In part one of the two-part interview, Oliver Stone talks about the new -- his film, U-Turn, and his novel, A Child's Night Dream -- and the old, like the way he lost his virginity, the reason he went to Vietnam, and the time he put LSD in his father's scotch.
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In front of the Santa Monica building where Oliver Stone has his offices, a man with a long white beard, dressed in flowing saffron-colored robes, gets out of a black limousine with Sally Kirkland. The actress is bringing her yoga master, Swami Satchidananda, to meet with Stone, which means my scheduled time with the director will be delayed. And so, as I sit in a room overlooking the ocean, I read the inscriptions on some of the awards Stone has received, one of which is The Torch of Liberty Award presented to him in 1987 by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California: "For your outstanding efforts to broaden the public's understanding of civil liberties and human rights and for letting the light of freedom, justice and equality shine through your motion pictures."
When Stone finishes with the Swami, he takes me on a tour of his offices, introducing me to his editors, assistants and company executives. In the large conference room where he holds readings of scripts with his actors, he shows me framed political cartoons that feature him as a character. In one he is being shot like Oswald was in that Dallas basement; the shooter is not Jack Ruby but the "media critics." "There were dozens of these cartoons," he says. "I'm glad I framed a few of them." He shows me the rows of black file cabinets that are filled with paperwork from all his projects. "I've kept everything," he say: "I'm very paper-conscious. Not that I want to one day give it away or show it. I'd have to go through it and censor myself before I did that. There's some very naked stuff in there. The idea is, the older you get the less you have to hide. It all simplifies down to the basics. At the end of the day, you're shameless. Maybe that's a good thing, because you're ready to move on to another life. It makes it easy to keep calm."
He takes me to a narrow hallway where framed posters of all of his work are hung on both walls. "All in order," he points out, beginning with Seizure, Midnight Express (for which he won an Oscar), The Hand, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, all films he wrote or cowrote. Then Year of the Dragon, Salvador, 8 Million Ways to Die, Platoon (for which he won the Best Director Oscar),_ Wall Street, Talk Radio, Bom on the Fourth of July_ (another Oscar), The Doors, JFK, Heaven & Earth, Natural Bom Killers, Nixon. These will soon be joined by the poster for U-Turn, his new film, which stars Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, Jennifer Lopez, Claire Danes and Joaquin Phoenix.
The son of a French mother and an American Jewish father, Oliver Stone was in boarding school in his teens when his life came apart as his parents divorced and left him on his own. His search for self and adventure provoked him to leave Yale after a brief stay to teach in Vietnam, then to join the merchant marines. He returned briefly to Yale, and then returned to Vietnam as a soldier. Stone's 15 months of infantry life changed him forever. He was wounded twice and awarded medals for heroism. When he returned to America, he was profoundly alienated and spent a number of years writing in confusion and poverty, during which time he attended New York University film school and gradually put together his career as a filmmaker.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: What is your new film U-Turn about?
OLIVER STONE: John Ridley wrote a book called Stray Dogs. The film's essentially his screenplay, but [long-time collaborator] Richard Rutowski and I did a lot of work on it. It's called U-Turn now, because Stray Dogs is not available--it's a Kurosawa title. And U-Turn is what it's about. [Laughs] It's about the day in a life of a man where he reassesses his character. It's a dark tale, but with a lot of humor in it. I've never done a picture like it.
Q: What's the most personal reaction you've gotten to it so far?
A: My 12-year-old son, Sean, saw it. He gave me some shit. He said, "This is worse than Natural Bom Killers, Pop."
Q: More violent?
A: Not violent, sex. I thought this was a tamer film. But he's 12.
Q: I'd never let my 13-year-old daughter see Natural Born Killers.
A: He sees everything. He saw Natural Born Killers in '93 and appreciated it. My ex-wife, his mother, hated it. Hated it. He got it and he explained it to her.
Q: Did she get angry with you for letting him see it?
