Oliver Stone (New York, 1946) has had a movie life that does not fit into a single book. That is why In Search of Light (Libros del Kultrum), where he writes the first part of his memoirs, covers only until he was 40 years old, an age in which he reached the peak of his success with war films such as Salvador and Platoon. . With his personal vision of the Vietnam War he won the Oscar for best director in 1986, a statuette that he already had in his hands in 1978 for the script of Midnight Express. In between, a path dotted with continuous ups and downs that he relates with an agile, revealing and sincere pen in a volume of almost 500 pages that has the subtitle ‘Writing, directing and surviving Midnight Express, The Price of Power, Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street…and the film industry’. From the studio of his home in Los Angeles, the established filmmaker and screenwriter with a reputation for being controversial and lunatic, is charming in a videoconference interview with La Vanguardia.
Why did you want to write your memoirs?
I wrote a book when I was 19 years old. It was called A Child’s Night Dream, a partly autobiographical novel that wasn’t published until 1997. And I wanted to write a book, a more mature one, about my memoirs. I started writing between 2018 and 2019 and in the United States it was published in 2020, although in Spain it arrived now. After making Snowden I realized that I had already directed 20 films and that my first dream in life was to be a film director. Screenwriter-director. And I ended up doing it successfully when I was 40 years old. At that time I had released Salvador and Platoon and I felt that I had achieved what I wanted in the first part of my life, I was happy and satisfied. The second part will start from 1986 until now. I’m just writing about it because I want to observe my life. I want to know who I am as best I can and be honest about it because that is the nature of my being. That’s what I was like at 19, I told myself. I think it is a very embarrassing book. There are so many things in it that perhaps I wouldn’t like to tell! But that’s what writing is about. Expression, self-expression.
He is really very sincere and explains many intimate situations. What would you say has been the most difficult for him to write?
It’s a book about my parents, growing up, and Vietnam, and then working in the film industry to make a film about the Vietnam experience, which was very successful, extremely successful. A movie that made a lot of money, which surprised me, because it was rejected for so many years. Platoon was a worldwide hit and Elizabeth Taylor kissed me when I won the Academy Award for best director. It was my second Oscar after Midnight Express. Then it was all like a dream. At 40 I knew I would never be better than I was at that moment. Never. And he was right. There are different pleasures after 40. I made many more films. I made 20 films in total and 10 documentaries. And of course, there have been many ups and downs. That is the nature of life. But it was a pure dream to go from being a poor man and a vagabond, as my father said, to being a writer and director highly respected in the world community. It is something extraordinary. And I remember when Salvador premiered at the San Sebastián festival before 5,000 spectators. It was amazing. That’s why I wrote the book, because it was enough. If I had made it longer than it was, it would have been this size, too long. So now I have to attack the second book in a different way. It’s no longer about that first dream I had. It’s about life as it progresses. If Don Quixote had solved all of his problems, he could have written In Search of Light. But it’s about what happens after chasing the light and what happens in real life, something more realistic.
Would you like to bring your life to the big screen?
Not at all. I think she is too big, too long and I wouldn’t know how to do it. But it will depend on whether someone wants to embark on this adventure… I’m not trying to make a movie, I’m trying to write a book. Books are sometimes made into terrible movies and other times great ones.
Their parents were very different. She was French with a rebellious spirit and he was republican and strict. He says that this dichotomy resides in his soul: on the one hand, the need to put down roots and, on the other hand, to dream of spreading the sails to the wind.
My mother was extremely energetic and so was my father. They were both strong people. I thought they were in love with each other. I thought it was a very happy family, that everything was going well. And then, boom, suddenly her divorce from when I was 15 blew up in my face. And they didn’t even tell me. I found out about it in high school and I was quite shocked. It was something that ended up changing my life. I left school and ended up, as you know, in Vietnam twice. And from there, it’s all about lies. The lies that are told. Of course, I also discovered that Mr. Kennedy was not assassinated by Mr. Oswald. And then I go to Vietnam and the whole war thing is a complete lie. Those are important things for a young person to face. I return to my country after the war and face more lies. And as I progress I realize that the world is like that. It’s full of lies. And you have to discover them, unmask them. That is what this book.
