"Our hearts were broken because it was awful, that war. He wrote me a story that he never mentioned it, on any interview, but I'm going to tell you. The awful thing about Vietnam was the marécage [swamp], you know, the water bed. They were up to the waist in water and leeches would come and climb…they had to tie up their penis [so] that the leeches didn't go inside to their intestine. That's what he write me! So [you ask] 'what do you feel?' How do I feel? It was awful."
-Jacqueline Stone, mother (a non-native English speaker)
Absolutely incredible find on YouTube, the 1992 documentary on Oliver Stone originally made for Showtime here in the States and which aired on the BBC's Arena show in the UK:
It's very telling that Oliver's recounting of his combat experience is limited to basically one funny anecdote, and it's a fellow solider and his mother who recount the horrors:
"Oliver and his platoon saved our lives one day. We'd walked right into the middle of a U shaped ambush. We all thought we were going to die. We thought they were going to come out of their bunkers with their .45s and finish us off when it got dark.
I had one bullet left - our whole unit had one bullet left - and I shot it into the air, and that was the signal for Second Platoon to come up. They had been out of the fire - out of harm's way to this point - and Oliver came running up. I said, 'You guys be careful, they're all over the place out there. We've lost a lot of men. There's guys dying out there.' He said, 'Don't worry about it, we'll go get 'em.' And they jumped over the anthills and they went up there to get the Viet Cong [and] NVA. There was a lot of shooting going on, hand grenades, and I was afraid all of them had gotten killed.
Then they came crawling back, and Oliver had been wounded. I think all of them had been wounded. But they had done their best to save us, and I credit him with saving my life. There are survivors of our platoon that day [because of it]."
-Larry Robinson, 25th Infantry Division
"He wrote me [that] he save the life of this platoon….I said, 'How can you do such a thing? How can you kill somebody?' You know, I could not even think. When you're the mother, you see your son as…how could he have killed another person, you know?"
-Jacqueline Stone
I hate Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), which is also to say that I love Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991). A contradiction, surely, but also the truth: It’s a movie designed to repel and seduce at the same time — and to spin out of control, much like its protagonist. I was more on the repulsion side when I first saw it back during its original release. The film celebrates its 35th anniversary this month and has just been released in a nice new 4K edition from Lionsgate, so I looked at it again, and found myself both cringing and captivated. Stone’s attempts to portray singer Jim Morrison as a tripped-out divine figure able to see through the bullshit of the 1960s still feel misguided and childish — the hedonistic rock god as ubercool truth teller, yawn. The movie contains some of the director’s worst cliches, but it’s also often so personal it hurts. You walk away from it somehow knowing less about Jim Morrison and more about Oliver Stone, and maybe that’s the point.
In that sense, The Doors makes a fine companion piece to JFK (1991), the picture Stone made immediately after (and which he was already working on as he finished up The Doors — remarkably, the two films, both massive productions, were released the same year). JFK’s wild-eyed journey into conspiracy might not hold water as history, but as a portrait of personal disillusionment made by a man who was both physically and psychologically wounded by the 1960s, it’s a masterpiece. The Doors plays as the flipside of that. The figure of Morrison that it presents — never sober, never grounded, never sane, never really there — is perhaps the only way to process the era.
Val Kilmer’s performance as this trickster poet forever thumbing his nose at reality embodies the movie’s tensions. It’s an uncanny recreation of Morrison, and a great showcase for the actor’s hammiest impulses. (Kilmer was often hard to take seriously as a lead, but as a supporting actor, he was one of the best we’ll ever have, a born scene-stealer.) He becomes Morrison, but he becomes a very specific version of Morrison. It’s an unflattering portrayal that at first seems like it wants to be the opposite. Stone admires him, but we can’t. This Morrison appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of gravity. He can’t seem to stand without swaying, and when he moves, he practically undulates. When we see him wooing Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan), he sashays after her on the Venice boardwalk and then arrives at her window by climbing up a tree. (“You have a problem with doors?” “Waste of time.” Ho ho ho.) Imagine trying to have a normal conversation with this guy. Imagine trying to grab a cup of coffee with him. You can’t.
But then Morrison goes on stage, and suddenly, it all makes sense. To understand The Doors, we have to appreciate the theatricality in each sequence. “My concept was to set the story to the songs,” Stone told my colleague Matt Zoller Seitz in his excellent and exhaustive book The Oliver Stone Experience. Stone is talking specifically about the fact that many of the episodes from Morrison’s life that he depicts are literally scored to Doors songs, complete with on-the-nose confluences between onscreen incident and offscreen lyrics. “There’s a killer on the road” Morrison sings on the soundtrack as young Jim looks at a car accident involving an overturned truck and injured Native Americans (who will of course haunt his future visions, in that pseudo-mystical way Native Americans often do in Hollywood movies). “Hello, I love you/ Won’t you tell me your name?” we later hear as he first spies Pamela. But Stone’s comment also suggests a different dynamic. The correlation between the songs and Jim’s life may be corny, but the film clearly presents Morrison’s life as a search for these songs. He’s a lost figure looking for transmissions from another world — an old-school Romantic, in other words.
And again, once Morrison actually starts to perform, his bearing finds its moment. This is a man who lives his life as myth — who is, indeed, incapable of doing anything else — and he is most himself when he is onstage, where his shamanistic swaying and zonked-out delivery become part of a Dionysian communion. The same could be said for the film’s style — a frantic miasma of tilting frames, unmoored Steadicam shots, and dreamy dissolves — which feels overbaked and indulgent during “ordinary” scenes but becomes electrifying once the concerts start. This is most evident late in the picture, during an idealized recreation of the April 1969 Miami concert where Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure. Stone films the sequence as if it were a combination of physical combat, demonic ritual, and orgasmic sing-along, as Morrison is thrown off stage during the melee and leads the crowd in a conga line singing “Break on through to the other side” while giant speakers collapse around him and the place descends into total chaos. On a narrative level, this should mark a stage in Morrison’s decline – he’s drunk out of his mind, his bandmates are rebelling, and he’s pushing drugs on them before the show – but Stone clearly loves it. What was a disaster in the Doors’ story he turns into an unhinged Boomer bacchanal, self-destruction as self-actualization.
To hear Stone talk about shooting these sequences is telling: “We shot five concerts. Five concerts, maybe fourteen, fifteen songs,” he told Seitz. “We found these incredible places, we made every space count, we filled them with extras in period costume…. We had too many volunteers to take their clothes off, because they were on LSD! We didn’t know! They were doing drugs, living the seventies vibe again.” He adds, “I loved making that movie. I was wild and free. I finally felt more the director than anything.” And we can tell. The Doors represents Stone at the height of his powers. He had recently made two hugely successful Vietnam epics, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and was about to make his two masterpieces of paranoia and politics, JFK and Nixon (1996). The horrors of war on one side, and its corrupt runoff on the other. In between, this deranged Utopian interregnum of music, rebellion, and transcendence, all the more moving for its absurdity. The Doors is a film that shouldn’t exist, and we should be grateful that it does.
-Bilge Ebiri, "The Doors Is So Bad. And The Doors Is So Good," Vulture, March 10, 2026
Film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone, known for his movies such as Platoon, JFK, and W., visited Northeastern on Monday afternoon to screen an episode from his documentary series The Untold History of the United States and answer students’ questions about the project and his views on American history. The event was presented by the International Affairs Program, the Department of History, and the Northeastern Humanities Center.
Stone was joined by collaborator Peter Kuznick, a professor of history at American University. The pair worked for five years on the series, which aired on Showtime in 2012. The series examines American history beginning in the 1890s and looks specifically at the Cold War, using the atomic bomb against Japan, and America’s global role in recent decades. Here are some takeaways from Stone’s remarks during a Q-and-A session with the Northeastern community.
On the motivation to make the documentary: “Inspired by George W. Bush, I felt like we had to look back at American history in my lifetime and try to understand what happened. The series got to this conclusion that George Bush was hardly the aberration I thought he was. He was a continuation of a pattern of American exceptionalism, a will to power, and American intervention in foreign countries that went on from 1898 to the 2000s. So this was an attempt to hopefully bring a number of generations closer to another version of American history.”
On the process of making this series: “The process was very long and difficult. At the end of the day, it took two extra years to complete…We really had to focus on what we thought was the big picture. I think this is the way Peter and I strongly feel these 120 years have gone.”
On why he believes there is this forgotten narrative of American history: “I don’t think it was forgotten as much as controlled. The forces that won World War II strongly put out media propaganda that the U.S. had won World War II, that we had to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and there was a necessity for a Cold War with Russia. We go out of our way to deconstruct those myths and from there we shape this narrative that has been controlled for about 70 years.”
On how his military service in Vietnam shaped his political views: “I was exposed to a lot of ground warfare, and I saw reality. Prior to that I lived in a myth about war and American rightness. So I think I came back from the war not against America, but shocked. What do you make of a world that goes upside down at 21 years old?”
-"4 things we learned from Oliver Stone," Northeastern Regional News, Oct 22 2014
Oliver Stone on 40 Years of ‘Platoon,’ the War in Iran and Hollywood Turning on Him Over Politics: ‘I’ve Learned My Lesson. Keep Your Views Quiet’
There has never been a war film quite like “Platoon.”
Hollywood delivered powerful combat stories about the brutality of battle, but nothing came close to matching Oliver Stone’s depiction of America’s tragic Vietnam chapter. This drama about an idealistic recruit (Charlie Sheen) confronting the savagery, the chaos, the true horror of war, was a searing corrective to jingoistic action movies like “Rambo.” In “Platoon,” the enemy is largely unseen — the Vietnamese soldiers masked by dense jungle — but the camera does not shy away from the depiction of the mangled bodies of the servicemen who draw their fire. Stone, who served in 1967 and 1968, was the first Vietnam vet to direct a movie about his experience, giving the picture greater authenticity.
Filmed for just $6 million and featuring a cast of then largely unknown actors like Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker and Johnny Depp, “Platoon” was a smash hit, earning $137.9 million to become the third-highest-grossing film of 1986. It went on to sweep the Oscars, picking up six Academy Awards including best picture and best director. To mark “Platoon”’s 40th anniversary, Stone talked to Variety about his struggles to get the movie made, his sadness over America’s unbreakable attraction to foreign conflicts and his fears that his outspoken beliefs derailed his Hollywood career.
Was it hard to get a studio interested in “Platoon”?
We were rejected for 10 years. People thought the script was a bummer. You have to realize, this picture was made in a market that was unfriendly to anti-Vietnam statements. I was truth-telling and clearing out some of the lies being told about Vietnam.
Despite the setbacks, the film was a huge box office hit. Why did the audience show up?
I’m hardly a sociologist; all I can say is that I was very surprised. We made an independent, low-budget film in the Philippines, but by the time we were done, something in the national consciousness had changed. We’d just gone through the “Rambo” films and that Chuck Norris movie “Missing in Action” that were hardcore and like, “Let’s go back to Vietnam and do it again!” I was coming out of this wholly different point of view that war is hell and that Vietnam was a lost cause. We had no business being there.
In your Oscar acceptance speech, you said that a war like Vietnam should “never, ever in our lifetimes happen again.” Do you feel like we’ve ignored that message?
It’s just ridiculous that we’re back in this state of loving war again. We haven’t learned anything from Vietnam — we just continue to militarize and build up our defense budget. We continued to dominate and bully and threaten. The war in Iraq was the greatest disaster since Vietnam. George Bush, the worst single president we’ve ever had. What did Iraq get us? It drained our wealth and made us callous as a nation. And now Mr. Trump is [starting] a war in Iran, and he’s playing the same game with Cuba and Venezuela. It’s like the Roman Empire. We never learn our lesson.
Your body of work — from “Platoon” to “JFK” to “Nixon” — is about the psychic scar left by Vietnam. Do you feel like you’ve been shouting into the wind?
I feel frustrated. I’ve certainly been loud in sharing my beliefs over the years, and my career has suffered for it. I’ve learned my lesson: Keep your views quiet.
How soon after you returned to civilian life in 1968 did you start to think about dramatizing your experience fighting in Vietnam?
