Oliver Stone
The three-time Academy Award-winning director on Kennedy conspiracy theories, Platoon's illegal birth and why he stuck to the facts when filming World Trade Center
guardian.co.uk,
Friday December 15 2006
Mark Lawson: Welcome to the Guardian interview with the three-time Academy Award-winning director and writer Oliver Stone. We're going to talk about his work tonight, which over the last 40 years has dealt with America's critical emergencies, from the Kennedy assassination to the Vietnam war, to Watergate and the Nixon years, to most recently, with World Trade Center, the 9/11 attacks. Welcome, please, Oliver Stone.
We'll talk about the films in a moment, but the first thing that struck me on the way here is that tomorrow, after nine years, the report into the death of Princess Diana is published in London, addressing all the conspiracy theories - was she murdered, etc. And Oliver Stone flies into London the night before? Are we supposed to believe that's a coincidence?
Oliver Stone: I believe I was told part of the revelation tomorrow. What I had to do with it you'll find out. What was more shocking to me when I arrived today was, the first thing I saw at Heathrow was a banner headline saying "Strangler loose in Ipswich". I thought, how British. Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock's Frenzy - it was kind of a throwback.
ML: I mentioned in the introduction that you've dealt with the big American political subjects from Vietnam to 9/11. There's one gap so far, which is Iraq and Bush. Probably for a lot people here, the dream next film from you would be Bush or Iraq, or both. Is it going to happen?
OS: That's a very flattering comment because I feel World Trade Center is an opening for me into this world. And I really am interested in the "post" period, the 9/12 on. I'm not sure the answer lies so much in Iraq, I think that's a result. For me the answer lies in the interim step, in Afghanistan. I think there's a lot of light to be shed on the nature of that war, how it came about militarily and politically, and also the nature of the war with Pakistan, India and Iran. It's a great subject matter. It leads to Iraq but that's the third phase. And there are already many movies about Iraq in terms of the internet and documentaries - in a sense, it's been usurped by television, as 9/11 was, to a certain degree.
ML: Before we talk about World Trade Center, do you know what the next film will be?
OS: No. It's the same thing for any film-maker who works at it. It's a period of uncertainty. We've been developing three or four things. We do a lot of work in research and development - we hire, we write screenplays or have writers write them; sometimes the screenplays take a long time, sometimes they're quicker. You need an actor, a budget, a studio. It all has to blend; it really is like an experiment. Nine out of 10 things do fail, or four out of five. So it's that period right now and it's a tough period, but we work just as hard doing nothing as when we're filming.
ML: We're going to start with the most recent thing you did, World Trade Center, the story of two men from the New York Port Authority Police Department caught in the collapsing World Trade tower.
[runs clip]
ML: I think that film surprised a number of people who've followed your career. As you know there are numerous books of conspiracy theories about 9/11: the American government did it, Israel did it, it wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon and all the rest of it. But you've pretty much gone with the official facts of the story.
OS: We followed strictly the story of these four people - two husbands and two wives. Their story is corroborated. We also had 40-50 rescuers on the film who worked there. We're dealing with facts here, authenticity, we're dealing with what we know. Eyewitnesses would tell us, "This happened that day." I talked to John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno and their wives many times. I don't think they ever expressed to me even once any opinions about politics or Bush. It wasn't about that. In fact, John, because he'd been at the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, all he said was that in the confusion that day, he thought it was a truck bomb. It never occurred to him that it was a plane. And to the end, that's what they thought. There's a wonderful moment when Will Jimeno comes out of the hole and says "Where'd the buildings go?" They didn't know. If you're operating within the parameters of these 24 hours, you must adhere to what they know. This is a subjective movie - it's seen from within, from their point of view. But it's also from the point of view of their wives, from without, through the television, so it's subjective and objective. It would have been wrong to go to politics. Plus, we had a lot to do - there were three rescues, devastation, survival, life in the suburbs amid the worsening news, all this in 24 hours. You have to understand the tension - two wives at home realising that there would be no survivors. That's a great story in itself. Then there's the marine who rescued them, that's another great story. What time do you have to cut away to other things, much less want to?