A: No, he lives in Los Angeles. These kids are exposed to so much on television. There's no V-chip in our house. He's a smart kid. I talked to him before he saw _Natural Bom Killers _and told him what it was about--that it was a send-up of what's around us, a mirror, not condoning of killing.
Q: Is it more difficult to let your son see something sexual or something violent?
A: I don't look at sex and violence as entities, which is how a lot of Puritans look at it. I look at it as a process. I'm much more interested that he understand the nature of the movie, the characters. I don't like him to see pictures that are shallow, where the violence is taken for granted, where people knock each other off, kill 300 Arabs. If the sex and the violence grow out of the character in the story, it makes sense. As long as it's rooted. By the way, Sean stays with me during weekends and he brings over kids from his class and they check through the Internet and they get into the Playboy Web site, Jenny McCarthy and all that soft-porn. It's hard to keep an eye on that. What do you do at that age? They have adolescent urges. You talk about it, you have to deal with it. You can't say, "Put your penis away." There's no such thing as wrong. It's natural. I want to be a good, natural father and discuss things openly with him ahead of time, so then he understands what's happening to him--these feelings, these urges.
Q: Would you show a daughter the same films you show your son?
A: Probably. I have a daughter, she's a year and a half.
Q: When she's eight, will you let her see Natural Bom Killers?
A: Yeah. It depends on how her development comes along, where she's understanding nature and society. If she's ready for it, I'd show it to her. I'm not actively soliciting my children to like my movies.
Q: John Grisham, responding to the information that Natural Bom Killers is linked to more copycat killing than any film ever made, wants you in court. He said, "It will take only one large verdict against the likes of Oliver Stone...then the party will be over."
A: My God. Grisham's world would be a nightmare for everyone, not just me. it would be a legal paradise for lawsuits. He's arguing for product liability, where the products are ideas. Beethoven could be sued for inspiring violence or aggression with the Seventh Symphony. Picasso would be sued for his fractured people, for [encouraging] mutilation. Every single art form would be subject to review. It would be the end of what we call civilization. The end of civilized debate, freedom of expression. Where it becomes hate speech, there is an interesting argument, [but] Natural Bom Killers is an artistic expression; it's a satire.
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.
Q: How much did you heed your father's advice to do something you don't want to do every day?
A: My father also said, "Don't tell the truth. Because the persecutions are going to come again." That was Jewish persecution. He'd say, "Don't tell anybody you're Jewish." Which I wasn't, I was half Jewish. He'd say, "They'll get you, they'll come back." And maybe he was right. We don't know the end of the century yet. He did not want to be a Jew. He didn't practice it, he didn't believe in it, he thought it was a bunch of rabbis with beards and didn't like that ostentation. He was more a man of the '50s, where a man held it all in. You wear short hair, get a haircut every week. He didn't go to church. But he felt communication with a God. He was very much in communication with his God.
Q: Not a liberal God, I take it.
A: No. [Laughs] Not a liberal God. My dad wanted to be a writer. Perhaps in some ways my own life is a working out of some of his secret wishes. As with my mother's life--she wanted to be a movie star. So in some ways, in the movie business I've been able to bring together both parents and fulfill a subconscious desire. But Dad would say, essentially, Stay out of trouble. Be anonymous. Do your work well. Put truth in your work. Don't expect rewards in this life; none of us are getting out of here alive. A man does good work and through time it will be its own reward. Unfortunately, he worked very hard at the stock market, he was one of the best, and he didn't make any money from it at the end of the day. He died in a rented apartment in New York. He left my mother an insurance policy and he left me $19,000. After all those years that was all that was left. When people say I'm from a rich family, it's not quite true, because that implies that you're set for life. I was never set.
Q: As a boy, though, you came from wealth?
