In part two of our interview with him, Oliver Stone calls Pauline Kael "an elitist bag lady," speculates about why Joe Pesci and Gore Vidal sad bad things about him, describes the Zapruder film as "the most beautiful film ever made," confesses he sometimes fears losing his confidence...and more.
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LAWRENCE GROBEL: In part one of our interview, you talked about being deeply affected by writers like Conrad and Hemingway. What directors have influenced you?
OLIVER STONE: My influences were very collective. Hundreds of films affected me. I was influenced by The Robe as much as by Lawrence of Arabia; they were spectacles, concepts of life greater than 1950 New York City, America. Kubrick was really important. Then David Lean. On the Waterfront in black and white in '54 affected me. I thought One-Eyed Jacks was terrific. Fellini knocked me out. So did the French New Wave--_Breathless_ was the first one I saw, it just knocked the shit out of me. The concept of doing your own life story on film through symbols and metaphors was pretty wild to me--it was very direct as opposed to the impersonal American cinema.
Q: How important was Martin Scorsese as your teacher at NYU?
A: Oh, very, because he was one of the leading avatars of "buffdom." Marty worshiped the director. He loved Hollywood filmmaking. He under stood style, color, camera. And he taught so brilliantly that you got inspired as a result. We would do these two-minute black-and-white pictures and he would critique them. It was hilarious--the degree of sarcasm, you had to be there. Everybody would get grilled. You put up your film and by the time it was over it was, 'It stinks, it stinks!'
Q: How sensitive are you to criticism?
A: Less so over the years. At first, when I became nationally prominent in the mid-'80s and I wasn't used to it, to be criticized was heavy. But then, my character was also being slandered beyond the films. I mean, my films were terrible, but my character was also defective. Which was very hard for me to accept. To be ridiculed. I hope it didn't harden me, because that would be its purpose, to destroy your confidence and make you cynical. That's the easy way to go. They say so many stupid things, I just have to detach myself. The portrayal of me as screaming and angry and all that bullshit--believe me, I would not have done 11 movies of this size in 10 years if I was making enemies of my colleagues and friends and actors. The director has to be the leader, the visionary. And so he has to see the problem of the ego, and we all have to get the ego together and put it in a place where we all serve the higher ideal of making the film. Jimmy Woods, who's known me a long time--he worked with me on the first one and the last one, on Salvador and Nixon--said, and I'm paraphrasing him, "The thing with Oliver is that he doesn't have an ego. That's precisely what people miss; he wants to get the result and he'll take it from anywhere he can." But some critics have become so negative that they don't realize how they destroy people. Kael started it, Sarris, Vincent Canby. They're poisonous people.
Q: Even the early Kael?
A: Oh yeah. It was always about hatred, tearing down, destroying reputations, then building up a few darlings. Why should we believe Pauline Kael's collective mythology of America? It's bullshit. Let her go out and make Pauline Kael movies and make her dream, like I do. She never spoke for Americans. She was just an elitist bag lady. She was good with words, but so what? We need good critics who are generous of spirit and who have love in their hearts, who will take any movie and understand that the subject is not criticizable in itself, only the execution. That is the true, honest critic. Help the audience understand something in the work that even the artist doesn't see.
Q: Are you saying if a critic doesn't like something, he or she should pass on writing about it?
A: No. What I'm saying about critics can only hurt my reputation. I'm putting my balls in your hands. I'm not running away and giving you a bland interview, I'm not saying I love the critics. But I respect them if they're good. A lot of the anti-Hollywood sentiment is so boring. The fact that [a movie is] made in Hollywood makes it evil--that mentality, that intellectual nihilism is everywhere. It's insane. Any film made in a grocery store for twelve dollars is valid, whereas any film made for $25 million in Hollywood is a joke? Bullshit! Hollywood is the most democratic place I know on Earth. It's given talented people opportunities to write and direct and produce; it's the land of bullshit and dreams. It's the most egalitarian society I know. And that's why it's so hated by elitists.
Q: Is it a directorial technique of yours that to get anger from an actor you may enrage him, to get tears you may belittle him?
A: That's a method of directing. I don't have conflicts with actors. I really don't. Never did.
Q: Why, as has been reported, did a crew member on Seizure try to kill you?
A: Which one? [Laughs] The guy who almost killed me was a special effects man from New Jersey. He had a long pigtail and a machete. He was drunk and chased me--he wanted to kill me because he was fucking my lead actress, Martine Beswick, and he was jealous of me. She had eyes for me and I had eyes for her--and we ended up together after the film. He was out of his mind during the whole film--he was fucking the lead actress and started to believe that he was a star. [Laughs]
Q: I've read you had disagreements with Michael Douglas during Wall Street.
