Oliver Stone - film director - Interview

One of America's leading film-makers, Oliver Stone has won several Oscars for best film and best director. He has made many big hits, including Scarface (1983), platoon (1986), wall Street (1987) and JFK (1992). He follows political and social developments in the United States closely and describes them uncompromisingly. Here he talks about his commitment and the conditions under which film directors operate.

* You have made several films dealing with very sensitive matters. That is not easy. In the movie business, it isn't a question of wanting to do something then going and doing it, is it?

--No, it's never easy, because the studios want to make money. That's always the issue with movies like this: if you take on a large subject that's controversial, you're going to upset a certain group of people. That doesn't generally help the movie; people think it does, but many people stay away if there's controversy.

* That wasn't the case with Platoon, your film about the Vietnam War, was it?

--Platoon caught the national mood when it came out. President Reagan was about to invade Nicaragua, there was a feeling we were going to be drawn into another war, and there was a genuine curiosity, eighteen or twenty years after the event, about the Viet Nam war. People were getting tired of Reagan. The Oliver North trial had just happened in 1986, and opinion was beginning to turn against the militarization of the country. So I think the timing of the movie was just right.

* Was there an autobiographical element in the film?

--Platoon is based pretty much on my own experiences in Viet Nam. I was in the 25th Infantry and the 1st Cavalry. It was not straight autobiography, I fictionalized the story and ran characters together.

You don't see much when you're in combat, but I felt that every platoon that I was in was divided into the people who were more sensitive to the Vietnamese and the people who were insensitive to what we were doing in Viet Nam. There was a moral division inside each combat unit. I thought the same about America when I got home. It was very divided between what they called the hawks and the doves. Most people were neutral, but there were strong opinions on both sides. I fought with my father, with my family. I felt very alienated. I tried to deal with those feelings in a film I made about coming home, Born on the Fourth of July.

* We often hear from the American film industry that cinema is entertainment. When Hollywood turns to history, accuracy is hardly the main concern. How do you feel about this? Must entertainment come first?

--That's two different questions. I agree that movies are entertainment. A good movie has to grip you. Most people don't want to sit for two hours in the dark watching a documentary, so you have to introduce the element of tension, the thriller element. I think I've been able to deal with relatively serious subjects in my movies and make them intriguing, so that people want to see them. There are a million films made, in Europe or even in America, that, let's face it, nobody wants to see. They don't want to see life down on the farm if there's nothing to hook their attention. You know, the sun comes up, the sun goes down, the farmer washes his laundry... But if the farmer has a daughter and--aha!--she gets involved with some rich guy, then the complications start, that's when the audience gets interested.

* Let's look a little further into what you call the thriller element. Is it always simply a matter of good guy versus bad guy, or can it be more complicated than that?

--Good movies play with your idea of who the villain is. You think some character is the bad guy but he's not. The good guy turns out to be the villain. So movies are not that simplistic. In Alfred Hitchcock's films you rarely know who is going to do what to whom. In Vertigo, is the woman bad or good? In Notorious, is Cary Grant bad or good? We play with identity in movies.

I have to agree that the film business has notoriously bungled history. It's famous for it. We've made heroes of some very hollow people, no question about it. We would have made films about Senator Joe McCarthy if he hadn't been found out. J. Edgar Hoover was a hero in my country until recently.

But history is always being changed and rewritten. Shakespeare made a villain out of Richard III and history says he was essentially a good king. Why blame Hollywood? Historians themselves should be held to account, because we are always re-examining history. A historian like Arthur Schlesinger reinvents American history to his liking, making a hero of President Andrew Jackson, for example. George Washington has been reinterpreted several times. Thomas Jefferson has been reinterpreted as a slave-owner, a good guy, a bad guy. Abe Lincoln's the only one I know who seems pretty much to have gotten away with it in American history. * You say that history is reinterpreted every few years in America, but one thing that doesn't change is the presentation of Mafiosi and gangsters as heroes in American films. Why is there this perversion of the idea of the hero?