And then would come the lies of Hollywood, a place where he has not fit in
Absolutely. I think they see me as a bad guy there, like a black sheep, I don’t know. Someone who doesn’t obey the rules. My films were different. They broke the rules again with JFK, for example. Nobody makes movies like that. And they were highly criticized and highly praised. Nixon, for example, also shook the audience. I like that, I like to shake things up. For Born Killers I received lawsuits accusing me of murder. All kinds of things have happened. I think people don’t know who I am and I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding, which is fine. It is my nature to be complex and misunderstood. But I keep going. I talk about politics because if you don’t talk, people don’t understand that there is another point of view. I often have another point of view on a situation. I think the United States has followed a path that seems deeply wrong to me. I guess you could say that my hero was John F. Kennedy because he was a man of peace and he understood what peace meant and he gave a beautifully eloquent speech about it and defended it. He paid with his life, that’s what I feel. And, of course, people don’t understand it because they don’t accept that bad people killed him. That’s why I feel like a person who doesn’t fit into this society, I don’t agree with the turn our society has taken. We are very militaristic now. The United States is very barbaric. We talk in terms of we don’t even use the word peace anymore. We worship power, muscle. We only talk about domination.
What do you think of the United States’ role in the war in Ukraine and in that of Israel and Hamas?
The book ends in 1986, but it is definitely pro-peace. And that shows in the young man he was. Even though I voted for Ronald Reagan, I didn’t see the real face of him until he got involved in the wars in Central America, Nicaragua, Salvador, all that. The biggest problem I had in Vietnam was trying to maintain my humanity. Yes. And many people were extremely racist towards the Vietnamese. Many people were callous and callous. And, at the same time, I also became calloused. I’m honest about that. But there is a division in me. And I’m trying to be more and more aware of it. You see, I thought we were going to learn a lesson about Vietnam. I thought the lesson was clear. I was really surprised, really surprised by the end of peace. In the early 90s, there was that possibility for the United States to go in a peaceful direction because the Soviet Union was no longer the enemy. And look where we went. We enter into more and more wars, more hostility, more desire for dominance. It’s sad. It’s terrible what happened. No American president talks about peace anymore.
Going back to his childhood, his father was a great storyteller and instilled in him his love of writing stories…
Yes, I think it sparked my imagination. He paid me 25 cents and I bought a comic. At that time I was very influenced by television, of course. And the cinema. I wrote about the war in A Child’s Night Dream. Until then, in my life I projected war, a lot of war, blood and a lot of adolescent madness. It is a fascinating book to read now. That’s why I wrote my memoirs, because it’s the antidote. It is a story about the search for meaning, the search for light.
He confesses that after his parents’ divorce he felt absolute loneliness. What would you say to that 15-year-old teenager now?
I would have compassion for him. In fact, I wrote about it. (Stone rises to emotionally read an excerpt from the epilogue of his first book in which he talks about his need to be heard and loved. And how he inflicted tremendous suffering on himself and others) I wish I could have done more for he. But I really suffered in my own way. I think I volunteered in Vietnam because being a soldier was a form of self-destruction.
He dropped out of Yale to volunteer for the Vietnam War, where he was wounded, decorated, and experimented with drugs.
Well, it was a very bad, terrible war. A lot of people were hurt and in Vietnam the drugs were good. You know, the conventional story is that drugs are bad and people say I was addicted to drugs and blah blah blah, but the truth is it saved my life in a weird way. There was so much racism and insensitivity there, even the army of white soldiers was so divided that I ended up next to a group of black soldiers smoking a strong type of Vietnam weed that kept my sanity, my sensitivity and consciousness out of the numbness. Outside of that lack of feeling that results from drinking, from killing, from looting, from the daily routine of war. It’s very important. And on the other hand, drugs can be bad because later in life, as I write in the book, I got hooked on cocaine, which in my opinion is a terrible drug. You become a slave to it. While drugs like marijuana and hallucinogens, mushrooms and LSD are good. There is a big difference. And it’s ironic that I just stopped using drugs as soon as I started writing the script for The Price of Power.