ML: I understand that. You're entirely true to the story, but if I'd had to guess which aspect of 9/11 you would have chosen to dramatise, I don't think I would have chosen this. It's the one optimistic part of the story - that some people did survive it.
OS: There were times in the 90s when things were so prosperous... I mean, when Reagan was still around, I made Salvador attacking the Reagan administration in Central America. Perhaps I'm a contrarian. It seems to me 2006 is a far darker time than 2001. Those of you who remember that day would have seen how united the world was - the world was with America, had great empathy with America, and did again, maybe not as much, for the war in Afghanistan. But that has all changed. Now we have serious problems - more deaths, more terrorism, more constitutional breakdown in my own country. It's a disgrace, what's happened. And that's much more serious to me than the 2001 was-there-a-conspiracy-or-not. I don't know enough about it and I'm sure there's a lot of leaks and messy stories, but I've been through these arguments. But al-Qaida claimed they did it, over and over again. They claimed the credit, and the motive is very clear. They succeeded in creating a panic, a mental instability in the world and that had tremendous consequences because it was fuelled by George Bush's administration's reaction. So they've won. It's the opposite of the JFK killing - there you had a man, an uneducated, single guy who said, "I didn't do it. I'm a patsy." He disappears with the Dallas police for almost 48 hours, all his transcripts are destroyed, or are missing, and he's killed. It is the opposite of this story. It's a Reichstag fire kind of story. There's no motive, and who benefits? This is the key question and never gets addressed by the press. They always follow the scenery - that's what Ruby and Oswald were. I always say follow the money. Who benefited, what was the motive to get rid of John F Kennedy? I think there's a big difference. So why waste time with conspiracy theories? If you're going to politics on this issue, go now. But we don't know everything. If I'd made a movie in 2004 about the politics of the Bush war, I'd be shamefaced today because there's so much new information that we didn't have in 2004. Every month in the US there are about 10 books - [Bob] Woodward['s Bush at War, etc], The 2% Solution [by Matthew Miller], The Looming Tower [by Lawrence Wright]; every book has deepened my awareness of what really happened and it's not so simple as going after Osama bin Laden. If I make a movie - and we're not journalists, we're film-makers and dramatists, we have to look for the overall meaning and pattern of an event. That takes time.
ML: But it seems to me you are moving towards that film.
OS: Don't rush in where angels...
ML: The reason why I chose that clip from World Trade Center was that another surprise for me when I saw it was that, when I think of an Oliver Stone film, I think of the huge expansive camera movement, reminding us how wide the screen is. This was very, very different.
OS: This was a very tough picture to do, as hard as I've ever made. The lungs alone took a beating. But then you're working with two men in a hole. You have two actors - Nic Cage hasn't been this quiet in a long time. You basically have half a body and a head - it's a pickle in a jar. It's not easy. And Seamus McGarvey, our Irish-Scottish DP, lit this thing - you could see the expression on Jay Hernandez's face, but this was a very dark hole. It's basically a conversation between light and dark, because then we'd cut to the suburbs. We timed it so that you had 10 minutes in the hole the first time -very dark, very cold - then out to the suburbs where it was a really beautiful day, then back to the hole; eight holes with diminishing time periods from 10 minutes down to about two or three minutes. But our biggest problem was the third act, because once they're rescued by the marines - I don't know if you've all seen the movie...
ML: You've just given the ending away.
OS: There are three rescues in the movie - the marine, Will and John, and each one was a big number in itself. It took five hours to get Will out. People think that when you see somebody it's easy to rescue them but on the contrary, it's even more difficult; people can get killed because the spaces are so dangerous and narrow. We wanted to show the heroism of the first responders - it was their job but they went into those positions and risked their lives. And it becomes more than a story of two men, it's the story of collective effort.
ML: Let's take a look at a second clip. We're now going in chronological order, starting with Platoon.
[runs clip]
ML: I'm interested in the shape of your career because there had been work before Platoon - there were screenplays and some directing. But in 1986, when you were 40, that's when your career really seemed to begin and you became a director. Was there something that happened?