--The glorification of the Mafia in our country is sick. As great as Coppola's two Godfather films are, they are, I believe, historically wrong in attributing this degree of power to the Mafiosi when they are really a bunch of thugs who have done much to corrupt the country via organized labour, business--the liquor business, Las Vegas, the jukebox business--kickbacks for politicians, and so on. Gangsterism in our country goes back before the Italian Mafia, back to Boss Tweed, the Irish Mafia, the ugly Mafia that existed in the time of George Washington. There were all kinds of gangsterism in American life. To glorify it as we have done is, as you say, a perversion.

* But why do American audiences respond to these films?

--I think it's because we were revolutionaries, because we were mostly outcasts from Europe, because we have a tough-guy strain. We don't like being shoved around by authority, which is not a bad quality in some ways. We admired Bogart and Cagney, but they were sentimental gangsters, movie gangsters.

* When you made JFK, for example, did you think of it as a militant film?

--Yes, in a sense. I didn't give the Warren Commission's version of events because it had been defended for years by the establishment and the media. I touched a very sensitive nerve in JFK when I attacked the media, saying that the cover-up was not only the work of certain people in government but was propagated by the media, who accepted the story without doing any homework--and they didn't do any.

The power of the media is, I think, one of the biggest problems in my country. The newsrooms of CBS, NBC, ABC, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times--there are fifteen or twenty of them and they all think alike, they plug the same agenda over and over again. When Clinton came into office, they forced this young man to consider the agenda their way. They force the issue by putting tremendous pressure on somebody new who may want to address the situation in a new way. I think this is a distorting effect of the First Amendment, whose authors couldn't have guessed how strong the media would become in the electronic era. I don't know the solution. You have to have freedom of speech, but it's reached insane proportions when it's really control of speech, not freedom.

* Why is there this consensus among the twenty or so centres of power in the media?

--I can't tell you where it starts, but there's a decision that certain things will be on the agenda, that they will make those things the issue of the day or of the month. One time it may be homelessness or taxes, another time it will be why the military must be supported in Iraq or whatever. As I.E Stone said, the press are like blackbirds, they all take off from the telephone wire at the same time and when one comes back, they all come back. We're living in an Alice-in-Wonderland society where from one month to the next we stagger from one issue to another. We are told what is important for that month. I resent that.

I went to Viet Nam as a result of a media onslaught that convinced us we had to prevent it from being the next domino to fall to communism. The media messed this country up terribly with that one. With the Kennedy murder, they all lined up behind the idea of the lone gunman firing three crazy bullets and killing the President, although there is little factual evidence.

* Why exactly did you make JFK?

--I think Kennedy was killed for political reasons, to remove him from power. First of all because, as of 1963, there was a significant change in his policies and the way he viewed the world. He made a deal with Khrushchev; the two of them signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. He was talking to Castro behind the establishment's back. He had signed a memo to pull out of Viet Nam. This is not speculation: the document exists, he signed it, it's called the National Security Action Memorandum 263. Only recently Robert McNamara finally admitted that Kennedy was going to pull out of Viet Nam.

There was a significant acceleration of intention when Lyndon Johnson took over. On the very day Kennedy was buried, as I showed in the movie, Johnson called an emergency meeting with General Maxwell Taylor and the joint Chiefs of Staff to push the Viet Nam agenda. There was a meeting in Honolulu the day that Kennedy was killed about the subject of Viet Nam. It's a fascinating story, what went on the last two or three days before he was killed.

* Did you have free access to all the archives?

--The archives in America are like they are in Russia, they're opened but by the time the public gets to know of them they've been reviewed and censored by the bureaucratic process. A new legislation was passed, that the film helped create, opening up the Kennedy files. Anything that might endanger national security has to be reviewed by a special board of people appointed by the President.

I'm sure that Kennedy, if he had lived, would have ended the Cold War with Khrushchev in the late |sixties, in his second term. It's interesting that very shortly after Kennedy was killed, Khrushchev was ousted. I think there's a linkage between the fates of the two men. That's why I think the subject is of such importance, not just to American history but to world history in the twentieth century.

* JFK is a mixture of stockshots and fiction. Were some of the stockshots in fact staged?

* We staged most of it. There are some genuine stockshots in the beginning, but not as many as people think. The autopsy sequence, for example, was all staged except for one very clear shot of Kennedy at the end. You'll see that his face was intact, which is interesting because if he had been shot from behind the face would have been blown away.