When I got back, I was disoriented for a long time. Drugs didn’t help. Marijuana didn’t help. And then I wrote a screenplay in 1969 called “Break,” which was very surrealistic. It’s about someone who enlists. And it becomes a blend of sci-fi and LSD — it’s very, very phantasmagoric. It’s a very Jim Morrison kind of movie. And I sent it to Morrison — actually, Morrison had it in his apartment in Paris when he died. The script was returned to me years later, when I made “The Doors,” written by his road manager. That script was not “Platoon,” but it became the basis for “Platoon.”
There were several films made in the ’70s about the Vietnam experience like “Apocalypse Now,” “Coming Home” and “The Deer Hunter.” What did you think about the way they portrayed the war?
“Coming Home” was very powerful. But it was told from the point of view of Jane Fonda as the veteran’s wife. I thought it was pretty accurate, but that was not my experience. “Apocalypse Now” I admired as a movie. But the story seemed mythological, and I couldn’t square that at all with what I saw as a soldier. It’s all secret ops and a strange mission on a riverboat. And the same with Michael Cimino’s movie [“The Deer Hunter”]. It didn’t reflect what I had been through.
How did you land on Charlie Sheen for the lead in “Platoon”?
Initially, we set up the movie in 1984, and Charlie’s brother Emilio Estevez was going to play the main role. But it fell apart. And when it came back around in 1986, Emilio was older. He no longer had quite the look. Charlie was 19 or 20, and he has a lot of the same mannerisms as Emilio. And I liked him a lot. He hadn’t done much work. But he had a naive quality, like I had when I was back in Vietnam.
Did Charlie Sheen have a reputation as a partyer back then, or did he acquire that later?
In a young man’s way, he did. Nothing serious. I sent the whole cast to boot camp. I wanted them to look like infantry when we started filming. Of course, I got much criticism for it, because it was a 24/7 deal, and that’s not allowable in SAG contracts, but we did it.
Did anyone drop out of boot camp?
They dropped out before it started when they were asked about it. I think four or five people quit, but we just replaced them and forged ahead. We started shooting the day the camp ended, and they came out looking pretty tired, which was great for the film. And we shot 48 straight days. It was really rough conditions in the Philippines.
What was your directing style? Based on stories from the cast, it sounds like you were pretty rough.
That’s a bit of a war story. It sounds good — you know, the veteran who can’t forget the past. Like I’m Charles Laughton in “Mutiny on the Bounty” or something. I had a vision, I knew what I wanted, and was only disappointed with myself in that sometimes I couldn’t achieve it.
Was it surreal to reenact your war experiences decades later?
There were times when I had the feeling of living this again. Of course, you have to work inside the limitations of the camera. In movies, when you hear gunfire, you expect to see the result. In real life and in real battle, you hardly ever see who you kill. But that’s unfilmable. Audiences would reject that, so you have to use some conventions.
Did your depiction of war influence how subsequent films staged it?
No. Most of the films that came after are ridiculous and stupid. I mean how many Iraqis does Mark Wahlberg kill in “Lone Survivor”? And that’s supposed to be a true story, right? If you look at the recent movies, they’re so militaristic. And that’s because they’re made with the cooperation of the Pentagon; you need access to their equipment. To get one of those choppers on “Black Hawk Down,” you’ve got to make a deal with them, and they will pay for everything. And for that matter, the CIA is involved too.
It’s been 10 years since your last narrative feature, “Snowden.” Will you make another film?
I’ve been pretty busy setting up this lower-budget feature called “White Lies,” which I’ve tried to do for many years. It’s off and on. It’s a script I keep working on. It’s a personal story about people and relationships — husbands, wives, children, grandparents. It’s about three generations of a family, and hopefully I’ll pull it off. I’m very close.
What’s your most indelible memory of making “Platoon”?
Every day was memorable. But on the last day of the shoot, I had this feeling that we’d done something important. I didn’t know whether anybody would see the film. I didn’t know that it’d be a success. But my conscience was clear. I felt I had achieved something in my life that could withstand the test of time. I didn’t expect everything that came after it. That was beautiful, but I don’t want to make that the peak of my life. I think the peak is coming.
-Brent Lang, "Oliver Stone on 40 Years of ‘Platoon,’ the War in Iran and Hollywood Turning on Him Over Politics: ‘I’ve Learned My Lesson. Keep Your Views Quiet’", Variety, March 11 2026
DENNIS COZZALIO: One of the things that’s immediately striking about Alexander is how personal it seems as an Oliver Stone film while not particularly resembling the template of what we’ve come to think of as the films closest to your experience and politics, films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July or even The Doors.
OLIVER STONE: I’ve wrestled with Alexander for so damn long, and at this point it’s probably my favorite movie. I loved Nixon too, and I appreciate that it’s the one you think most of too. I watched it recently because Disney is preparing an iTunes digital version that I had to check, and I ended up watching the whole thing! I couldn’t believe I directed it! Somebody else must have, right? (Laughs)
DC: No, I'm pretty sure you did! The movie approaches the subject of Nixon as if it were the man’s horror-filled, self-loathing home movie playing out inside his head. Matt Zoller Seitz suggested that the movie is really Nixon’s fevered perception of the way the world sees him, as a failed leader, as a failed man. It’s a non-talking heads, non-docudramatic way of boring into him as a character study which allows you creative breathing room to examine the familiar facts and historical figures in a more speculative but no less truthful way.
OS: I actually thought we were closer to the historically accurate Nixon than has been written, that we caught something unique about Nixon—I mean, I remember the Nixon administration like it was yesterday because I was a young man. I still think we were closer than people realize, certainly on the Cuba stuff, the more I find out about Cuba. I mean, Eisenhower did give the go-ahead to kill Castro, so who’s kidding who here?
DC: The more you vary from a typical biographical approach, the more nervous people get.
OS: Certainly that’s true. But in terms of the complexity of its structure Alexander is right up there with Nixon. I’m so far removed now that I couldn’t even tell you off the top of my head all the differences between the theatrical version and the director’s cut, or the theatrical version and this longer, final cut. But the structural changes are enormous. It’s much like the cutting in W-- you go back to the past, then you come forward.
DC: Yet Alexander doesn’t settle into that predictable rhythm of chronology the way W did.
OS: W is double linear, but it’s not as complex because it does go from one to two, two to one. But in Alexander, like in Nixon, you’re going inside and then inside inside. The biggest deal on the new version was starting with the battle at Gaugamela, which to me works so much better ‘cause it really focuses on the heroic concept of who Alexander was and brings the viewer immediately to a moment in time where they have to consider, what has he achieved here? Then you move back into the past where he’s formed by a conflict between mother and father—the ominous clouds of patricide and matricide are starting to form, both of which go back straight into the heart of Greek myth and Greek tragedy, which are themselves the basis of all, or most of our writing today and throughout history.
DC: When you start with a big battle scene like that, it’s there to grab the audience, but it’s also a way of setting into place the mythology of Alexander that we’re all most familiar with—Alexander the conqueror—and then, as you say, digging into the subject of the mythology surrounding the person. Where was the battle placed in the narrative of the theatrical version?
OS: It was more linear. After the introduction by Ptolemy, we shot into Alexander’s life as a baby and a young boy and then eventually culminated with the battle. But that was definitely the more conventional approach. I don’t know why I backed off—I’d have to go back to 2004 to remember exactly why I made that change, but at the time I was facing enormous pressure from all sides. I had to make Warner Bros. happy in the States, and at the same time the homosexuality and the violence—they were very much opposed to those elements.
DC: And you were also dealing with the talk of another production which was going on at the time as well.
OS: Yeah, that was always a pain in the ass because, frankly, they did not have a script—they never did. But Dino De Laurentiis kept pushing us and was announcing his project in order to cut off our financing. We did this movie wholly independently and structured it out of Europe with Moritz Borman. It’s one of the largest independent movies ever made and generated enormous publicity. But I did lose my balls, frankly. Warner Bros. is intimidating. I’d been through so many battles on Nixon and Natural Born Killers, and the reviews in my career have not been very friendly overall, so you do get scars. I talked about that in my essay, about how I didn’t carry through on some of the stuff that I should have carried through. (The afterword of Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander is written by Stone, in which he responds to the published articles in it and the general reception of the film—DC.) After the film failed in the English-speaking countries, it freed me up to go all the way, and I did that two and a half years later in 2007. Nobody paid attention, but it’s on digital now and I’m very happy with the result.
DC: I was mesmerized by the movie, both as a physical feat and an engrossing attempt to reconnect with a style of filmmaking that last found its richest, most popular expression in films that are close to 50 years old. And one of the things that grabbed me about it is how you’ve fashioned the storytelling methods of the period—Ptolemy’s recounting of history to his scribes as the film’s narration; Philip’s recounting of the myths drawn on the cave walls to the young Alexander—as reminders both of the cinema and, more importantly, the process of becoming mythologized and how we can never have an objective grasp on history. Yet you don’t use that realization as an excuse to go completely off the boards into a grotesque fantasia. What do you see as the storyteller’s responsibility toward historical accuracy when even the first historical accounts of a life may not necessarily be seen as objective truth?
OS: Well, the key to the film, as you say, is this cave scene between Philip and Alexander, and you register it more keenly because the movie goes from this battle at Gaugamela, itself the subject of much historical recollection and representation, back to the origin of the myths.
DC: There’s a connection forged between actual event and mythical representation.
OS: Yes. Alexander is an amazing, original man because he is an amalgam of all these figures—Achilles, Jason, Prometheus. Prometheus was the one I brought into the discussion. Hephaestion calls him “a friend to man,” and through the film that’s what we learn. Prometheus was a friend to man. He brought fire, but he paid for it with his life—he was fed to the eagle every day. It’s the greatest love of man— and that’s why I love the Greeks, the love of man. They conceptualized this idea that you could love man, and I suppose in a way they—I’m not that familiar with Babylonian myth, but in that mythology I just don’t feel the love of man that I felt in the Greek mythology.
DC: Or in the more familiar Roman mythology either, come to think of it.
OS: Oh, there’s no comparison. Yes, Alexander’s empire became— And by the way, that’s a bullshit mythology that his empire didn’t last. It did last. The cultural cross-fertilization he began went on for centuries, and although it fell into four parts, the kingdoms and Alexander’s influence existed and went on. Although there were civil wars, people generally lived a better life—trade was up, the economy was up, prosperity was up. Those four empires existed until they became the Roman Empire, and the Romans were militarists. It’s a whole different way of seeing life and the world. Half the historians hate Alexander and go after him because he’s pre-Christian and go on and on about how bloodthirsty he was. But he was actually one of the least bloodthirsty of historical conquerors. He put the whole world together into one unit, like a return to the womb, and then after he took power he let autonomy reign. He had local satraps, local people run the show and mix the cultures. His idea was to mix.
DC: It seems incredibly unlikely, yet the historical research bears it out, the degree to which he delegated his authority in a very modern way, and the movie does a good job of illustrating this strategy and delineating the ways in which it works against Alexander’s vision too.
OS: There were a few betrayals, which he dealt with harshly. But once the deal was made, it made for a great life and Alexander left a rich empire behind him. And he was running it all while on the move. The explorer part of him kept him going. He could have easily returned to Babylon, had he wanted to, brought his mother and entourage, consolidated his empire as king and achieved enormous historical renown. But he chose to continue with the exploration because he was restless in his soul.
DC: The cave scene strikes me as just one more potent metaphor, along with the scribes detailing Ptolemy’s descriptions, for the power of perpetuating mythology and enriching it with meaning, to which the movies can be included. What is the importance of that cave scene to the narrative structure of this final version of Alexander?
OS: It clarifies the importance of mythology both to Alexander and to Philip.
DC: And for the audience too, I would think, in determining how best to understand the spirit and will and yearning of Alexander, the man.