OS: Yeah, I think I got angry and fed up. I had done Midnight Express, Scarface and Conan, but I really was a director at heart, and I wanted to break through. I'd had two failures up to then, two horror films. They were similar in theme, actually, and I vowed never to do a horror film again. Jamais deux san trois. It would be a disaster for me to do a horror film - I'm not a natural born sadist, actually, and I think you have to be to do a good horror film. You have to scare the shit out of the audience, you have to really want to. I don't know if I could. 86 was a banner year.
ML: You'd served in Vietnam. Had you always known that that would be a big subject for you as a film-maker?
OS: It wasn't made, you know. It had been written 76 and turned down for 10 years. It was a bit of a stale joke. Frankly, when I got the opportunity from an English producer called John Daly... he actually read both scripts, Salvador and Platoon, and asked which one I wanted to do first. Which of course to a young film-maker is like a dream. I picked Salvador first because I was so convinced that Platoon was cursed - it had been started so many times but not got made, so I thought it was not going to happen. It was [Michael] Cimino on The Year of the Dragon, which I wrote with him, who convinced me to pull it out of the closet and go with Dino De Laurentiis, who reneged on his promise. I got another lawsuit but I got it back by the skin of my teeth. And then John Daly walked into my life. God bless the English for making those two movies - they were made illegally, almost fraudulently in Mexico. Salvador was made on a letter of credit issued to an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie - on our slate on Salvador, you can read the word Outpost, which was supposed to be the movie he was doing. Years later, of course, for other reasons, the banker was indicted, the letters of credit were questioned and so forth. But I do think you need government tax help - Britain benefited enormously from this. I don't know what's going on now...
ML: It's in the balance at the moment.
OS: You had a great system for a while.
ML: One of the subjects of Platoon and also Born On The Fourth of July is the number of people who were destroyed by the Vietnam war - the suicide rate being higher than the death rate for example. Did you ever come close to being destroyed by it?
OS: I'm very lucky that I got to make three movies about it - I think that helped enormously. I think there are a lot of successful Vietnam veterans in civilian life who are doing very well on the surface but are very bottled up inside. People who killed people, who killed civilians...Vietnam was a charnel house, there was a lot of indiscriminate killing, probably more so than in Iraq. But that's the nature of war. Platoon is fundamental, it's almost biblical. I was in three different combat platoons, and looking back I have to say there were people who were predisposed to kill anything, and other people who are predisposed to restraint, and it's not an easy equation because there are times when you are under pressure and you kill. It was a bit like a western. And of course, there are the kids who fall in the middle, like my character, the Charlie Sheen character in Platoon. Sometimes life is that way. And the kids in Iraq - who I hear are better soldiers than we were, and there are more Christian-trained and born-agains - they're all encountering this fundamental problem now. Their hatred of the enemy has reached the point where many of them hate the civilian population and they don't know the difference any more.
ML: Do you get angry when you look at people in America, from the president downwards, who got out of the war?
OS: I am beyond it. 2002 was the year I got upset. He was moving troops to the Middle East before the UN resolution. Now they're re-examining that whole period and the Colin Powell speech, but there were troop movements before Powell's speech. Once they moved there, you knew something was going to happen. And [former White House anti-terror adviser Richard] Clarke and various people have verified it, that Bush had the thing on his mind, he wanted to go to war, it was a given. It angers me greatly because when Bush went to Vietnam just four weeks ago, they asked him, "What did the Vietnam war mean to you?" And of course, this is the guy who sat out the war, draft dodged, as did Cheney, six or seven times. And he said something to the effect of, "I think it proves that if you stick in there, you'll win." That was his lesson from Vietnam.
ML: We move now to an earlier president, John F Kennedy. This clip I've chosen, it's part of a very long scene, and is my favourite Oliver Stone scene. It's a speech which I think is one of the great speeches in cinema and I want to talk to you about the writing and the directing of it. But here it is, from JFK.
[runs clip]
ML: The reason I chose that is I want to get at this business of getting what's on the page to what's on screen. It's an enormously long and complex speech, and it's exposition, which is what people always say you can't do in movies. So can you talk a bit about planning that visually?
