Oliver Stone said Friday he was shocked to hear that the stars of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer had walked out of its London premiere the day before as SAG-AFTRA officially declared strike action.
“I know several producers are opening movies, like Oppenheimer. Chuck Roven, he was in London. I heard it was going to be cancelled,” said Stone, when asked for his view on the strike.
“I don’t know if it went ahead but all the actors left. That was shocking that they really meant business and cut off right away all the promotion, which is big.”
Commenting on the ongoing 11-week WGA strike, Stone suggested the roots of the current industrial action lie in the deal brokered to end the five-month writers strike in 1988.
“There was a basic miscarriage of justice way back when, when Brian Walton was the head of the WGA, when we gave in. I wasn’t on the front line, but I supported that strike,” said Stone.
“We gave in to the producers. They got away with murder on one of these deals where all that DVD money was deferred. They claimed they were in the hole, in the red, and that they had to get their money back from DVD.
“I forgot what the percentage was, but they took something like the first 75% off the top. The DVD business was huge, especially for my films. So, the gross was never divided fairly.”
Stone said this trend had continued with residuals and profits.
“Not so much residuals, as profits really. Residuals are important for some of the writers who don’t make as much money. But people who do make money, they don’t touch the profits from the film, the studio does,” he said.
“The studio is always telling you that they’re losing money, but they always find a way to make a new level of profit for 10, 15 years. … It’s that perpetual industrial problem with a capitalist group that pays its executives more and more money and screws the average writer.”
Looking back over past industrial action, Stone recalled how the 2007 writers strike initially led to the postponement of his 1968 My Lai massacre drama Pinkville, and then resulted in it being cancelled for good.
“We had three weeks to go and it got cancelled. We got hurt,” he said.
Stone said he doubted there would be a quick or easy resolution to the current writer and actor disputes.
“I don’t think it will be wrapped up quickly. Because well, I don’t understand the economics of Netflix and these new guys, but it’s the same old bullshit. You know they’re making money and they always say they’re losing money. It’s the classic conflict that goes back to the 1880s in America.”
Stone was talking to Deadline at the Jerusalem Film Festival, where he showed his 2022 documentary Nuclear Now, arguing the case for nuclear power as the only viable way to tackle climate change.
Based on the book A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, the work premiered at Venice last year.
The work is a passion project for Stone, who says he was inspired to make the film by his fear of climate change.
“I’m not a science expert and I have no kinship with nuclear power. On the contrary, you could say I was a mild believer in the Jane Fonda-Ralph Nader concept of the 1980s that nuclear power was dangerous,” said the director, who also took co-writing credits with U.S. scientist Joshua Goldstein.
“But it’s clear to me from my travels all over the world, that it’s getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. We were in Italy, two, three days ago, and they said it was hottest day on record or something.”
Stone was also honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Jerusalem Film Festival at the opening ceremony Thursday evening alongside Helen Mirren and Belgian directorial duo Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
The director last spent extensive time in the country in 2002 at the height of Second Intifada to make his documentary Persona Non Grata, in which he interviewed Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon as well as the Palestinian Al Aqsa Brigade on the Middle East conflict.
Two decades on, he suggested the situation is unchanged.
“It’s a repetitive cycle. I’ve been here several times. I planted an olive tree for peace here in the ’90s with my then-partner Arnon Milchan and came back in 2002 for Persona Non Grata. … I don’t see a difference. It’s just worse. Like it’s getting hotter. It’s just getting more and more choked.”
-Melanie Goodfellow, "Oliver Stone Shocked By ‘Oppenheimer’ SAG-AFTRA Strike Cast Walkout; Says Roots Of Writers Strike Lie In 1988 Deal," Deadline, Jul 14 2023
Oliver Stone is rolling deep. The veteran film-maker shows up for an interview with the Guardian with a support team of two: Joshua S Goldstein, a professor who will serve as a real-time factchecker-cum-footnote-provider, as well as a therapist, a twinkly eyed woman who happens to be Goldstein’s wife. “People can get very emotional when they’re reacting to the topic of their film,” she explains of her role. “I’m here in case anyone needs my help.”
Her de-escalation services will not end up being required, but it is admittedly comforting to have an emotional support professional on hand for an interview with the legendary firebrand that is Oliver Stone. As it turns out, the director isn’t looking for a sparring match or a conspiracy theory soapbox. Dressed in a beautifully tailored dark blazer, red pocket square and crisp white shirt, the Natural Born Killers and Wall Street director, who has been giving promotional interviews since dawn, is a gracious if not entirely relaxed interview subject, scribbling mysterious notes onto the margins of a printout while he fields questions.
Nuclear Now, based on a book that Goldstein co-wrote, makes an impassioned case for nuclear energy. Forget wind and solar power being enough, the film tells us. Nuclear is the answer to a world on the verge of losing the race against the climate crisis. Stone reckons it’s his 30th film and 10th documentary, but he thinks of them all as interconnected parts; his life’s work is making movies about the “undiscovered lies that people wouldn’t admit”. Since serving in Vietnam, and briefly driving a taxi, he has been devoted to making movies that prod at our prevailing narratives, be it that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F Kennedy or that nuclear is a dirty word.
Stone brings up his 12-hour docuseries The Untold History of the United States. “Chapters [of the docuseries] attacked American history they keep teaching at school and I wish they were teaching my version of it, because I think it’s a lot more accurate than the bullshit you’re getting,” he says gruffly. Nuclear Now stands apart from anything else Stone has made because it’s his first work “about an object, not a person”. And therein lay the challenge. “There’s no sexy chick in the movie,” he says with a note of chagrin. “It’s not like highly original film-making. It’s about assembly, editing, writing.”