OS: In thinking about the mythological precedents for Alexander, I wrote down the names “Achilles, Oedipus, Heracles, Jason, Prometheus and Medea.” Jason and Medea are linked to each other and to Alexander because Medea was Jason’s wife, the mother of his children, and to Heracles because Alexander did go mad, he did turn on Roxane, his own wife, and say “I never want to see you again.” So he never saw his son. He cut himself off from Roxane, a very “Heraclean” thing to do. Heracles, one of the great heroes, goes mad and kills his own children. In much the same way, Alexander cuts Roxane off because he thinks she’s responsible for the death of his lover, his soul mate, Hephaestion. And Oedipus is in there too, because he’s blind in his heart and his soul. He doesn’t know if his mother participated in his father’s death. He always must question himself, because his mother openly exalted—and that is historically correct—at his father’s death. Olympias, of course, says Alexander isn’t even his father’s son—she says he’s the son of Zeus. So Alexander questions himself. Should I kill my mother and do like Orestes did with Clytemnestra and kill his mother? Which would make him guilty of two crimes—patricide and matricide. So you see how the mythology is a huge issue in the movie, which works out entirely in India when he goes up against the elephant and sacrifices himself.
DC: The movie is fascinated with the idea of conquest as not so much geological or cultural domination but as migration. Is it simply that the world was as yet unknown, or that Alexander was relatively cognizant of not destroying the culture of the peoples he conquered, that is the difference for you between Alexander’s bloody migration and that of, say, pioneers in the American West or George W. Bush’s disastrous distractions in Iraq and Afghanistan?
OS: The word “simply” throws me a bit. The fact that the world was unknown is unbelievable. It’s literally hard to conceptualize. According to Aristotle’s maps, if you reached the edge of the world you fell off! But here was a man who was thinking about pushing past those boundaries near the end of his life. Not only was he going to conquer Saudi Arabia, but he talked about the Straits of Gibraltar and Rome. If he’d lived a long life he probably would have founded six or seven global centers, from Spain to Rome to Carthage. And each one of those centers would have respected the local culture. Every other emperor goes back to Rome, goes back to Paris, goes back to Berlin, wherever. He didn’t sack the places. That’s why he got into such problems with the Macedonians. They wanted to consolidate the wealth. They wanted to be rich. Ptolemy relates that the generals tell him at one point, “What do we have to gain after all this travel?” I also imply in the voiceover, as heard in the long version, that Ptolemy is very likely part of the conspiracy to kill Alexander because Alexander just kept going and the generals couldn’t stand him anymore.
DC: As I see it, it’s this difference that you see in Alexander, the one between exploring and pillaging or exploiting, that makes him a ripe subject for an Oliver Stone movie.
OS: No one ever ruled like him. He married three princesses of Eastern origin, one of whom, Roxane (played by Rosario Dawson), antagonized the army. By right he should have married a Macedonian girl first, but he didn’t. Another difference: Why wouldn’t he have brought his mother to Babylon? Historians don’t seem to even ask that question. He doesn’t want to see the bitch. And Angelina Jolie— Fuck ‘em. She was great!
DC Yep. She was mesmerizing. Yes, she pitched her performance high, but so what? That wouldn’t exactly be a first in a historical epic. But some people also had a problem with the fact that there’s only a couple of years difference in the ages of Jolie and Colin Farrell.
OS: So she was sexy! She wasn’t some old coot, the typical representation of pent-up female royalty in movies like these in the past. She was a young, hot chick who wasn’t sure she could actually get her son on the throne, so there was a lot of motive for her to get rid of Philip, who had his own son later who was fully Macedonian.
DC: I really think she nailed the part and gives the movie a jolt of sinister spirit. And I recall she was one of the things that even naysayers liked about the original version.
OS: She loved the role, and she won’t back down from it.
DC: It’s a really fearless performance in many ways, because she does take it to the edge of camp, with the sinuous Eastern European-type accent and everything. But I like Jon Solomon’s point in his essay in the book on the popular reception of the movie in retort to all the flippant criticism of her choice of an allegedly silly accent. He wrote: “For all the amusing jokes about Angelina Jolie’s inappropriate 'Transylvanian/Count Dracula' accent, have any of these critics looked at a map of Southeastern Europe, or do they have a Molossian Epirote voice coach they could recommend to the next actress who portrays Olympias?”
OS: And what of all the Irish? The Macedonians were all portrayed with Irish accents, the Greeks English, being the establishment power.
DC: A nice twist on the curious tradition of the whole of Europe being portrayed by anyone with a British accent.
OS: And Olympias was the outsider, the outer tribe, so she’s got to have an accent completely unlike theirs. But this whole “camp” business is a cheap shot. You’re telling me from the feminist point of view that there’s no room for a caricature of a dominating woman? You have to allow for Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Faye Dunaway and the like, because we do have those figures in our lives, and in the movies, and they do represent a certain truth.
DC: What’s great about The Final Cut is that it’s got room to deal with all this stuff, all these elements pushing at the edges of the frame. It’s not in a hurry, but at the same time it’s the furthest thing from stodgy and remote. Did you have a hard time talking Warner Bros. into letting you go back a second, and then a third time to try and get this movie into the shape you wanted it to be?
OS: The DVD did well all over the world, so I actually went back and talked with the head of Warner Home Video, Jeff Baker, a department under the nose of the Warner Bros. theatrical film division, who would not have supported the idea of going back into Alexander. Because the DVD had done so well, Jeff Baker let me do this. No money. I just did it on my own, supported by them. They made The Final Cut possible, and we did a lot of work on it, remixing, editing. We worked on it a long time, the original editors and I. Warner Bros. issued the DVD and Blu-ray and it turned out okay, because without any advertising, as a catalog item, they’ve sold close to a million in the United States alone. But still nobody knows about it. Matt is so kind to allow us to do this. The Museum of the Moving Image has a great new theater, so this is a big thing for me, to get the movie talked about a little bit by people like you who care about movies. It’s a huge effort.
DC: Hopefully it’ll be a big deal for people in the New York area who may not realize this is probably their one chance to see this version of the movie on a big screen.
OS: I hope so. Michael Wilmington, bless his soul, called the movie Lawrence of Arabia in hell. That was in his original review. He got it. He got how mad this film was.
DC: It really does connect up to that epic tradition and honors it, but it’s also very modern, it’s very much of your filmmaking style, and the way you play with the chronology not only emphasizes elements of the story with more power, but opens up the movie’s allusive possibilities. You’re seeing images and scenes juxtaposed with each other that allow you to see things you might not have had the scenes been separated by time in a more conventional way. With Alexander you’re consciously reaching for the visual language of the cinema epic which you’ve suggested is a bit of a cultural anachronism these days. You’re evoking the templates and spirit, if not remotely the same style, of a master of the form like David Lean, and even affording the technological advantages, yours feels like a movie that could have come from that time, even if it clearly would have shocked people.
OS: I think I knew in my deep subconscious that we were dead in the water. We never even opened in America, especially in the South, and that didn’t have anything to do with reviews. That was because the subject matter was “Military” and “Gay.” It’s like Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye. There’s no fucking way you’re gonna get a movie to open with a gay military theme. Brokeback Mountain is one thing, but it better not be the military. But I just love those epic movies, that epic style. I loved them as a kid, even the ones that were panned, like The Robe. Victor Mature! I love that shit! Love it, love it, love it. I miss it. It’s sensual, extreme, fun.
DC: And those movies really let you see what it is they wanted to show you too. There was a chance for the viewer to absorb the wealth of beauty (some will call it cheesiness) and information on that wide screen. That’s another thing that surprised me about Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut too. It’s a grand movie that’s finally allowed the time to mentally sift through all the history and the characters and take in visually the rich, sensuous imagery you and DP Rodrigo Prieto managed to get on screen.
OS: We went to India to shoot some of those landscapes. Did you notice when he’s looking out at the mountain range that you see his face in the contours of the mountainside? **
DC: Yes, I did! In fact, I thought I was seeing things when that image snuck up on me. It’s a beautifully hallucinatory image, and for a moment you actually entertain the thought, the hope that it might have been one of those divine accidents, like the shadows of the raindrops on the window sill appearing to make Robert Blake cry in In Cold Blood. Yet it is so deeply connected to the character that he would project himself onto the landscape like that. Now, that’s how you use CGI.
OS: (Laughs) Yes.
DC: And all throughout the movie demonstrates a pretty judicious approach to computer-generated imagery. It allows the epic scope, but I don’t remember a moment where it jolted me out of the story. But beyond wrestling with the film intellectually in terms of trying to structure life not necessarily lived in three or five acts into a manageable script, the sheer physical size of this production must have been daunting.
OS: I’ve never experienced anything like it. Three continents, a massive amount of military— It was like being a general but at the same time trying to keep it intimate. We ended up shooting on the border of Laos and Thailand. That’s right on the banks of the Mekong River where he’s at when he delivers that wonderful speech where he says, “These are the things that destroy men.” And then we were in England in the winter, Morocco in the late summer/fall, and we finished up in Thailand in early winter. And the sets we built in England—It was an amazing experience to go from the rainy, cold, miserable outdoors of England at that time of year— gray, gray, gray—and then walk into a set at Pinewood Studios and see all those lush interiors. I’d love to do that period again. The dancing, the choreography, the attention to detail in all the cultures-- Indian, Greek. We were back in ancient Bactria, which was an incredible cultural capital. And Balkh, an unbelievable city. If the Afghani thing ever ends, they’ll be able to continue some excavations that will reveal they were a much more advanced civilization than people know, as was the Macedonian, by the way.
DC: According to Joanna Paul in her essay “Alexander and the Cinematic Epic Tradition,” the Director’s Cut of Alexander did come under heavy criticism from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for what it termed your compromised artistic integrity regarding the toning down of the film’s sexuality and the deleting of certain scenes. But one of the things that heartened me about The Final Cut was the way in which the whole subject of Alexander’s sexuality was approached. It couldn’t have been more nonjudgmental, and it certainly didn’t amount to the gay camp spectacle that everyone was predicting before the movie came out.
OS: As you say, nonjudgmental. It was what it was. People especially hated the character of the eunuch Bagoas, most particularly that we showed him kissing Alexander. That’s in the third version, but it didn’t make it into the theatrical cut. He was muted down to nothing in the first two versions. But Bagoas is a major character. Mary Renault wrote about him in The Persian Boy, one of the great books she wrote. Bagoas was the main squeeze in Alexander’s life. You sense, in the third version, the great bond between them. But I think Bagoas the eunuch is instrumental in demonstrating that Alexander went beyond even homosexuality. He was an explorer. With Bagoas he approached a third gender.
DC: As depicted in the movie, his entire worldview seems to be encapsulated in that kind of openness.
OS: It’s beyond feminine or masculine. When you get into the idea of a third gender, it’s important to note how Bagoas physically occupies a space between the two—he’s not transgender, he behaves like a woman, but he’s also masculine— he’s a great, athletic dancer, and he identifies with the female. Alexander, in his relationship with Bagoas, goes beyond masculine and feminine definitions. And because of his upbringing, with his mother and father being so strongly opposite, you feel the place from where that exploratory tendency emerged. That was the great quest of his life, getting back to the womb, trying to make it all one—one world, one sexuality.
DC: Given the effort and inspiration that inform this movie, particularly this version of this movie, and many other movies of yours, do you think that it’s in you, at this point in your career, to make a movie that could be, rightly or wrongly, seen as a straight entertainment sans political themes or concerns, something like Any Given Sunday or U-Turn?
OS: Absolutely. It’s all temporary, this matrix, this tyranny of popular fashion shows, who’s hot, who’s cold, what kind of movies should be made, all that crap. Nixon was a tremendous letdown. I love that movie, and I know you love it. I feel that few people saw through all the fog surrounding that movie and picked up on what it really was. In the same way, Any Given Sunday is filled with the same kind of detail. If you love football, you’ll see that detail and appreciate it. Currently I’m doing a 12-hour documentary regarding the forgotten history of the United States. Three years of work so far and the culmination of all my themes in contemporary American history from 1945 till now. But I am working separately on a film called Savages. Totally fun entertainment—Southern California, young people, drugs, violence, sex, Jules and Jim-- (Laughs) Personal? No. I was never that, but I love that kind of movie, like U-Turn or Any Given Sunday. I’m comfortable in all those worlds.
