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back-and-totheleft · 16 days

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Salvador/Platoon

1986 was the year of Oliver Stone, when the writer-director blasted out of somewhat murky obscurity with the double play of “Salvador,” his Central American civil war drama released to sputtering results in April, and “Platoon,” filmed immediately after “Salvador” and released at Christmas. It’s appropriate that both pics are being simultaneously brought out by MGM in “special edition” DVD packages (a “Platoon” DVD sans bells and whistles was released in August), since Stone credits the momentum of “Platoon,” which won four Oscars including best picture, for helping the nearly forgotten “Salvador” gain two noms, including a richly deserved acting nod for James Woods as amoral, hustling photojournalist Richard Boyle.

Boyle’s collaboration on the project proved to be far greater than a mere co-writer credit, as revealed in both Stone’s commentary and Charles Kiselyak’s accompanying hourlong docu, “Into the Valley of Death,” about the film’s hazardous making.

Stone met both Boyle and Ron Kovic — Stone adapted latter’s life into “Born on the Fourth of July” — at the Sidewalk Cafe in Venice, Calif., in the late ’70s, and heard Boyle’s colorful accounts of his time in El Salvador. To Boyle’s surprise, Stone quickly wanted to adapt the stories for a movie, incorporating recent Salvadoran developments, and asked Boyle — who had never touched a script — to stay with him and co-write it. Stone even considered having Boyle play himself, when production cash was scarce.

Apparently, for all of Stone’s reputation as a wild man, he was a relative piker compared to Boyle, whom Woods openly admits he was scared of during production. In the docu, there’s a clear tension between helmer and star; even though the pair subsequently worked together on “Nixon” and “Any Given Sunday,” they waged some terrific fights on the set.

Stone characterizes Woods as “instinctively bourgeois” and forever concerned about his safety, while Boyle was the complete opposite; Stone’s low-budget guerrilla filmmaking approach in some remote Mexican shooting locales also rubbed up against Woods’ fear of danger, triggering the thesp to walk off the set during a battle scene and board a bus to the U.S.

The many conflicts, which also involved Jim Belushi playing opposite Woods’ gonzo Boyle as sleazeball Bay Area disc jockey Dr. Rock, played into what Stone refers to in Kiselyak’s making-of docu accompanying “Platoon” as “method direction.” The helmer “kept us on edge,” Belushi notes, even as he had to fend off the concerns of co-producer Gerald Green about the production’s Byzantine money problems and the concomitant strikes waged by the largely Mexican crew when the producers weren’t able to come up with the week’s wages.

On the fascinating if sometimes rambling commentary, Stone reveals that the entire production, in fact, was based on a variety of “scams,” including exploiting Dutch tax-shelter laws and — when pic was initially set to film in El Salvador itself until the technical advisor was assassinated — deceiving both rebels and government troops with phony scripts depicting either side as heroic.

Ever reflective, Stone acknowledges the ironic chasm between pic’s agit-prop, anti-interventionist idealism and the results-at-any-cost ethic of the filmmaking process. While former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White relates in the docu vivid first-hand accounts and analysis of the decaying political situation under Reagan administration sponsorship of the country’s corrupt military regime, Stone is more willing to exaggerate, commenting, “We were making a Western,” and that part of him wants to be “the Messenger, and part of me wants to have fun.” As he has displayed so often in his work, Stone has a showman’s desire to weave threads of fact with those of fiction. In the case of “Salvador,” where the Boyle character seems to be in all places at once, it’s a case of journalism running head-on into fantasy.

While the “Salvador” package includes several extras, including 25 minutes of footage deleted to gain an R rating (including an outrageous but key orgy scene that by all rights should have been re-inserted into pic on this new edition), the “Platoon” DVD is fairly modest, featuring running commentaries by Stone and military adviser Capt. Dale Dye along with Kiselyak’s informative 45-minute “A Tour of the Inferno” docu. From the sound of it, whatever horrors Woods faced in Mexico were nothing next to the extremes of prep training Stone and Dye put their cast through before filming.

-Robert Koehler, Variety, Jun 1 2001

#Oliver Stone #variety #Salvador #platoon

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back-and-totheleft · 17 days

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"Strong peyote"

Oliver Stone, 74, is seated for a Zoom interview at his home office in Los Angeles. He’s just finished reading an email proposing he direct a film about Led Zeppelin. “I don’t know much about them, frankly,” Stone admits. “They were never really my band.” The Doors were his band. On March 1, 1991, the universe got its first look at The Doors — Stone’s beautifully irrational biopic about the late ’60s rock group led by Jim Morrison (played by Val Kilmer, then 31, amid a Method-acting spectacle). The result is an R-rated feast that acts as an extravagant rejection of puritanism and “Just Say No.” It is campy, erotic, deeply disturbing and smoldering like a pagan bonfire.

The cinematography in this film produces some astonishing eye candy.

We used a lot of filters. We had to go back into the past. We had everyone dressed in period, which was very expensive. We were also taking chances that we normally wouldn’t. We were growing in our boldness. We wanted to challenge all the ideas. We had no rules, no limits, no laws.

At least for my generation, the film has come to symbolize a darkly funny and dizzying parody of the “cock rocker.”

That was never my intention. I’m a little square, perhaps, for your taste, but I worshipped Morrison. I thought he was a great force breaking through to the other side. He was saying things that needed to be said. It was being said by others: Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, and so on. But he was the only one that was really going into the erotica as much as he was. Of course, he talked about Indians, shamanism, but back then, we were coming out of the ’50s. It was a very different time. He was liberated. He was sexy as a man. He felt at ease with himself. And he carried on as if he were a free man. I worshipped a free man. I’m actually one of the people who really likes his lyrics. Some people make fun of them.

The Doors feels like a rebuke of the Bush era and “Just Say No.” Was Morrison acting as your mouthpiece when he was screaming at us that we were all “a bunch of slaves?”

Yes. The things I say sometimes don’t go down so well. But I don’t agree with so much of what’s going down. I still don’t. I haven’t changed. If anything, I’m worse. His timing may have been off when he said, “You’re all a bunch of slaves.” He was a philosopher.

Critics focused on the lack of historical realism in this film. But it’s a fantasy. Morrison himself was a kind of myth-maker. What do you think is rooted in the obsession for realism in a film about Jim Morrison?

By this time, I had been taking so much flak. I don’t mean to self-pity, but my God, I had just done Born on the Fourth of July, Talk Radio and Wall Street. I was exhausted by trying to be realistic. This was freedom. It was like tearing your clothes off and breathing. It was about going out and having fucking fun making a movie. After JFK and Heaven & Earth, I did Natural Born Killers. Again, I wanted to be free. I get off on those films.

I first discovered this film as a teenager. It somehow captured rock ‘n’ roll at its purest.

Thank you. I didn’t really have the connection to music that other people had. A lot of filmmakers study music. I didn’t. I just followed a god that I liked. You see, I heard him in Vietnam for the first time. I was doing LSD on R&R [rest and recuperation] — not in the field — but we were discovering LSD and realizing you really had to pay attention. Morrison had done enough LSD to really understand it. It’s a powerful consciousness journey. I never stopped. I kept going in that direction with all kinds of drugs.

Did you experiment with any psychedelics while you were making this film?

I was high, in a sense, by osmosis, but I had the attitude to just free your ass and your mind will follow. I think people would say I was pretty wild as a director. But I was not getting high on the set. Yeah, the occasional grass here and there, but I wouldn’t do anything on the set. Off the set, I had some fun. I had a friend, Richard [Rutowski], who played Death in the film. I wanted to go back to South Dakota, with the Sioux, and do this peyote ceremony with a very powerful shaman. And we did it. We got to this place on the reservation and got fucking high beyond belief. It was a big trip. A lot of Indians were involved. Strong peyote. And then we flew back. I was dead on Monday morning when we shot the peyote scene. I had no energy as a director.

What were some of the political challenges involved in making this film?

I guess I didn’t know the barriers back then. Paul Rothchild [the band’s producer] was a key figure. He was with us all the way. I never got that from the bandmates. They didn’t seem to know him that well. Certainly Ray Manzarek thought he knew him. Ray did not cooperate in any way. In fact, it was a very disagreeable relationship for me. And of course, when the movie came out, boy, he was tearing it down from the beginning.

I found Ray Manzarek accusing you of “assassinating” the character of Jim Morrison to be pretty remarkable. I honestly don’t think anyone knew the real Jim Morrison (not even Manzarek).

Jerry Hopkins, who wrote the book [No One Here Gets Out Alive, 1980] left me 120 documents of interviews he did with people who knew Morrison in the beginning, from grade school to the very end. And if you read these 120 versions of his life, it’s like Citizen Kane. That’s what he was to this person or that person. In the interviews, there were several women, my God, sexually, he was all over the place. He wasn’t necessarily impotent. Perhaps that occurred later, when there were issues — which did bother him. But you saw in the loft scene with Kathleen Quinlan, when he has an orgasm. And that’s the truth of the matter, he had orgasms with intensity that came from intense situations. That was the only way he could get off — dangling from a window may have worked for him.

Morrison seems like the original “cock rocker.” I think he understood that he was a sex symbol.

Well, they made him a sex symbol. Part of the reason he started drinking was to probably run from that. He was not comfortable with publicity. I do believe he was inherently shy. Girls would come at him, and according to Paul [Rothchild], he ended up talking to them all night. He loved women. He talked them to death. But it wasn’t about sex. It was about something in his mind he had to work out. He was running toward death.

He was a sex symbol who was said to have been impotent. He seemed to be struggling with some kind of imposter syndrome. Was he crucifying himself?