OS: It was a 12 to 18-minute speech. I offered it to Brando, and I'm glad he didn't do it - it would have taken 30 minutes. It's actually two scenes, it was really complicated editing. Jim Garrison sees Fletcher Prouty in the middle and at the end. We ended up collapsing that in the middle. The secret, I think, to why many people have liked it is not only John Williams's music, but it's coming at the end of the first half. In Holland, there was an intermission after this scene so it gives you time to absorb this. Really, it's about Garrison going from this small, local investigation in New Orleans and jumping up another level - a quantum level leap. He never met Fletcher Prouty but he met a man similar to Prouty, who told him a similar story. But the man vanished. He's no longer operative. Fletcher was somebody I met separately. He'd written several books about it, including The Secret Team. He was chief of special ops, one of the key guys in the cold war. He was involved in at least 25 to 50 CIA missions in Tibet to Guatemala, everywhere. He supplied the hardware - the CIA didn't have the military weapons at the time. Something smelled bad to him that year and he quit, and he was discredited by the administration and by journalists, not for any correct reason. They spread the usual disinformation about him and Garrison. He told me the story from his point of view. I'll never forget that day.
ML: How carefully was it planned in advance?
OS: This was shot on the fly. We did it in two, three days. It was the last scene in the film. [Donald] Sutherland is the fastest talking actor in the world, he's very authoritative at that speed. It was a hell of a lot of dialogue, but I wanted to get it all in. Because Garrison is learning it as we learn it. And Garrison's jaw is dropping, "This is much bigger than I ever thought, how can I go on?" Garrison was the only public official who did anything. It is as a result of his beginning something that we have some records, and those records are invaluable. He also attracted the attention of the private community and they gave him a lot of help. But he could not get all the facts together. I didn't change what Prouty told me - this is based on what he said.
ML: That account in the film is very exciting. Do you believe that that account is what happened, that it's correct?
OS: I don't know who did it but I believe it was a military operation. The shooting, the autopsy, the brain, the Zapruder film - you shoot the guy coming towards you so you get the second shot, the third shot. You don't shoot him going away from you. The pressure's enormous, the sound's enormous and Oswald was not a great shot. And the [6.5mm] Mannlicher-Carcano was a piece of junk. I mean the story was just so ridiculous. The Zapruder film is evidence enough - there are two smoking guns. His head flies backwards, he was shot from the hedge. And they talk about this bullet that hits Kennedy and [Texas governor John] Connally 11 times - it's the most ridiculous bullet in the history of the world. In fact, a British audio group did a test a year ago - this is the English saying this - and said they're 99.9% sure that there were four shots. And the Americans came back a few weeks later and said, "The British are off on this." They always do that. This is a contentious thing, but bottom line: I don't know who, but I know it could not have been one man because too much went wrong at a high level. It was planned, there were a lot of red herrings and misdirections. As Prouty said himself, that whole thing about the military group is typical of a misdirected operation. All this stuff had been worked out in the 50s - you saw this time and again in assassinations in Latin America and everywhere. This is black ops. Who did it? Somebody with military capability. Why? I presented several motives in the film but I can't tell you the answer. But I would say Cuba and Vietnam and the détente with the Russians, with whom Kennedy in 1963 signed this historic agreement on nuclear weapons. That really was potentially the beginning of the end of the cold war. All this had occurred after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Fog of War, as good a film as it is, never mentions why the Cubans were so paranoid about an American invasion in October 1962. Why did they have Russian missiles coming into Cuba? Because they were frightened of our 1961 invasion. There is always cause and effect. Cuba was a big issue and Kennedy was backing off. He was making this new relationship, partly with De Gaulle, with Khrushchev. The world balance was changing. He did announce that he was coming out of Vietnam, whatever contrary evidence is presented. He had no intention of running for re-election on Vietnam, he knew it was a dead duck. So out of these factors, the military-industrial complex, as described by Eisenhower at the beginning of the film, was threatened. This guy was going to win the election in 1964 and the nutcase, his brother Bobby, looked like a 68 potential. This was a serious business, to stop the Kennedys.
ML: You mention Bobby Kennedy. There's a recent book, endorsed by Gore Vidal and others, suggesting it was a mob killing because Bobby went after the mafia.