A deep conviction that set in after reading the book that Goldstein co-wrote with Staffan A Qvist, a Swedish nuclear engineer, impelled Stone to bring the message to the masses. He started by asking Goldstein to write a fictional treatment of the subject matter. Goldstein’s face lights up at the memory and he goes into Hollywood pitch mode – something to do with a female nuclear dynamo, the American president, a villainous Texan senator, an activist daughter. It was all over the place – from the US to Korea and Russia, ending with a chase scene in Saudi Arabia. Stone called the climax “a made for TV bullshit ending”, Goldstein recalls. “It wasn’t good,” Stone grumbles. They worked on several drafts of a documentary script, a series of versions zig-zagging between their sensibilities until they landed on one that they agreed was suitably informative and entertaining (you can guess who was yanking it in either direction). Stone appears on screen, the reliably blazer-clad student who travels the world to meet with scientists and engineers and a nuclear power influencer who is the project’s closest thing to a Julia Roberts.
“We’re getting it all wrong, and in the face of climate change, nuclear isn’t only an option – it’s the only option,” intones Stone, who says he considers Marie Curie, the Polish physicist known for her work on radioactivity, worthy of sainthood. “The truth is, we had solutions, and we fucked it up.” It all went wrong in the mid-20th century, when nuclear power and nuclear war were conflated and Hollywood started churning out sci-fi movies with phosphorescent freaks and nuclear bomb-wielding villains. By the early 1970s, environmentalists were warning of the hazards of nuclear anything, and sounding alarms about nuclear waste that had the American public in a tailspin.
“There’s not an issue [with nuclear waste], it’s completely handleable, especially compared to the waste of gas, oil and coal, my God,” Stone says. “It gets safer over time because of radioactive decay,” his right-hand man chimes in. “Which you can’t say about the arsenic, lead mercury that are in solar panels or any number of other things.” The film points out that there have been far fewer casualties related to nuclear disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima than the fatal levels of air pollution produced around the world by coal and other fossil fuels.
Stone still leaves the science to Goldstein, but becomes animated when talk turns to fear-mongering. “Politicians could get votes by making people afraid. And then it’s hard to reverse yourself after many years and say: ‘Well, actually, we’ve changed our mind now. And we see that climate change is the bigger threat and that actually what we told you about this is sort of overhyped.’” Of course he read all the scholarly articles making the case against nuclear. “When you read them, it’s so concentrated. It’s like taking a dose of acid,” the director says. Thankfully Goldstein was on speed-dial, at the ready to review the science and put Stone’s doubts to rest. Goldstein points across the office at a red Exit sign and brings up that it contains small traces of tritium, the same compound in the tanks at the Fukushima power plant. “They have a short half life and they don’t accumulate in your body,” he says. “It’s like the most innocuous thing.”
Stone lives in Los Angeles and has three Oscars, but does not consider himself part of the Hollywood firmament. His feeling of alienation appears to have intensified with this project. “The movie business has not been kind to nuclear at all from Silkwood, The China Syndrome, and all the horror movies of the 50s,” he says, going on to weigh in on the way mainstream cinema has veered off course. “I like the glamour of the old movies. You know, I want to see Elizabeth Taylor and I want to see Brigitte Bardot. Marilyn Monroe. I want to see stars!” Such movie-making has become harder to pull off in a culture that is heavy on the show-all social media and light on the mystique. “I respect reality, but I don’t want to see it necessarily. I like to see heightened reality.”
Stone’s media diet is as idiosyncratic as you might expect. He follows Rumble, the Peter Thiel-backed right-leaning video platform; RT, the Russian state-owned news service; and Al Jazeera. He cops to reading the Guardian every once in a while, “although I don’t like their rightward tilt of recently”. A copy of the New York Times is sticking out of his bag, on a day when the paper published a glowing review of Stone’s new film. He reads the paper with “skepticism”, he says. “I’m reading to see what they think.” And what does he think? “I would say extreme middle,” is how he identifies his position on the American political spectrum. It’s a rather catchy but meaningless term, no? “The truth matters to me and we’re digging for the truth,” he says elliptically. “I think I happened upon a very important subject, which is climate change. And I’m grateful for that. It could be my last film, you know, because I’m at that age where I can keel over tomorrow.” (Stone’s forthcoming documentary about Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is “almost ready”.)
At 76, Stone is four years younger than Joe Biden, who many say is too old to run for a second term. Stone doesn’t want to weigh in on the president’s age and his fitness for re-election. But he will share what he thinks of the guy. “My favorite president was John Kennedy, so if you look at the two Irishmen sideways, you’ll find that John Kennedy is a peace lover. And you find that Joe Biden is a cold warrior in the worst sense of the word.”
The last time the Guardian US profiled Stone, he had just completed a strangely sympathetic 4 hour-long documentary about Vladimir Putin (at the time he said “the Russian people have never been better off”). Have his feelings about the Russian leader changed in the especially troubling years since? “I think Russia is doing a great job with nuclear energy,” he says after a moment’s thought. “China is also a leader in that field, although I never was able to penetrate into China, which was a shame for the movie I wish we had. But Putin is a great leader for his country and the people love him.” And that is as far as he is willing to go. He’s gone far enough already.