I do believe there was a lot of self-hatred. He’s a deep man. If you really want to know him, look at the lyrics. There’s a lot of depth there that people often miss.

JFK (1991) provides a panorama of possibilities regarding the JFK assassination. With this film, you end with Morrison in a bathtub under a kind of amber glow. We don’t know what has happened to him. He’s just beautiful and dead. Were you trying to leave the cause of his death open to interpretation?

It didn’t make any difference to me if he was on heroin or not. In the movie, you have to assume he was. But he was half in love with death all his life. An American Prayer is filled with images of death. I don’t think Morrison made the normal difference between life and death. It was a boundary that he crossed many times. He was ready for death. I found the scene tranquil. Like the ancient Romans cutting their wrists, I didn’t see the fear of death in him. As a shaman, he saw it as a transition to continue life in another form. I would have loved to see him survive Paris. I think he died by accident. I do feel it was an overdose of something. I do feel like he was doing it to accompany somebody he cared about. I think his plan was to come back and be a writer. I think he would have been a really interesting writer and philosopher for American society into the ’80s, ’90s and even today. He got robbed early.

Looking back at his phenomenal performance, do you feel Val Kilmer was snubbed for an Oscar nomination that year?

I do feel he was slighted. It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of performance. I certainly know the pain and the sweat he put into it. But I kind of knew The Doors was doomed because of the hijinks Morrison was going through. In other words, it was a crossing-the-line kind of movie. It’s become more acceptable now. But this is 1991. You gotta look back. Certainly Val deserved it, but also the sound: There were so many sound breakthroughs and editing breakthroughs in that movie. We were using some new methods. The sound work by Paul Rothchild and that group was unbelievable. The fact that Val was singing about 70 percent of his stuff was pretty significant.

I feel like a lot of today’s rock biopics, like Bohemian Rhapsody, are pretty sterile. They feel more like marketing films.

I don’t want to be negative on that. I wish we had made the money Bohemian Rhapsody had made. Look, every film has to be marketable. The Doors was not. We just made an outlaw film because [producer] Mario Kassar was out of his mind. He was willing to gamble. He didn’t give a shit about all that stuff. He was a pirate. He made films against the grain.

In the final shot at Père Lachaise cemetery, we zoom in to a bust of Jim Morrison placed on his gravestone. It’s a beautiful documentary-style shot scored to “A Feast of Friends.” It really takes us to the end. Wasn’t the bust stolen in 1988?

It was. The bust was our creation. It was based on Kilmer and not on Jim. But what the press never seems to understand when they describe it as a “rise and fall” is that he wasn’t falling. He was moving through life as an explorer. Some of his best work is in [1978’s posthumously released L.P.] An American Prayer and [1971’s] L.A. Woman. I didn’t see the decline. I guess what I’m saying is that you don’t die when you’re Jim Morrison, you just move on.

-Art Tavana, "Oliver Stone Recalls ‘Doors’ Inspiration as Jim Morrison Biopic Turns 30: “Strong Peyote,"" The Hollywood Reporter, March 11 2021

#oliver stone #the doors #30th anniversary #art tavana #the hollywood reporter

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back-and-totheleft · 17 days

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Lessons in Darkness

Oliver Stone has both Brezhnev and Kissinger state, on separate occasions, that Richard Nixon’s tale is a tragedy, and his Nixon certainly assumes an empathetic position on its disgraced presidential subject. This does not, however, mean that it’s a particularly kind portrait, as Stone’s epic – charting the 40th commander-in-chief’s childhood, early career, and Oval Office tenure from his own warped perspective – depicts the confluence of forces that shaped Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) not in order to absolve him, but merely to comprehend what drove him to such ignominious lengths.

What the writer/director comes up with is a litany of internal and external stimuli: his Quaker mother’s stern belief in strength above all other virtues (including happiness); his aspirations to be a Lincoln-esque uniter; his lifelong bitter resentment at being unpopular and bullied; and the way those feelings fostered a persecution complex so deep it drove him to see JFK as his light-dark counterpoint (and personal tormentor), the world as out to get him, and himself – via intermittent references to himself in the third person – as America’s, and the world’s, nucleus.

Stone’s predilection for the grandiose is in ample evidence, from a shot of CIA chief Richard Helms (Sam Waterston) with all-black devil eyes (in a scene reinserted into the new director’s cut), to a pre-resignation Nixon disproving his earlier statement that men don’t cry while praying alongside Kissinger (Paul Sorvino). Yet the filmmaker��s deftness at evoking theme and sentiment through editorial montages within individual dramatic scenes reaches an apotheosis here. Stone employs breathtaking cutaways during conversations (so that a shot of a character speaking will be interrupted by a fleeting, silent shot of them flashing genuine emotion), constant camera tricks, different film stocks, and flashbacks and archival footage to create a multilayered, invigorating psychological account of a president consumed by bile and obsessed with legacy. Even as it teeters on the edge of (and, on a couple of occasions, tips over into) overblown extravagance, Nixon is an imposing model of cinematic storytelling forms, cemented by an all-star cast led by Hopkins’ tour-de-force titular performance – nailing Nixon’s mannerisms, body language and consuming loneliness and anger – as a man beautifully described by Watergate perp E. Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) as “the darkness reaching out for the darkness.”

-Nick Schager, "Lessons in Darkness," review of Nixon, Oct 27 2009

#Nixon #Oliver Stone #reviews #blogs

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back-and-totheleft · 20 days

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dailymotion

Oliver Stone visiting the beaches of Normandy and the American cemetery in February 2014.

#Oliver Stone #d day #Normandy #wwii #French #video

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back-and-totheleft · 22 days

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"It’s part of that Vietnam thing too — maybe my hearing [impairment] — and that I just want to be clear. It’s like you have to be a commander to be a director. You have to be clear, you have to really project yourself, make an effort of projection. Because I come from obscurity and confusion, essentially, and shyness. I was terribly shy in school, always an outsider. Sort of avoided groups and cliques, didn’t want to run with any gang. Always wanted to be alone. Reconciled myself to being alone. So I think that maybe part of going the other way is trying to fight all of those earlier tendencies, where I felt like I was totally irrelevant to the human race and that I was totally obscure and confused. ’Cause my childhood was very confused."

-Oliver Stone [x]

#oliver stone #Playboy #david breskin

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back-and-totheleft · 22 days

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It’s a few weeks after his 74th birthday when director Oliver Stone’s distinctive drawl comes onto the Zoom call. He is speaking from Los Angeles, on what the director of films such as Platoon , Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK , Natural Born Killers , Nixon and, most recently, Snowden , describes as a beautiful day. “Blue skies, no fires.” Stone seems cheerful, relaxed and eager to talk about his newest project.

That project is not a new feature film about a US president, or a documentary about one of the US’s many public enemies — Castro, Hugo Chávez or Vladimir Putin, all of whom Stone has interviewed and made films about. Nor is it a continuation of his mammoth 12-episode 2012 series The Untold History of the United States, produced in collaboration with historian Peter Kuznick.

Rather, after years of making his career as a determinedly political filmmaker with a burning curiosity for what many have lazily written off as conspiracy theories, Stone has turned his attention to his most mystifying and complicated subject yet — himself, in his recently published memoir Chasing The Light .

The book, while peppered with the kind of on-set, behind-the-scenes details that film fans will eagerly gobble up, is also an engaging, empathetic and honest piece of self-examination. It weaves its Bildungsroman narrative of a young, white and relatively privileged post-war American’s journey from the fragile middleclass fairy tale of his youth through to the shattering of that dream through his parents’ divorce to his volunteering for service in the Vietnam War.

That experience leads to the building of a consciousness that questions established ideas and leads him into the treacherous world of Hollywood where he finds some early success, develops some bad habits, falls from favour and manages to re-emerge by the age of 40 as the Oscar-winning director of Platoon . That film was a longdreamt-of drama about the Vietnam War based on his personal experience that would set him on a winning streak of distinctive, ambitious films that have earned him his own adjective in the filmmaking universe.

As Stone sees it, Chasing the Light is more a memoir than a history — “In the sense that you’re really engaging with the unmaterial things such as spirit, character, life choices, what happened with your parents and your wives and your choices in life — and it really makes you re-examine everything.”

Central to the narrative of the mythological quest of the memoir’s central character is the pivotal plot point of his parents’ divorce. Stone, who was 16 at the time, now sees this event as having affected him painfully personally. “It also affected my way of seeing the world, which is to doubt things, doubt the surface of things.”

A SHATTERED FAIRY TALE

Stone’s father was a World War 2 soldier and, later, Eisenhower Republican who met his French wife in France in the last year of the war. The couple married, and their only child, apple of his French grandmother’s eye, Oliver was born in 1946. Stone grew up believing that his parents epitomised the happy, post-war-boom-era US couple, only to have that illusion shattered when, while at boarding school in 1962, he received a phone call from his father telling him of the divorce. He learnt that his parents had both been less than perfect — conducting affairs and struggling to overcome the glaring differences between them while sheltering their son from the truth. As he looks through the narratively satisfying lens of hindsight, Stone believes that his parents wove a fairy tale. “And I don’t blame them for it, that’s the nature of parents,” he says. “But they couldn’t live up to it and when it fell apart it was ugly.”

In 1963, during his final year of high school, Stone, along with millions of griefstricken Americans, watched the news of the assassination of John F Kennedy. He writes that he felt stunned, “understanding nothing but the surface of things, the explanations handed down to us by our chief priests … After four long years I felt like an overworked clerk, always under obligation to do what I was told rather than having a genuine curiosity over any subject … I was more robot than human.”

As was expected, but with little enthusiasm, Stone enrolled at Yale University, where high achievement was expected of him. “It was bred into my bones. American life is geared to upward motion; the only response to adversity I knew was, ‘Never Give Up. Never. Never. Never’.”

