Stone cold sober

The introductory handshake comes with an additional squeeze of the wrist and a roguish smile.
“You’re Irish. I can tell.”

No. Your correspondent hasn’t been transported back to a disco in the 1970s. Instead, she’s in New York’s Regency Hotel meeting Oliver Stone.
That twinkling opening gambit has brought about a Proustian rush of wayward tabloid headlines. I remember that idiotic book on the making of Natural Born Killers, with its scurrilous tales of loose ladies, psilocybin mushrooms and cocaine abuse. I recall that story about the director commandeering the Warners corporate jet to do peyote in the Mexican desert while making The Doors. I remember too how the set of Alexander reputedly became an extravagant saturnalia. Sure enough, I can effortlessly picture this man partying down with Colin Farrell, a duel study in swaggering Dionysian charm.
Though Stone insists his appetite for debauchery has been greatly exaggerated, he’s always owned up to unruly habits. Yes, he does have a fondness for marijuana dating back to time spent on the frontline in Vietnam. He has also ‘expanded his consciousness’ with the occasional psychedelic. But driving offences from last year and 1999 have, he claims, more to do with pre-diabetic medication unwisely knocked back with alcohol than exotic marching powders.
Still, it’s an impressively scandalous record for a man of his years. Stone is 60 now, though you’d say he were a decade younger if you suddenly spied him on the street. In person he’s imperturbably casual, far more relaxed than the ‘madman’ headlines might lead one to suppose. His glowing tan is offset by a bright yellow polo shirt and he sits way, way back in his chair holding your gaze all the while.
Accommodating and easy in his manner, you’d be hard-pressed to identify this individual as Oliver Stone – Controversial Filmmaker. That is, nevertheless, to whom we speak. Stone boasts a fearsomely uncompromising reputation as a screenwriter and director. Throughout the ‘80s when the post-classical frisson of counter-cultural Hollywood had fizzled and poachers died off or turned gamekeeper, only Stone kept the faith, authoring politically conscious cinema at a time when the Academy was honouring Driving Miss Daisy.
His screenplay for rapper’s favourite Scarface set the frenzied pace and ultra-violent tone that would later characterise his visual style. But Stone was too engaged with the world to become the new Brian De Palma. Salvador, his first major film as director, probed the gulf between the ideals of American foreign policy and realpolitik. Platoon, Wall Street, JFK and Nixon would further confirm his interest in micro and macro conspiracies and establish him as an outlaw auteur.
Though he’s now rueful about being stereotyped or “pinned like a butterfly”, he was a good sport about it, appearing as a conspiracy nut in Dave and Wild Palms.
“You know, I’ve never really regarded myself as a political filmmaker”, he tells me. “I consider myself a dramatist. I always get involved with people more than the politics. With the movie JFK, for example, the book by Jim Garrison had a lot of theory. I was more interested in making him part of that story. And Oswald fascinated me. If you watch that film it is really a trail of people played by great actors. Nixon, despite the whiff of conspiracy, is truly a psychological portrait of a man. Many people in the right wing thought it would be a hatchet job but I really made him apathetic. I refuse to be pigeon holed. I am not a political guy. I don’t go to rallies. I am not an activist. I don’t have the time because I’m busy being a writer.”
He may deny the role of agitator, but his opinions, both off and onscreen suggest otherwise. His most recent work in the documentary sector includes Persona Non Grata, an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and two features about Cuban president Fidel Castro, Comandante and Looking for Fidel. (Stone has described himself as a friend and an admirer.)
He has, before now, referred to the events of September 11th as a ‘revolt’ and expressed an interest in the work of Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism advisor whose book Against All Enemies accuses the Bush administration of ignoring the al-Qaeda threat, then linking the group to Iraq, contrary to all evidence.
“We Vietnam vets, in particular, found it very difficult”, says Stone. “We had the backing of the world in Afghanistan. We were rounding up the main suspects. Then we go into Iraq with no support. Militarily, it was stupid. It was overreaching. And any American who travels can tell you how the rest of the world is resentful. What the hell are we doing in Iraq when the enemy was 4000 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan?”
When it was announced last summer that Stone would direct World Trade Centre, a film focusing on ‘first response’ police officers trapped by the Twin Towers collapse, many eyebrows were raised. “To allow this poisoned and deranged mind… (to recreate 9/11) in the likeness of his vile fantasies is beyond obscene,” raged one conservative commentator. But World Trade Center, it transpires, is Stone’s least obvious work even by his own consistently innovative standards. The towers do not fall back and to the left. There is no grand plot or secret ruling elite.