OS: I know Gore, and I've talked to him about it and we just cannot agree. The mob has no history of doing this kind of thing, except for one time, maybe, with Roosevelt. They seem to be close order killers - they do The Godfather style shootings. This was an organised thing. The mob did a lousy job in Cuba - they missed Castro how many times? The good work they did was with Lucky Luciano in the second world war, when they were called upon, with the labour unions and strikes and stuff like that. But the mafia has never been a very successful ally of the CIA, unless they have some involvement with drugs, with I don't know enough about.
ML: We move on from Kennedy, missing out Johnson, to Nixon.
OS: The reason I chose that scene was because, certainly in this country when people wrote about it, the blood on the plate was seen as a metaphor that you'd imposed. But I happened to have read The Haldeman Diaries and it was there: there is a scene where Nixon tucks into his steak and he sees the blood. And most of that, those exchanges, is documented.
OS: Anthony Summers actually followed up the movie with a wonderful book [The Arrogance of Power] which never got any publicity in America. Nixon as far crazier than I thought. Anthony, who's a very sound journalist and double-sourced everything, documents these six or seven occasions when, in the middle of the night when he was loaded, he'd declare war. He'd call up Henry [Kissinger] and say, "Send the battle ships to Syria or to Lebanon. We're going to blow them up. I've had it with these people." "Yes, Mr President, they're on their way." And then around eight or nine in the morning, he'd call and say, "Did you send those ships?" And Henry would say, "Well, there was a bit of a malfunction and they're still there." In other words, they humoured him. He got really aggressive at times, especially when he'd been drinking. I'm not saying he was a big drinker but I do think he could not take drinking. But you can't underestimate the man's brilliance. His concept, or Kissinger's, whoever takes the credit, of triangular diplomacy, for instance. In 1950 the smart people knew that China and Russia had a big problem. But we persisted in my country for 20 years to believe in this China-Russia alliance that was going to destroy us, when in fact they were fighting far more amongst themselves.
ML: We've talked about the camerawork and the visuals, but that's an example of acting. Do you work closely with actors in rehearsal for a scene like that?
OS: We rehearsed it and rehearsed it - I believe in rehearsal - and then we got out. It was one of the last scenes in the movie, so we got out one night on the Potomac on a boat. I think Hopkins is great. He embodied to me the spirit of the man, the irritation. I wish the movie had been released in 2006; it would have had much more success with the Bush administration as a contrast. I think Bush makes Nixon look like St Augustine.
ML: To ears in this country, Hopkins sounded a bit Welsh for Nixon. He doesn't do an impersonation, does he, in the film?
OS: No, but it's about the spirit of the man, and I think he gets it for me. He gets the anger, the love. Nixon was a human being. People expected me to do a hatchet job - I'm not sympathetic to Nixon, I think his policies were bad for America, but I'm empathetic to him. And I feel he did suffer greatly from his inferiority complex and from his mother and father and the Kennedy thing. He was the used car salesman in this situation, and I find it very moving sometimes.
ML: One of the visual decisions you made in that movie is that you have switches of style, so that sometimes we have CCTV footage, black-and-white, etc. What was the thinking behind that?
OS: Much less so than in Natural Born Killers and JFK. I think this film was more reserved. It was a tough film to make - you're dealing with 15 white guys with bad haircuts in suits. There's not much to attract a big audience on this movie, and it didn't. It's mostly talk. To me it's one of my favourite films because it's got so much going on inside. It's a psychobiography of a man. I loved it but it was not meant to be a success. But it still holds up for me.
ML: Apart from Nixon, the modern American president most written about is Clinton. Were you ever tempted by Clinton?
OS: Was I what?
ML: Tempted. I don't mean sexually. I mean as a subject?
OS: Frankly, I think Mr [Mike] Nichols did a great job with Travolta in Primary Colors. It was a hell of a job - it doesn't tell you the whole story but it does tell you part of it. I look at the Clinton administration as a lighter leaf in the storm. I suppose the third one, if I ever did it, and if I survived it to see the pattern, would be Bush Jr. This is a true Richard II or perhaps Richard III story.