But Stone did give up, negotiating a year off, much to his father’s disappointment. He took a job as an English teacher for a Catholic Church group in Saigon. After six months, Stone resigned and spent the next year travelling around Southeast Asia and serving a stint as a seaman, cleaning out engines on a ship bound back to America.

Emboldened by these glimpses of a very different world from the one in which he’d been raised, Stone did not return to Yale when he got home but threw himself into the writing of a 1,400-page, stream-of-consciousness novel that was eventually rejected for publication, leaving its author adrift and depressed. Looking for some larger meaning to make sense of his life, the 20-year-old Stone decided to volunteer for service in Vietnam — “the war of my generation”.

It was an experience that would indelibly shape his life and plant a seed of distrust of official versions and a belief in the idea that, rather than being the paragon of democratic values and freedom, the US was a nation built on lies intended to drug its citizens into acceptance and unquestioning unconsciousness. As Stone writes, from the vantage point of over half a century later, “I didn’t really wake up until I was 30 years old — in 1976 … I was darkened. A part of me had gone numb there … died, in Vietnam, murdered.”

LEARNING TO LOOK

After two tours of duty in Vietnam, Stone returned to the US, married his first wife Najwa Sarkis, and enrolled on the GI Bill at NYU’s Film School, where he studied screenwriting and directing and was lectured by a young, filmobsessed recent graduate, now lecturer named Martin Scorsese. Stone was also greatly influenced by a course in Greek drama, taught by one Timothy Leahy. He remembers Leahy telling them to rethink the ordinary and find the myth behind it. “He inspired me to reexamine my own experiences with that in mind.”

Out of that came the initial idea for Platoon , written when Stone was 30, in the wake of the death of his grandmother at whose coffin he vowed to “do something with my life”. Platoon tells the story of a young Vietnam soldier who finds himself struggling with the two very different beliefs of a pair of platoon leaders in the jungle — one, Barnes, committed to the cause of the US by any means necessary. The other, Elias, is a more aware, disaffected but better American who realises the futility of the war and the lies on which it’s predicated.

I speak to Stone the day after the first Trump/Biden debate, and when I suggest that these two visions of his homeland are still battling it out almost 40 years later, he enthusiastically agrees, “It’s just unbelievable to me that people still don’t see that. It’s exactly the same — red and blue, the same red and blue states — that was going on in Vietnam and that’s still going on today. It’s the same civil war … last night at the debate, here’s one guy yelling, ‘Law and order, law and order!’ It’s the same story over and over again. The guys who yell, ‘Law and order!’ are the guys who break the law first, like Nixon.”

It was on the back of the script for Platoon that Stone began his career in late-’70s New Hollywood, but it would take him another decade to get the film made. Along the way, he won his first Oscar for the screenplay for Alan Parker’s Midnight Express in 1979; wrote the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s 1983 pop culture classic Scarface ; watched as director John Milius and producer Dino De Laurentiis butchered his script for Conan the Barbarian; and shook his head in resignation as Michael Cimino performed a similarly depressing operation on his story for Year of the Dragon.

During these years, Stone developed and kicked a cocaine habit, divorced his first wife and married his second, Elizabeth Cox, and welcomed his first child, Sean. He also met a gonzo journalist named Richard Boyle, whose tales about the results of US Cold-Warera political interference in the small central American country of El Salvador fascinated him. Together Boyle and Stone wrote a script and managed to secure tenuous funding from a British production company for the filming of what would become Stone’s comeback film, Salvador , shot in Mexico in 1985 in uncertain, skin-of-the-teeth circumstances that were not made easier by the prima donna madness of the film’s star James Woods, or the threatening financial concerns and machinations of the producers. Stone says he “got toughened up on Salvador so much that [by the time it came to making Platoon ] nothing could stop me”.

When the book ends with Stone being handed the Best Director Oscar for Platoon by Elizabeth Taylor — “the fantasy doll from my youth” — you have to agree with the director’s assertion that perhaps that was the best moment of his life.

“To have a film that had been rejected so many times and looked down upon … ending up as the Oscar winner and a big moneymaker … it’s all too much. God, you gotta celebrate the moment and it was a lifetime moment.”

In spite of his long struggle to get there and the many projects that were either mangled by others or never saw the light of day, Stone’s memoir is mostly surprisingly free of bitterness or acrimony — either towards his former collaborators, his parents or his ex-wives. That may have something to do with the fact that, since 1992, he’s been a devotee of Buddhist philosophy and principles, but it’s also, Stone thinks, due to what he learnt from his parents.

“I do owe a lot to my mother — she was extremely optimistic, she was a lover of nature and animals and people. She was no intellectual, that’s for sure, she never much really cared about history or literature or the things that I worshipped but she really did convey a spirit of optimism, and that’s the best thing you can do for your child.

“My father was both — he was more sardonic and far more intelligent in some ways, intellectually certainly, and sometimes saw the darker side of things,” he says.

There’s also the fact that, as Stone sees it now but couldn’t always then, that he was raised with love — in the beginnings of his life. “I was raised with love and then I lost the sense of it for a while and I talk about that in my first marriage — not knowing what love was but recognising the absence of love, and that’s important and that leads to the next book — what love is and how it moves the world.”

A RIGHT TO BE POLITICAL

As to the future of his country, Stone believes recent developments like Black Lives Matter and protests against Trump may signal that the US is beginning to have a long overdue conversation about the realities of its past and their effects on its present.

It’s a past that, according to him, has been lied about, mythologised, “so that’s a good thing, a cleaning out”. But he cautions that they have a long way to go.

“We’re still worshipping the military without thinking; we’re involving ourselves in foreign affairs without thinking; and we think we have the right to dominate … to tell anybody what to do, I don’t get that. It’s what we do — we use our money to bully. It’s a sense of privilege and I’ve seen it all my life here — in the George Bushes, in the Donald Trumps — this sense that we have the right to tell other people what to do.”

For now, Stone has no plans for a film about Trump although he’s sure that there will be many made soon. “Some will be good ones — but it certainly doesn’t need me.”

Instead, he’s focused on a new documentary about applicable ways for science to deal with climate change and a long wished “legacy piece”, detailing the developments that have emerged around the Kennedy assassination since he made JFK in 1991.

“You shouldn’t be asking me if I’m political,” he says. “You should be saying it’s a normal thing to be because, in my mind, artists should have the right to say what they think about anything in the world and should be allowed to go far and wide. But it doesn’t seem to be allowable in our society. I got away with it a few times … but I haven’t got much encouragement since then. In fact, it’s a continual problem — to be labelled a political filmmaker as if the only reason you’re making films is to send a message. Hardly so. I want to entertain. I want to make a film that’s involving, and I happen to think that politics can be very involving, but it’s not like I want everyone to be a Leftist and jump on my bandwagon.”

With that, Stone hangs up and returns to his lifelong project of chasing the light in all its messy, sometimes blinding, but always revealing rays.

-Tymon Smith, "Blood From a Stone," Sunday Times South Africa, Oct 25 2020

#Oliver Stone #chasing the light #Sunday times #tymon smith #parents #Vietnam #memoirs #Donald Trump #South Africa

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back-and-totheleft · 24 days

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"You'll see a different point of view"

Last year, three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone made his 20th directorial outing with Snowden—a look at the life of former NSA consultant and whistleblower Edward Snowden. The film took Stone on numerous trips to Russia, where Snowden has lived in exile since 2013, which then led to a series of interviews with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The format is something Stone has used to great effect before in his documentaries about controversial politicians such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

I can’t think of too many of your peers who would do something like travel to Russia to conduct interviews with Putin. How much of this came from the time you spent there with Edward Snowden?

I met Mr. P. over there, during one of those trips. I was introduced to him, and one of the earliest conversations we had was about Edward Snowden—because obviously, I’m fascinated by what happened, from his point of view. And sure enough, he was very forthright and honest, the way he speaks. As we talked, he told me the Snowden story from his point of view, which is in the film.

In the western media view we get of Putin, he comes off like a Bond villain. Why was all this important to you?

I think in the film, we did him the justice of putting his comments into a narrative that can explain his point of view, in the hopes that it would prevent continued misunderstanding between the countries, and trust, lack of trust, and—I fear—a near state of war, on the brink of war. That’s what I’m worried about, and that’s why I returned. We did four different visits after Snowden to get this on film. On every situation he talks about in the film, you’ll see there’s a different point of view than what we’ve been told.

Is this a documentary like the ones you made with Castro or Chávez?

It’s not a documentary in the sense that there, we examine the whole situation from two different points of view. No. It’s told from his point of view, which allows us to hear him in, I think, a pretty interesting way. For example, now you never see him on American television. Well, he did an interview with Charlie Rose for his show. It wasn’t bad, but it was short, and they dubbed him with an American interpreter who was a tough guy, almost like a baseball announcer. So everything [Putin] was saying in Russian, the dubber was making the words harsh, as opposed to the way he actually speaks. Putin speaks very clearly, very evenly. Doesn’t raise his voice. There’s a big difference already in the interpretation of what you’re getting. If you’re a guy who’s dubbed, and he’s talking like a Russian is supposed to talk, it’s quite a difference. That’s one example.

One thing you have to remember is that he’s popular in many countries, and not just Russia. He’s very popular in Germany, France, among many people—and he’s one of the most admired men—and for that matter, in a lot of Africa, a lot of Turkey, Syria, the Middle East. So you’re talking about a world figure here who we are constantly demeaning, treating him like he’s a con man and a murderer. As a character out of The Godfather, because maybe we like The Godfather.