-""ALL MEN REACH AND FALL…" OLIVER STONE ON ALEXANDER, REVISITED YET AGAIN," June 1, 2014
I was in high school, circa 2000, and watching through the movies that John Williams had scored — at least the ones on DVD I could borrow from my local library. That journey (which eventually culminated in my writing his biography) took me off the well-beaten path of Star Wars and Spielberg, and into a trio of films that Williams scored for Oliver Stone: Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Nixon.
Striding into theaters 30 years ago on Dec. 20, 1995, Nixon pissed off the recently deceased President’s family (his daughters called it “character assassination”) and it somewhat divided critics—although Hollywood Reporter’s Duane Byrge praised it as “an insightfully shrewd psychological portrait of the only president to resign” and a “brilliant panorama of the political landscape through Nixon’s rise and fall.” Roger Ebert was enraptured. “There’s something almost majestic about the process: As Nixon goes down in this film, there is no gloating, but a watery sigh, as of a great ship sinking,” Ebert wrote in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times. “The movie does not apologize for Nixon, and holds him accountable for the disgrace he brought to the presidency. But it is not without compassion for this devious and complex man, and I felt a certain empathy: There, but for the grace of God, go we.”
It was the compassion that startled me. This was a spectre from well before my time whom I knew only as a universally despised and mocked cartoon villain, a bulbous Halloween mask with a funny, jowly voice. And at first, Stone’s film seems like it is going to be a monster movie about the American Antichrist. It even opens with the famous Bible verse, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” which is then followed by sinister scenes of the men planning the Watergate break-in and shots of Nixon, drunk and slurring in the White House on a dark and stormy night.
But Nixon is no hit job. It’s not a smug farce that wears hatred on its sleeve, à la Adam McKay’s Vice. This film has more in common with Citizen Kane (Stone modeled his establishing shot of the White House after that of Xanadu in Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece), and it presaged Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer with its sprinting portrait of an epic character and an epic slice of history with an all-star ensemble cast and moral shades of gray. When Billy Wilder asked Stone, at a dinner party, why on Earth he wanted to make a movie about “such a negative character,” Stone answered: “Nixon is the most important political figure in the second half of the 20th Century. He tore the country apart and nearly presided over a civil war.”
Nuance and curiosity carry this tale of a compulsively ambitious man who rose from the depths of poverty on a California lemon ranch to the highest perch of American superpower before burning his wings on the folly of his own paranoia and insecurities. Nixon is Shakespearean, it’s Greek tragedy, sung in a melancholy and even romantic key.
There is something so poignant about the scenes of Richard as a young boy in Whittier, cowed by his bitterly angry father and desperate to please his intensely religious mother, who is played with cold grace by Mary Steenburgen. Nixon, this film tenderly establishes, was born into hardship and tragedy. “What about happiness, Mother?” a weeping young Nixon asks after the premature deaths of two of his brothers. “Thee will find thy peace at the center, Richard,” his Quaker mother tells him. “Strength in this life. Happiness in the next.”
His mother’s dignified stoicism, her heroic ability to stomach pain and disappointment, and her crusade for a life of sacrifice and virtue, forever burn inside Nixon — but so does an insatiable desire to be loved and respected and the acrid taste of social rejection from an early age. He emerges into adulthood as a smart, ambitious, but painfully awkward misfit, hell-bent on succeeding in politics and reshaping the world but also hounded by the belief that all the cool kids and society powers hate him.
In a sweeping, picaresque odyssey that jumps back and forth in time, mixing film gauges and faux documentarian media with a riptide of quick cuts and constantly changing angles (much as he’d done in JFK), Stone channeled a mighty river of historical facts and personal drama that flows by but never drowns the viewer. He cast Anthony Hopkins in the lead role because the Welsh actor was a chameleon and played loneliness well, but also because he had an inherently sympathetic quality. When Stone offered Hopkins the part, the actor said there was no way he could play such an iconic and distinctly American figure. Stone said, “Chicken, huh?” “That’s typical Oliver,” Hopkins told me a few years ago.
Hopkins changed his mind, in part, because Stone promised not to burden him with garish prosthetics or mastering the famous voice; he didn’t want a sketch comedy imitation. Stone told him: “Nixon had the most brilliant mind, an extraordinary mind — he was just emotionally unstable, and for some reason felt a lot of shame in his life.” Stone added: “I just want us to walk in his shoes. See what it must have been like.”
The real Nixon is often lumped in with our current President, but this is historically illiterate. While there are certainly some stark echoes (hostility toward the press and all “enemies,” overreach and abuse of power), the two men could hardly be more unalike in their character. As the Trump film The Apprentice showed, this new guy simply is not very interesting or complex. He does not share Nixon’s mind, emotional depths, or better angels.
Stone does not gloss over Nixon’s manipulations and dirty tricks, the profanity and cruelty, the realpolitik and “the president can bomb anybody he likes.” In one scene, sitting at a far distance from his emotionally distanced wife, Pat (Joan Allen) — recalling the breakfast table montage with Charles Foster Kane and his wife — Nixon rings a bell to have “Mrs. Nixon” coldly removed.
But in an earlier scene, Nixon pleads with his wife not to divorce him, reminding her of their idyllic courtship days; Williams’ music here is a lyrical love theme for solo trumpet and strings — pure bittersweet Americana. As portrayed by Hopkins, this Nixon is, deep down, a broken little boy and a hopeless romantic. In another powerful scene, alone in the White House one night, Nixon looks up at a painting of John F. Kennedy and says: “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”
The cast is packed with heavy hitters: Ed Harris as Howard Hunt; Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover; Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger. It’s worth watching for the performances alone.
It is also, in my opinion, Stone’s magnum opus — the apex of his angry but sorrowful interrogation of what went wrong with the country he loved so much before he was drafted into the Vietnam War, his inspiring leaders were assassinated, and his government was revealed to be corrosively corrupt. Locking arms with the likes of Hopkins and Williams, artistic geniuses who understood the assignment, Stone crafted an enormous, almost operatic tragedy that was about more than merely Richard M. Nixon, but about America itself. When we look at Nixon, we do see what we are. We are complicated, we are not Halloween caricatures, we are broken, we are marked by loss, we are horrible and we are good — and desperate to be loved.
My favorite moment in the film might be when a shattered and sleepless Nixon, with the noose of Watergate tightening around his neck, tells Pat how, when he got sick as a boy once, his mother gave him medicine that made him throw up all over her. His eyes brim with tears as Pat holds him close. “I wish I could do that now,” he sighs.
It’s an awkward thing to say, but so vulnerable — and so revealing. It’s Oliver Stone’s Nixon in a nutshell.
-Tim Greiving, "Oliver Stone’s ‘Nixon’ at 30: A Portrait of a President Quite Unlike Trump," The Hollywood Reporter, Dec 20 2025
In Oliver Stone‘s new memoir, he writes about when he first understood that his screenplay about a lost soldier in Vietnam connected back to the oldest tales of humankind. The protagonist of what was then titled “The Platoon” was like Odysseus in Homer’s epic, he saw, a young man who’d traveled into hell and who would only find the path home if he opened his eyes to the truth around him.
It was a lesson Stone had retained from his days at NYU when a classics professor used to hammer home the message to the students.
“He used to pound it into the blackboard, ‘Consciousness! Consciousness, gentlemen! Wake up,’” Stone says recently from his home in Brentwood. He’s talking about his memoir “Chasing The Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game,” which covers the writer-director’s first four decades.
But that a-ha moment of waking up to the truth is also a recurring theme in the book — from his parents’ divorce when he was a teen to the futility he felt as a grunt in Vietnam; from the thrill of his Oscar for the “Midnight Express” screenplay to the despair of the failure with “The Hand,” his Hollywood directorial debut.
“This book is about realizing your dream,” says Stone, now 73. “That’s why it ends when I’m 40 years old. The reason is because when you realize the dream, which I did, finally, it’s a wonderful feeling.
“You’re on top of the world,” he says. “It’s like the end of a book. Yeah, other things are going to happen after 40, there’s going to be a lot more detours and a lot more craziness, but the essence of what happened was the dream I had from childhood, which is I got to make the movie I wanted to make.”
Movie fans know that Stone volunteered to fight in Vietnam and it fueled a trilogy of films — “Platoon,” “Born on The Fourth of July” and “Heaven and Earth” — about the war that left an indelible mark on the American psyche.
Before that, though, Stone writes that his parents’ divorce also left a mark on him.
“It was fascinating to rediscover my parents,” he says about his financier father, who married his French mother while he was serving in World War II. “To rediscover who I was fundamentally, that I was a torn person.
“My father was, let’s say, the writer in me, and my mother was the director in me, and I lived out my life in this France-America split, so much so that it became a part of me I didn’t realize until I wrote the book.
“I think it tears me up because I will always be flawed in that way,” he says. “I never kind of fit in. I felt it in the movie business, too. It’s a way of life.”
Early in the book, Stone spends many pages writing about Vietnam, including a battle on Jan. 1, 1968 he describes as both terrifying and divine.
“I’m three months in, I’ve been wounded twice, I see I’m becoming a soldier,” Stone says. “And this all-night battle, biggest battle I’m in, goes from the dark into dawn.
“I was certainly seeing all this stuff, and I describe it in detail,” he says. “I said, this is like a myth in this battle. It came back to me in 1976 at the Bicentennial when I saw all the fireworks in the sky.
“So I see war as divine because when I remembered that battle I felt that I was protected by the gods.”
After writing “Platoon,” Stone headed west for Hollywood, his much-admired screenplay his calling card to getting work.
Hired to adapt the non-fiction account of American Billy Hayes, who was arrested in Turkey for drug smuggling, Stone wrote a visceral script that helped make the Alan Parker-directed “Midnight Express” film a success.
At the Golden Globes where he won for its screenplay, he writes of embarrassing himself with his attempt to deliver a drug-fueled speech. His speech at the Oscars a few months later went better, but he’d started to earn a reputation as a stubborn collaborator.
The Michael Caine-starring psychological horror movie “The Hand” gave him a chance to direct a studio picture. His bosses imposed changes on the movie that Stone fought unsuccessfully, and when it flopped he feared its failure might cost him a second shot.
“Some people told me I represented a standard of rebelliousness back in the early ’80s,” Stone says. “In the sense that as a writer I was like, ‘I’m doing it my way,’ and people would be scared sometimes of me, and they’d say, ‘He’s too tough, I can’t deal with him.’
“Because you’re right, the Hollywood way is compromise, and sometimes you must, you have to listen to others. You can’t be just mule-headed, but you have to find a way to keep your own integrity. It’s a tricky trade-off.”
“Chasing The Light” is dedicated to the late British film producer John Daly for good reason — his backing led to Stone’s back-to-back career-making triumphs with “Salvador” and “Platoon” in 1986.
Like many in Hollywood, Daly had long admired the “Platoon” screenplay and felt by the mid-’80s it finally could be made. When Stone showed him his script for “Salvador,” a political thriller about the United States’ not-so-secret involvement Central America wars, Daly said he’d fund them both.
“I felt cursed with ‘Platoon’ so when John Daly asked me, ‘Which do you want to do first?’ I immediately said ‘Salvador,’” Stone says. “I felt if I said ‘Platoon,’ it was going to fail; I was so down on it.’”
The “Salvador” screenplay was co-written with the Irish journalist Richard Boyle, whom actor James Woods plays in the movie. Making the film in Mexico on a shoestring budget, with constant money problems and ultimately no studio distribution, left Stone again thinking he’d blown his last chance to direct.
“I really thought it was my last shot,” he says, describing that fatalistic attitude as fuel for his fight for the film’s dark ending and strong anti-American sentiment. “I didn’t think I was going to work again.”
Not that he had time to fret. Even as “Salvador” struggled out of the gate, Stone was in the Philippines to start “Platoon,” which featured Charlie Sheen as a young soldier based on Stone. Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe played two very different sergeants with whom the filmmaker served in Vietnam.