A: Privilege. Until I was 14, my life was rock solid like some Tolstoy or Nabokov end-of-the-century story. Then it all fell apart. My father divorced my mother in a horrible 1960s New York adultery-type suit. Private detectives were necessary--you had to prove it. He locked her out of the house, then rented the house and moved to a hotel. My mother had no home and went back to France. I had a family one day and then no family. They didn't even come and see me at my boarding school. I had a phone call from my godmother telling me that they were getting a divorce. My mother claimed she called me, but I don't remember a call. I wish this had happened when I was 17 instead of 14, because I would have had three more years of security. Security's important for a child. It really is the foundation for his happiness. Much of the pain I have suffered and put into my work is based on insecurity.
Q: Have you ever worked this out with your mother?
A: To some degree. If you don't resolve it with your parents, how can you begin the road? I'm much happier because I've dealt with my mother better now, because I still have a lot of hate for her. It was a treacherous relationship. Recently, with the birth of this new child, she's become very happy, because she always wanted a daughter to give her jewelry to. And I have gone to therapy, yes, and talked about my mom, I'm working it out. She's a strong woman, my mother. So was my father. I had two strong parents and they both rocked my boat.
Q: Did your mother really take you to a nudist colony when you were nine?
A: Not nine. It was after their divorce. She took me to Europe on a trip to explain to me what had happened, [and that's when] she took me to a nudist colony. I couldn't do anything about it, though I felt strong urges. Beautiful women in Europe. I was very embarrassed and shy I didn't have any pubic hair. [Laughs] That was a real issue with me for a few years: no pubic hair.
Q: Is it true that you've had erotic dreams since you were four?
A: Yeah, but I don't know if Movieline is the right place to go into this. Essentially, I seem to have a very strong dream life and very strong erotic impulses. I find it motivating. It's an interesting life force. It can be perverted, it can be lustful, and it can reach excess, definitely. But it's a life force and I welcome it.
Q: How old were you when you had your first wet dream?
A: I don't know. I was a late developer. I didn't even grow to this size until I was about 20. I was smaller when I went into the Army. The first women I really knew were in Asia, hookers--and they were a great introduction, because I got to play out a lot of what American teenage boys think about.
Q: I thought your first experience with a hooker was the one your father got you when you were 15.
A: Yeah. Do we have to get into that?
Q: It is an interesting introduction.
A: It was an effective way. My father was a practical man. See, I didn't grow up in a high school setting. I was very retarded in that sense. Because I was different and an outsider, I didn't have girlfriends. I was very lonely.
Q: Was your father's gift to you a good experience?
A: It was great. She was a professional woman. She was nice. I didn't feel the taint of money or anything. It didn't have to be associated with falling in love, thank God, because you don't. Some boys fuck and they have to marry. They haven't learned that lesson yet. I think my father did the right thing, given my needs and insecurity. I wish I'd had a girlfriend--it might have been easier. But that wasn't the time in which women made love very easily.
Q: Were you close enough to your father to talk about the experience afterwards?
A: That's a good question. I loved my father and respected him, but we never talked too deeply about any subject, especially when it was personal. My father wore a tie and a jacket, like Nixon. He had a great sense of humor, but feelings were not part of that "man thing." My French grandfather, my cousin, my uncle, they were big men, they were in World War I and II, these guys were really tough, but they also kissed, so I had a whole other example.
Q: Of all the corruption you've seen, what corrupts the most?
A: Nothing corrupts as quickly as luxury. All Americans dream of luxury and materialism, but it's very corruptive.
Q: You've said that money was your father's Achilles heel. What does money mean to you?
A: Most of it I've been separated from. [Laughs] I've lost most of it in a divorce. I've never been a materialist, but I was always concerned to have enough to live.
Q: Did you ever play the stock market like your dad?
A: No, I didn't like that. I did the opposite of my father. He was a good father, but tough to understand, to get to. Always a hidden, mysterious section to the man I could never understand. It was as if he was perverted in a way. Perversion is hard to understand; it's like a black hole in somebody's personality. So your father becomes perverse because sometimes he won't wish you well, sometimes he wants to hurt you, sometimes he resents you because you're taking his place or he's getting older and you're younger or you're not good enough. All those thousand reasons. Fathers can hurt sons, deeply, with a word. It's very violent.
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.