We like that concept of villains, but it’s a very dangerous caricature when you’re dealing with world peace and the nuclear power that we have.

It’s reminiscent of when the Bush administration lumped every world leader that ran afoul of U.S. policy into that axis of evil, which meant no dialogue was necessary. Are you trying to demystify Putin as you tried to do with Castro and Chávez, with simple dialogue?

Very well said. Absolutely. And it’s important to do so. We are really creating a fear and a situation in the American mind that is very dangerous. All of a sudden, it’s conveniently shifting to, “Oh, forget about the war on terror. He’s the bad guy.”

Sean Penn went a long way through the jungles to interview El Chapo, trying to humanize a villainized cartel leader, and Penn himself was criticized for being in over his head. How do you come at these figures, knowing that if you allow them to come off too sympathetic, you’ll be the one who’s vilified for it?

Well, I don’t think like that. I don’t. If they come off too sympathetic, that’s really a manipulation. My intention is to get to the bottom. First of all, I prepare as well as I can, try to research as much as I can. I know what I’m talking about. They’ll pick up on it if you don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s the problem with some television interviews. The anchor is so busy running from one show to the other, he doesn’t really prepare. I got some good information, and I think he respected the fact that I knew my subject. And that I was talking to him with a genuine sense of curiosity.

Did Putin know your work as a director? Does he have a favorite Oliver Stone film?

Well, he knew I was doing the Snowden movie, and he knew I was very interested in it. He had seen some sections of my work. I never asked him what he liked, what he didn’t like, and so forth. Certainly in Russia, they admire the war movies, because they’ve been through a lot of war. I’m sure he saw Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. But I don’t know what he’s seen. I know that Untold History of the United States, which took five years, was very popular in Russia. It had a very strong view of World War II and the Cold War. And I think it did a very good job of demystifying that. I think he was aware of that.

Donald Trump recently said that he would meet Kim Jong-un in the right circumstances. Would one of these lengthy interview sit-downs with the North Korean leader appeal to you?

Frankly, I don’t do this for a living. You know, I rarely do this. The last time I did it was 2009, with Mr. Chávez. It’s not a living, it’s a curiosity. Also I think with the Korean leader, you have a danger there. Does he communicate at all? I don’t even know him, so I can’t say. Mr. Putin worried me. He’s stoic, and known as a reasonable man and a rational man, the way he talks. So sometimes you wonder, “Is there going to be any emotion in this thing?” You have the opposite of the Castro problem. So I’m dealing more with behavior. When you talk to a man or woman over a certain period of time, you do get behavior. And we got some very interesting body language. We walk, we talk, we’re in the woods, we’re in offices, we’re riding together in cars. There’s all kinds of scenes, which you’ll see.

When President Obama gave a break to Chelsea Manning, who leaked the documents to Julian Assange, did you think that maybe Snowden should’ve been dealt with in a similar way? Do you have an idea of what will happen to him?

No, I thought Snowden did a lot of interviews. He was very smart. I think he made his case transparent, to me. Everything he said about the journalists, and what he wanted to do, is what came across in the [documentary], in my film too. I think he’s very clear. I think certain people just didn’t ever pay attention to what he said. But you asked earlier about Sean Penn, and El Chapo. As I remember, that was not an interview, was it?

It almost seemed like an Apocalypse Now-style journey into the jungle—something Penn called “experiential journalism”.

Oh, I get it. It wasn’t at all what I’m doing. I’m filmed, I’m with a crew. From the beginning, it’s an official interview.

The reason I brought that up was because it didn’t work out the way Penn hoped it would. He was trying to look for common threads to someone who was viewed as a villain to all of us, but his questions seemed soft, on paper.

He might’ve protected himself by bringing a camera in that case, is what I want to say.

This is for Deadline’s Cannes issue. There was talk of taking Snowden being there last year. How much did that cost you, not going?

Well, we wanted to go to Cannes. It was an Open Road decision to bring [the release date forward] to September, and I think that was a mistake. They did a good job, but I think we would’ve had a lot more heat at Cannes because European critics ended up liking the film the most. In the U.S., we had mixed reviews, the usual mess. But we always knew that the U.S. would be more hostile to Snowden.

Your Wall Street sequel premiered at Cannes before its fall release, and seemed to suffer for it.

They should have released the film at the same time. That’s what Fox said, and I agree that they should have rolled it out then. But that was a different film, a different place. Snowden’s time was in Europe. He was most popular there. That’s where you go—you go where the heat is.

It feels like what studios want are either giant, global tentpoles, or micro-budget genre films. How different is it for you than when you came in the door years ago with a movie that sought to challenge audiences?

Well, those days are over, I think we all know that. Listen, Snowden was financed out of Europe. And basically this Putin documentary was financed out of Fernando Sulichin and his South American connections, as well as Europe. So it seems that I’m going to be working out of Europe for a while. I really believe in making good movies, and you have to piece together every one.

The changing landscape has brought about alternative outlets like Netflix, Amazon and Showtime, where your Putin interviews will be released. What changes excite you as a filmmaker?

You just become a TV film. And there’s a thousand of them, it seems all the time. It is a very crowded market, and I think you have to take your chances. But at least you get to film; hopefully you get to make what you want to. If you’re ending up working for some place where you’re just doing something you don’t even care about, my god, what suffering you’re going through. I don’t know what I’m going to do, after this. But it’s always tough. I don’t even know who the studio chiefs are anymore. They don’t even know me. Probably, they’ve forgotten who I was. They don’t have good memories beyond a year or two.

Then again, how easy would it have been for you to make Platoon if you hadn’t distinguished yourself as a writer of commercial dramas? How tough was that movie to get financed back in the day?

Don’t forget, it was passed on by every studio. It was made by a British independent filmmaker called John Daly. Don’t ever forget that. I won’t. And Salvador too. So I got into this business at the low end of the spectrum on a very low-budget film. I never really had a Hollywood base. My best deal I ever had for a few years was at Warner Bros. It’s where I made a few films, because Terry [Semel] and Bob [Daly] were more sympathetic to my views than anyone. But I make one film here, one film there. I’ve never had a home beyond Warner Bros. for that brief period of time. Platoon was rejected everywhere, and Salvador was too—it would never have been made now.

My first studio film, as a writer, I connected with Midnight Express, and even that was very low-budget. Scarface was not well-reviewed, and didn’t do that well. It was always tough for me to get films made in that system, but it was easier then than it is now. If you wrote the most brilliant film with real characters, it would not be made, probably because it would be considered to have not enough action. So it’s never easy. I’ve never looked to them for a solution, and thankfully I’m still working. I’m 70 years old.

What fuels you now?

I feel like I have my own life on the side. And I feel very strongly about war and the path to war. I think that there’s an internal war in the United States right now. There’s a very small peace party, and a very large war party. I’m very worried about it. I do not want to have our lives ended or shattered in any way by this constant belligerence we bring to the world, whether it’s Korea, whether it’s China, whether it’s Russia. We keep making statements like we’re in charge and we’re the bully.

We have to realize that other countries want their sovereignty. We can’t be like this. We really are no longer a uni-polar power—we cannot act like it. [We were] the top boss, that was brief, and that was in the 1990s, and we blew it by attacking Iraq twice. We think we run the world. As a young man, I was very conservative; I grew up that way. But Vietnam and the other wars have taught me that we can’t run the world this way.

What would be the alternative?

The alternative is a multi-polar world, taking into the account the interest of other countries and the sovereignty of other countries. That includes Iran, China and Syria. These countries are legitimate countries, with sovereignty of their own. And Iraq, too. We undermined Iraq’s sovereignty. It’s a wreck now. And Libya too, don’t forget Libya. We’re responsible for that. We brought chaos to this world, in the Middle East especially, and it’s engulfed us. All these refugees, that’s our fault. I’m sorry, don’t get me going here.

Is there a project on your bucket list?

Yes. Something I’ve been writing over a period of time, that I very much care for and hope I can do one day. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s a drama. It’s personal.

-Mike Fleming, "Oliver Stone Goes Face To Face With Putin: “You’ll See A Different Point Of View” — Deadline Disruptors," Deadline, May 22 2017

#Mike Fleming #Oliver Stone #deadline #Cannes 2017 #the Putin interviews #cannes film festival #Snowden #antiwar #Hollywood #studio politics #Warner brothers

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A Cannes Conversation

Oliver Stone is in Cannes today for a Special Screening of Lula, a documentary he co-directed with Rob Wilson about the unbelievable comeback of Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The film chronicles his extraordinary journey in 2022 to regain the Brazilian presidency after spending 19 months in prison. This happened after a hacker exposed a conspiracy meant to take down the labor leader in a corruption scandal that tied back to Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and the most powerful judge in the country. It’s a story you have to see to believe.

Here, Stone discusses his film, and how the four-time Oscar winner hopes to mount one final major drama after a career spanning Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street, JFK, Natural Born Killers and so many others. He also revisits his position on Vladimir Putin, whom he interviewed extensively several years ago, in light of recent events that have ratcheted global tensions.

DEADLINE: What made Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva worth his own documentary? We got a presidential election coming up in the U.S., a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, latter of whom disputed the last results, and whipped his followers into a frenzy that led to the January 6 storming of the Capitol. You tell a very specific story here, a Brazilian story, but you usually focus on the bigger picture and from Trump spending the early stages of his campaign mired in prosecutions and courtroom appearances, there are parallels.