Oliver Stone is an American film and documentary director, producer and screenwriter. His work includes Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, JFK and Any Given Sunday. I spoke with him on Thursday.
Fitz: Mr Stone, I’m not going to waste too much of your time by burbling compliments. Let me just record my deepest admiration for almost your entire body of work.
OS: Thank you, Peter.
Fitz: In your long and storied career, have you had much to do with Australia or Australians?
OS: I’ve been there, I don’t know, a dozen times, often to open my films. Before that, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, I would go to Sydney on R&Rs, which were quite exciting.
Fitz: In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?
OS: [Pause.] Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, “Hello, I’m your daughter.” That turned into some few days, naturally, trying to get to know this sincere young woman who’d lost touch with her mother. Eventually, we sorted it out with a DNA test, and she was not my daughter.
Fitz: Moving on! Having watched all 12 episodes of your documentary Untold American History, I was absorbed by your theme that what we think is actually happening in the world isn’t what’s really happening – a theme that runs through all your work. Is it fair to say that it was specifically your experience in the Vietnam War that made you see the world entirely differently?
OS: The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not. So my military experience pretty much started to repeat itself. I would get into a subject matter, such as a JFK film, and the deeper I went, the more it became apparent that there was a lot of lying going on. So yeah, I had a deep suspicion, a deep distrust of the official narrative. We all should know by now that governments often lie to cover their arse.
Fitz: I loved your film on JFK and your documentary on his assassination asserting it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who shot him. But given your experience with Australia, I’m hoping you won’t mind if I put this next question in Australian vernacular?
OS: Go on.
Fitz: So who the f--- did kill JFK?
OS: [Pause.] I don’t know, but you can start with the CIA and its great interest in Kennedy in the Cuban operations, and how Kennedy – by not going through with the desire of the warrior class to attack Cuba in 1962, after the Bay of Pigs debacle – really made serious enemies. There were people who really thought he was a traitor. We kept hearing the word “traitor” used by certain of these people, some of whom worked with the CIA; in fact, there are several suspects inside that agency who we’d like to know more about.
We can start at the top with Allen Dulles, the CIA director who was fired by Kennedy. And there are other suspects from the CIA, but it’s certainly not the whole organisation. No, it’s always about some key men who operated on their own terms because they had been given so much leeway by president Eisenhower over the previous eight years. They had operated “off the shelf” – that was part of their charter. In 1947, under the National Security Act, they were given that vague right to do so on a covert basis as the president saw fit. That part of their charter was a huge mistake. Hundreds of covert operations have followed.
Fitz: Through your whole career, you’ve taken turns that nobody saw coming, with one of your most recent being your advocacy of nuclear power in your documentary Nuclear Now. I would have positioned you as a strong liberal, but the position you take in this documentary is we need to go back to nuclear which, at least here in Australia, aligns with some notably shrill conservative voices.
OS: Nuclear energy was one of the great discoveries of the last century, actually the late 19th century, and it was developed. Of course, it was given a stimulus by WWII and the chase for the atomic bomb, but people have not understood and they haven’t distinguished between a bomb and the uses of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. To make nuclear energy, you only need approximately 2 per cent enriched uranium, as opposed to approximately 95 per cent enriched for a bomb; there’s a huge difference in making and producing that kind of energy. So nuclear energy is very usable, it’s been proven safe for many usages over the years, and we should be employing more and more of it in the mix with hydro and renewable energy to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
Fitz: We both hope you live for another 30 years and can keep working for 27 of them. But is it fair to say you’d rather live, surely, next to a wind farm than even a small nuclear facility in your backyard?
OS: I’d have no fear. Because there’s going to be a lot of new small SMRs – small modular reactors – built for many purposes, and with updated safety measures. It’s the next step, especially for the Americans who are developing that form of it. The Russians and Chinese are way ahead of us in nuclear development. They’ve been doing it consistently, whereas we stopped building in the 1970s after the Three Mile Island supposed disaster. No one died, and no serious radiation was released. This was a shame because it was so misunderstood and hyped as a disaster. America can’t build a nuclear reactor any more on that scale as we did from the 1950s to the ’70s. We gave up, but now we’ve started building again to some degree with scientists and researchers, with more than 50 different companies pursuing original research, including small divisions at Westinghouse and General Electric. But these are smaller reactors. Meanwhile, the world, especially the less developed regions, are going to need a lot of nuclear energy, a lot. We’re going to need not just a little, we need a lot.
Fitz: Another surprising turn that you took, at least for me, were your interviews with Vladimir Putin, in The Putin Interviews. I take your point that he’s not just a cartoon character dictator, but a man of flesh and blood beset by forces that are around him, navigating the best he can. Nevertheless, are you shocked, as I’m shocked, by the brutality in the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin at the base of it?
OS: I’m sorry, there has been a great deal of awful new propaganda about Russia ever since the turn of this century. It’s coming from a neoconservative Washington, which is seeking to destroy the so-called Russian Empire and use it as a rich base of natural resources to be exploited by the West. We’ve made Putin into the major villain of our time because he’s invaded Ukraine, whereas the United States – with NATO – illegally invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria with impunity. This is a war that’s been very misunderstood, especially the stakes. If you remember correctly, the United States staged a coup in Ukraine in 2014, which exiled the elected president and brought in a vehement and strongly anti-Russian government. They have a long history in Eastern Europe of fighting Russia. Donbas, which is the eastern, Russian-minority part of Ukraine, never joined this new government, nor did Crimea, and they were identified as “terrorists” by the government. The Russians, however, saw them as “separatists” who wanted no part of this unelected government.