“They’re both war movies and they’re both about American government mistakes,” Stone says. “Certainly ‘Salvador’ is an incipient Vietnam 10 years later, 15 years later. I was very much aware at the time that they were similar in that way.
“But in ‘Salvador’ I went with the gonzo aspect more because he was a risk-taker and he broke all the rules as a journalist, but I loved him,” he says. “In ‘Platoon,’ I’m dealing with the US Army, which is another thing completely. I react badly to authoritarianism like that.”
“Salvador” slowly won fans thanks to word of mouth and a second wave of reviews more favorable than the first. When “Platoon” arrived in December 1986, its immediate success rekindled interest in Stone’s earlier film.
At the Oscars in 1987, Stone was in competition with himself in the screenplay category for both movies. “Platoon,” though, won best picture and best director for Stone, its triumph represents the end of the memoir — except for a bit of a tease toward “Wall Street,” which would come next.
“There’s definitely going to be another story,” says Stone, who is currently working on documentaries on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and climate change. “I have to shape it; there’s so many twists and turns.
“It’s not the same story anymore,” he says. “Because I have realized the dream.”
-Peter Larsen, "In ‘Chasing The Light,’ Oliver Stone writes of Vietnam, ‘Salvador’ and ‘Platoon’, Jul 22 2020
“Oliver is an amazing director and an incredible man. He is somebody who suffers from an affliction that is not that common in today’s society, especially in respect to people that are as fortunate, as wealthy and as successful as he is; he suffers from pure honesty and complete integrity. He also has an inordinate amount of compassion for the human race; and not many people give him credit for this. He wonders why we do the things we do to each other every day, either in functioning first-world societies or places further afield in the world. He wouldn’t be able to make the films that he has made, if he didn’t ask himself these questions, if he didn’t have that level of compassion. Making this film was very much a journey of discovery for everyone involved, including and maybe particularly for Oliver. There was no doubt that he was our leader and Oliver led by example, like Alexander; he pushed the crew and the cast extremely hard, and he didn’t push anyone harder than me, except maybe for himself. So, in that respect he is an incredible leader, he’s a director that demands that you give as much as he gives.”
In the space of three years, Oliver Stone made three films in Dallas, an unusual number for any director but especially one not from Texas. “I know, I’m from New York!” Stone said with a laugh, when I connected with him over Zoom.
The films are quite different, but each captures a facet of the city. The late-night claustrophobia of Talk Radio (1988) is a maze of reflective glass with the neon skyline in the window. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) uses the sun-dappled streets of Oak Cliff to tell a very American story of idealism curdling to betrayal. And of course there is JFK (1991), Stone’s feverish spin on that fateful day in 1963 and New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s doomed crusade to make sense of it.
Stone is coming to Texas Theatre to screen and discuss those movies — in addition to his warped serial-killers-in-love classic, Natural Born Killers, celebrating its 30th anniversary — for a mini-festival called “4 Days in Dallas With Oliver Stone” running Oct. 3-6. He’ll be talking with Dallas-based journalist Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture critic and one of the preeminent Stone experts, having written a collection of conversations and essays about the director called The Oliver Stone Experience.
It’s hard to imagine better movie programming than watching JFK with Oliver Stone in the theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was caught. I spoke with the director about filming in Dallas, the lone-gunman theory and what Jerry Jones gave him.
Let’s start with your first Dallas film, Talk Radio. How did it wind up being shot here?
We were trying to make Born on the Fourth of July, but it was a big cookie to bite. It was too expensive, it was about a paraplegic and the studios considered it a downer. Tom Cruise and I came together to make that happen, but Tom was doing Rain Man, and we had to wait. [Producer] Ed Pressman saw this play in New York with Eric Bogosian called Talk Radio. The play was powerful. I said, maybe we should take a couple of months, and I’ll shoot it while we’re waiting for Tom.
It essentially gave you a chance to get to know Dallas.
That’s right. Because we had a limited amount of money for Born on the Fourth of July, which was a very big production, and Texas was very attractive. It’s a right-to-work state, and the Texas Film Commission came after us aggressively. Come to Dallas, see our beautiful new studio out in Las Colinas. And Dallas had so many talented extras.
So why had you wanted to film Born on the Fourth of July in Dallas in the first place?
[Real-life Vietnam vet and film protagonist] Ron Kovic grew up in Massapequa, Long Island, but Long Island was being developed, so it didn’t have the kind of emptiness, the open-space skies I found in Dallas. There was a neighborhood that really turned out well, [the Elmwood section of] Oak Cliff. They gave us a whole street.
Texas was good to us. I hated the hospital we shot in, though. We moved into an abandoned hospital, and that was probably the hardest two weeks I’ve ever shot. Those scenes based on the Veterans Hospital in the Bronx are very depressing, but it was necessary, because that’s the truth, of course.
You were reading Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins while you were shooting Born on the Fourth of July. So was it filming in Dallas that sparked the fascination that led to JFK?
I never really made that connection, but I’m sure someone took me to see Dealey Plaza for the first time. When you see it, you realize what a jewel box it is. How small. You don’t realize that from pictures. It’s a perfect ambush site.
Dallas spent decades in denial about the Kennedy assassination. The Sixth Floor Museum didn’t open until 1989, shortly before you shot the film. And the movie JFK blows the doors off history, creating that feeling that something just isn’t right. How hard was it to get permission to shoot in Dealey Plaza?
There was a big fight. A lot of politicking behind the scenes. And Dealey Plaza was our first day of shooting. Can you imagine? With all those cars and the bang-bang echoing through the city. They closed off Stemmons Freeway and gave us the whole square. It turned into quite a circus.
That movie was a nightmare in terms of work. I had to be totally focused and ignore distractions. The Washington Post ripped off a first draft of the script, and we were already on the [sixth] draft, and they came out with a Sunday piece months before the movie opened, ripping us to shreds. I didn’t realize the opposition to the film until I got into it, which is somewhat like what happened to [New Orleans DA and the film’s protagonist Jim] Garrison.
I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole on JFK’s assassination, but friends who have will tell me: The conspiracies are fun, but at the end of the day, it’s just a lone gunman. They often cite Vincent Bugliosi’s book. What are your thoughts on Reclaiming History?
It’s ridiculous. It’s like citing Gerald Posner’s book [Case Closed]. The best refutation is from Jim DiEugenio, who went into Bugliosi’s book detail by detail [Reclaiming Parkland]. It’s sad that people don’t bother to read the rebuttals.
I went back to all this material in 2021 with the documentary JFK Revisited. It’s very clear that Oswald was known to the CIA. I don’t want to get into all the arguments here, but that documentary is worth seeing.
For a non-Dallas filmmaker, you’ve tackled some very essential Dallas stories. You came back to make the football film Any Given Sunday.
We were having a huge fight with the NFL. We couldn’t get stadiums, and we couldn’t get the jerseys or uniforms. We had to create our own parallel world. Thank God, Jerry Jones was a real gentleman, and he said, you’re welcome to use my stadium. Or maybe he said the Dallas Cowboys stadium.
No, it’s his. [Laughter.] So when you come to town, will you go to Dealey Plaza?
Oh, well, sure.
-Sarah Hepola, "Oliver Stone talks ‘JFK’ and his trio of Dallas films that capture the city," The Dallas Morning News, Oct 2 2024
What was the feeling about being in a jungle war that you most wanted to communicate in Platoon?
Point of view. The subjectivity. The sense of fear and chaos, so that you can understand what war really is. The confusion. The fact that maybe twenty percent of people who get killed in a war get killed by their own friendly fire. The sense of fear and panic - and heroism too. There's daily acts of heroism. There's a bonding between the men. [...]
The kind of confusion that you're talking about, in the middle of a jungle war, you captured that both in Platoon and in Born on the Fourth of July. Can you talk a little bit about choreographing a scene so that what you get watching it is the sense of confusion of not knowing, not being able to see, not knowing who's firing or who you're firing at? But from your perspective as a director, everything has to be completely controlled to communicate that confusion.
Well, it's very important to show that confusion. Very important. You do not see the enemy very often [in real combat]. In fact, in the movies that I made, you see them a little too much, because I always had to compromise to some degree with the needs of an audience, but it's even more difficult to see them [in real life]. The tendency in a movie is to bring somebody who's firing at you a little closer to camera so that you can at least see some outlines. In real life, it was probably more invisible, and dirtier and even more surprising. And death is even worse than it is on the screen. I mean, death is so....you know, it's pretty ugly. And it smells bad too.
-Terry Gross interviews Oliver Stone, NPR's Fresh Air (Jul 17 1990)
Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone opens up, unfiltered: from his career as a filmmaker of cult films like "Wall Street," "Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Any Given Sunday" to his passion for inconvenient truths, expressed in controversial works like "JFK," "W." and "Snowden." From his often provocative political views that made him an outsider, to his work as an activist documentary filmmaker, which he has been committed to for half a century.
It was only fitting that he was awarded at a documentary festival like SalinaDocFest, where he was accompanied by his wife, Sun-jung Jung, whom he married in 1996. Among the new developments, he reveals that he has been working for years—he's now 78—on a new feature film, "White Lies," starring Benicio del Toro. Oddly enough, it won't be a political film, but a work "about life, from what I've understood so far."
A balance sheet: what was the cost of being an outsider?
The slander of those who have been calling me anti-American for years. It’s not true—I’m proudly American, I served my country in Vietnam. That doesn’t mean I must agree with those who govern it. With time and age, I’ve earned the right to dissent and speak my mind, and all things considered, it’s gone well. I’m still alive, I can support myself without kissing anyone’s ass, I’m not beholden to any studio or any nation. So I guess you could say that being a free man today can still guarantee a good and successful life.
You're speaking of the current American government?
I can’t speak intelligently about Trump because I don’t know what he thinks. He changes his mind so often, I’m not even sure he knows. The truth is, no one knows what will happen in our country, just as no one knows what will happen in Russia. Trump is a madman, but sometimes he says things worth listening to. Honestly, I’ve never seen so much disorder in the world, but I want to stay optimistic. The ancient Greeks believed chaos was a divine energy. Today it’s dangerous, but I hope over time it leads to healing, a cure, some kind of restoration.
What do you fear most today?
War. It would destroy all the good we’ve built.
You mean nuclear war?
Any kind of war. I aspire to world peace, but not the kind Trump envisions, where it’s always America first. I don’t understand why we can’t all be companions, why America and Russia can’t get along again. I really believe America has a serious problem today. It’s too aggressive toward other countries. Take sanctions, for example—they’re horrific. Designed as punishment, sooner or later we’ll sanction everyone. It’s absurd.
Meanwhile, extremists—especially on the right—are spreading worldwide.
Terribly true. Extremists move faster than moderates and pacifists. It’s dangerous. We should stop extremists now, more than ever. Even those who don’t seem extreme in my country: John Bolton and all those who pushed for war with Iran. In my view, the worst have been Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken - and I wasn’t fond of Hillary Clinton either. Even Obama lied about so many things.
Earlier you said we aren’t free today to talk about Israel.
I don’t understand why Trump is allied with Benjamin Netanyahu and supports him. It has to do with money and politics. I think a lot of Trump’s money comes from the Jewish lobby, which is very powerful in the U.S. Anyway, no one in Congress would ever go against Netanyahu. It’s a kind of mafia. I experienced it myself: in 2003 I made the documentary Persona Non Grata [about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], and I was crushed because I spoke about Palestine. Hollywood went crazy. Luckily, I had supporters and survived. But these things still aren’t talked about enough.
At SalinaDocFest they screened your film Salvador. Why show it now?
Because the world has changed since 1986, but many things haven’t. Back then, many topics were off-limits, and today you can’t speak freely about Israel. People are still afraid to speak out, but this film encourages it. I hope we never lose our essential freedom of speech.
Salvador was your first major film as director.
I remember fighting to get it distributed. It was so radical, raw, and violent that no one wanted it. It still has a strong impact. You can see the attitude of a young director throwing in everything he could, not knowing if he’d ever get another chance. But I’m proud of this angry film. At the time, people talked a lot about Vietnam, but no one said anything about Central America. People disappeared. Journalists and dissidents were tortured and killed. It was brutal, and no one knew. I owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Boyle for exposing all this. I also remember lying shamelessly to the Salvadoran government.