OLIVER STONE: You couldn’t write a movie where a guy like this [da Silva] would be president. First, he was a trade unionist who never wanted to be a president, who was never interested in politics, and he becomes president. It’s a reminder that we can elect working class people to the presidency, of any country. You don’t have to have a billion dollars, you don’t have to be a member of the elite. I prefer that, to have actually somebody who’s more humble, run a country. I think that’s one thing that really draws me to him. And of course his life story is very dramatic. He has had two very positive terms. He reduced the poverty in Brazil enormously, giving money to the poor directly. $10 goes a lot farther than the promise of a hundred dollars or building some other big structure. Give them the money directly, let the mother or let the family decide what to do because that makes a huge difference. That $10 can go a long, long way. It’s a way of giving money and it’s a way of encouraging, stimulating your electorate to work, to educate, which is what he really believes in. Education, family, you can see he has very strong ties to his family and the way he grew up without a father in a very poor area of Brazil.

What he did with that makes it an amazing story to be celebrated. We don’t have enough celebration about politicians in this world. We treat them like, oh, they’re always corrupt. They’re always this or that. Ironically, Lula gets charged with corruption, in a new form of warfare. It’s called lawfare. And if you can’t get your way in an election, you can go after somebody legally and through the media. This is certainly what happened with him, he was suddenly accused of corruption with the workers’ party, a case that was always very strange and very thin. And we show in the film what happens.

DEADLINE: Given the film you made about the whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is interesting that the behind the scenes manipulations of justice meant to bring Lula to heel were exposed by a hacker motivated by his own ire over a drug arrest.

STONE: I made that movie Snowden in 2016, but the Snowden leaks came out in 2013 and in 2014. And in 2014, that’s when the Operation Car Wash accusations came out against [the petroleum corporation] Petrobras. In the Snowden movie, I showed scenes where Petrobras was introduced in the montage by Snowden, and he talks about tapping phones and how Petrobras was targeted by the Americans. How they tapped the phone of Dilma Rousseff, who was president. You remember that? She was upset [when that was revealed by Snowden] and she canceled her trip to her dinner for the American when she went to Washington. She had some very tough talk with Obama about being tapped. Germany was tapped too. There was a whole bunch of scandals.

That brought focus on what is going on here. Petrobras was becoming a worldwide operation. This was a Brazilian oil company that was becoming as big as anybody was and competing against us, among others. And I think that the concept of using brass to blame as an example of bad corruption is part of the strategy to bring down not only Dilma, but then eventually Lula. That’s what it was about. And that’s what lawfare is. It’s a tactic to charge corruption, and it is certainly doable in the modern world because there’s so much of it. There was a system in place in Brazil where a certain amount of corruption is allowable. And I think that’s the way the world works. The oil company has to take care of people in their country in order to have the relations, they have to have the power and the ability to make moves. All of a sudden, why now does Petrobras become a big issue? Because the United States is looking at it and saying, look, this whole arrangement with the left, with the workers’ party and Lula, is a threat to American interests around the world.

The question is why these accusations against a working class president who’s a trade unionist, and they’re going after him in the worst possible way. And they got him for a while, he went to jail. It’s unbelievable that he went to jail. This was pretty outrageous and bald attempt to undermine the election of 2018. And it worked.

DEADLINE: It propelled the controversial president Jair Bolsonaro into office, until hacked message revealed a conspiracy between the powerful federal judge Sergio Moro and Bolsonaro designed to take down Lula. The hacker revelations and the journalism that exposed it led to Lula being freed. You interview Lula extensively, along with the hacker and the journo. Bot Bolsonaro, or Moro, whose political aspirations as an anti-corruption crusader were undermined by the exposed truths. The way you told the story indicates you were convinced that Lula was a righteous guy, a victim who overcame manipulations for a heroic ending. Why do it that way?

STONE: I’m certainly going to face some controversy there because of Brazil, it was a very close election recently, and Lulu was elected by 51-49 margin. Making charges and accusations like that does have an effect. And we show people who are screaming how much they hate Lula. You feel the opposition. Time becomes a factor. Look what I had to cover. I covered his life, the concept of him going into politics. I didn’t spend a lot of time on the first two terms. The whole point was to get to the 2018 election, which is where he was removed from the election. Now that is where the case falls apart because not only does a hacker get involved, and you see there’s hundreds and hundreds of pages of Moro’s files and the prosecution against Lula, and you see that it was corrupted. You see the intention and that Bolsonaro was involved. It’s thrown out by the Supreme Court, and then Lula wins the election. It’s very dramatic, a comeback like you can’t believe, by a working class president. How many do we have left in the world? I mean, how many guys in our political structure have actually been in a union, been a president of a union? In America, we had Walter Reuther of the UAW, a very powerful man in the 1930s and very honest. He was a clean guy. Lula reminds me of Walter Reuther in the way he set a new agenda for Brazil, taking care of the poor and certainly reaching out to them and being one of them and coming from dire poverty. It was quite a story to me. It’s very inspiring.

DEADLINE: People you show who opposed Lula were as highly emotional as the polarized factions we see on either side of the political spectrum in America, like those who believe the false narrative that the 2020 election was rigged. Why were they so demonstrative against a guy you depict as righteous?

STONE: I think it’s a lot in common with American character. I’ve done so many films down there. Salvador, the films on Castro and Chavez. They are emotional character, and Americans too, they get very excited in their own politics when they make these accusations against Biden and Trump. People get carried away and politics tend to be emotional and not always reasonable. They’re not using their minds, they’re using their hearts. It’s the nature of what makes politics. I think dangerous too, because you’re going to elect somebody out of the wrong emotions, looking at someone like Hitler. It can lead to disasters. And America’s really on the edge here with these two candidates who are both untrusted by a large majority or certainly a large minority, and maybe Bobby Kennedy, the third party guy. He might benefit by being seen as an honest broker as opposed to the corrupt ones. I can’t tell you the answer, but they are emotional. You see it on film, but I can’t get into their mentality as to why they think Lula is corrupt. I mean, there’s no evidence of it. I was in his house, I saw the way he lives in between when he was out of office. He lives very modestly in a small apartment or a small house, small house, and he had a speech apartment in Sao Paulo. That’s not really anything special. I see no evidence of living a high life. And I’ve been among presidents in Mexico and so forth who have come out of office with mansions. It’s just the nature of life down there, that you tend to benefit from public office as a sort of way of getting paid back.

It’s not the case with Lula, at least I saw no evidence of it. No evidence of it. And now with what the hacker brought in, and these Moro Papers, it is clear that they framed him and that was the intention and they got what they wanted. All of this leads me back to the Snowden papers just to say, what is going on here? Is there a link? Was the United States involved? And we probed that question with Operation Car Wash because it seems that the United States was very heavily involved there, in bringing down leaders when we didn’t like what they were doing.

DEADLINE: Will you get back behind the camera to make another narrative film?

STONE: I’d like to, I think I have one more in me. I’ve done 20 and about 10 documentaries now. I never counted them that way because one of them was 12 hours long, The Untold History of the United States. I like documentaries because it’s honest and you’re going out into the world and you’re really seeing it as it is. You’re not in Hollywood with actors and makeup where everything is artificial in the sense that it’s created on camera. So it’s a whole different ballgame. And people who spent their whole lives in features sometimes don’t have a very good handle on reality, and they don’t go into the real world. They don’t want to, because they’re safer here in Hollywood. It distorts their value system. I’m very aware of what’s going on because I travel a lot and I meet a lot of people, and I always want to stay that way. It’s the way I was raised by my father. I do have a narrative film in mind, but I can’t tell you what it is, Mike, I know you’re going to ask that. But it is an important narrative. I’d like to have one more film if I can get it done. It’ll be done in the next year, that’s for sure.

DEADLINE: Last one for me. A few years ago, I joined you at Cannes for a presentation to territorial buyers, and I interviewed you on a series of interviews you did with Vladimir Putin. Your purpose, you said, was not to canonize the Russian leader, but simply to humanize him. Given what has happened since, from the imprisonment and death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny to the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent long war, what’s your feeling about the validity of what he said then, and how do you feel about having provided him with that platform?

STONE: Well, it’s not about him. It’s about Russia and the United States. This is my concern. I am most concerned, Mike, and I still am, that this American involvement in Ukraine is leading to disaster. Why, for God’s sake, in 1990, did we shift this allegiance to NATO, a device from World War II that should have ended at this point, but it stayed on and it’s become a dead end because we are pushing NATO’s goals? When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 with Baker and Bush and Gorbachev, we agreed we would respect the borders of Russia and that NATO would not move further east. We gave East Germany to NATO; we said, Germany will be now unified, but there will be no further movement. And that was agreed to by the Americans very clearly. Although they may not have done so on paper, it certainly was a contractual agreement and an understanding between not only Gorbachev and Bush, but also Reagan before he went on their first meetings.

The United States broke every treaty with Russia. 13 countries have been anti-Soviet anti-Russian countries, not just anti-Soviet, but anti-Russian have been incorporated into NATO. And we are following that plan. The Russians have said, this is a red line for us, Ukraine especially. This is the border of Russia, and you’re right there and you’re putting missiles in. And just today, was it Biden yesterday was saying that they wanted to integrate Ukraine into NATO.

With all the complimentary access advantage to Ukraine, which is basically a dead state and has been attributed to as some kind of democratic protest or resistor, but it’s not true. Ukraine is a totally corrupt state, much worse than many corrupt states, probably on the index of corrupt states, it’s about 140 out of 170. It’s a lost dog. We have supported it, created it, financed it completely, and I don’t think it’s going to end well because we are not backing off. This is the Russian interest, it is on their borders, man. Think about it. We are going to go to a potential World War III situation for Ukraine? Don’t you think that’s crazy? The American people haven’t been consulted about that. Do they really know what’s going on? Do they know about the agreements with Gorbachev? Do they know how the Russians think? That’s why I went to Russia, because I wanted to get the point of view of these people at war with them. Now, whether you admit it or not, Mr. Biden has very clearly called Putin a bad actor and so forth, a butcher. And on top of that, he’s saying, we’ve got to weaken Russia. He said that that’s our policy to weaken Russia basically to disappear it, get rid of Putin, and to cut Russia up into three different four sectors and give Wall Street access to their resources. That’s a crazy tactical goal. It won’t work because Russia is united and strong and at the same time, proud. I mean, you can’t do this to Russia. This is what the United States is doing and creating a block of Western countries, European countries that want to end Russia, end the Russian experiment. With who?