A: The whole film depended on credibility and I had some problems with what he was doing. We had a showdown after three or four days. I went to him and said I wasn't convinced that he had gotten the character of Gordon Gekko. We worked it out. I think his ego might have been hurt by some of the things I said about his previous performance--I didn't say this to him, but in my mind I was thinking that he was resorting to television things he did on The Streets of San Francisco. He got more intense and serious as a result of that. Whatever we did, he got the Oscar, right?
Q: What was it like being with Al Pacino when he was playing Tony Montana in Scarface?
A: Well, Al is a very interesting character. I was young working on Scarface, and he very much intimidated me.
Q: Did you know Scarface is Pacino's favorite movie?
A: No, I didn't. I knew it was good at the time. Talk about getting bad reviews--awful things were said about me, and I was just the writer. There were great lines in that movie and they were not all mine--I took from wherever I could, from Al, from [Scarface producer] Marty Bregman, [Scarface director] Brian De Palma.
Q: Did you have any sense that it would become a cult movie?
A: Yeah. I thought it was a terrific picture. It was highly original for its time. Still is. It was picked up on back then, on the streets of New York in '83, '84, you'd hear it--black kids were getting it, the future rap kids. [But] Scarface didn't do me much good because it was perceived as very violent and brutal.
Q: Was this your personal farewell to cocaine?
A: I was doing cocaine during the research phase. I went cold turkey during the writing in Paris. That's why I went to Paris. I couldn't break the habit here--Florida, L.A. and New York were the three hot spots.
Q: Scarface's producer, Martin Bregman, once said he was your rabbi--were you that close?
A: Rabbi? That's a good word. No, I think that Marty thought he was my rabbi. My break came a little bit from everywhere. My first break came off of Fernando Ghia and Robert Bolt in '75. Bolt signed me to William Morris and taught me something about screenwriting. Shortly thereafter I wrote The Cover-Up for Robert's company and Fernando Ghia produced it. Then I wrote Platoon on my own as an original. Marty bought and shepherded that, but unfortunately he didn't get it made. But Peter Guber loved the script and hired me to write this low-budget movie, Midnight Express, in England. The picture was a huge hit.
Q: When Midnight Express came out, the star, Brad Davis, looked like he was the next James Dean. What happened to him? Was it a lack of direction?
A: Lack of sophistication. I knew Brad. When the movie was being made he was a very sweet kid, very lucky, grateful. Next thing you know he was a big superstar and he couldn't be approached at parties--he'd be in the corner with his entourage; doing his coke out in the limousine. Then years later, his agent brought him in for something, and he was a very bitter young man. I've seen so many actors repeat this--a little bout of success goes to their heads and they believe they're immortal. The media promote these people like hotcakes, and they believe it. Next thing they know, they haven't done anything significant, because they haven't really been honest with themselves. Those who don't seem to get aware die along the way pretty fast.
Q: Did you ever fear that could happen to you?
A: It could have.
Q: Many people consider Salvador your best film. Where do you place it?
A: That's an elitist point of view--_Salvador_ is the littlest seen of my films, and it's the first. I've grown so much since then. I'm not the same filmmaker. If it happened to catch the zeitgeist of that moment, great, but that picture's as flawed as any I've done.
Q: Do you think it wasn't commercial because it lacked a big star?
A: Look, you had Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford in The Devil's Own. That was as purely unsatisfying a movie as has come out, and it had the two biggest stars. Both with guns. It had all the ingredients.
Q: During the filming of Platoon in the Philippines, did your Filipino crew go on strike because you kicked the head crew person in the ass?
A: That's exaggerated, but I booted him in the butt because I had gotten fed up with the numerous fire engine delays. We had huge special effects, and water towers and fire engines were required, and every time the water truck was late. I d had enough and booted him in the ass. Apparently he had a gun and was going to shoot me.
Q: Did the guy get to slap you in the face to save face?
A: Perhaps so. It was no big deal to me. I apologized to him.
Q: Didn't Val Kilmer like to mess with your mind on The Doors?
A: We fought a few times. He did hurt me, but it wasn't anything dramatic. They hurt me more in the press. I always thought I had a good relationship with Daryl Hannah and Meg Ryan, but I was surprised by what they said in the press. I really was hurt. It came out of the blue. The press looks for that, especially with me. How many people have said nice things about me that never get in the press? Anthony Hopkins said marvelous things about me as a director--but I never read one word about it. People are only looking for negative images of me.