Meaning?
We told them we needed helicopters and tanks to film their version. In reality, we wanted to tell the revolutionaries’ version.
Did the plan work?
No. They found out, and the consultant the government assigned us was even killed. But we survived and brought the film home, and it’s still relevant given today’s dictatorships and repression. I wanted to recall that story and that film, because I’ll die and be buried, but my stories won’t.
Would you ever make a documentary on fentanyl, the ‘zombie drug’?
I don’t think so. It’s just one of many phenomena. Synthetic drugs have always existed.
But this one causes 200 deaths a day in America alone.
We must always be cautious with numbers, with who provides them, and why. The world is full of fake news. I’m not saying this is fake, but we must always be careful.
You published your autobiography Chasing the Light. Was writing always your dream?
Yes, I’ve always loved writing. I kept diaries, and at 19 I wrote my first book, a sort of memoir disguised as a scandalous Greek drama. My parents were strong characters, almost cinematic, and that book was my way of venting my anger at them. A bit like my kids do with me today. But it was rejected everywhere. No one wanted to publish it. I was so desperate I thought of ending it all. That’s why I went to Vietnam: to look for death in war.
Later, with the success of Platoon, you realized the dream of becoming a director.
Looking back, even at its high points, my career has been an Iliad, full of battles and controversies. Maybe at 80, the Odyssey will begin - my return home. Who knows. Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg managed to bring their lives to the screen; I want to try, too.
Over your career, you’ve met countless artists. Who do you want to remember?
Val Kilmer was gone too soon. He suffered so much and put all that pain into his work. A unique, extraordinary artist. I miss him deeply. I also want to remember Michael Madsen, also gone too soon. It may not seem so, but actors live very hard lives. By contrast, I live a soft life, and I hope to live another hundred years.
Are you worried about artificial intelligence?
I like it. It seems to fulfill many creative fantasies. I admit I don’t know all its uses and risks, but so much of the world already uses it outside cinema: doctors, dentists, hospital machines. Medical technology is helping us live better, longer lives. The real issue is fake news. Artificially created videos spread quickly. But honestly, that’s always been true. Political propaganda has always existed, just in other forms. It seems new, but it isn’t.
Why are you always drawn to political cinema?
I want to tell uncomfortable truths in documentaries and shed light on important cases in fiction. Of my films, I think W. is the most underrated, yet it told the story of America, of fundamentalism - including Christian fundamentalism. America often uses morality and Christianity in the name of freedom and democracy. And from then until now, nothing has changed.
Do you follow any religion?
I was raised Episcopalian, but today I practice Buddhism. I don’t say I’m Buddhist, only that I practice it.
Deep down, are you still an atheist?
No, I’m a believer.
A believer and a fighter. What’s the hardest battle you’ve fought?
The one with myself.
Did you win it?
It’s a battle you can never win - only balance. But you’d have to ask my wife. She knows me better than I do. Women always know more.
Would the world be better if women governed?
I don’t think so. Look at Golda Meir, former Israeli prime minister - a warmonger. In power dynamics, women often feel they must appear tougher than men, so they end up being even more bellicose. Look at the Green Party. I once respected it as a party of peace, now it seems full of people who want war, and it’s led by a woman.
Do you have regrets?
Who doesn’t? But I’m someone who focuses on doing. I still care deeply about my work. I want to write a proper finale to my career - and be proud of it.
-Claudia Catalli, "Oliver Stone: A Life on Screen," L'Espresso, Jul 31 2025
For Oliver Stone, chaos isn't just a political or social condition. It's a mythological substance, an ancient deity that spans eras and cultures, and which in our time has found a new incarnation: that of Donald Trump. But if the president of the United States represents the most visible face of systemic disorder, perhaps from there—from that form of uncontrolled and dangerous energy—a chance for healing could arise. A Dionysian rebirth, as the director himself suggests. This is why Stone urges us not to give up. And he does so by evoking a forgotten film, marginal by Hollywood standards, but now more necessary than ever: Salvador.
The occasion was the Salina Doc Festival, where Stone was the guest of honor for a special event at the cinema in Piazza di Pollara and spoke the following day at the Rapa Nui Resort in Santa Marina Salina with journalist and producer Silvia Bizio.
Produced on makeshift means, opposed by studios and distributors, Salvador, shot in 1986, was a rebellious project at the time. And it still is. "At the time, no one wanted to distribute it," says the director. "There was no money. No one knew what was happening in Central America. But that film endures. It has become something different: a document, a warning."
The Salvadoran civil war—with its disappearances, massacres, tortured journalists, and peasants slaughtered in the countryside—was a reality removed from American public debate. "People knew nothing. And those who did, kept quiet," says Stone. Then the director, a Vietnam veteran, conceived the crazy plan with Richard Boyle, the journalist on whose story the film is based, to film both sides of the story: the government's and the rebels'. He even sought the cooperation of the Salvadoran military, then fled to Mexico to film the other side of the story. The government official assigned to the production was later killed. "It was a nightmare. But a necessary nightmare."
Today, in the midst of a new era of global uncertainty, Salvador reemerges as an unheard parable. Its time, says Stone, is now. Because it speaks of America as a repressive power, incapable of accepting change. "In the 1980s, we wanted to stop every attempt at reform. Honduras finally had an honest president, but we got rid of him. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, contributed to destabilizing the region. Today we complain about immigration. But we caused it."
Salvador , in this light, is no longer a film of denunciation: it's a lens through which to interpret the genealogy of a contemporary disaster. A watershed between the American dream and its dystopian version. And Trump, from this perspective, is not an alien, but a symptom. "I don't know what Trump thinks. And maybe he doesn't know either. But the chaos he's unleashed is real. It's the expression of an unstable, ancient, Greek energy. It can be destructive, of course, but also regenerative. Because it speaks truths, even if in a rambling way. He should be listened to, at least on certain things."
Stone, as always, denounces. His reading of America is that of a tired but stubborn Ulysses, who has weathered the storms of history and now tries to recount them. "At forty, I had achieved my dream," he says. "I had reached that point with Platoon , then another odyssey began. From the controversy over Natural Born Killers, to the controversy over JFK, to the media chaos. Now I'm writing the second part. Maybe I'll call it Iliad II, or Odyssey I. I don't know yet."
In the meantime, he continues to think about new projects, which are difficult to realize in an industry that no longer accepts risks. "In the United States, making protest films is almost impossible. Everything is governed by money. Directors are afraid. Afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of telling the truth. So they self-censor. The Palestinian issue, for example: if you talk about it, you'll be destroyed. I did it. In 2006, I directed a documentary, and Hollywood tore me to pieces. But it was the truth. And someone has to tell it."
-Monica Straniero, "Oliver Stone at the Salina Doc Festival: Trump and the Forgotten Lessons of War," La Voce di New York, Jul 16 2025
In his soul, the spot occupied by Vietnam is “terrible. Thank God I had another life. Many Vietnam veterans didn’t. . . . Because all the guys who came back from Vietnam, we’re all fucked. We are fucked. And I don’t mean to be self-pitying, but we are so out of touch with our generation. You know what I’m talking about. You come back, you can’t sit in a room and talk. Your value system is different. You’ve seen things at the dirtiest level. And people sit there, and they’re mostly hypocrites, you know? They’re mostly hypocrites in America. . . .”
Maybe all these years later, Stone simply cannot put a square frame around his feelings. Maybe he is toying behind the role he allows himself as Hollywood rogue. Or maybe what comes from Stone are the same wild neutrons we detect in the guy on the street corner with the signboard in his lap. Vietnam can be suppressed but cannot be contained by the combat veteran, even the magnificently creative veteran.
--John Balzar, "Coming Home is Never Easy," The Los Angeles Times, Apr 16 2000
William Oliver “Ollie” Stone, child of Eastern privilege who eschewed at least some of that advantage to go through hard knocks on his own, a Vietnam Vet who enlisted and fought as an infantryman, later a pacifist and outspoken critic of American foreign policy and values, shock impact screenwriter and artful, sometimes poetic director — they’re all present in the 70something filmmaker’s rise-to-glory memoir, “Chasing the Light.”
I’ve been a fan pretty much since “Salvador.” My first reporting assignment at my first newspaper, where I was a freelance critic had me take five Vietnam War veterans to a showing of “Platoon” and buy them coffee at a local diner afterwards. Their harrowing stories, and tears at seeing their experience reflected so “accurately,” stick with me.
Stone remains a fascinating study in contradictions, champion of the underdog and occasionally an on-set bully, macho yet lefty, generous to every collaborator and teacher who helped him “make it,” learn his craft and get better at it, but almost always hitting them with a backhanded compliment or two. Or three.
From the beginning he has been an artist of stark dualities and excesses. He sees himself as Odysseus or a pirate, a rogue operator outside “The System.”
He comes off in print the way he’s always come off in interviews — passionate, thoughtful and somewhat dogmatic. I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, about his “Vietnamese POV” Vietnam film, “Heaven and Earth” (the third in his “trilogy” about his war — after “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July”), about “World Trade Center,” his post-9/11 tribute to first responders and most “pro-American” work, and that Latin American politics doc he did a few years back. He’s long had that confidence of his opinions, certitude that he’s “right” in a historical sense, quick to analyze a performance, a colleague’s film or judge his own — sometimes harshly.
There’s a lot of psychoanalyzing of himself, his parents, their failed marriage, his own failures and insecurities in “Chasing the Light.” He talks about his drug abuse, hits a few romantic relationships, and consults his decades of diaries to remember everything from his father’s death to his first brushes with triumph.
I didn’t recall that his first trip to Vietnam was before the “escalation,” as an English teacher. I had no idea he was in LRRPs in Vietnam (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol). That’s infantry on steroids.
I knew he had boarding school and Yale acceptance (he didn’t stick it out long) in his pedigree.
I didn’t realize he’d studied under wunderkind alumnus Martin Scorsese at NYU.
He understudied/worked for/was critiqued by the great screenwriter Robert Bolt (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago”) in his 20s.
For this book about his long, long road to fame — “Seizure” (nobody saw it) to “The Hand” (a few more saw it) to “Salvador” (ditto) and then “Platoon” — Stone traces everything, from his scripts to his own saga, back to “The Odyssey.”
Stone’s lasting obsessions aren’t just Vietnam and America’s misguided way of throwing its weight around the world. It’s The Doors and Jim Morrison, as he quotes The Doors often, sees himself (and occasionally others) in Lizard King terms at several points in his memoir.
He details the ordeals involved in each early directing effort, and in his many screenwriting challenges — “Midnight Express,” “Year of the Dragon” and “Scarface” among them. Those are some of the most fascinating chapters in the book. He says Brian DePalma’s “operatic” take on his “Scarface” script has grown on him. Some.
Of Billy Hayes, the “hero” of “Midnight Express,” passed off in the media and the movie as just “a kid who made a mistake” — “stunned” that Hayes, contrary to the way he told his story, was caught on his “fourth” hash smuggling run out of Turkey, that Hayes led people to believe he was heterosexual, heightening (if that’s possible) the horror of prison sexual assaults and encounters.
“How do you live with yourself? I have no problem believing he can.”
Stone opens the book with an introduction to his love/hate relationship with the mercurial, motor-mouthed blowhard James Woods, telling tales out of school of Woods’ tantrums and fear-filled experiences filming “Salvador” on the fly in Mexico in the ’80s, fleeing a cavalry charge shot too early, exaggerating the danger and “Stone didn’t know what he was doing…but I did” way Woods described the experience.
Having interviewed Woods myself, a bantam rooster who can’t wait to work his (alleged) IQ into any introductory conversation, Stone seems on the mark in picking at the man being “the most insecure” movie star of them all. They worked together several times after their near-brawling “Salvador” experience.