DEADLINE: Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comic actor who became a world famous political figure as Ukraine president leading the resistance against Putin and Russia. His rise is as unlikely as that of Lula.

STONE: He’s the underdog. The problem is I despise him because he promised when he was elected that he was a peace candidate. The moment he got elected, I presume he made some effort to settle this thing, and he almost did. Ukraine is not in charge of its approach. It’s been told to them by the United States, we’ll support you on these conditions. We want you to be our democratic flag bearer in far East of Europe. We will fight for you. We will support you. We’ll give you all the money you need. All we want you is to give, put your men on the front line and keep fighting. But eventually there’s going to be a breakthrough. And that breakthrough, as I said to you, I think it’s been more likely that the Russians will step up and really fight. They haven’t done that yet. They’ve have limited goals.

DEADLINE: Are there echoes here of Vietnam, which you covered in a Best Picture winning film Platoon, recounting your own experience of buying into a U.S. agenda that led you to volunteer to fight, only to find you were way over your head in a chaotic war that had no endgame. and seemingly little regard for the soldiers in the trenches just trying to survive?

STONE: You are as old as I am, almost. You’ve seen this process. We fought for certain places. We made this into a Cold War, but now we’re way past the Cold War. This is not communism. This is another form of Russia. And they’re capitalists. They want to integrate. They did integrate for 20 years, successfully. Why all of a sudden did Biden change the rules? This is very disturbing to me and very dangerous to us, our economy. Imagine if we had even a limited nuclear war with Russia, what happens to not only Russia, but to America? I want the United States to be at peace and I don’t want a war, and we don’t need this. There’s no need to fight a war. And that is what concerns me.

-Mike Fleming Jr., "Cannes Conversation With Oliver Stone On New Documentary ‘Lula,’ Hopes For One More Narrative Film & A Sobering Take On Putin & Ukraine," Deadline, May 19 2024

#Oliver Stone #Cannes 2024 #Cannes film festival #Lula #Snowden #the untold history of the United States #deadline #the Putin interviews #election 2024 #joe biden #Donald Trump #mike Fleming

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Blowback

”I’ve enjoyed dope for more than 40 years,“ Oliver Stone says, speaking by phone from his Los Angeles office. “It started in Vietnam, I was a soldier. I showed it in Platoon. Half the platoons were getting high—not in the field, but in the back, and it made that whole experience survivable to a large degree. I don’t think I would have kept my humanity without it. Getting high was an antidote to the madness we were surrounded by. I’m very serious about that. The music and the dope.”

I’m talking to Stone about his latest film, Savages, the story of a couple of high-end hydroponic pot growers—rock stars of the Southern California boutique marijuana scene—who run afoul of a ruthless Mexican cartel angling for a cut of their business. It is, I think, his best movie in years: a ripe, wildly energetic caper—a Stone(r) noir, if you will—that also provides a sharper snapshot of the way we live now than the more overtly topical World Trade Center, W., and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. International diplomacy and the state of the economy are very much on Stone’s mind here too, but the politics are niftily concealed by a vibrant genre-movie surface; striking, color-saturated visuals; and the toned, tanned bodies of a sexy young cast in various states of rest and motion. Think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (a movie Savages directly makes reference to) if Butch, Sundance, and Etta were a full-blown ménage à trois. Think They Live by Night with surfboards and tattoos.

Adapted by Stone, Shane Salerno, and Don Winslow from Winslow’s compulsively readable 2010 novel, Savages follows the perils of Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch), yin-and-yang best buddies who meet cute on the beaches of Laguna and soon go into business together. They use primo seeds ferried back by Navy SEAL Chon from the Afghan war zone to cultivate a highly potent strain of weed whose profits in turn fund the new-agey Ben’s third-world nonprofit. The two friends share home and hearth with the movie’s narrator, O (Blake Lively), a burnt-orange beach bunny who claims to love the two men in her life equally, though perhaps that love is not quite as intense as their own bromance. Then into this progressive love nest comes a missive from the cartel honcho known as Elena “La Reina” (Salma Hayek), who makes Ben and Chon an offer they can’t refuse: join forces with her or else it will be O’s decapitated head they find under their communal sheets.

The cartel in the film behaves like a corporation—Wal-Mart by way of Monsanto—wanting to co-opt not only Ben and Chon’s distribution network, but their seed-growing technology too. And everyone is, literally or figuratively, in bed with everyone—the cartel with American Indian reservations, the DEA (in the person of John Travolta’s deeply compromised agent) with the dealers and the growers alike—leading to a wild, loop-de-loop climax that may leave some wondering if THC has somehow been piped into the cinema.

Savages presents a fascinating cycle of subterranean trade: high-quality Afghan weed makes its way to Southern California as a kind of byproduct of the war over there, and ex-SEALs use their military training and weaponry against the Mexican cartel in a new kind of war zone.

I don’t want to be preachy, but that ties in to my belief that blowback exists in this world. You don’t go fight foreign wars and expect them to stay there. The blowback comes, and not only in the form of Osama bin Laden in 2001. We have so many wounded people from the two Iraqs and Afghanistan, people with diseases and concussions and maimed limbs. There’s tremendous callousness in the country and it destroys us, and in a strange way Don Winslow caught that in his book with this idea of these soldiers becoming active here. In Vietnam we always thought that we’d come back and we’d make a difference here in this country; we’d lead the revolution against Nixon. I love the idea that this kid Chon just takes things in his own fucking hands. He doesn’t go crying to the cops—there’s no cops to cry to. They drive around on bicycles in Laguna. So he gets his RPGs and his IEDs and he fucking does it with real hardcore veterans. I loved that idea of war coming home to roost.

The depiction of the Mexican cartel is unusual in that the characters are quite three-dimensional, particularly Salma Hayek’s Elena, who has a fraught relationship with her twentysomething daughter, and who ends up treating O as a kind of surrogate daughter when she kidnaps her.

We always thought of it that way. We also had scenes with Uma Thurman as the mother of O—they were good scenes that were funny, actually. But with the movie being two hours and 10 minutes now, we were concerned. John Travolta’s character also had a wife, and there was a tender scene between them. And there was a very interesting side story with Lado, Benicio’s character—we had Mia Maestro as his wife, and we see that she is trying to make their children into Californians and the kids disgust him because they don’t have any of the old-fashioned ways that he wants. But we had to let all that go. What I like about the movie is that it has a tension to it, and I think it keeps you going, wanting to know what’s going to happen next, and it doesn’t let up.

The three leads have a terrific chemistry together. They really click in a way that gives the movie a lot of energy. How did you decide on the casting?

Aaron was the first one in. I met him and I just fell for his charm. We met in London and I said, “I don’t know which one you should play, but I want you to do this movie.” He was getting hot, he had done Kick-Ass and I had liked him in that. He was being offered a big role, and it was a big deal for him, but he gave up the [other] movie because he loved this idea so much. Then I saw Taylor in Friday Night Lights and an early version of Battleship and thought he was dead-on for Chon. So that made Aaron Ben. Blake came about after Jennifer Lawrence dropped out to make The Hunger Games. It was a difficult movie because she had Gossip Girl shooting 10 months a year, so she had to fly to New York practically every fucking day. She was working monster hours, as they do on TV. We stayed on schedule, but it was a difficult shoot.

The film feels in some ways like a sibling to Natural Born Killers and U-Turn in its ferocious pacing and the hyperreality of the imagery—the intensity of the sunlight and the bold primary colors.

Let’s put it this way: it was going to be a sun movie, which is to say Mexico, the South. The colors were intended to be primary, and I drove everyone a little bit crazy with that. Early on, I screened Contempt for [cinematographer] Dan Mindel, and I said, “I want these colors.” We had great sun all summer, we were shooting outdoors, we shot with windows, we shot with light, we tried to use as much beach life as we could. At one point, I went out on the set and screamed that I wanted towels, as many bright yellows and blues as possible, to get rid of the weaker colors that were sneaking in. Sometimes set designers want to have that tasteful balance, and I said, “No! We want excess!” Flowers, paintings, everything we could do to get some color in there, including bringing standby painters in and just slapping a wall together if we had to at the last second. My references in this were certainly Contempt, but also Duel in the Sun—I saw that several times when I was young, and I saw it again recently, and it’s just beautifully done. The showdown scene at the end was sort of an homage to that. Also to Leone.

To wit, the movie’s score has a strong spaghetti Western feel to it.

It’s funny you should say that, because I went about 10 rounds on U-Turn with Ennio Morricone. It was the only time I worked with him, and I never worked with someone so difficult in my life. It was a creative collaboration, but I think I’m the only American director who made him return to America a second time—he doesn’t like to travel—because I was unhappy. At one point in our collaboration, I actually showed him a Road Runner cartoon and I said, “This is the type of music I want you to write.” And he looked at me with a cold stare and said, “You want me to write cartoon music?” But if you listen to U-Turn, there’s a lot of boings and bings and bangs.