Q: Norman Mailer didn't care for The Doors, but wrote that Born on the Fourth of July came near to being a great movie, and he said of JFK, "The first thing to be said about it is that it is a great movie, and the next is that it is one of the worst great movies ever made."
A: [Laughs] That's very funny. What do you say? Mailer writes well, and it was kind of him to do that to help the movie because it was being attacked quite a bit.
Q: He said something else about you: "He is one of our few major directors, but he can also be characterized as a brute who rarely eschews the heavy stroke. All the same, he has the integrity of a brute, he forages where others will not go."
A: [Laughs] Those are funny lines, I forgot that. What he's saying is that with subject matter I'm very frontal, like an infantry soldier. I'm going after big game. It's ridiculous for me to defend myself, but don't you think van Gogh could get the same attack? In those days they probably were saying he was a brute. That intensity that van Gogh had--he was so lonely and isolated in a strange way. But when painting was flourishing and all painters were starting to be recognized, he was having to go through this horrible period of abnegation and denial and no money and no recognition. That must have been terrifying. And his madness, too--I can understand that.
Q: You hoped that _JFK'_s mythology would replace the Warren Commission Report. Think you succeeded?
A: Unfortunately the Establishment media went after it big time. They saw the danger in it before I saw it. I thought they were overreacting--I hadn't realized how deep a nerve this was. Who knew that it was that deep? I thought you had to be a moron to accept the Warren Commission. I still do. Look at the Zapruder film, which is the most beautiful film made. It should have gotten the Best Short at the Academy Awards for '63.
Q: Six years after all the hoopla regarding JFK, do you think any minds have changed?
A: Oh sure, I opened some minds.
Q: On the issue of historical responsibility, you've pointed out that directors Bob Zemeckis in Forrest Gump and Ron Howard in Apollo 13 have not exactly met theirs. What disturbs you about those films?
A: I like Ron Howard and Bob Zemeckis, they're really good guys. I don't want to make any sub-headlines here. Gump was brilliantly done, but I do fault the historical message. It was an avoidance message. An avoidance of our past. It's brilliantly conceived, but it bothers me, the moral essence of it. There was no responsibility for Vietnam, and, also, Vietnam was rendered in a very pictorial, romantic way, as a baptism by fire for poor Forrest. Apollo 13 was very well done, but again, at its essence it was a blind celebration of America. There was no critical standard applied to American consciousness. It works at the box office, but what are the moral consequences of that? These directors make a lot of money, but they are promoting, especially Apollo 13, a surefire brand of patriotism that I don't think is correct. We have to move beyond that to a higher consciousness to save this planet.
Q: At the Academy Awards, gay protesters yelled "Shame, shame" at you because of how you portrayed gays in JFK. Do such protests annoy you?
A: They said the homosexuality was gratuitous, but it was not gratuitous. And I got the same thing again with Larry Flynt, from women against pornography. By now I would imagine that there are very few people left who can go see my movies. [Laughs] I need a new generation.
Q: Did you go after Marlon Brando to play the mysterious character Donald Sutherland ended up playing in JFK?
A: Yeah. He first called me because he liked Platoon. He wanted to meet me. I came to his house, but he wouldn't talk there--he felt the government was picking up the airwaves. So I had to follow him in his car down into this canyon next to his house. He was bare-foot and he walked over to some bushes and he sat there, and I had to sit in the bushes with him. We started to talk and people would walk by in this park and they must have looked over at the two of us in the bushes and wondered, Who is this guy, is he crazy?
Q: Joe Pesci, who gave such a memorable performance as David Ferrie, one of the gay characters in JFK, said he would never work with you again. "He's a terrific director," he said, "but..."
A: "...he's a piece of shit as a person." I was sad to see that.
Q: He said you beat up your crew and actors. Does it hurt you to hear this?
A: Yeah, sure. I like Joe, he's a good guy, I enjoyed working with him. I think I got a great performance from him.
Q: Did he call you to deny saying what he said?