ML: But also, Bush Sr would be a good character in that. The relationship between them...
OS: I wanted to do the remake of the Manchurian Candidate. The producer did not want to because it was already under way, it was a conventional script, and it was a remake. And I'd done Scarface as a writer and I'd done it completely differently from the original, tried to anyway. I wanted to make Barbara Bush into the Meryl Streep character, when it was Angela Lansbury. Barbara Bush is the key, she runs the family, and this guy George is the Manchurian candidate. He's basically a very shallow, brainwashed person. And ideologically motivated, the most disastrous thing of all in a political leader - you might as well be Khomeini.
ML: The fifth clip we're going to show now is from Any Given Sunday.
OS: In England?
[runs clip]
ML: As you said, we have no idea what's going on in that and we couldn't tell you the score. But I chose that scene as an extreme contrast to the one I started with. What fascinated me, watching it originally and seeing it again tonight, is how you get to that? How much do you know of what it will look like before you shoot it? And how much emerges in the cutting room?
OS: That scene is what I feel like as a director when I walk out on the set. Sometimes, there's so much pressure and there's so much going on. This is a cut film, very much so. When you have huge infrastructures - you have the stadium, huge amount of extras, the football team who are beasts and have to be fed. You have two teams, you have to do this like a military operation, so you shoot a lot more footage. Platoon was a low-budget film where you picked it out, you shot as much as you could in your head and the scenes were very precise - almost minuets. There were only eight or 10 scenes in Platoon. This is the opposite. This has at least 10 characters and perhaps 50 scenes. So this is the other end of the spectrum - it's definitely an attempt to tell multilevel stories at the same time.
ML: Thousands of cuts in it.
OS: Natural Born Killers was the most I made. That was maybe 3,200 cuts, which was a record I believe. But that was prompted by the style of the movie, it wasn't imposed. This also requires a frenetic style to match the pace of football, which is a rough game and about egos, too. World Trade Center is a quiet film because it's a life and death issue, it's about those two men and how close they come to death, and what makes them survive. Why do they stay alive? Most people would die.
ML: There's one part of the equation that we haven't mentioned at all, which is critics. When you've had a bad time, which you did with Alexander, did it affect you?
OS: Oh, I suppose so. It all goes in and goes somewhere. That was a very tough film. But I'm not a quitter. I went back and did a third version, which is coming out in America in February. And Warner Bros is very excited about it. I changed the structure and I went back to what it should have been. It should have been a road show. They don't make them anymore but this is for video, not for theatre. So it's three-and-a-half hours, two hours to the intermission, then a break and then it goes to the last hour-and-a- half. To me, because it starts with the Battle at Gaugamela instead of later, it changes the perspective of the entire movie. It was always a road show but I backed off it because it wasn't doable in America. So I took advantage of DVD and I hope you like the new version. It's the best, the clearest and it allows you the time to immerse yourself in that world.
ML: So is the fact that you went back to it an admission that you got it wrong originally?
OS: Not wrong, but trial and error. It only gets better. I mean, the director's cut is better than the theatrical cut, but I backed the theatrical cut because I had seven months and I thought we'd go with it. I just don't think it clarified to enough people what we were after. Some people loved it and that's what gave me the right to do three cuts. It's only because of the success of the director's cut - they shipped a million copies of that in America. Plus, we did very well theatrically with Alexander - it was one of the top 20 films of the year. So that allowed me to go on to this third version, which I hope you'll like. I just think he's too important a man to forget. It's so important to get it better because he deserves it.
ML: We'll take some questions now.
Q1: You said earlier that we're not journalists, but I perceive you as a social commentator. How did making Natural Born Killers, which had the impact on society that it did in various extremes, affect you as a director? Did it influence your choices later either thematically or aesthetically?