On Savages, I didn’t really know what the sound should be. There was a guy, Adam Peters, who I’d used on The Untold History of the United States, and he did great work for me. He’s English, so he’s not at all of the Italian style, but he adapted. As with Natural Born Killers and Any Given Sunday, we used a lot of needle drops, a lot of Mexican music. We listened to all the narcocorridos, but we didn’t end up using any of those. We put Brahms in under the sex scene at the very beginning because I wanted the movie to have some tenderness and romance. There has to be that element like in Duel in the Sun where you feel for these people—they’re young, they’re tender, they’re at the mercy of the world, they’re in danger, and they’re in love.

How do you interpret the love triangle at the center of the film? Do Ben and Chon really love each other—as Elena intimates—more than they do O?

I don’t know. I did look at Butch Cassidy before we shot the movie, and it’s interesting, because Katharine Ross is with both men, but it’s so hidden in the movie that you barely notice it. Certainly, Butch Cassidy was considered, even at the time, a bit homoerotic. O has her own journey, too. She lives through this thing and she has to find herself, through this process of looking at death so clearly. She says toward the end: “I don’t think it’s possible for three people to be equally in love.” Which indicates that she’s thought about what Elena says to her in the dinner scene: “Something’s fucked up about your love story, baby.”

What is the current status of your Showtime miniseries, The Untold History of the United States?

It grew out of my desire to leave something behind. I’m aware of what my three children studied in American History and I’m aware of what I studied in American History, and I feel like we were all cheated by the book publishers and by the schools. In my case, it grew into a mythology about the United States that was very dangerous, because among other things I went to Vietnam under the belief that we were fighting the demon enemy: Communism. And what we did in Vietnam was so heinous, so evil, and it bothers me still that it was never apologized for, nothing changed, and we went to more wars. So in 2008, around the time I was doing W., I started this project. It was designed to be 10 chapters about the mythologies of American history, going back to 1945 and the bomb and working our way through to 2012. It’s an upside-down version of American history, which is to say it takes everything you thought you knew about America and questions it. Anyway, it turned into a monstrosity. It went two years over and took a lot of time. Writing history for film is the hardest thing in the world, and I’ve been giving all my free time to it when I haven’t been making other films. It was originally scheduled for May, but when Universal moved Savages to July, we and Showtime decided to push it back to November because we didn’t want to overlap. We’re working like dogs on it as we speak. We keep revising, fact-checking. Things change. It’s a bitch.

Savages ultimately feels like the work of a filmmaker reborn. If you watched it without knowing who directed it, you might think it was the work of a first- or second-timer fresh from film school or music videos, showing us everything he can do, in case he never gets to do it again.

It’s really my third or fourth childhood, because I’ve had these kinds of periods before. Bear in mind that I did Platoon when I was 37. To me, part of me had died in Vietnam, and to finally get a chance to make a movie about Vietnam in 1986 when I was almost 40, I felt like an old man then. I was going back to my 20-year-old self, and being in the jungle with Charlie Sheen and all those young dudes, I was the old guy. Life is like that—you get old, you get young, you get old, you get young. That’s happened to me repeatedly. Natural Born Killers was an enormous explosion of energy at a time when I was getting divorced and my life was falling apart and I was in a very dark place and I just said, “Fuck it.” So the answer is, I felt very old on the movie at times, because it was such hard work, and to get out of your chair for the hundredth time of the day and have to walk over to some young person and talk them through the whole thing again… What am I doing out here in 100-degree heat at Pyramid Lake? But it’s the idea that keeps it alive.

As a director, you sometimes feel like you’re the most loathed person, because you’re telling everyone what to do. And most people in life, myself included, don’t like to be in control all the time. I don’t enjoy it. But once in a while, you have to go out there for 60, 70, 80 days and you’ve got to be in charge and you’ve got to be tough to bring it together, because it’s tremendously logistically complex, and if you have 16 competing visions or even two competing visions, it won’t work. Every time you direct, it’s a tremendous effort. It’s like mounting the D-Day invasion. I’ve made 19 movies and they were 19 wars.

-Scott Foundas, "Blowback," Film Comment, July-August 2012

#Oliver Stone #film comment #savages #divorce #drugs #marijuana #aaron taylor johnson #taylor kitsch #blake lively #Salma Hayek #dope #cinematography #colors #natural born killers

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back-and-totheleft · 26 days

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Embarrassed to be an American

Q: "You start JFK with the sentence, 'Today I'm embarrassed to be an American." Are there any days where you feel embarrassed to be an American, these days?'"

A: "I should be embarrassed about watching Joe Biden throw his arms around Benjamin Netanyahu and say, 'We're behind you, pal. We're supporting all your plans in Gaza.' I should be embarrassed about that, no? You see the destruction of Gaza - the killing of so many women, so many children, so many innocent civilians. Destruction of what? I mean, it's just madness. […] America sends out bombs every day. We're droning the world. It's the war on terror. We declared war not against one country, not against two countries, we declared war on 'terror.' It's an adjective. It's abstract. Anything they don't like, they will bomb."

-Oliver Stone at the Millenium Documentary Film Festival in Brussels, May 24 2024 [x]

#oliver stone #quotes #free Palestine #israel gaza war #benjamin netanyahu #Israel #Gaza

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back-and-totheleft · 29 days

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"Corruption is a way of life"

Oliver Stone is talking about “Lula,” his new documentary about Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which is premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, when the conversation turns to American politics. The conspiracy-minded director, who’s never seen a grassy knoll without glimpsing a second gunman on it, is drawing an analogy between Lula’s political travails, involving a corruption investigation that led to a 580-day prison stint, and those of Donald Trump. That’s when the film’s publicist interjects and politely tries to steer the topic back to the documentary. But Stone waves him off and plunges ahead.

“The charges on both sides of the Trump-Biden election are pretty wild — that Biden is corrupt and Trump is corrupt,” he says. “It’s a new form of warfare. It’s called lawfare. And that’s what they’re using against Trump. And I think there’s interesting parallels here in America, as well as all over the world, you’re seeing this kind of behavior. [Trump’s] got four trials and some of these charges, whether you’re for him or against him, they are minor.”

Stone, who, it should be said, is no fan of Trump, argues that corruption is just a constant throughout human history. Too much was made of it when it came to Lula — Stone doesn’t buy the claims the Brazilian president was guilty of money laundering, noting that he lives “modestly” — and he believes that corruption is a charge leveled against political figures without examining the root causes of the rot.

“Corruption is a way of life,” Stone says. “It goes back to the Greeks, the Romans, and before that the Babylonians, There’s corruption all through history, so let’s not be Pollyannas about it and think we’re ‘America the clean’ and we’re better than anybody else. That’s such bullshit.”

Stone goes on to suggest that the more pernicious problem in politics is money. “If you’re a poor man or a middle-class man it’s very hard to run for office in the United States, unless you have money and corporate sponsors. Money controls politics in the United States. If you go to European countries, you’ll find that their elections are very mandated. The British elections are very low cost, or they used to be until recently. In France, they have election rules. And we need that in the United States. Let’s get the money out of the politics.”

But I’m not following Stone. What does the high cost of presidential elections have to do with Trump’s legal travails? I wonder. After all, Trump’s trials involve mishandling of classified documents, as well as allegations that he obstructed attempts to retrieve those files; illegal efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat; and claims he falsified business records in order to mask his pay off to an adult film actress. Stone doesn’t directly answer the question.

“In a broad sense of the word, it’s manipulation of your office,” Stone says. “You’re trying to control what the perception of you is in the public eye. And if you’re willing to pay money for that. That’s part of the concept of corruption, isn’t it?”

Frankly, I’m baffled. Is Stone suggesting people should just shrug off corruption because there were crooked politicians in Ancient Rome too? After all, poverty, armed conflicts and other terrible things have been recurring themes of human history. Shouldn’t we still try to alleviate them?

“That’s how things are,” Stone counters. “There is life, there is death and there’s corruption. But it’s a scale. You can’t point fingers at another country and say that is a corrupt country and that president has to be removed from office or we have to attack them or end a regime. Who are we to say those things when we are deeply corrupt? Look at the [two] parties. We should be multi-party and we should have public money in politics like they do in Poland. Or look at the English and the French models.”

But if he’s a skeptic about the court cases against Trump, Stone is a Lula convert. He believes the Brazilian leader, who served two terms in office from 2003 to 2011, before mounting a remarkable comeback that saw him defeat Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election, is a hero. He credits him with lifting millions of people out of poverty and strengthening Brazil’s social safety net.

“He had two tremendously productive terms as president. It was beautiful; you couldn’t have asked for a better two terms,” Stone says. He’s pleased by Lula’s approach since coming back into power. “I like his fighting spirit,” Stone offers. “I love how he’s made it clear that we’re not going to have fascists in our government, and we’re going to run a clean government.”

Stone’s documentary details Lula’s fall from grace as well as the many twists and turns that led to his conviction getting overturned. By then, public opinion had shifted in the former president’s favor after it was revealed that Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw a larger corruption probe into misappropriation of public funds, had improperly colluded with prosecutors to build a case against Lula. Moro also raised eyebrows after he took a post in Bolsonaro’s government as Minister of Justice.

“There was serious evidence of misconduct on Moro’s part,” Stone says. “He was like a Torquemada — he just became excessive in his zeal for reformation.”

Moro also reportedly shared information with FBI agents and U.S. officials about his probe into Lula. Stone sees this as further evidence of American meddling in the region, something he notes the U.S. has done for decades in countries like Chile and El Salvador.

“We have a horrible record in South America going through many years of interventions,” Stone says. “Recently, it’s been quiet on that front, but who knows what’s really going on?”

Stone doesn’t rule out the possibility that the U.S. government played a role in the death of Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chavez from cancer in 2013.

