Oliver Stone: The First Stone

Q: When you hear that two people watched your film repeatedly and took acid and went on a killing spree, doesn't that get to you somehow?

A: I'm not responsible for the audience and their reaction. If there's a psycho, a moron, somebody who says, "That's the way it happened, Mickey and Mallory are my heroes," then that person lacks the ingredients for living in society, period. That person is fucked if he sees Pulp Fiction or Bugsy or Trainspotting-- anything can kick it off. Where does it end? Who is declaring what's responsible and what's irresponsible? Natural Bom Killers was done as a mirror that says: this is what we are, this is what you're getting, this is the world you're surrounded by, this is our valueless, junk-filled society. Some people see Natural Bom Killers and say, "Robert Downey Jr.'s my hero." I still can't believe that! He's a shallow, craven monster. And people come up to me and say, "He was cool. I really felt sorry when that guy dies." What!? I'm not responsible if that's what they think.

Q: When you were a boy, was there anybody you wanted to be like?

A: There was a lot of hero identification. First as a novelist: Norman Mailer was a hero, J.P. Donleavy, Joseph Conrad. I wrote novels when I was a kid. I read a lot of fiction when I was in Vietnam the first and second time, and when I was drifting around. I started to write my own novel, which was called A Child's Night Dream. It was based on the language of Joyce and Donleavy and Joyce Cary. The book had different styles to every chapter. It was like a prism, like Natural Bom Killers.

Q: I read that you tossed it into a river after several publishers rejected it.

A: Half of it was lost. What was left was a bunch of pages all over the place. It was never finished. I threw away some of it. The rest was in a shoebox for most of the '70s. Then finally in the '90s I pulled it out because I'd mentioned it in an interview and an editor at St. Martin's Press asked to read it. I gave it to him without sorting out the pages. He read it and he found something there that he felt was special. After Nixon came out, I took six months and reedited and rewrote some sections.

Q: Will the critical reception of your novel be as important to you as any of your films?

A: It's hard to say. I wouldn't judge the book on failure or success. I like it. It achieved what the boy I was set out to do. He'd be happy with it, that's enough. I don't care if it's ignored. I would be surprised if it was understood and accepted readily.

Q: Will you read the reviews?

A: It all depends. If they're going to destroy me, no. But it's well written--there's some wonderful writing there. The problem is that it will perhaps only be paid attention to because of my film background.

Q: You'd prefer to be thrown in the ring against Conrad?

A: I was affected most by Conrad. Lord Jim put me into Asia for the first time. My book is about three continents: Europe, America and Asia. My mom was French, so I had a European [as well as American] identity. Part one is America; part two is Asia; part three is trying to get back home. So it's about time and about adolescence. How do you bum off your old life? How do you come around to be an authentic human being? That's basically my quest through the movies too. The novel moves by free association through time--it's Proustian, really. In its intensity, it's closest to Celine's Journey to the End of Night, which very much influenced me.

Q: Is it also about all the ways your character tries to kill himself?

A: There is a strong suicide theme. We ignore it, but kids commit suicide a lot, especially now. Back then, same thing. Holden Caulfield comes from the same darkness: boarding school. I was very influenced by that--I left Hill School for two days as a result of Catcher in the Rye. Hid out in the Taft Hotel. Awful experience.

Q: You were an only child, correct?

A: I would have been a different person if I'd had a brother or sister. I was a loner. I didn't get much input.

Q: In your biography, you said your life as a kid was marred by violence. You got into fights, got beaten up and chased.

A: Oh really? That sounds pretty dramatic. [Laughs]

Q: Harrison Ford told a similar tale--but he never fought back.

A: He's a natural bom Buddhist. I don't remember being beaten up as much as chased. And definitely scared, because the gangs in New York at that time were pretty tough. There were Irish gangs, Puerto Rican kids who stole my bus passes and pushed me around. In France, too, there were country gangs who chased me and my cousin in the summer. All of this is in my book, the damage. I was a forceps delivery, and that was very violent. It compresses your head, and there's all this stuff in your body that's the result of that: you get squeezed when you come out, you hit the light, you've got blood, the doctor spanks the shit out of you--it's a terrifying experience. So when I was defending Natural Born Killers I was saying, "Who are we kidding here?" Violence is a way of life. It's part of us. We've got to stop separating violence as if it's some kind of thing you can control. When we acknowledge the violence within us we can begin the journey of having to deal with it. Buddhism is very aware of violence and talks about it, because it understands that it's a part of life.

Q: How deeply are you into Buddhism?

A: Very much so. I practice, I do my meditation every day. I have a guru. It was always part of my life. That's what writing is about. Writing is an act of devotion--it involves the anti-materialistic, it involves spiritual and philosophical concepts. I've been doing that all my life, but I could not find a form in the Christian church that worked for me. In Vietnam, we went to a lot of temples, saw Buddhism all over the place. I loved the East. It changed my life; it was an orphan home for me. My parents had just divorced and I was alone in Asia. I was really alone. So Asia became like a mother. And Buddhism was in there. When I did Heaven & Earth, Le Ly Hayslip [author of the book from which the film is adapted] was a Buddhist, and she made me a member of the Vietnamese Buddhist church. Then I was inducted by Richard Rutowski, who's been a Buddhist for 20 years, into the Tibetan side of it, which is much more accessible to me because of its wild nature. And they speak more English.

Q: Was going to teach in Vietnam in '65 similar to going into the Peace Corps--a sense of idealism?

A: Yeah, I think so, though it was based more on Conrad's concept of there being something mysterious out there. That's what drove me. Maybe I'm flattering myself in hindsight, but it seems to me that I was more interested in knowing about life. There were too many pat answers at Yale and in the East Coast of America--to this day. [Laughs]

Q: How long were you at Yale?

A: A year the first time, half a year the second.

Q: Ever regret leaving Yale?

A: At times I did. It was very scary to leave. The second time, I didn't go to any of the classes, and the dean called me in. I realized it was over. It was sort of an epiphany. And I was scared. I was throwing my fate onto the waters. I didn't know what was going to happen. My dad was giving me a lot of shit because he paid a heavy tuition to send me there, and the money had been forfeited [laughs], and also because it looked like I wouldn't do anything with my life. The months before I volunteered for the draft were some of the darkest. It was winter in New York and I had little light in my apartment. I was writing day and night, no social life, no sex--pure, pure mind mind mind. It was like a monastery experience for me.

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