Oliver Stone: Stoned Again

Q: But the memorable parts are the men you've directed.

A: I know where I got the rap--it was based on an unfortunate one-two perception: one was Platoon. There were no women in the movie. I was perceived as a sort of Sessue Hayakawa in The Bridge on the River Kwai. A man's guy. Coming after that was Wall Street, and frankly I didn't get along with either of the two actresses in that movie [Daryl Hannah and Sean Young]. But if I have a highlight clip when I'm 90, one of the most memorable scenes I'll put on it is Hiep Thi Le with Tommy Lee Jones when they talk about reincarnation in Heaven & Earth.

Q: Are you committed to making provocative movies?

A: I want to make [movies with] ideas that are provocative and that grow with time. I want to stay in touch with my time. I don't want to just be making films because I have the clout to do them. I'd rather stop and retreat. If I don't have anything to say about what's going on, if all of a sudden I don't recognize this splurge of attitude that's out there ... and I don't--some of it really puzzles me. All these attitude films like Pulp Fiction, which is about nothing but attitude and behavior and being cool--there's been a slew of that stuff. Where do I fit? I don't know. I don't have much interest in that. I should stay with what I know, and even if I'm not ultra-popular, if there's a few people who dig it, it's going to last. The message will go on. Maybe I'll be watched again in 2030.

Q: You're talking as if you were out of the business.

A: Sometimes I feel like I am.

Q: On the contrary, you've got to be one of the most in-demand directors in the business.

A: No, I don't feel that.

Q: How are you doing financially?

A: I don't have any money. Because of my divorce, basically. Alimony plus child support. Divorce is a punishing thing for the income earner. I'd be a deadbeat dad according to Clinton, who never worked a day in his life as a business-fucking-man. Because of the assholes, who are a small minority, the average good father has to pay a fucking fortune. What a stupid fucking system! You can't be responsible for somebody for the rest of their lives. There are people sitting around on their asses not working, living off ex-spouses. It's just unproductive for society and for themselves. Any self-respecting person should get off their ass and work.

Q: Are you happier married or single?

A: Both. [Laughs]

Q: Because of your finances, would it hurt you to make a small independent film?

A: Oh yeah. I could do it, but I would take a beating. What am I talking about? I didn't take any money to do U-Turn. I took a nominal salary and basically I'm riding the gross. Which, it being a dark film, may not have been too smart a move.

Q: You tried to hold up the publication of John Ridley's novel, Stray Dogs, so it wouldn't give away the ending to U-Turn. Now, if someone wanted to make a film of your new novel, would you agree to hold up its publication until after the film?

A: It's totally different. In the case of Ridley, the book had been turned down, and the screenplay had been turned down. He used the movie deal to force the publication. And it's a thriller with a plot that you don't give away.

Q: Are you angry with Ridley?

A: Yeah, I think he's an opportunist. Considering that I also helped produce his movie? And I asked him to hold it off? What does he get from this? Is a few hundred thousand dollars the issue? The ethical thing to have done was to release the book in conjunction with the movie.

Q: Would The People vs. Larry Flynt have gotten made without your involvement?

A: They would have gotten it done without me, but I think I helped. Milos [Forman] had been out of the business several years.

Q: What was your involvement?

A: If it's my name, I get involved in how it gets made, who's in it, what kind of script it is. I'm not looking to be the controlling element, but perhaps a helping, guiding one. It's the director's movie, he puts his stamp on it. But I like to help create a framework where we'll be proud of the movie.

Q: You wrote Evita. Did you like the film?

A: It doesn't have the soul that it should have had. They gave me co-screenplay credit. It missed by a wide mile. I wrote it. [Director] Alan Parker--who's got an ego the size of Michael Jordan's presumed dick--says he rewrote it, but it's hard to believe judging by what's on the screen.

Q: Well, regardless of who owns your films, you're still making new ones. Assess yourself as a director.

A: In development. In progress. I've accomplished far more than I ever set out to do. [Now] I can either go down because some of the feelings of self-destruction can assert themselves again, [or] I can go on and evolve into a new phase. Which I hope to do. I can't guarantee it, because it takes tremendous energy to make movies.

Q: What do you think your impact is?

A: I don't know. I'm driven by my own inner drives. I've had failure and success; I've had derision and applause in equal measure. If that happens to you enough in your lifetime you begin to realize the illusion that it is. And I'm on that trip now. I'm in space. I took off. I went to the ionosphere. The stratosphere. Without gravity. If you loosen up and go out, that's a blessed state, a truly Hindu state, a serenity state. I like the serenity state. It gives you a feeling of wholeness on this Earth.

Q: But you don't seem to put yourself in that serenity state in your work.

A: I do, I try to. Perhaps I live my life by contrasts and I need one to excite the other. Serenity inside the chaos is great. I handle pressure better than I used to. It's very interesting to see stress at work, feeling it, hearing it, smelling it. You've got to be like an infantry soldier, [focusing on] the six inches in front of your face when you're in the jungle. Because that's really what it comes down to: your life's experience, its authentic feeling. That's all we know. How do we get real feelings in our lifetime? It's so hard to really know what we think and feel, because we get all the impostors. We get all the television, the simulations of what to think and feel. It really is an Orwellian media state, and it overwhelms the mind.

Q: You've said that most everything in your life has been a failure. That's not how most people would perceive you.

A: If I were to do an honest assessment of all the efforts I've made in film and in life, most of them would be misses. Many scripts, ideas, developments that went down the tubes. But perhaps I learned from the failures. What is failure and what is success? You should learn from success, but most of us don't, because success gives you confidence. I've had some great successes which came at key times, picked up my spirits. Maybe I feel like I'm developing as an artist, but it's certainly a slow go!

Q: How important are rejection and failure for an artist?

A: I think you could find maybe a thousand rejections in my files, and there must have been another 12,000 from phone calls. During that time, believe me I wanted to give up. [But] I was convinced that if I could ever see the daylight, I could become the filmmaker I wanted to be. But my battles have gotten bigger--not only with my own confidence, but there are so many other battles in life I hadn't been aware of. The will has to be forged in steel and pain and suffering. Now part of the trick is to make joy and creativity work.

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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Michael Keaton for the August '97 issue of Movieline.

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