While pretending to follow a peace process in Minsk I and Minsk II, the US and European Union betrayed Russia, significantly building up the Ukrainian army from 2016 on. One hundred thousand of these troops were poised to retake Donbas in February 2022. At the same time, the Ukrainian government was making quite a bit of noise about getting nuclear weapons into Ukraine. This was a huge issue for the Russians because, as you may remember, Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush negotiated in the 1980s and ’90s for a new, peaceful Europe. East Germany was reunited with West Germany on the basis that NATO would not move beyond Germany one inch to the east. That vow was broken repeatedly by the United States. NATO, with our blessing, added 13 countries to its treaty, and grew into a monster on the borders of Russia in a major movement to supposedly “contain” Russia.
There’s no point going into the history of this enormous violation to Russian national security, but it would be similar to Mexico or Canada suddenly declaring they have put a hostile army on the Mexican or Canadian border of the United States, and were, with nuclear weapons, minutes from all our major industrial centres. Nor should it be forgotten that it was the United States who reignited the Cold War in 2002 when Bush abruptly abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. So, between using NATO to expand and breaking several other nuclear agreements, the United States and NATO began the process of encircling Russia, which became increasingly suspicious of the motives of the West.
To put it in another way, if Putin had not reacted to the build-up on his borders by invading Donbas and annexing Crimea (which occurred, interestingly, without violence, because most of the population was pro-Russian), he would have lost the trust of the Russian people, who were not blind to what was going on. That’s when Putin, after giving us several warnings about the West crossing Russian red lines, reacted and sent some 120,000 Russian troops into Donbas, which had already become a bloody war by 2022 with some 7000 to 8000 “separatists” murdered by the illegal Kyiv gangster government. It was certainly not in Putin’s interest to destroy the Donbas. To the contrary, he wants to have it back in the Russian sphere of interest and keep it productive, which it once was. So one wonders where all this alleged brutality propaganda is coming from? Motive is necessary, and perhaps when this war is over, there’ll be a more rational reporting of the news.
Fitz: We can talk about this one for three hours, and I’d love to, but I’m aware of your time restrictions. Do you just despair for the current state of the movie industry with the endless Marvel franchise stuff?
OS: I don’t despair because there’s always good movies made, and there are ways to make them. I despair at the lack of depth of the theatrical movie in the United States, because the distribution system rewards essentially only blockbusters and crucifies the less lucrative releases. As a result, it’s very hard for independent and less popular productions to get made and distributed, which is a great loss to the art of cinema. It’s not just a circus business.
Fitz: Of all your movies, the scene that I most loved is in Any Given Sunday, with Al Pacino’s as the ageing Coach D’Amato talking to his team before the big NFL match: “We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time. Now I can’t do it for you. I’m too old … but the inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch!” It’s a classic. When you shot it, and Al Pacino delivered it, did you recognise it at the time as that, or only when you saw it at the cinema?
OS: We never know what’s going to hit or not, or connect with an audience. You never know. Yes, that happened to be taken up, and it’s been used by numerous coaches across the country, and possibly on some Australian rugby teams, as a model for rah-rah speeches.
But, nonetheless, that movie called for it, not only because the team was losing, but also because the actor, Al Pacino, was in a mental hole too. He was having problems with ageing. If you remember, the movie is based on his being edged out of his NFL club, which goes on all the time. People get too old. So there was a lot of personal identification with it. At that point, I had been in the movie business a long time. And there were new executives coming in and a lot of them were women. And so that Cameron Diaz character, the team owner, was based in large part on a couple of the cut-throat executives I met in the film business who were young women in their 20s and 30s.
That’s not to say there weren’t cut-throat young men also emerging from colleges and entering the film business without much love or understanding of cinema.
Fitz: But did you have any experience in a dressing room with a coach saying stuff like that in your background? Or anything where a coach had spoken like that?
OS: I played tackle football in elementary school, but the speech was created for the film.
Fitz: You wrote that?
OS: Yeah. Because I believe football most embodies warfare – you win or you lose. It’s tough, gritty, people get hurt, and key decisions have to be made. And you have to recognise that, often, the outcome is a matter of inches.
Fitz: Allow me to say, as somebody who was sort of raised in dressing rooms like that, across several countries, it is extraordinary to me how well you captured it. We’ve all heard the theme of that speech a hundred times, except our coaches were never quite so eloquent as that. I mean, that was extraordinary!
OS: Thank you, that’s what movies are made for, I believe. Movies are bigger than life. And those are the kinds of movies that I especially like. Unfortunately, so many movies now are smaller than life. Times change. I miss the old movies, the spectacular shows.
Fitz: Last question, if I may. Most of us in Australia don’t understand Trump. We sort of understand how he might have been elected once, but after everything that happened, finishing with January 6, we cannot understand how Americans could look at him and go, “Yeah, let’s have four more years of that.”
OS: And if you look at the Biden administration, you can say the same thing. It has gotten America into three wars, if you really think about it: (1) Ukraine, which is really a proxy war to weaken or destroy Russia, which is the most extreme strategy any American president has ever attempted; (2) the Middle East war continued in Israel, with America’s full support of Israel; and (3) now we’re bombing Yemen ourselves.