“This is not a political film in any sense”, insists Stone. “It harks back to Platoon in that respect. In Vietnam, we didn’t sit around talking about LBJ. And the truth is, I don’t think we can say for sure what happened during 9/11. We spent more investigating Bill Clinton’s blowjobs than the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Whatever was going on in the background, if you look at the forest through the trees, it seems to me that what has happened since is far worse than what happened that day. So the politics and conspiracies behind that day, whatever they may be, are not as relevant as where we are now.”
Completely eschewing polemic, the movie instead offers a heartfelt portrait of ordinary fellows on the front line. Stone’s traditional constituency are, needless to say, horrified, and assorted doublespeak statements have been issued attacking World Trade Center as “non-conspiratorial lies”.
John Conner, a leading voice in the Christian branch of the 9/11 Truth Movement, went so far as to ask the following– “Was Stone used by the Illuminati as an unknowing pawn to whitewash the 9/11 conspiracy theories to the masses? Was he approached with the project and coerced into a commitment to occupy his time in attempts to thwart any other 9/11 angle from being used? Is Stone a pawn in the game? Perhaps Stone didn’t know at the time, and found out too late.”
Oddly, however, like Paul Greengrass’ United 93, Stone’s film has found champions from either end of America’s bipolar political spectrum, often the same folks who had previously dismissed him as a pinko malcontent. L. Brent Bozell III, the president of the conservative Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television Council — a latter day Mary Whitehouse in trousers — called it “a masterpiece” and sent an e-mail message to 400,000 people saying, “Go see this film.” Cal Thomas, the right-wing syndicated columnist and contributor to The Last Word, wrote that it was “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”
“I just felt this was a great story dying to be told”, explains Stone. “It may not be like anything I have done before, butHeaven And Earth wasn’t like anything I had done before. Nor was U Turn or Natural Born Killers. I do jump around and each film is a different style. This isn’t like United 93 which was a brilliant piece of vérité. This is more like a classic John Ford, William Wyler or even Frank Capra film. Against tremendous odds this rescue takes place. This has the traditional Hollywood tropes of emotional connection to four main characters from the working class.
"I would love to bring Hollywood back to that, making films where people actually work for a living, not sit around making things happen with a remote control like that Adam Sandler film. Born On The Fourth Of July was blue-collar. So was Any Given Sunday. Although it’s about elite athletes, it was about work. They had to punish their bodies for their lifestyle.”
A marriage of disaster movie and combat zone drama, World Trade Centre follows Port Authority officers Sergeant John Mc Loughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) on a doomed rescue mission into the Twin Towers. On September 12th, they were among the last survivors to be pulled from the rubble. Though the original script by newcomer Andrea Berloff read like a relocation of Beckett’s Endgame, Stone has widened the remit to include the rescuers and the anxious wives at home. As a director noted for working within a decidedly masculine milieu, was it a challenge to represent domesticity, I wonder.
“Oh yes,” he admits. “That was a big challenge. On the surface this is a very simple story of catastrophe and rescue and heroism. But if you go beyond the cliché it is very fresh. Everything the rescuers did was dangerous. We assume rescues just happen, but it is hard work. These men really crawled into places where they thought they would die. It took hours to get them out. I tried to show some of that digging. But an even bigger cliché in these circumstances is the waiting housewife. Actually, it goes further than that. Each of these women died that day. They sit there as the hours pass and the only news is no survivors. You knew no one would come out of there. The buildings were so pancaked. So it was like death for them. I wanted to portray that. I wanted them smelling the sheets from the previous night where they had slept. Again it’s a cliché but the idea was to take the cliché and make it fresh.”
Another subplot concentrates on Staff Sergeant Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) a Christian marine in Wilton, Connecticut, who watches events on TV and tells his colleagues that America is now at war. Once he decides that God wants him to go to New York he heads to Ground Zero with a flashlight and eventually hears the two cops in the debris. A postscript before the final credits informs us that Kearns has since served two tours of duty in Iraq.
“It’s a remarkable and weird story,” Stone admits. “But that’s how it happened. I also think Kearns represents a significant sector of the American population when he says, ‘We’re going to need some good men to avenge this’. For many people, revenge was their first thought.”
And there you have it. For all the pigeonholing as a conspiracy theorist, facts are of paramount importance to Stone. He spent two-and-a-half years researching JFK. He spent three years immersed in Persian history for the much-maligned Alexander. It was a labour of love and the ill-tempered critical reception seems to have cut to the quick.
