have a question they’d like to ask Oliver? Please stand up so they can see you—and make sure the questions are better than mine that I just asked.  My name is Michael Lester and I’m currently a student at San Jose State University and I'm a film major as well. I’m a junior. My question to you is: When you were young, around my age, what was the biggest challenge to you in getting your voice heard and getting your voice out there? Well, first of all, it was learning how to make a film, because whatever they say - they say you can learn it in a day - that’s not quite true. You have to feel it. You have to feel your way and you make smaller films. I started at NYU, so the natural route was short films: one minute, two minutes. We worked our way up to three or four minutes. And it's tricky, because that was film and it was not quite digital, which is a little bit more forgiving. But anyway, we learned lighting and we learned everything at NYU we could, and making short films was frustrating. I made three: one was good, the other two didn’t make it. They fell short but they were certainly ambitious. 

And then after that, it becomes a search for a job. You have to get a job and you have to go around and you have to know people. Basically, I went through it as a writer, and that was very hard because I had to write screenplays. I didn't want to have to beg. I wanted to prove, so I wrote eight or nine, ten, eleven maybe, and they were always turned down. Always turned down. Some were not so good screenplays, some were good. Platoon I wrote in '76, it was turned down for ten years before it was made. Ten years. You know, I'm sick of rejection [laughter]. And frankly, I'm sick of the business, too, because the business went through all the worst impulses. The people who do the best - make the most money - are the most prostituted, generally speaking. They just see what they can make and they know that's going to make money and that's what they do it for. I’ve been passionately driven and unfortunately, I paid a price for that.

So probably right now - I don't know - probably I'm on a blacklist in Hollywood, or a gray list or whatever it is, because I did interviews with Putin. They're so nuts in Hollywood. They're so virtuous. You have to express your virtue, you have to wear a ribbon that says how virtuous and conscious you are: political correctness and all, whatever you want to call it. They call it "wokeness" now. I can’t stand all that stuff. That’s why I went to Vietnam, to get away from that kind of thinking. So be a rebel. That’s the best way to make films. You might not get there but you'll feel good getting there [laughter] or else you'll feel really bad. But look at what our country's becoming. 

I'm going to make a big mistake here and have a USSD professor ask a question [laughter]. I just want to thank you, first of all, for coming. It's so fascinating to see you in person and I want to thank you because, you don't know this, you gave me one of my first jobs. I worked on The Doors film. I guess you would've been in the service when Dr. King was killed and I teach African-American history. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the changes you saw in Black servicemen and women, and also their relationships with White servicemen and women, when you were in Vietnam and after?

Well, the killing of King was in April [1968 and] that was a very big moment. Very big. Because Johnson had just pulled out of the war in March. That was a getaway. As I said earlier, we knew in our gut that we were not going to go for the victory here. It was over. It was going to be a stalemate or something like that. When he got killed, it got worse because the Black soldiers, who were always very outspoken - you saw Platoon, that was the situation. They had their own worlds. They had their own music. They had their places to smoke dope in the infantry units. After that, a lot of them - not all - became bitter. There was a bitterness toward the white [soldiers]. I felt it. It was a very bad time.

Then, if you look at the figures, there were more prison sentences. There were more insurrections. There were mutinies that started: "Fuck you, I'm not going to go out there." It became a wilder place. By 1969, I think that's when the Defense Department - or was it '71, they put out that famous memo saying, look, what's happening in Vietnam is [like] the French mutinies in World War I. That's what they said. I think it was '71. You would know. If you thought of the Kirk Douglas film Paths of Glory - beautiful film - that was about those French mutinies. They were slaughtering those troops. It was not like that in Vietnam, but still. People didn’t want to die for that. Life was valuable.

I think we have time for one last question. Yes, sir? In your opinion, what is the main reason that this country actually hasn't won a war since World War II?

Well, neoconservatives would answer, “We’re gonna win the next one!" [laughter] and that'll be World War III. Kennedy said it the best: if the generals get their way, we’ll never know who won. There's no point in fighting. It's just so monstrous an idea now. The generals still believe that they can win a “limited nuclear war.” That's doctrine. Read the Pentagon stuff. It's amazing. They still believe it. Although the Russians now - thank God for the Russians - they have improved so much their nuclear [capabilities] that they're probably more dangerous than we are. So either way we're losing. It's going to be everybody loses. Our economy, which is the second richest in the world, is going to be devastated from any limited war even, and who knows the dangers of nuclear winter. That one has never been factored in here. 

Well, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Oliver Stone. [Applause]

-Gregory Daddis interviews Oliver Stone, "Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America's Forever Wars," San Diego State University, Dec 12 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

"Anora was the most surprising new film to me and really hit me hard. I liked it very much, so I’d say it’s one of, if not, my favorite film for 2024, but I haven’t had time to see many of the new movies yet."

-Oliver Stone, "65 Directors Pick Their Favorite Films of 2024," IndieWire, Dec 30 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

"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.

[back-and-totheleft]

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

[back-and-totheleft]

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!

[back-and-totheleft]

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

[back-and-totheleft]

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

[back-and-totheleft]

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.]