OS: It's ironic you mention Natural Born Killers - it's a fictional movie, therefore there were no restraints. I was able to really let loose. I was also going through some personal turmoil at the time, so I really put a lot of passion and chaos into that movie. But I did think it reflected the OJ Simpson mentality of that time. America sold out to television big time in the 1980s, when the news was made for profit. Television, when I was growing up, was a public trust, or it was supposed to be. They didn't give licences to these people unless there was supervision. So there was a concept of quality. But when Reagan came to office, that line eroded very quickly. In 1982, I believe, Laurence Tish at CBS said, "I'm going to make the news division for profit." That changed the news in America. Not that it was ever great, but it was the end of any serious news. So what you have now in America is celebrity news, soundbites, and every major issue is reported but so superficially. It's the "he said, she said" school of journalism. That's not a serious debate. So Natural Born Killers grew out of anger and chaos, and it cost me deeply because it was coming out close after JFK. And between those two films, I took a major hit. Warner Bros was really upset with it. Americans took it really literally - they saw it as a pro-violence film. It was never intended as such. It was clearly to me a cartoon of violence, but it was perceived as violent and aggressive and castigated by the mainstream press. It did well with young people in spite of that, but Warners was never really behind that movie, and the DVD was not really sold. And it was the end of my relationship with Warner Bros after three great experiences. And there was also a major lawsuit for five years, instituted by John Grisham, who was a lawyer whose friend was killed by a couple of teenagers who claimed to have seen the movie and acted upon it. These claims were repeatedly made and never proven. We were sued for accessory to murder - it took six years and went to five different courts before the supreme court. It cost Warners at least two million bucks, it cost me quite a considerable amount of money to defend myself also, and at the end of the day, it was basically a product liability. Grisham was saying a movie is a product - if your vacuum cleaner comes out and it's defective and someone blows up with it, you're liable to pay insurance to the person. Can you imagine, if you can say a movie made me kill someone, then you could also say "Beethoven's music drives me crazy and I had to kill my neighbour" or "I read Dostoevsky and decided to do something about it". It would have been the end of movies, and that lawsuit came so close.
ML: So you won't be making a John Grisham film any time soon?
OS: I can honestly say that I would not have made it before the lawsuit.
ML: Just briefly on that point, the fact is you say that the film was misunderstood. Did that make you rethink or affect the way you made films?
OS: Yeah. I mean, how many times do you get burned? It does burn, it singes. Nixon was controversial, but it was a different kind of controversy. Again I was accused of lying and defrauding the public and miseducating young people. And this gets tiring after a while - it would tire anybody. It's been going on for 20 years. Does it change you? If you let it. You get wiser, smarter, try to figure out ways to do it without... For World Trade Center I was accused of being too far to the right. I don't think I can ever make an Oliver Stone film, whatever that is, because every time I make one it's not like an Oliver Stone film. If I made an Oliver Stone film about the World Trade Center, they would have been deriding me as a conspiracy nut. So I don't know. Who can you be except yourself?
Q2: Do you get a lot of problems with ratings boards, because of the subjects that you deal with?
OS: I'm very pleased to announce that World Trade Center was the first PG13 I've ever had in my career. And it did very well all over the world, enormously well for this kind of movie, where you have two men in a hole, it's not easy to look it. But it made $165m. The other films, like Natural Born Killers, I went through 155 cuts - it was a hassle. There was an unrated version that I managed to release through Lions Gate in America, but it's no longer available. But the licence ran out and it's now with Warners, and they won't release anything unrated. I thought they were very stupid cuts. There was nothing specific - it was always, "Mr Stone, this is too much chaos. Just take the chaos down." But that's the whole point, the whole world gets turned upside down. The riot at the end was what got hurt most - we really shot this in a state federal prison in Illinois, very serious violent prison with a lot of gangs, and we used them as extras. So it was quite a nuthouse, quite a scene.
Q3: Do you have any plans to direct in French or in France in the near future? Have you ever contemplated asking Brigitte Bardot to make her long awaited comeback, maybe for a film of penguins discussing Marcel Proust and The Remembrance of Things Past on an iceberg?
OS: My mother is French and met my father in the second world war. So I love the French language and I love the French movies of the 50s and 60s, 40s and 30s, more so than the more recent movies. It's a wonderful place to shoot. I would do it but it would have to be on a smaller budget and with lesser ambitions because French cinema, the subtitling alone is a problem. If I could do something very personal about my own boyhood there, I would. I just don't want to do the Ridley Scott movie, because I loved the landscapes better. I'd get my own vineyard if I could.