A: No, he wrote me a note of apology for saying it publicly. Joe's a strange guy. In his own way he probably felt threatened, but I didn't pick up on it. You know who else [bad-mouthed] me recently, out of the blue? Gore Vidal was all over the goddamn newspapers saying he hated my work and that he had blown me off when I tried to get him to do Alexander the Great for me, which was bullshit. I was shocked to see that, because we had been at a private party, so somebody leaked it. It might have been Gore. He said I had no talent at all and that he didn't want to work with me. It was an embarrassing, violent, angry, aggressive quote. I've very rarely seen that degree of hostility. I've known Gore Vidal for years, off and on. When he offered to write _Alexander the Great _for me in 1990 at his villa in Ravello, Italy, I turned his ultra-homoerotic suggestions down. It's festered for years.
Artists are very jealous, angry people. They're the most envious people in the world. I don't like to hang out with them. When some new fad happens, they all run in that direction like sheep off a cliff. Most of them don't stand for anything. Most of them are whores. Joe Pesci, Gore Vidal--their opinion is their opinion. Gore has never written a good movie. He's at best a fair novelist. So he's probably jealous. He wants the power of imagination that my films have had on history, and there's an envy, perhaps, because he views himself as having failed in that historical mission. His hatred may be based on the fact that he hates himself in some way. Personally I don't think he knows me at all. Joe Pesci doesn't really know me. He probably had an image in his mind of: "Fucking director, he's making me do this fucking faggot, I hate fucking faggots. I am not a faggot. And all this fucking guy wants me to do is blow this fucking sleazy faggot. I've got to wear this fucking hairpiece and I feel like a piece of shit." I called him up a year or two later and asked him to play Hoover in Nixon. [As Pesci] "All you want me to do is suck somebody's fucking dick!" So I'm tying in, in some fucking way, to his fucking image of some fucking faggot in New Jersey that he hates right from the age of 11! [Laughing]
Q: You've been interested in another victim of assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. What are your thoughts on that murder?
A: I'm probably going to cut my own throat, but I know a lot about the case. I just met recently with James Earl Ray. We approached the King people three years ago about a movie we wanted to do called Memphis.
Q: I heard you wanted to use Cuba Gooding Jr. long before he won his Oscar.
A: Yeah, how'd you know that? We talked to Cuba before he was famous, but we couldn't get financing for it. We didn't have a script, either. I turned the project over to my Nixon cowriters, and they just didn't solve it. It's in redevelopment now with Warners.
Q: Primetime Live did a story indicating King's assassination might be linked to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
A: I can't say that, because Jack Valenti will kill me. Johnson was a bastard, man. The King thing may have come from the top. I think it had to. Because I don't think military people, who I believe are involved, would do something of that nature unless they had a hierarchical OK.
Q: Think your future includes more political films or do you worry about being attacked or burning out?
A: I was at dinner the other night with some of the older denizens of Hollywood and I had a wonderful moment with Jeanne Martin [Dean Martin's second wife]. She's a tough old dame, not intimidated by anybody She was telling me her perceptions of Dean's self-destructiveness. She said to me, "Don't do that. You've still got another 10 or 20 years. You've got to do like John Ford, you've got to go the distance. You can't feel sorry for yourself now." She read some stuff about me and she said, "Because they are pissing on you, don't hurt yourself as a result of it. Don't destroy yourself. You've got to make Part Two of your life."
Q: Do you feel you are self-destructive?
A: Sure. Haven't you seen that yet? Maybe you don't because you're seeing me in a productive place, working. But I've had a strong self-destructive streak my whole life. Going to Vietnam was very much that--and it continued in many ways: self-flagellation, destroying my confidence in myself. In the weirdest way, I've backed into this position. [Laughs] I know I project confidence, perhaps because I didn't have it when I was young.
Q: Your self-doubt is surprising.
A: The worst thing that can happen to a filmmaker is to have doubt. Filmmakers need to feel the wind behind them. You have to be a pirate ship captain. Filmmaking is like hitting different ports. We don't belong to any flag. And you need confidence to do that. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm losing it.
Q: One of the sharpest criticisms against you is that you portray women one-dimensionally in your films.
A: I disagree. Heaven & Earth has flaws, like every other film that I've made, but I think it's one of the most beautiful films that I've done. It makes me cry. I don't know why the critics got on that film so badly. It really deserves some notice. Not only was I white doing an Asian experience, but I was also a male doing a female experience. A lot of angry feminists didn't give it a chance. I've worked with women all through my career. I worked with Joan Allen on Nixon. I love Juliette Lewis's performance in Natural Born Killers. Sissy Spacek as Elizabeth Garrison delivered what I asked, because it was a character who I had met and knew a little bit about. And I like Kathleen Quinlan in The Doors, and Meg Ryan got some decent notices.
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.