The compliments mixed with slaps extends from Alan Parker, director of “Midnight Express,” who took his script and never invited him to the set, to Dale Dye, the formidable Vietnam vet and military consultant on many a war movie, who developed his “boot camp” for the cast of “Platoon,” and repeated that in other war films he worked on. Dye made “Platoon’s” cast a unit, with the right look and jumpy reflexes Stone remembered from his service. But keep politics out of the conversation, and Dye’s racial tolerance — filming in the Philippines — wasn’t the most enlightened.
Then again, he wasn’t the guy who kicked a Filipino production manager in the ass, on set, in front of the entire crew. That was Stone, who airs lots of his dirty laundry, even if he takes his shot at “explaining” or spinning that behavior.
He also quotes freely from interviews conducted by a biographer who talked to many of those he worked for
Stone is wise to limit this volume to his early years. His career has been winding down, although he has a small scale film, “White Lies,” in pre-production, “Snowden” didn’t set the world on fire and the Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin interview docs he’s made in the last haven’t done much for his reputation.
He turned 74 in mid September, and probably needed a better book editor to fact check his memories. He confuses the F4 Phantoms used in Vietnam with F16s — repeatedly (They didn’t come into service until ten years after his 1968 battles “in country”), gets a major plot detail wrong in “Gone With the Wind” just to make an analogy to his French mother taking up with his WWII American command staff officer father work. He thinks one-time producer-nemesis Dino DeLaurentis opened a movie studio in the middle of their ’80s kerfuffle in “Wilmington, Delaware” (Wilmington, NC sport).
But it’s a fair self-portrait, with enough colorful detail of research trips, filming ordeals and failing and failing and failing before finally succeeding, fine fodder for a film biography of one of the cinema’s grand mavericks.
'Please don't make this about politics': Oliver Stone gets personal
"Don't make this just a political interview, would you, please," Oliver Stone begs me towards the end of an engrossing 45-minute chat over Skype. "They always lead with that: 'Oliver Stone says George W. Bush was the worst President ever'. But that's not what this interview is about. Lead with the book."
The book in question is Chasing the Light, a memoir that ends in 1987 with the triple Oscar-winning filmmaker at the top of his game, basking in the sheer unadulterated pleasure of receiving the best director Oscar (for Platoon) from Elizabeth Taylor — "my dream girl of the 1950s and 1960s," he writes, "still so glamorous, the heart of the movies". He's enjoying critical raves for back-to-back films, Salvador and Platoon, is happily married, has his sometimes raging cocaine habit under control, and has even learnt (kind of) how to avoid shooting himself in the foot in public appearances and the media.
"Perhaps that was the golden moment," he tells me when asked if, in writing this book, a single time in his life crystallised for him as a zenith. "It was me realising I was making money, my film was a commercial and critical hit, and I'm still in health and under 40, thank God. It was quite good. And I think I knew it was quite good. 'This is special'. I wasn't stupid. 'This is not gonna happen that easy again'."
Despite the occasional glimpse of feistiness, Stone is a generous interview subject, offering long and thoughtful responses from his large, tree-lined attic office. He's as willing to reflect on his own failings ("I always registered zero practically in the young women market," he says at one point) as he is to rail at the world's failure to see things through his eyes ("I just don't think people want to know").
And he has much to reflect upon. In the 33 years since he accepted that Oscar from Liz Taylor, Stone has had more hits — Wall Street and its sequel Money Never Sleeps, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK — some failures, a second divorce, a third marriage and plenty of controversy. He's been labelled a conspiracy theorist, an apologist for America's antagonists — including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin — and a defender of an official enemy of the state, Edward Snowden. It's been a hell of a life.
So sure, let's lead with the book, which is a rollicking tale full of highs and lows, a little gossip (Al Pacino is a bit of a slippery customer; Midnight Express director Alan Parker a cold fish), and lots of "do what I say, not what I did" advice for aspiring filmmakers. But let's also acknowledge that trying to separate the book and its author from politics might ultimately prove a futile exercise.
Stone was the only child of a French Catholic mother and an American Jewish father (of Polish extraction) who met in Paris at the end of the war, sailed back to New York when peace was declared and attempted to make a life of it despite their vast differences in temperament.
His father, Louis, was a stockbroker, and pretty good at it, though he never owned anything because, Stone writes, doing so "involved Pride, which came before the Fall". He liked to write, too — both poetry and the investor newsletter he maintained until near the end of his life — and encouraged young Oliver to do likewise, paying him 25 cents a piece when he was just seven to write "about anything you want".
"Make it two pages, three," he would tell him. "Just tell a story."
If it is Louis that Stone credits with making him a writer, it is his mother, Jacqueline, who gave rise to the director. She was vivacious, outgoing, loved to party. She made things happen.
Late at night, Jacqueline would crawl into bed with her young son for a cuddle. "Yes, it's true, her 'sexy' manner may have given me a hidden desire for my mother," Stone writes in one of the book's frequent passages of self-analysis. "Possibly I adored her too much, but I'd prefer this fate to the cold, queer dislike or distrust of women I see in some men."
His childhood was charmed, at least on the surface. Prep school, summers in France with his grandparents, the prospect of a gilded life in East Coast society. But when his parents divorced at 15, it all fell apart.
"Everything I'd believed up till then about my life — that there could be security, love and happiness between people — turned out to be a lie," he writes. "The pain of it is still palpable almost 60 years on.''
Given the centrality of deceit in Stone's work over the years, it is hard not to see this as the defining moment of his life. There have been others of course, most notably his experience as a GI in Vietnam in 1967-68, which opened his eyes to the insanity of war. The making of Salvador almost 20 years later inspired him to join the dots between America's involvement in south-east Asia and its misadventures in Central America, and to find the corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex behind both.
But psychologically speaking, these were arguably echoes of that first monumental betrayal.
"I was a child of divorce, and the split between my parents deeply affected me," Stone tells me. "No brothers, no sisters, any sense of family dissolved. We were all in different spheres. So I was on my own at 15. It was a strange feeling."
He spent the rest of his teens drifting, lost, and after failed stabs at college and at novel-writing, he enlisted for Vietnam, aged 20. He was driven, he writes, by "very dark thoughts … if I didn't have the courage to take my own life, perhaps God, in whom I was raised to believe, would take it for me".
There's some self-dramatisation in this, for sure. Stone says his memoir "is also a novel", a belated successor in some respects to A Child's Night Dream, written when he was 19, published in 1997, and ostensibly to be adapted for the screen by his son, Sean. "I mean, you've got to keep it moving, you've got to keep it relevant. You've got to keep it entertaining."
But it also acknowledges the general reality that for young men, that phase of life is often, as he writes, "a dangerous time".
Stone's Vietnam reality included one all-night firefight that left hundreds dead, but which he processed in his mind "as a stunningly beautiful night full of fireworks … a dream through which I'd walked unharmed, grateful of course, but numb and puzzled by it all".
Emerging from the war, he began writing screenplays about it, trying to make sense of what he'd seen and of its strange and lingering after-effects. He enrolled in film school and made a short film called Last Year in Vietnam, which his tutor, a young former student named Martin Scorsese, hailed as proof that here was a real filmmaker. "Why?" Scorsese asked rhetorically. "Because it's personal. You feel like the person who's making it is living it."
In 1976, Stone began working on another Vietnam story, The Platoon. A decade later, he would get to film this mythic tale of a good sergeant (Willem Dafoe) and a bad sergeant (Tom Berenger) and the naive young GI (Charlie Sheen) caught between them. Along the way, he would also direct two feature films that few saw and that most who did would write off as failures (Seizure, The Hand), win an Oscar for screenwriting (Midnight Express) and enjoy soaring highs and crashing lows.
If there's a moral to his tale, I suggest, it surely has something to do with persistence, with never giving up no matter how many times you crash to the floor.
Yes, he agrees, "but what else could I do?"
By that, he means he didn't have his father's gift for numbers, nor a taste for the "respectable" life that briefly beckoned during his first marriage, when the possibility of going into business and "making an accommodation" hovered on the horizon.
He was driven to write and, later, to direct, and from the moment his eyes were opened in Vietnam and he began his long, slow emergence from "being a conservative, like my father, Republican", he was driven to put what he'd learnt in front of his fellow Americans whether they liked it or not.
"I'm certainly attacking nerve centres," Stone says of his body of work. "And I enjoy it. I think we need films like that."
Increasingly, he's doing it in the documentary format because making features has become too much of a struggle. "It's very hard to do a film; it takes so much energy, and I'm 73 going on 74," he says. "It's nice to have a little joy in life, not to have to worry, tension and all that and being judged all the time, questioned."
He's working on a film about JFK, and another on energy. His most recent release, screened on Showtime in 2017, was the four-part sitdown interview with Vladimir Putin, a man he feels has been entirely misrepresented by Western media.
He's proud of the film, as well as earlier documentaries on Venezuela's late socialist president Hugo Chavez and Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul.
"Those films are so well done," he says. "I mean, they're real. Those guys expose themselves, they feel they're telling their truth, and that's very important. One day somebody serious, a historian, will look at them with a different light, not as [framed by] America's Cold War policy, you know.
"The fight against Castro and Chavez and Putin has been uncredible and has distorted the values of this country enormously."
He heaps equal Shakespearean-infused disdain upon Hillary Clinton — "Lady Macbeth, the killer; she's a war hawk, man" — as he does Donald Trump, whom he dismisses as a "mad King Lear, 'which daughter loves me more', that kind of thing''.
"The guy doesn't sleep, he doesn't exercise, he keeps the strangest schedule I've ever seen," he adds of the President. "He just needs to fuel the flames. I don't think he has time to think. He seems to have a very hard-wired redneck policy on immigration, plus the environment, plus Iran. I don't see anything progressive. And the thugs he appoints to be around him!"
But no one has done more to undermine democratic values than the younger George Bush, he insists. "He totally overreacted to 9/11. We became another country. I mean, we always loved to kick ass, but we became seriously aggressive, doubting of ourselves and suspicious of dissent."
Stone doesn't have another narrative feature in development right now. But what he does have is another volume of memoir, maybe two.
"Why not," he says with a chuckle. "Doctor Faustus is three volumes, isn't it? It's my deal with the devil."
He's been keeping detailed journals since around 1982, and he has "1000 pages of notes" towards the second book. But he won't start writing it until he's finished with those two documentaries and can dedicate himself fully to the task.
"Frankly, I am really looking forward to tearing apart those diaries from 1986 on, because there's so much that happened so fast — so many films, so many awards, so much success and failure," he says.
"I can't remember that much of it, and I'm going to be shocked to death, which makes it fun. 'Shit, man. I did this. I did that.' It's like rediscovering your country."
-Karl Quinn, "Please don't make this about politics': Oliver Stone gets personal," The Sydney Morning Herald, Jul 24 2020
Oliver Stone’s Journey from Cold Warrior to America’s Untold History
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.
The ten-part series The Untold History of the United States is a series that unpacks much of the conventional narrative of U.S. post Cold War history. We’ve been doing a multipart series with Peter Kuznick on The Real News, coauthor of this series with Oliver Stone.
Oliver Stone, as most of you know, is one of the more celebrated filmmakers in Hollywood. Oliver is a three-time Academy Award winning director and screenwriter, a Vietnam War veteran. He’s made around two dozen acclaimed films, including Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, W., and Wall Street and Wall Street 2.
Now Oliver Stone, as I said, with Peter Kuznick has produced this ten-part series for Showtime, The Untold History of the United States. And Oliver joins us now in the studio.
Thanks for joining us.
OLIVER STONE, FILMMAKER: Thank you, Paul.
JAY: So, first of all, congratulations. You guys took on some of the taboo subjects of American history. We don’t have to repeat it, ’cause I discussed it with Peter. I’m still kind of amazed it got on Showtime.
But let’s start at the end of the series. And the last segment is about sort of the endings of the Bush government and the beginnings of the Obama. And President Obama, when he was candidate Obama in 2008, someone asked him about the roots of his foreign-policy thinking, and he said they begin with Truman and end with Reagan. And it seems to me that’s actually the thesis of your film. The whole arc of the series is that President Obama is a continuum of that American foreign policy. So talk a bit about what those roots are and why you think President Obama is that kind of continuum.