Q4: You've worked with some incredible actors in your career that have been hugely inspirational to young actors starting out. You must see so many people, so in your opinion, what is it that makes the difference between a good actor who gives a good performance and a great one that brings it to life and communicates with people the world over?
OS: If I could put it in a saltshaker... it's worked on, it's magic, it's a combination of things. A good actor with great charisma can be in a bad piece but still be charismatic. The ideal is to give an idea that inspires the actor, that raises him, so that he goes and takes his natural born charisma and does something with it that no one's ever seen before. That's the goal of most directors. It's a marriage, and it's luck, it's incidence and timing, and you cut the actor. Brando, as great as he was, didn't cooperate with his directors after a certain point and I think he got hurt by that. I think it's really a collaboration, and a good actor and a good director knows that. You all depend on each other, it's organic. But it doesn't happen all the time. You work and you work, and then it does happen. There are those moments that shine. I hope you get a chance to see World Trade Center because Nic Cage, he doesn't have much to operate with, and here plays a sour man who very rarely smiles, but towards the end of the movie, when he lets the light into his eyes and he goes to the edge of death and fights for life, he just flickers back. He sees the spirit of his wife and then he meets her in the hospital - I'm just so moved by that, that's one moment where Nic becomes transcendent. But he worked on that very hard.
Q5: For films like JFK and Nixon, there seems to have been a lot of research put into them. How long does the research process take before you write the scripts? And how were you able to pummel out so many films between 1986 and 1996?
OS: That was 10 years, 10 films. Yeah, that was quite a push. I really was hungry, I had been denied making films for so many years. I was 38 when I got the ability to go ahead, so I really had the attitude that this thing could end tomorrow, so I just kept plunging. I burned out by Nixon. I see that in hindsight, I was tired. And I wrote a novel the next year, and I just did not want to see a camera and I did not want to be around films for a while. I did documentaries, small films, tried different things. As for research, we do as much as possible. That's not to say you can't burn it out. You have to get it right but so much is unknown about Nixon and Kennedy. You go as far as you can and then you go behind closed doors. That's when your instinct comes into play. There are two books about Nixon and JFK - they're available with the entire screenplay and footnoted. Footnoted! We never tried to pull the wool over the public's eyes. It was always there; the press knew it and they never gave any coverage to those books.
Q6: You often talk of Godard, and the master finally honoured the disciple because there's a shot of Nixon in Notre Musique. The question is, what could America learn from Alexander?
OS: Alexander was a great frontline commander - he was in the frontline. Mr Bush never went to Vietnam. If you fight a war like Alexander did, you win it. Whenever anyone betrayed Alexander - and he made alliances all the way through, he was a smart guy and would prefer to negotiate - but if you screwed him on a negotiation, the first thing he'd do was go back. He was famous for going back and he punished the bandit tribes, the armies that revolted. He never left anything behind. He ran into problems all along the way - and in India... exhausted army, edge of mutiny, too many elephants, too much rain. He got as far as he could. But he never lost a battle. At the battle of Multan, that's his finest moment. At Multan [battle against the Mallians], he was about to lose, but he jumped into the enemy - him and three men. And that made his entire army turn around and charge the walls and save his life by this much. But an arrow through his lung was probably the most dangerous wound that he had. That's the kind of man Alexander was. That's a great leader.
Q7: You've taken a lot of hits for a lot of what you've done in your career and you continue to do it, you've persevered . So what I'm trying to understand is, what is it that you're trying to do and what makes you want to continue to do it?
OS: I don't have an easy answer to that. I've done what I've done as I felt it over the last 20-some years. And I've gotten to a place where I've achieved a lot of what I wanted to do. I have to be grateful for that, I mean, I get to do three versions of Alexander. And Nixon, Kennedy, Castro - I've really got a lot done. The next thing I do, I want to make it count. I don't want to just make films, it's just too tough to just make films.
ML: That seems like the perfect final speech to me. I'm sorry we couldn't get more questions in but the British Comedy Awards need him. Thank you very much to you and to Oliver Stone.
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