“He died very mysteriously,” Stone asserts. “He had a very sudden cancer that came on quickly. If you know the history of deaths from quick cancers like [Lee Harvey Oswald assassin] Jack Ruby, you have to begin to question if there’s something mysterious going on? Certainly, a lot of Venezuelans believe [there was U.S. involvement]. But we don’t know and we can’t prove it. But still, there is a shadow.”

As for the razor-thin Brazilian presidential election of 2022, Stone makes it clear that the stakes could not have been higher. Bolsonaro and his right-wing forces were threatening all sorts of anti-democratic crackdowns, but rising crime made his authoritarianism attractive to many voters. He had also opened up the Amazon to more logging, mining and other industries, which posed an existential threat to the environment, Stone argues. Lula, in contrast, pledged to reduce deforestation and institute stricter environmental controls.

“It was very close,” Stone says. “But Brazil has had a good democracy for a while, and I’m so happy that they kept it. When we were making the film, you could see it on people’s faces, their love for their democracy.”

Stone hasn’t made a feature film since 2016’s “Snowden” with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the controversial whistleblower. Instead, he’s busied himself making documentaries on the JFK assassination and nuclear power. But he says he’s almost ready to roll cameras on a new narrative film, which he’s writing with journalist and “The Devil’s Chessboard” author David Talbot.

“I can’t tell you what it’s about,” he says. “We’ve done several drafts and we’re getting there. I hope to make it next year.”

Even at 77, there are still dark chapters of human history and shadowy conspiracies Stone still needs to examine and untangle.

-Brent Lang, "Oliver Stone on New Cannes Documentary ‘Lula,’ Donald Trump’s Trials and Money in Politics: ‘Corruption Is a Way of Life,'" Variety, May 18 2024

#oliver stone #Lula #cannes 2024 #Cannes film festival #variety #election 2024

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back-and-totheleft · 30 days

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"America's on a road to war"

Brainy political lightning rod Oliver Stone isn’t making feature films anymore. Sure, he’d love to add a 21st to his 20 films to date; he just can’t find backers. His alternate route, like many other directors today, from fellow Cannes entrant Ron Howard (“Jim Henson: Idea Man”) to Martin Scorsese, is documentaries.

Stone has churned out a career total of ten, including recent 2021 Cannes entry “JFK Revisited” (Showtime) and 2022 eco-doc “Nuclear” (Abramorama). His latest, “Lula,” marks a move to the left from his much-criticized recent portraits of right-wing leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro (HBO’s “Comandante”) and Russia’s Vladimir Putin (Showtime’s four-part “The Putin Interviews“).

Since his start as a filmmaker in the 1970s, the Yale-grad-turned-Vietnam-vet, now 77, has leaned into political fiction, from “Salvador,” “Wall Street,” and “W.,” to Best Director Oscar-winners “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July.” His last Oscar nomination came in 1996, for “Nixon,” after earning three Oscar nominations including Best Picture in 1992 for the controversial global smash “JFK.”

More informed than most, historian Stone’s complex global viewpoint is more nuanced than the current polarized American political landscape will tolerate. He has alienated folks on every side of the political debate. He has been criticized for promoting violence with “Natural Born Killers,” celebrating a whistleblower in “Snowden,” and conducting affable documentary interviews with Castro and Putin. “My main causes are America and keeping peace in the world,” said Stone at the Hotel du Cap outside Cannes. “And America plays a fundamental role there. And unfortunately, we’ve been bad boys.”

Now he’s taking a walk on the Left side with “Lula,” co-directed with frequent collaborator Rob Wilson, a friendly portrait of Brazil’s working-class hero president Lula da Silva, who never finished school, learned to read at ten, built a labor movement, commanded an 83 percent approval rating when he left office in 2011, and then was thrown in jail on a trumped up charge by the right-leaning courts, abetted by the corporate-owned right-wing media, opening up a path for controversial right-wing Jair Bolsonaro to win the office of president.

Stone got help from Brazilian Oscar-nominated filmmaker Petra Costa, whose 2019 “Edge of Democracy” covered the way the right wing took over the elections in Brazil. “Her film is definitely worth seeing and we’re not trying to go into that depth because her film is directed at her country,” he said. “This one is directed more at the rest of the world. I wouldn’t say news is being broken, but the story is unknown to the U.S..”

Stone again is in the Cannes Official Selection hoping to make a sale in a challenging market for non-fiction fare. Showtime is no more. “Like Francis [Coppola], we’re out there,” said Stone. “I saw him. He’s quite ballsy. And it’s his own money.”

He also relies on reporting from controversial journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped to break the Edward Snowden NSA whistleblower scandal. “Glenn Greenwald is the Donald Sutherland figure from ‘JFK’ in this movie,” said Stone, “who’s giving all of the background to the audience in a quick and concise manner.”

When Stone went on a South American tour, he interviewed seven leftist presidents for documentary “South of the Border” (2009), including Lula during his first term in office. “Lula is a beautiful, extraordinary story,” said Stone. “It’s just to give credit to a man who has been around a long time. It’s a movie, if you think about it: working class hero emerges out of nowhere. He’s got no education. I don’t think he even learned how to read until he was about ten. It’s from the bootstraps up and dire poverty. He worked his way up to the trade union ladder. And he got into union leadership, which is unbelievable, because the Workers Party was not a big deal back then. And he made the Workers Party over time, into one of the leading power centers in Brazil, which, given how the [country] was stacked against lower classes, is an amazing story. As if Eugene Debs became president of the United States.”

More viewers in the U.S. would likely recognize the flamboyant Bolsonaro, who is constantly in the news, more than Lula. “I didn’t realize until looking at all the news reports recently,” said Stone, “how blunt Bolsonaro has been about calling for a coup everywhere.”

What got Bolsonaro into office after Brazil’s most popular president ever was lawfare. “[Lula] leaves office in 2011 with an approval rating of 83 percent,” said Stone. “How often do you get that when you’re a president of any country? It goes to show that there was a huge, almost unanimous approval of him after eight years, where all the media is controlled by rich people. And they’re definitely to the right over there in South America. He goes, they vote for his favorite candidate, Dilma Rousseff, who’s an important, extraordinary woman. She turns and becomes president and in her second term, they start to revolt. The right wing begins to activate strongly. And they impeached her on the basis of bookkeeping bullshit. So they got rid of her very happily. And then they came for Lula.”

The former president is tried and convicted on trumped up charges — that were completely unsubstantiated — by the politically motivated court. Stone starts filming after Lula comes out of the jail after 19 months. “Lawfare is a way to get rid of somebody who’s legitimate by the media and the judiciary,” said Stone. “And they have an independent judiciary in Brazil.”

The question is whether this could happen in the United States. “This guy Bolsonaro came along,” said Stone. “And he was in Congress since the early ’90s. And he’s been calling for a coup since the early ’90s. You can do that in Brazil. In America, they would throw you in jail. You’re not allowed [by law] to call for the overthrow of a government. Trump didn’t cross that line. He never said that. He may have implied it. But no, he was careful about that. Trump keeps saying, ‘I’m a Democrat. People will put me in if you just let me fucking get a little election.’ So there’s similarities to Brazil, for sure. Because look how close Bolsonaro came once Lula got to jail.”

The nailbiter scene in the movie is the 2022 election, as Bolsonaro and Lula watch the numbers come in over a long, long night. “The mentality in Brazil is that we need law and order,” said Stone. “Law and order is a big deal. People get that it’s a stock phrase, think of Nixon: ‘Law and order, law and order.’ It seems to work. It registers with the poor, it registers with the rich, it registers with the middle class especially. And that’s what Bolsonaro has been saying all along: ‘We need a cleaning out of the government, we need to have military people running the show. They know what they’re doing.'”

The vote among the Brazilians was close. In the end, Lula wins. “In this whole thing, Lula has been very cool,” said Stone. “And let this thing play out. But Lula is interested in a bigger picture of running the country and making it work. So that the people’s party, the Workers Party will stay in power, or at least be close to the levers of power.”

One reason Lula stayed in power so long was that the economy was flourishing. “So even the people that wouldn’t support him later, were supporting him then because they benefited. Lula is instructive for audiences in the US. It’s good to know that a person can get elected, serve two terms, deliver for people and leave office.”

President Biden is doing measurably well in terms of the economy and helping people get the things that they need to lead a decent life. But his approval rating remains low, at 38 percent, because of the right wing media’s dominant alternate narratives. Stone is a Democrat who voted twice for Barack Obama, but disapproves of Biden’s stance on Ukraine. “I don’t like Trump,” he said. “Maybe I like Kennedy. You have to allow for that choice. Because I don’t read the media religiously. I do not buy their line. America’s on a road to war, and I don’t think it’s a good one. Just today we raised the number of our commitment to Ukraine, so we have to be careful. This is how you get to a War World War I situation. I’ve been a fan of peace.”

Next up: Stone has been writing a second book, the follow up to “Chasing the Light,” “which is a bitch,” he said. “The whole thing has been hard to do; 40 years telling a long story short.”

Stone’s long-gestating memoir film “White Lies” is not getting made: “It doesn’t deserve the fate it would get in studio hands. I am pursuing something. I’ve got one more. Fernando Sulichin is producing it. And Rob [Wilson] is involved. But I’m old. I’m not as independently wealthy as Francis [Ford Coppola]. Like everybody else, I’m subject to market conditions and actors. Getting the right elements together and the budget and by God, by the time you make a movie, you’re dead. Even when you start, you’re dead, right?”

-Anne Thompson, "Oliver Stone: ‘America’s on a Road to War, and I Don’t Think It’s a Good One," IndieWire, May 24 2024

#oliver stone #Anne Thompson #indiewire #Lula #cannes 2024 #cannes film festival #bolsonaro #election 2024

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