Biden is a simple-minded, old-fashioned Cold Warrior of the first degree. As mad as [WWII US Air Force] General Curtis LeMay was in his way. He’s extremely dangerous. Trump might not be a solution to this madness, but he’s nothing compared to Biden or to the damage that George W. Bush did to my country by declaring the “War on Terror”, which was wholly unnecessary. He provoked this new world that we’re living in of extreme violence and militarism.
From Bush, it grows to where we are now in a most dangerous position. Obama, then Trump, now Biden, have provoked China as well by declaring a “pivot to Asia” and sending American marines and so forth to Australia, building up the Pacific Fleet … The US is brokering a major war in the Pacific. This is a very incendiary position. I hardly see what’s so wonderful about Biden.
Fitz: He is not Trump, is the first thing that’s wonderful about Biden!
OS: That’s your way of putting it, but I don’t think you fully understand that Biden has truly split the world into two scared camps and abides by the outdated imperial notion that the US can still dominate the world. It cannot. It must accept a multipolar world that can exist economically without war.
Fitz: OK, thanks. It has been one of the privileges of my professional life to speak to you and I seriously thank you.
-Peter FitzSimons, "Trump, Putin and a Sydney ‘love-child’ … I’d chat to Oliver Stone on any given Sunday," The Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 11 2024
“Making a documentary means much less work, much less money, much less stress”
Oliver Stone (b. 1946) is a legendary American film director, producer, screenwriter and author. He’s known and praised for his ‘dramas about individuals in personal struggles,’ as he describes his films on his website, and considers himself a ‘dramatist rather than a political filmmaker.’
During the past fifty years—give or take a few years—the outspoken, rabble-rousing, highly acclaimed and three-time Academy Award winning film director tackled various subjects. He directed a trilogy on the Vietnam War (“Platoon,” 1986; “Born on the Fourth of July,” 1989; “Heaven & Earth,” 1993) and did three films about U.S. Presidents (“JFK,” 1991; “Nixon,” 1995; “W.,” 2008—on George W. Bush while he was still in office). He also made crime dramas and, in recent years, a series of solid and, to some, controversial documentary features. For the first one, on Fidel Castro, entitled “Comandante” (2003), he went to Cuba.
His latest documentairy features include “The Putin Interviews” (2017), a four-part, four-hour television series with interviews conducted with Putin between 2015-2017, “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” (2021) with newly declassified information about JFK’s assassination, and his latest documentary, “Nuclear Now” (2022), stating that nuclear energy is the best solution to combat the climate change crisis.
Mr. Stone, a Vietnam War veteran who distinguished himself in combat and earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, first broke into Hollywood as a screenwriter with his Oscar-winning screenplay for Alan Parker’s prison drama “Midnight Express” (1978), based on the 1977 memoir of Billy Hayes. The film established him as a dynamic stylist and tough-minded writer who pulled no punches. A few years later, he brought the same intensity to his screenplay for Brian De Palma’s remake of “Scarface” (1983) and his career-changing directorial debut films “Salvador” and “Platoon” (both 1986)—the latter earning him an Academy Award for Best Director. Although working mostly independently, “Wall Street” (1987), which earned Michael Douglas an Academy Award as Best Actor, became his first and one of his few big-budget films.
Throughout his career, Mr. Stone remained one of the most accomplished raconteurs and politically-charged directors of his generation. He made several exceptional and compelling films that cemented his place as one of Hollywood’s most versatile film directors.
He also authored a semi-autobiographical novel “A Child Night’s Dream” (1997), his captivating memoir “Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving ‘Platoon,’ ‘Midnight Express,’ ‘Scarface,’ ‘Salvador,’ and the Movie Game” (2020), and “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” (2022, based on the documentary; written by James DiEugenio, with an introduction by Mr. Stone).
The following one-on-one interview with Mr. Stone was conducted in Brussels. As the guest of honor during the Millenium Documentary Film Festival Brussels—which runs from March 15 until March 22—to present his documentaries “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” (2021) and “Nuclear Now” (2022), and a masterclass as well, I got to sit down with him in a Brussels hotel for a conversation on his craft that he knows inside out. With his approval, this interview didn’t focus on his two documentaries, but rather dealt with general topics and his work as a filmmaker.
Mr. Stone, after your last feature film, “Snowden” [2016], you changed your modus operandi and became a documentary filmmaker. Why did you do that?
Documentaries are different. When you make documentaries, they’re not consuming your life. You don’t have to build the sets, you don’t have to hire actors or paint walls. You don’t have to think about a hundred different things. That also means you’re no longer ceating an artificial world. A documentary is something real, you have witnesses, people who went through it or who were around when it happened. So the preparation for a documentary is very different; it’s a living environment parallel to you and you’re joining it. My documentaries are a lot about political ideas and about the country, so it’s something entirely different. Making a documentary means much less work, much less money and much less stress. It’s simpler to be a documentarian.
Several of your films are based on true events, and “JFK” [1991] and “Snowden” are documentary-like features. Were they maybe your most difficult films to make?
They are difficult in the sense that you have to check everything and authenticate it. Obviously, fantasy gives you a lot more freedom: if you’re doing films like “Natural Born Killers” [1994], “U Turn” [1997] or “Savages” [2012], those are fictional. They give you more freedom, and you can f*ck around. When you’re doing “JFK” [1991], you really have to pay attention. There’s so much out there, and the film is so difficult to authenticate because it’s not like a book. The dialogue is difficult because those are real people and you don’t know what they really said. So you’re taking dramatic liberties.
When you did “Snowden,” you met Edward Snowden in unusual circumstances. What was he like?
