'We Tried Not to Cross the Line of Truth'

Stone, whose Vietnam experience fueled some of his most successful work ("Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July"), says he did not know Bush at Yale but "knew the type" -- "retrograde" frat boy, as he puts it. They met once, in 1999, when Stone was invited to a Bush fundraiser in Los Angeles. After the event, Stone met privately with the then-Texas governor and says he came away charmed and convinced that Bush would be elected president the next year.

Stone says the movie relied heavily on journalistic accounts of Bush that he says have broken through a "veil" of secrecy surrounding the administration; he cites in particular Bob Woodward's books, an account of prewar spin by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine," and books by New York Times correspondents Michael Gordon and James Risen.

"We could not have made this movie without those breakthroughs -- those books," Stone says. He also says he got little cooperation from anyone in the Bush family or the administration, not surprising given his leftist reputation; he does say he got some technical assistance from unidentified people in the military who helped him structure a key scene in the situation room.

There will be much that purists for accuracy won't like about this movie. Bush does not call his dad "Poppy," as the imaginary president does, nor does the elder Bush call his son "Junior." Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser take real quotes and place them in different contexts; they have Laura Bush telling her future husband, "I read. I smoke. I admire," a comment she actually made to Bush's grandmother. Nor did Rove routinely attend national security meetings, as the movie suggests, and he's a more robust figure in real life than as portrayed by Toby Jones, perhaps best known for playing Truman Capote in a previous film.

More seriously, Stone's account almost certainly overstates the amount of formal debate inside the administration about the decision to go to war in Iraq, and assigns to former secretary of state Colin Powell (played well by Jeffrey Wright) a much more vigorous role as war skeptic than the historical record so far seems to support. Stone concedes as much, saying he elevated Powell's role to sharpen the dramatic tension. But he says he captured the essential truth -- that, as he puts it, Powell was rolled by Bush and signed off on the invasion.

Similarly, Stone believes he's on target about the fundamental nature of the Bush-Rove relationship, what he describes as an intense "heterosexual attraction" between the pol and his closest adviser. Yet while he describes Rove as "Bush's brain," he says Bush is "in charge" and is not "this manipulated guy."

"I am sure he will be pleasantly surprised that he's not as ugly as he's perceived," Stone says of Rove, somewhat quixotically. "I think he's far uglier, and I think we gave him the benefit of the doubt, like we did with Powell."

Stone says his departures from literal truth were reasonable accommodations to heighten dramatic interest: "I think we got the overall thing right."