STONE: Very much so. Do you know the word teleological, what it means?
JAY: I don’t, no.
STONE: It came to me when you were speaking about this, and I thought, the only way you can look at this is from the back to the front. You have to go to the end of the story to figure out the beginning. And that’s always what I thought it meant. It was a space term.
JAY: Which I’ve always thought is the way they should teach history. Like, start with what’s happening today and go backwards.
STONE: [crosstalk] now and then go back, yeah. That’s—we’re living through now, this is what we know, but we don’t see past what I call the tyranny of now. We’re buried in details every day, and the events and so forth, and we’re carried on this sail, on this wind.
And that’s the beauty of being able to stop and do something like this with Peter. This huge project starts in the 1940s. Actually, it starts in 1900, and we have two chapters coming out, the prologue. The chapters A and B will be released on DVD in September/October from Warner Brothers in a set, a 12-hour set.
But your question is haunting.
JAY: And this goes back to McKinley, doesn’t it?
STONE: Yeah, it goes back to McKinley and Bryan in the election of 1900, and then it works its way up to the wars.
The First World War is huge. It’s the mother of all wars. It’s the mother of World War II.
But, you know, I asked precisely the same question. When I decided to do this in 2008, I said, I’m 62 years old at that point, and I said, you know, I’m getting to the end of my little passage. I want to know: what was it all about, Oliver? You know, what was the meaning of this thing? ‘Cause it started for me with the atomic bomb. It was ’46, and the week I was born was the week that Wallace, Henry Wallace got fired. It’s kind of an irony, the whole thing at Madison Square Garden.
I was born in New York, but my parents were very much of that optimistic generation of World War II. My father was an officer. And the world was so big and bright, and New York was the center of that world, and I was at it. And I ironically ended up in Vietnam. And my life, as you know somewhat of it—movies, because I suppose I wanted to escape further into illusion.
But all my generation, my cohorts at Yale University, the Hill School, did go on to become the power brokers of my time. Bill Clinton. George Bush was in my class at Yale of ’68. And he was typical of a generation that was entitled and privileged and assumed that America was at the center of the world and we had the right to do what we wanted.
JAY: A generation and a class.
STONE: Yeah, and that right was given to us by the bomb. And no one knows that today, you see. That’s what haunts me. I mean, we know it, but we don’t acknowledge it. And what bothers me, ’cause I guess I was a dramatist, part of what I do is I go into the subconscious of the generation and subconscious of the race and I try to bring out those things that are more primal that are not talked about at cocktail parties.
But I felt in my heart that everything in America changed with the atomic bomb. They gave us the right to do what we wanted to do. And because it was powerful and we had the might on our side, we had the right. We equated might with right, force with the ability to do good. And we carried that forward to this place where we invented our own morality as we went along. We never apologized, we never thought about apologizing for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. We never thought it was necessary, because we thought it was necessary to end the war.
And the whole story of the saga of my life begins with the climax to World War II is we won the war with the atomic bomb. Japan was defeated. That’s a huge myth, and I think we go into it in elaborate detail. It’s a foundation myth of our society. And I’m trying to address your Obama question, because I was going back to the roots to find out the end.
JAY: Yeah, because this also happens from the Democratic Party.
STONE: Say again?
JAY: It’s the Democratic Party in power that builds the bomb and drops the bomb.
STONE: Yes. Yeah. The Democratic Party, with few exceptions, has basically done a duet with the Republican Party. And the Republican Party, which, by the way, in 1946 is a key year. It’s the first postwar election. The congressional elections of ’46 bring the Republicans steaming back into Washington. There’s an angry edge to this thing against Roosevelt.
And Roosevelt felt it. I think that’s the reason he probably dumped Wallace, or turned on him, ’cause I think he felt the edge of conservatism coming back in ’44, even. All the party bosses and the Democrats were working to get rid of Wallace and replace him with this hack, Harry Truman.
But the Republicans were—the country was scared after the war, too. It was scared about going back into a depression. It was scared about the so-called nuclear—the atomic threats that we had. We’d dropped the bomb on Japan. But we felt—as Edward R. Murrow said, we’d felt a dread about it. There was a dread in the air, but we couldn’t quite place it. The Russians didn’t have the bomb for three more years. But still we were scared, and the Republicans took advantage of that in the elections. So Truman was in a sense also reacting to fear.
Fear has always been predominant in my life—the fear of the bomb, the fear of growing up, the fear of being attacked by the Russians. There was—my father used to speak of the worldwide Russian conspiracy to take over the world. That was bible for me, as was God. I mean, he believed it, and they were the enemy. China was also allied with them, and the Korean War enhanced those fears. And by the time I went to Vietnam, you know, I was a spooked individual, as were many Americans.
But when you go to now, to today, to Mr. Obama, it’s sad because we don’t learn. And that’s why we wrote this book and made this series. We were hoping that people would say, no, this history is a myth that’s been handed to us; this is the real history, and this is what America did in these years. And if we were able to face that truthfully and honestly, like most people who were defeated in war face their truths—the Germans, citizens, faced their German truths; the Japanese citizens faced the Japanese truths. We need—frankly, we needed a huge defeat to learn from. We’ve never met a defeat.
JAY: And as you show the series and you talk to people who voted for President Obama, and in Hollywood many of whom are still very enthusiastic about President Obama, and that whole mindset, this facing the truth of this history, it seems they can’t...
JAY: When you’ve talked to people in Hollywood who are still enthusiastic about President Obama, who somehow rationalize these drone attacks, who can rationalize this NDAA legislation, which is—you know, allows the military to indefinitely intern people, they find ways to rationalize that they are still the good guys, we are still for democracy, we’re the civilizers, we’re the moral ones.
STONE: Everything is backwards. Everything. It’s upside down. And teleologically it’s upside down. It’s like you’re looking through a telescope. But you’re not seeing yourself. It’s like we flip the image, as we do in film. You know, you should put it upside down, take the history, shake it, and put it upside down, to see everything. Take a history student, make him go through the whole thing, have a real debate about this, and take every one of these events from the atomic bomb on—and you have to start with the atomic bomb—in fact, you could start with the whole concept of World War II and who won World War II and what the U.S. role was in World War II.
And if you can have that debate with a student, at least we can be more humble and we can understand that we’re not all bad, but we’re not all good, and we’re not certainly blessed by divinity, and God is not on our side.
JAY: Well, you were saying you grew up believing a lot of this mythology. So when does the coin drop for you?
STONE: Yes, I did. That’s why I think I’m able to—. At the age of 40, when the coin dropped—. People think I went to Vietnam and got radicalized. That’s not the case. I did a movie about a man who did, Ron Kovic, who is a wonderful individual. He came back in a wheelchair and was angry, and I understand why. I was a little dumber, or number, call it, number. I think I was in the middle. It took me several years after returning to—. I was certainly on the fence. I didn’t feel good about Vietnam. But talking to people, educating myself—and I’m coming from a deeply conservative background now, you understand—Republican, Eisenhower, Castro’s the Devil, Kennedy was the Devil, Roosevelt is the arch Satan of all time.
JAY: This was your belief system.
STONE: That was my background. Around 1970s, with the Watergate hearing and the Church Committee, I started to have huge fights with my dad about all this stuff. He always called Vietnam a police action. He hurt my feelings, because I’d been in a lot of combat, and he hurt me when he said, you know, come on, this was nothing like World War II, it was just a police action, like he was trying to shuffle a mistake under the rug, as Korea was shuffled under the rug.
But not to me. It was not a police action. It was a huge—and we know now from the casualties and the amount of Vietnamese killed that it was a massive, massive war, a dirty, dirty war.
And then—but only about 1980s—I’m that slow. You have to bear with me. I mean, I’m on the fence. I believe all the Church thing. I’m horrified by the CIA, the coups.
Around 1980, Reagan gets elected. I’m still supporting Reagan, believe it or not, because Carter, my perception—I believe the media, I believe that he had made a mess, and I thought that Reagan could straighten it out. So I go down to 1984, to Central America with Richard Boyle to make Salvador, and all of a sudden I have this kind of strange flashbacks, ’cause I’m seeing American soldiers in the streets of Honduras in Tegucigalpa, men and women now in uniform, young, looked like me in Vietnam, and they’re telling me the same story about they’re here, you know, to—because the communists are next-door in Nicaragua and they’re going to come on—basically, Reagan is saying they’re going to cross the border, they’re going to—the Russians are supplying them, the Cubans are supplying them. And I know by now this is all horseshit. I go to Salvador, I go to Honduras, I go to Guatemala, which is a nightmare of death squads, and Reagan is—seems to me—all of a sudden I see him in a different light. I come back. I do Salvador movie, which I don’t know if you’ve seen, but it’s certainly—
JAY: Yeah.
STONE: —a progressive view of Salvador.
JAY: Very. I was about to say one wouldn’t have thought that filmmaker had come from those Cold War ideas.
STONE: Well, it was coming from the abuse of the peasantry, of the impoverished classes. It was in Vietnam, and Central America was the same thing to me. And I felt for those people, made that movie.
And from then on, at the age of 40—I mean, it’s late in my life. I started to really reexamine this thing, and slowly, because every one of those films—JFK, Nixon, the Vietnam movies—took me to another place of research. And I got front line research in Washington—Nixon, all that stuff, JFK.
I was shocked on the JFK situation, ’cause we were trying to deal honestly with transparency in transparent government. I was shocked that the conservative movement in this country so attacked that movie, ’cause it seemed to me the conservatives would be lining up with us. Goldwater would have said, let’s have transparency, let’s find out what happened. There was no desire to find out. And so the media all of a sudden became more of my enemy than ever, because they were attacking me on a broad front with JFK for having falsified history.
So I kept going in this direction. And by 2008, when I made W., which was my attempt to do the George Bush presidency on this vein of humor because it was so outrageous—satire, so to speak—that was what we were seeing.
I had decided I have to go beyond that now and, for my children, do something bigger, more definitive, and try to deal with the whole thing I have seen from 1940s to now. And Peter Kuznick’s story of Henry Wallace being kicked off the ticket in ’44 ties in very ironically to the atomic bomb. So if you want to talk about the atomic bomb, we thought that would be the entry point—go back to Wallace, takes us to the bomb story, takes us to the Truman candidacy. And that takes us into the Cold War.
JAY: Alright. Well, thanks very much.
STONE: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
-"Oliver Stone’s Journey from Cold Warrior to America’s Untold History," The Real News Network, April 8, 2013
OVER A DECADE AFTER THE DISASTROUS END of a heedless military misadventure abroad, one director released a film that he hoped captured in exacting detail the essence of American cruelty and hubris. Informed by real-life combat experience, he had labored to create the most authentic depiction to date of the soldier’s experience in a bloody war that Congress never officially declared. Before filming began, the young cast was made to undertake an extensive military-style training regimen; the movie was then shot, unusually, in near chronological order. The film I’m speaking of is, of course, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, but you’d be forgiven if you thought this was about Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare, the latest film to take as its subject the United States’ war in Iraq.
Platoon opens in late 1967 and follows a unit of American infantrymen along the Cambodian border. Loosely based on Stone’s experience, the young Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is torn between competing visions embodied by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), a harsh cynic, and Sergeant Elias (William Defoe), a Christ-like figure who works to maintain moral clarity amid the violence. Stone said the aim of the film was to “make a document of a time and place,” to show “what it was like to be there” on the front lines of the war. The film, which would go on to win four Oscars, including for Best Picture, struck a nerve. “It is a rare film in that it tries to re-create the grim chaos of combat. And it is likely the first film about Vietnam to give a sense of the persistent fear, discomfort and hard labor of fighting there,” wrote Michael Norman in his review for the New York Times. Officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that there was around a 25 percent uptick in demand for PTSD treatments in the months following the film’s release, with many veterans saying it had been a trigger. Psychologists, however, said the movie was helping ex-G.I.’s process memories and speed the healing process. The American public, it seems, was ready for an ugly story of American cruelty and stupidity in Vietnam.
-Charles McFarlane, "War Stories," The Baffler, May 9, 2025