He was very straightforward; he remindend me of a very bright boy scout. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do drugs. He’s quiet, shy, polite and pleasent. He had one woman in his life at that time. He’s a serious man; I was very impressed with him and he’s not a celebrity type attention seeker. Not at all. Some people said that I made him a white knight in the movie, but they don’t know who he really is. If they knew him, they’d realize he is very sincere, very articulate, and he really believed that his oath was to the constitution—which it is—and not to the NSA or to the CIA. He was a whistleblower at twenty-nine, so I wanted to know and explore how and why he did that at such a young age.
What film or filmmaker gave you the passion to become a filmmaker?
I went to the New York Film School and the message came from Martin Scorsese who was a teacher. I had done a short film of fourteen minutes, “Last Year in Viet Nam” [1971] and he liked it. He praised it and took it to class. That didn’t happen too often; short films were mostly criticized. That was the method; it was like a Chinese commune where you showed your work to the class and everyone went bla bla bla. But this time he threw it in the class and said, ‘This is a filmmaker.’ And he said, ‘Keep it personal.’ That’s what you have to do, keep it personal. That was very good. I felt very inspired by that and then I just kept going.
So then you began making personal films, and with “Midnight Express” [1978] and “Salvador” [1986], for example—not to mention your Vietnam War trilogy—you immediately put yourself on the map with message films. That reminds me of the films Stanley Kramer or Fred Zinnemann did, for example. Is that an accurate comparison?
That’s a tough question to answer, whether they are personal or not. You don’t know how Stanley Kramer really felt. He was an emotional man with a great conscience, and you know he was passionate about nuclear war; so he did “On the Beach” [1959] with that passion. And you know he wanted to be funny when he did a comedy [“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” 1963] with a lot of car crashes. He wasn’t funny, but he did make a point. “Judgement at Nuremberg” [1961] was about justice, bringing justice to the Nazis and America did the Nuremberg trials—the one good thing they did. And even then, it was compromised, but still he made the point of the Holocaust very clear. So I think we owe him because of the many films he did. They were motivated by passion. They weren’t motivated by politics, I don’t think so. It was in his heart. Of course, my interpretation of him may be different than critics who say, ‘He was just a producer.’ But I saw an early film he did with Frank Sinatra, “Not as a Stranger” [1955], and that was a very interesting film. Sinatra was great; he played the second doctor and Robert Mitchum was the first doctor who starts a relationship with a nurse who gives him the money to finish school. He uses her and then dumps her. But she comes back and plays a very good scene…
But you asked a tough question. Zinnemann, I don’t relate to him the same way you do. I don’t. I knew him, I met him, but I don’t regard him in the same way. Kramer was special, although he made some stinkers too [laughs]. He also did a beautiful movie, “The Secret of Santa Vittoria” [196] with Anna Magnani, beautifully scripted, beautifully done. Anthony Quinn plays the major of this Italian town and nobody trusts him. He’s a layabout and Anna Magnani is his angry wife. That was a great movie and he should have gotten more credit for it, right?
Did it ever happen to you that you should have gotten more credit for a film you did?
Yeah. “Snowden” [2016]. I couldn’t finance it in the U.S. We moved the production to Germany because we thought we might be at risk in the United States. We had no idea what the NSA might or could do. So we financed it abroad, and that’s very disturbing: you make a film about an American and it’s not possible to finance it in the U.S.
Generally speaking, has it been easy for you to be an independent filmmaker and make most of your films without the financial support of the major studios?
I can’t rely on the studios, so I have always been independent. I bounce around with different independents. A lot of my films are owned by bankrupt corporations and sell-of assets. I work a lot with guys who get bankrupt [laughs]. I have been both ways and when I work with studios, the experience can be good. “Wall Street” [1987] was good, but the second Wall Street [“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” 2010] was not because that was made by [executive] Tom Rothman. He acted like a head and would tell you what to do. It’s a whole different attitude. We give studios the power, we entitle them—every filmmaker in some way has a relationship with the studios so he’s always thinking about them because he’s gotta deliver his film and they have the money. Sometimes you’re the slave of that money, and sometimes… f*ck ’em [laughs]. Some filmmakers are always fighting against the studios; it’s a tedious relationship because it’s a slave relationship. Unless you prefer independent. But then, of course, you have to go to them for distribution.
Alain Parker once told me he always wanted a production deal and at the same time a distribution deal, otherwise you have to go shopping with your film. Did you ever have to do that?
Of course. A lot. With “Nuclear Now” we were invited to Cannes where you can get a lot of publicity, but they wanted to hold the film for America in October, and by that time it was not noticed. But it’s okay; that’s the business and I get tired of promotion anyway. Besides, documentaries don’t need that. You just throw them out there and f*ck ’em. You know what I mean; you have to be a showman and you have to care. A showman cares about the results. To go through that again, watching box office, counting numbers,… all that stuff is pretty tiring.
Have you always been able to cast the actors that you wanted?
No, but I had pretty much freedom. I mean, it’s always a deal pressure kind of thing. They mention a few names and things happen. There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but somehow you have to be the master cook [laughs].
Does that mean you have to compromise?
Always. But you don’t have to say yes. I never say yes to an actor overnight. I have never done that. I have made mistakes, but I have never said yes to an actor right away.
When you write a screenplay, do you have certain actors in mind?