* The docudrama element--the interlinking of fact and fiction--gives the film its aesthetic impact. But perhaps that mixture raises a moral problem too.

--I've heard that criticism. My answer is, it's a war. You ripped off this country, you told this story no holds barred, you fought dirty and I'm fighting you the same way, I steal things left, right and centre. Yes, I was militant.

* What difference did the film make?

--All films find their way into the country's subconscious in the end. I think what it changed was trust in the government. Around twenty million Americans saw it. And I don't think any young kid now will buy the story that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. The papers don't say that so much now. They think twice before saying it.

* Would it be possible to make a film in the United States now about the American attitude during the Gulf War, with President Bush as hero or anti-hero?

--That's another Orwellian story. It's not for me, it's for some other moviemaker. Someone said to me that the Gulf War wasn't a war, it was a TV film. Nobody got killed on our side and we didn't even know there were all those people killed on the other side. There were six Time magazine cover stories about the situation before the war started, and by the end of it Saddam Hussein looked like Hitler, complete with the moustache. He was demonized in the American consciousness, made out to be a monster. We were ready to go out and kill. It was a horrible time to live through because again you saw the way patriotism came out.'

* You mention patriotism. In the golden age of cinema, Americans were proud of Hollywood Now foreigners are buying into Hollywood and maybe in a few years they'll have bought it out. What do you think of this situation?

--The film business is a land without frontiers. You work for different people in your lifetime, different producers, people you never thought you would team up with. JFK was made with French, Israeli, German money. The Italians put up money for The Doors, the English for Salvador and Platoon. That's what's good about the film business. All these international players like to be in on the game.

* You approve of that?

--Of course it's a good thing. How else would movies get made? They need an enormous concentration of capital.

* What about creative freedom? Are you allowed it?

--Only if you can get away with it. If you make a film that makes money, they like you. I just got by the skin of my teeth. Salvador missed out at the box office, but Platoon was a hit, and then I got carte blanche for the next couple of films. They were both successful, so then I was able to make Born on the Fourth of July, which also did well. That gave me a little more freedom, so then I decided to go for JFK. They would never have let me do JFK in the beginning, but they did at that point of my career, and it worked.

* Why was Salvador not a success?

--Politics. When it came out in early 1986, we were still in the grip of Reaganism. The critics were not very kind. The New York. Times said it was a typical Costa-Gavras kind of propaganda effort. Yet most everything of that film--including American complicity--has emerged in the last ten years as a truth.

* Do you sometimes feel like a latter-day knight errant? Knights were privileged people people but they also had duties, they were defending sacred values. Do you feel both this privilege and this duty?

--That's very true. It's a special situation. You must use your power well to make films that are difficult to get made. Otherwise you'll lose it.

Right now is a good time for me to make difficult movies. I just finished Heaven and Earth in Thailand and Viet Nam. It's the story of thirtysome years in the life of a Vietnamese peasant woman. It was not an easy film to make.

* Are you working especially for an American audience, or do you feel the world is your audience?

--Most of my films have made more money abroad than in America. JFK made twice as much abroad. The films are going well internationally. I feel I need a world-view to understand my own life better. I always think filmmakers tend to underestimate the power and intelligence of the audience's subconscious mind.

* Not only that, maybe. Perhaps people want, at least sometimes, to be stirred by noble causes?

--JFK didn't make any commercial sense. It was three hours long, it had lots of dialogue and it was complicated. But I said I'm going to make this movie, it will bomb but I have to make it. I never really thought it would be easily understood by medium range audiences. But they did understand it. It was one of the great experiences of my life. It proves that people are more intelligent than they're given credit for. Even if they don't understand everything at first, they're willing to sit there and see it a second time, on video or something, to fill in the gaps.

* How do you explain the worldwide fascination with Hollywood films and with American popular culture in general?

--The world is a satellite world now, and America is on the cutting edge. People like the music, they buy it; they like the look, they buy the clothes; they like the hamburgers.... Youth wants to be free from the shackles of the adult world and old ways of doing things. It's more fun-F-U-N. And many Hollywood movies evoke the concept of fun. They're light, they're entertaining. I think that's the answer.

* But not all Hollywood films have had the same success...

--Maybe they didn't have the right lightness of being.

COPYRIGHT 1993 UNESCO
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