Oliver Stone: The First Stone

Q: Did you really once slip LSD into your father's drink?

A: [Laughs] Yes. If I tell the story I hope you put it in a context, because people don't understand that stuff and that's why I get this reputation as a crazy man. I'm not crazy. I was at war with my father. I came back from Vietnam and he was treating me like a child. It was a very tough situation. I didn't know where the fuck I was. I was living in the East Village here and there, I had an apartment I had painted all red. And he was ragging me about Vietnam--which he called a police action, like in Korea. Well, it may have been to him, by the size of WWII standards, but when you're in combat, you're in combat. It was pretty rough for me. I wanted to be treated like a man, which he wouldn't do.

Q: So when did you put acid in his drink?

A: I was doing acid and a lot of marijuana and I was talking like a black kid, which drove him nuts: "Man. Groovy. Wow." I'd been influenced by the black troops--that's where I learned how to smoke dope. My father just loathed everything about my habits after I returned from the war. I didn't have any respect for the old forms and I was struggling to find my way. So we just clashed one too many times and I'd just fucking had it, [and] I put the goddamn acid in his scotch. We were playing chess and all of a sudden you could see his face change [laughs]. We were at a dinner party in the Hamptons. These unbelievably sexy women were there--not for me, they were more his friends. He always liked women, my dad. He was a bachelor then, divorced. And he was standing out in the garden holding onto a tree--the whole world was moving. And he had this dream about African women and he could hear the drumbeat. There were 13 people at the dinner, I'll never forget that. He stopped in the middle of the dinner--there was a silent pause, you could hear the silverware clank--and he said, "Who's the Judas at the table?" He looked around and I kept a straight face. He was out of his mind, but he loved it--he knew that he'd been on something.

Q: Did he know it was you?

A: I think he did. I denied it the next day, but he suspected me, and years later he laughed about it. Maybe it changed his life, maybe that's the reason he became much more liberal. I felt that you needed a revolution to knock their fucking heads off. These people were so hidebound, they were just not open to reality. The problem to me, overall, with society is that establishment people who get the power are always out of touch with reality. They lose it, because all they do is wear blinders to get there. Even I do it. They lose touch with that common ground that we have, like being in the Army, being in Vietnam. Those people forgot what war was like. Neil Sheehan called it the "disease of victory" from WWII. It's a good line. So Dad, I wanted to knock his block off. I wanted to wake him up. I was into radical solutions. I wanted to join the Panthers. I wanted to go to Washington, be involved in protests and revolution.

Q: Did any of the bad acid trips you took ever scare you?

A: I was scared shitless. I took it alone, in the worst circumstances. I took it on the New York fucking subway one time. I was just out of my mind. I would challenge myself in the worst places. I got busted and went to prison in San Diego, coming back from Mexico with grass. That was a horrible experience.

Q: How long were you in prison?

A: Almost two weeks. I couldn't get the public defender to come and get me. My dad didn't know I was back from Vietnam at that point. When I called my dad, I said, "Dad, I'm back, that's the good news." [Laughs]

Q: You first went to Vietnam for idealistic reasons--to teach. But then you returned as an infantry soldier, to fight against the same people. How does that play with your mind?

A: You're the first person who knows these facts about me who's asked that question. It's a very good question. There's a dramatic turn in character there, part of the mystery of this life. My theory is that I was in hell in New York City and I was going to go deeper into hell until I got out of hell. I was reading Hemingway and Conrad. A man had to test himself in life. That was the way I accepted it. Of course, I believed that communism was dangerous, my father had convinced me of that. And I was driven partly by self-destruction. I was disgusted with myself, loathed myself for being vain and pretentious, so concerned about only myself--the opposite of my father's philosophy. Out of this need to destroy Oliver Stone I became William Stone again. William Oliver Stone was my bom name. So I split my personalities. In all the institutions I was William.

Q: It's been said about you that you were the only person who went to Vietnam to chill out.

A: Yeah, right. But I wasn't the only one. [Laughs]

Q: When did the reality of being a soldier in Vietnam set in?

A: The first day. Like with the Platoon character. I had to cut point my first fucking day.

Q: You've said that you smoked dope in combat. Wasn't that a little dicey?

A: I didn't go into combat on dope. We smoked in rear areas, where we felt safe. Maybe I said I was in an area around the beach one day, patrolling, and I got stoned and then something happened in the afternoon, so I was stoned by accident and went into a situation that turned into a major battle. I did all right. In fact, fuck it, I forgot this! I just remembered--I won the Bronze Medal that day. So dig that--for some reason I was bolder and more intense about the experience. I fought more intensely and threw a perfect grenade that killed a man. I killed a man. That was the first man I killed that I really saw.

Q: You've said you felt you couldn't be an honest person until you knew what war and killing were. Did killing make you an honest man?

A: I was 20. I felt I had to define myself, to go through fire in order to be a man.

Q: Did you once stop some soldiers from raping a village girl?

A: Yeah. One of the good things I did. I [also] saved some drowning people once. I think I prevented a couple of killings. I tried to help out where I could. It was a tough situation. It was racist. You were taught to distrust the civilian "gooks." You were supposed to treat them as aliens. And I fell into some of that.

Q: Did you feel like an alien yourself when you left the army?

A: When I came back I was shocking to my father and friends. I couldn't resume old friendships. All my contacts had to be new. That's where acid came into play--you'd meet people under acid trips and you'd become friends with them. Strange girls, strange apartments, strange friends. I joined Scientology for a few weeks because I was chasing some girls. It was a free-floating existence.

Q: Did the experience of surviving in Vietnam unleash confidence and creativity in a way that might not have otherwise happened with you?

A: It comes from that, absolutely. But it was unleashed before [too]. My mind was in search of adventure and experience. Experience was the only way I could authenticate myself, because I'd grown up in a family where certain things were [just] given to me. It was like the Buddha--he grew up sheltered and his father and mother tried to keep him away from anything ugly for many years. And then one day he saw, by accident, an old man and he thought that was horrible, because old people had been kept away from him. [So] he went out into the world, and he walked away from all of it to follow the path that had come to him.

Q: In an interview a few years ago, you admitted you continue to smoke pot and take psychedelics. Do drugs take more of a toll on you as you get older?

A: Alcohol is harder to recover from as you get older. I view life as a drug. Life is dangerous. We wear down. Life hits our nervous system; it stresses us. The stress factor is the biggest drug of all. People who separate drugs into a category of pharmaceuticals and grass miss the point of the damage of life to our system. I also think we create drugs in our bodies. The hormonal balances we have create our own drug system. We have to move away from thinking of drugs as a separate species. Marijuana, if anything, has a beneficial long-term effect on your life span--it slows you down, calms you, it's enjoyable. You can use any drug, including psychedelics, effectively to improve your life. Which is why God put them here.

Q: If you could rewrite the Constitution, what changes would you make?

A: I never thought about it. I would remind people that we're dedicated also to the pursuit of pleasure as human beings. We have the right to happiness and pleasure, and that includes our marijuana--our home-grown, natural, God-given plants. Nobody said they have the right to get into our abortions, to our private bodies, and the government keeps encroaching on that.

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Next month Lawrence Grobel talks to Oliver Stone about his career as a filmmaker, his view of critics, and his assessment of his own work.

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