Yes, but that’s more elusive because by the time you go through the casting process, you have seen different interpretations and you may prefer an actor’s interpretation to your own. I had many actors reading for me—that helps—or I have them read on tape with a casting director and then I see the tape. You don’t have to be there always. Sometimes if you’re in the room, you’re the gorilla, you know.
In your films you always have a great cast of supporting actors, such as Sylvia Miles, Millie Perkins, Haing S. Ngor, Paul Sovino, E.G. Marshall, Eli Wallach, Madeline Kahn… Mel Brooks recently said that ‘Madeline Kahn was maybe the single best comedian that ever lived.’
Casting your supporting actors is always very special. Most of what you’re doing is picking supporting actors. The main actors line up on money deals; it’s a money situation with agents and lawyers. Whereas the supporting actors, that’s a different story, that’s really where the casting process kicks in.
How closely do you collaborate with your casting directors?
A lot because he or she will make suggestions and knows who is out there working or not. You don’t know and you can’t remember everything. Sometimes you have a thought in mind, like, ‘I want a Cary Grant type for this.’
You have a long and rewarding career as a filmmaker, with a string of highlights. Is there a secret, or is it always a challenge?
Well, it’s been okay. Is it a challenge? I would say yes. It’s a challenge to stay relevant, it’s a challenge to be interested in society but that naturally comes to me. My ideas may not be popular at the moment, but they are fresh—at least, to me, they are. I don’t talk like most directors, and I can’t stand most directors’ irresponsibility about political situations. Most directors want to be friends with everybody and avoid all controversy. But that’s not the way you should speak. You should speak your mind. But then you risk ostracism.
Did you ever have any problems with your actors?
Yeah sure. Some got drunk, some were uncommunicative and stubborn, some dropped out. Bill Paxton, for example, dropped out of “U Turn” [1997] and was replaced by Sean Penn because he didn’t understand his character.
How important are your three Oscars to you?
They look good in the corner. Memories. I think I’ve passed the level of merit. I see myself as a better filmmaker, although others may not agree. But the Oscars, it’s a game, you know. Oscar chasing is like high school politics where they want to be president of the class. I don’t like any of that.
You worked with a lot of great actors and big stars. Have you ever been starstruck?
Yes. When I was forty, I won an Oscar for [directing] “Platoon” [1986]. Liz Taylor presented me the Oscar on stage and then she kissed me. She was my sweetheart, my dream girl, during the 1950s and 1960s, so that was a special moment for me.
-FilmTalk interview with Oliver Stone, March 19 2024
"I have children, so of course I worry about climate change"
Oliver Stone is late. The 77-year-old director has come to the Netherlands to promote his latest film. But until the last moment, the American, known for Wall Street (1987) and JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994), left his Dutch distributor nervous. Would he show up?
At previous European screenings, Stone sometimes canceled at the last minute. But on Monday morning the moderator reassures the room of waiting journalists: Stone is now really on his way from his hotel to the press conference at the Tuschinski Cinema in Amsterdam. Half an hour later than planned, Stone arrives – blue shirt, checked jacket, laborious walk – and takes a seat behind the microphone together with his producer.
It is not surprising that many journalists from various media come to his visit. Stone not only won three Oscars, he has also been quite controversial in recent years. He interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin for 20 hours for a four-part documentary series in 2017. He also spoke to former Kazakhstan leader Nursultan Nazarbayev for an eight-hour documentary released on his 81st birthday. In both films, Stone was criticized for being too nice to the autocrats and not addressing alleged human rights violations.
Stone's recently released documentary on nuclear energy is also not without controversy. The director came up with the idea after reading the book A Bright Future (2019), a plea by two scientists for nuclear energy as the main solution to the climate problem. Studios and Netflix saw no interest in a film adaptation, so the filmmaker himself looked for investors and released the film on streaming services in 2022.
Thanks to the Dutch pro-nuclear energy organization WePlanet, it will still come to 13 Dutch cinemas for a one-off screening. The founder of WePlanet found Nuclear Now 'very impressive' and managed to convince a distributor to release it. Anti-nuclear energy environmental organization Wise is very critical of the film. “It is an advertising film for the core lobby, in which no critics have a say,” the organization says.
Stone appears not to be an easy man at his press conference in Tuschinski. He becomes irritated when a TV journalist admits that he had not seen his film beforehand. When the moderator cuts off Stone's long answers because she has promised the journalists present that she can ask two questions each, he barks at her. “You made up those fucking rules! Bad rules.” Stone sighs. “Fuck, these Dutch people.”
When Trouw meets the director an hour later for a one-on-one interview, the filmmaker fortunately appears milder. “Have you seen the movie?” he asks. After agreeing, he nods friendly. "Well done."
Stone delved into the Vietnam War for his films, had conversations with Putin and asked who 'really' murdered John F. Kennedy. Why a documentary about nuclear energy now? The director has been fascinated by the subject since Al Gore's climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), he says. “That was a powerful film. And I have children, so of course I worry about climate change.”
But while the former vice president extensively discusses the need for much more wind and solar energy in his film, he is less vocal about nuclear energy as a solution. “I wondered why,” Stone says.
When Stone read A Bright Future, he got the idea that people are far too negative about nuclear energy. “That fear is because people confuse nuclear energy with nuclear bombs,” Stone thinks. While nuclear energy is relatively safe, he says. Only a handful of major accidents have occurred worldwide throughout history, with Chernobyl being the worst. Fukushima often comes second, “and that wasn't even a nuclear disaster, but a tsunami and an earthquake.” No one died directly from radiation from the Japanese nuclear power plant, says Stone. (Fukushima was indeed a nuclear disaster, caused by a tsunami and earthquake. Although no one died from nuclear radiation, cancer patients from the region later demanded compensation, ed.)