At New York University he had Martin Scorsese as a professor, who supported him in his first short about Vietnam. And he says that his classes were very fun…
He was a very charming teacher. He was enthusiastic about cinema and transmitted it with passion, almost like a religion. So even if we made a one-minute movie or a 32-minute movie, he took it seriously. Many students didn’t pay attention to him, but he had a lot of energy, just as I describe in the book. He gave me a lot of encouragement. And over time he has become very famous and one of the best filmmakers in a treacherous industry. I spoke to him not long ago and I’m glad we’re both still active and doing our best. I think I’ll see it soon.
Scorsese praised his very personal style from the beginning
Marty has recognized it, yes. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I don’t fit in. I guess it’s because I was a precocious child. My producer Marty Bregman used to tell me that sometimes he was alienated. That he was too sensitive and that he offended me too easily.
He fondly mentions John Daly, one of the few true friends he has had in the industry
He was an English pirate. A tough guy, skinny, tough, cockney and very funny, as much as the English can be. Of course, he was an outsider to the industry. No one trusted him except a few people like me, because he was honest with me. I think he understood that I had a passion for making movies and he felt that. We did Salvador together and then he backed me up again on Platoon, which is amazing. But John was also difficult to deal with when it came to money.
Before achieving success he also worked as a taxi driver…
Yes, that was an eye-opening experience. He doesn’t know how exhausting it is to drive a taxi at night in New York. But the day can also be very exhausting. It was very hard work. And there is also a lot of corruption in that environment.
His father warned him not to tell the truth, because he would get into trouble. You have avoided his advice and have had a lot of trouble for it. He regrets?
No. Otherwise I couldn’t have written these books about myself. I have always gone with truth and sincerity first. I’ve done a lot of interesting films and a lot of good and bad things have happened after I became famous, once you become a film director, a film writer, a star and all that. I have achieved success after many failures and that has been a big step for me. My motto has always been: do it or die trying!
He is a person with great energy and passion for his craft. At one point in the book he describes himself as a workaholic Macbeth.
Yes, and passion is very dangerous. In Buddhism they tell you not to fall under their seduction. Passion, of course, for an artist is necessary, but too much passion is not good and I have paid for it. Movie critics will tear you apart if they feel you’re an idiot in certain ways. I mean, I’ve been told many times that my work is raw, too passionate, too exaggerated, the usual, not subtle, you know, what they say. But the truth is that people remember the things that matter. Critics like a lot of boring movies. Sometimes there are movies that you don’t even remember for two months or three months, you know, you forgot about it, even a month, a week. But many times it is those films that show the passion of the filmmaker that really matter and last.
What do you think of the agreement that writers and actors have reached after the strike?
I’m happy they reached an agreement. Ultimately, it was impossible to make movies. Movies are getting more difficult and more expensive. Special advisors are needed for everything. You need all kinds of rules. I went through the strike of ’87, it was a long strike in the writers’ union, and there was also a strike in the 2000s. Many of the members of the union belong to television and work in a different way. The Writers Guild takes good care of its people. On the other hand, the business class has become too rich. There was a time when it was more lucrative to become an agent than to be a filmmaker. People asked for too much money for actors. So much money was spent on a movie star that the movie had to be made up for. And marketing costs are so high that it is even doubly difficult to recover the money. That’s what gets everyone to the top. You have to be at the top or you will run out of money. And I do not like that. It’s not a good trend. It would be better if we had a broader distribution of income. But I don’t know to what extent the agreement will achieve it. I’m not a labor negotiator.
What do you think of the victory of the far-right Milei in Argentina?
Fernando Sulichin, producer of many of my films, is Argentine. It is a matter that worries me. I don’t know. I think he’s going to be bad for the economy. This guy is like Macri, who was president before Fernández. Macri did not resolve anything. He made things worse. And Fernández inherited a lot of trouble. The truth is that I don’t know how he’s going to get out of this.