“I’m a historical dramatist”, he explains. “I wasn’t a Kennedy assassination junkie at the time, nor was I a 9/11 junkie. But I love the past. It hurts when I read someone claiming that I’ve fabricated something. But then you make a film like Alexander and scholars say you have it right, but critics say it’s all wrong.”
Similarly, while Stone has been at pains to represent those involved in the World Trade Centre disaster as faithfully as possible, he has not been able to quell dissent completely. The widow of Dominick Pezzulo – a cop portrayed in the film - has accused Jimeno and McLoughlin of cashing in on the tragedy by selling their story to Paramount. There have also been mutterings about the film being too soon.
“I know,” nods Stone. “But I honestly think it is the right time. The Killing Fields was made five years after those events in Cambodia. During World War II, Hollywood made propaganda films. Casablanca, made in 1941, takes a very anti Nazi position even before we declared war. The Vietnam movies took longer to make, but life goes faster now. I would say to you the consequences of 9/11 are so bad that we better look back now and understand what happened on that day. When you leave it too long, events become mythologized. Watching Pearl Harbor, you’d think we won that battle. This is the epicentre of 9/11, but there are many stories that still need to be told.”
Though personal and more modest in scope than the $63 million budget might suggest, the director does hope that his intense focus on McLoughlin and Jimeno has a wider relevance.
“They did not have a clue as to what was happening,” he says. “They knew it was a terrorist attack but there was no discussion of politics. They’re cops. They are far more likely to talk about pop culture, whether it is Starsky And Hutch or GI Jane. It wasn’t Bergman down in that hole.
So I am not claiming this movie will answer all the questions. But let’s say you go to a psychiatrist and all your life you have been repressed because you were raped when you where 14. Perhaps the psychiatrist says, ‘Let’s go back to that day’. They make you remember that day and it changes all the defences you had built up. So perhaps by undoing the screw, the secret at the beginning, you can take some of the armour off.”
The events of 9/11 may be difficult to disentangle, but no more so than the filmmaker himself. Born in New York City to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, William Oliver Stone was raised Episcopalian by way of compromise. His parents divorced after his father, a conservative Republican, conducted various extra-marital affairs with family friends. Young Oliver spent much of his subsequent childhood in splendid isolation between private schools and five star hotels - ‘a cartoonish Little Lord Fauntleroy’ by his own account.
Still, Stone needs neither bullfighting nor marlin fishing to confirm his Hemingwayesque credentials as an artist. He attended Yale and dropped out twice before enlisting to fight as an Infantryman in Vietnam. Mixing with the lower orders and smoking pot soon transformed the spoiled youngster into a military hero. He was wounded twice in action and received the Bronze Star with ”V” device signifying valor for “extraordinary acts of courage under fire”, and the Purple Heart with one Oak Leaf Cluster.
Soon after the war, he was arrested at the US-Mexico border for possession of marijuana. His father bailed him out but the experience served to radicalise him. Later, meeting understandably embittered veterans such as Ron Kovic pushed Stone further to the left.
He has, however, wooed Hollywood despite the often overtly political nature of his films. He won his first Academy Award as the screenwriter of Midnight Express and has been further honoured for directing Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July.
Now, after World Trade Centre, has attention and lavish praise from the likes of Bill O’Reilly turned his head? Not bloody likely.
“People are people,” he tells me. “I think people have to take care of themselves and their families first. But there are bigger questions now. The ecological movement want us to clean up, but how can that work when there is always the issue of jobs? It’s a very selfish world and avarice triumphs over the green imperative. After Katrina, there was a tremendous outpouring of help. That was also true when the tsunami hit Indonesia. People are very generous in America and there are some very fine Americans. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t have passports. Most of them don’t know where Iraq is. And a lot think al Qaeda and Iraq are the same thing. There’s a problem with the education levels. American television keeps people trapped. The news is very superficial and mostly filled with advertisements and rapes and murders. If you travel in the country and you stay in the smaller places you find very limited resources. If America spent the same amount of money as we spend on embassies and CIA stations around the world on our major cities with the goal of helping bring those cities to a way of life that was democratic and economically viable, we would have a tremendous success in this country. Instead, we have an international presence and I don’t know if it is worth it. All we are doing is promoting a system which is now suspect all over the world. We have broken our constitution repeatedly since 2001.
He smiles cynically.
“I don’t think pictures of soldiers pointing their naked dicks in Abu Ghraib has helped us at a local level either.”
He’s still got it.