Stone became increasingly amazed while reading A Bright Future. Because people are concerned about nuclear waste, while fossil fuel emissions cause more damage, he says, for example in the form of countless deaths due to air pollution from coal-fired power stations.
Stone wanted to do for nuclear energy what Al Gore did for climate change. “I wanted to put it back on the agenda. Not as the only solution, but as part of the energy mix.” Solar and wind energy are on the rise worldwide, but 80 percent of energy still comes from fossil fuels. “I am in favor of any way we can reduce CO2.”
A common thread through all his films, he says, is that he doesn't like it when "governments hide things and lie, especially when it comes at the expense of people's well-being." Just as he does not believe that John F. Kennedy was murdered by a loner, Stone also sometimes leans towards conspiracies in Nuclear Now. Nuclear energy became much less popular after a boom period in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. According to Stone's film, major oil companies would have played a significant role in this, by financing and disseminating research on the dangers of radiation to human health.
He also explains why, in his opinion, companies such as Shell do not invest in nuclear energy, but do invest in wind and solar energy. Because nuclear energy always works, unlike solar and wind energy which are dependent on the weather, allowing companies to continue offering their oil and gas as a backup.
Stone is quite skeptical about solar and wind energy. “After twenty years and trillions of dollars spent on the renewable craze, we're still nowhere. That is depressing: as if you are going to war without results.” Global energy demand is still growing, which means that the absolute amount of fossil fuels burned is not falling sufficiently. Joel Scott-Halkes of pro-nuclear energy organization WePlanet, who also attended the interview at Stone's request, provides additional criticism. “If you wanted to run the Netherlands on wind energy, you would have to fill up the entire country,” he says.
The environmental organization Wise criticizes Nuclear Now because the film is selective in its criticism of renewable energy and leaves undiscussed disadvantages of nuclear energy, such as the high costs. “That's the worst argument!” Scott-Halkes breaks in. “These high costs are due to years of opposition from environmental groups!” It is believed that it is due to the many protests that it now takes so long to build a nuclear power plant.
Other criticism from Wise, for example, is that solar and wind energy take up too much space, according to Stone's film, but he does not mention that panels and wind turbines can be built on roofs and the sea. “We only show facts in the film,” says Stone. And also: “We only have an hour and 45 minutes." Addressing all the critics with all the technical objections would make the film 'too tiring' for the audience. And the negative voices about nuclear energy have been discussed enough in recent decades, he believes. “Why let the same people speak again who have been making the same arguments since the 1970s?”
It is no surprise that Stone's film is warmly received by the core lobby. This week the American travels to Brussels to tell MEPs about the need for more nuclear energy. But what about the financing of the film?
In an earlier interview with the American magazine Jacobin, Stone denied that energy companies had contributed in any way. Even now he denies this. The film was paid for by “rich individuals,” says Stone, “people from Silicon Valley.” Yet one of the “executive producers” (an honorific end credits term, often used for backers) is Stefano Buono. He turns out to be the CEO of Newcleo, which develops nuclear reactors. Newcleo appears large with its logo at the bottom of the credits, and Bueno writes on LinkedIn that he is 'proud' that his company has 'financially supported' the production and distribution of Nuclear Now.
“Yes, he became involved in the film later,” Stone admits when Trouw asks about this. A producer, who is also there, now joins the conversation. “Buono joined when the film was already finished.” Stone says his money was 'more for the distribution side', and not for the manufacturing process. Isn't something like that still a conflict of interest - creating a journalistic story for which the industry itself helps pay? “You're right,” says Stone. He acknowledges that he was also surprised when he saw Buono's name in the credits, and places the responsibility on his other producer. The CEO of Newcleo has had no say in the content, promises Stone again.
When asked, Buono says that he did indeed become involved when the film was already finished. But his share was not small: his company is said to have paid about 20 percent of the entire film budget.
This financing raises questions about the integrity of the film. These are reminiscent of Qazaq, the documentary about the former leader of Kazakhstan, which showed a financing trail of five million dollars linked to the government. Stone now says that he was only an interviewer on this film, and had only limited involvement. “The director denies [the government money trail] and says there is no evidence.”
During this confrontation, Stone remains surprisingly calm – much calmer than he did to the moderator an hour ago. He himself says that his films about Kazakhstan and Russia are important now. “The war in Ukraine needs more explanations, all we have is the standard American explanation.” But didn't his controversial documentary about Putin also lead to significant damage to Stone's image in the West, making it difficult for him to finance his films, as the British newspaper The Independent states? Nonsense, says Stone. In any case, money would not influence his choice of which films to make. “I don't need money – I'm a successful director. I'm going to go out and do what I think is right.” He is still 'very proud' of his Putin film.
But Stone is most proud, looking back on his entire career, on his feature films and not on his documentaries. “Those are my children.” And then the director hints that it is not easy to get such a really big film off the ground.
Yes, there is a documentary about Brazilian President Lula in the pipeline. But Stone also wants to make at least one more feature film. He has the subject, but he does not reveal it. It has to become – again – something he 'worries about'. The question remains whether Hollywood will support the controversial filmmaker for one last time. “I might not get the chance to make it.”
-Interview with Oliver Stone by Maarten van Gestel, Trouw, March 19 2024 (translated from Dutch)
