That’s a good way of putting it. Yes, I do. The most surprising part of that story that you just mentioned of him going on the Michael Medved show is finding out that he’d been on there more than once. … And you know he’s been on the O’Reilly Factor many, many times — in fact, he was on there [recently]. He likes to, he likes to argue and debate. And he’s not afraid of it. I think there’s a part of him that relishes the challenge of a situation like that. And I have to say, there’s a bit of the, a kind of Don Quixote-like quality to him right now. Where he’s still, he’s upholding some kind of a code of manly artist’s chivalry. He talks a lot about honor. He uses the word “honor” a lot. Which is not a word I hear people use much.
And the other thing that strikes me is that he actually has a lot of conservative friends. Which I didn’t expect. He knows conservative historians, he’s buddies with [them]. You know he speaks very highly of James Woods and John Milius, and there’s a whole section of the book where he talks about how much he loves Charlton Heston as an actor. And of course they don’t have anything in common, politically. I think that, also, this is a guy who made two films about extremely conservative presidents, “Nixon” and “W.,” that were quite sympathetic to those presidents, ultimately. I think he makes fun of George W. Bush for being not an intellectual, and for, but he doesn’t mock his faith. He takes that very seriously. And he doesn’t mock his marriage. And he has incredible empathy for the struggle of the son to establish himself apart from his accomplished father. That’s something Oliver Stone understood very well. …
I watched — I hope he’s not mad at me for telling you this story, but I’m just going to tell it to you. I watched “Nixon” with Oliver. And that movie is dedicated to his father. And that movie is very much about, it’s as much about his father as it is about Nixon. And at the end of it, Oliver, I looked over at Oliver and there were tears rolling down his cheeks. And he stood up and said, he said “Everyday I miss that man.” And then he walked away. And that’s, I thought, you know, I thought of my own father. My own father has issues with his dad, and his dad died 20 years ago. And you know the way we carry these things around with us. That’s not something that you usually see in a book like this, and I only got it because Oliver was so honest with me.
How much of his career do you think — you know, he mentions several times this idea of being a traitor to his class, etc. How much of his career is a response to his father, a reaction to his father?
Well, a lot. To his upbringing. I would say the two formative influences of his early life were going to Vietnam, enlisting in Vietnam as a rich kid, because, like the main character in “Platoon,” he didn’t think it was fair that working class and poor people should bear so much of the burden. And there’s a scene in that movie where a black GI played by Keith David makes fun of the Oliver Stone character, that he says you have to be rich in the first place to think that way. [laughs] But his experiences in Vietnam, particularly meeting black soldiers and white soldiers with kind of counterculture sympathies, that was a big deal for him.
And then later, after he got back, he got busted for drugs when he was down near the Texas-Mexico border, he got busted for pot. He might have done six months to a year for possession of a fairly small amount of pot if his father hadn’t bailed him out, and he talks about this in the book. The fact that that jail was filled with people who were busted, mostly on drug charges, and they were almost all black and brown, and those guys weren’t getting out. And it bothered him that those guys weren’t getting out. Like, he got out because his dad was white and has money, and all of those other people in there with him weren’t going to get out. …
It’s interesting to read some of the stories about the left-critiques of Oliver Stone as not being interested in the Vietnamese side of the Vietnam war in “Platoon” or the gay orgy scenes in “JFK” being problematic for painting the villains as opposed to the white-bread hero. This sort of thing — what you were describing [above] is a guy talking about white privilege before that was a term, basically. And, and it is, it is interesting to me as someone who spends a lot of time watching all of these silly fights on Twitter and in the pages of the Guardian and elsewhere — how would Oliver Stone be received today in this kind of Take-Industrial Complex that we have? This kind of constantly looking for something to be angry and outraged about. Would he be able to survive in this sort of atmosphere if he was making the movies he made from ’86 to ’99 or so?
Probably not. In fact, I was just reading a piece online — you can find it pretty easily if you Google it — there were complaints on Twitter that “World Trade Center” had cast William Mapother as one of the rescuers in “World Trade Center” and the guy he is based on is African American. And the accusation was that Oliver Stone was whitewashing the heroes of “World Trade Center.” And I think that’s, that in and of itself would be a valid complaint, but I think you would also need to take in account that there are two leads in that movie, and one of them is Will Jimenez. You know? Like there’s a Hispanic lead, and they also cast a Hispanic guy as an Italian in that movie too.
And this is a guy who made his second-most-financially-successful film, “JFK,” he turned around and he took the clout he had made from that and made a two-and-a-half hour movie about a Vietnamese woman settling in the United States after the war. And he spent $35, $40 million on that, it didn’t make a dime, and he cast an unknown actress in the lead. And I think the flashbacks in “JFK” absolutely deserve to be characterized as homophobic, because I don’t think there’s a context that gives you some other way to read them. But I think you have to balance that against the fact that you have a guy who fought to include as much of a gay encounter as you could put into “Midnight Express” in 1978 because he felt like there was a, as he put it, a need for tenderness. And this is also the guy who made the most expensive film ever about a bisexual, “Alexander.” That’s like a $150 million movie, and he cobbled the money together from all over the world to make that film. And he fought Warner Brothers—Warner Brothers wanted him to take out any of the sex that wasn’t heterosexual, they wanted him to cut out. …
So, you know, is Oliver, is Oliver a completely enlightened person? Absolutely not. Is he a homophobic racist sexist reactionary? Absolutely not. He’s a complicated guy. …
There’s a moment in your book, where you ask Oliver Stone, “do you think if movies can be a force for good or for social change, doesn’t that logically follow that they can also be a negative force?” And he kind of says yes, but it’s the responsibility of the viewer to be smart about it. I’m wondering, from a critic’s point of view, what do you think is the responsibility of the critic in terms of talking about the political content of a film? So you’ve got Oliver Stone who is a very liberal, progressive filmmaker, a very kind of anti-establishment, more than anti-American filmmaker — how do you think critics should respond to the thematic content?
You’ve just got to be as honest as you can about how you respond to it. I don’t expect you to respond to Oliver Stone’s films politically the way I do. I do think it’s really interesting that our mutual friend Victor Morton considers “JFK” to be one of his favorite films.
I do too, actually — I think it’s one of the best films of the ’90s.
I think that’s remarkable, and I have to say — I’m going to get killed for saying this — but I think that conservatives are generally much more able to accept art that doesn’t share their political views than liberals are. If it’s only a function of the fact that you guys are artistically in the minority. For whatever reason there are not a lot of great conservative popular artists. I don’t know if this has something to do with the artistic temperament or what, but except you know, like, who’s the greatest conservative, politically conservative filmmaker in the world right now? In the United States, let’s say? Probably Mel Gibson.
Yeah, I think that’s probably fair.
I think that guy is like, I think he’s as good an action filmmaker who has ever directed an action film. And I include George Miller. I would never want to have a political discussion with Mel Gibson because I think I would have an aneurysm. But I could watch “Apocalypto” once a week for the rest of my life. That movie is a masterpiece.
It really is! I’m surprised “Apocalypto” has fallen off, respect-wise. I don’t know if that’s mostly a reaction to Gibson the person and his problems, or if it was just kind of too, too strange to be a, a movie that people watch once a week.
I don’t know, but that final shot — the knee jerk political reaction to that final shot in “Apocalypto” really annoyed me. There was this assumption that the Spanish galleons on the horizon meant “oh, now these savages are going to be civilized” but you gotta be some kind of fool to think that’s what that shot meant. What that shot meant was, that shot is a very dark joke. It’s like, look, he made it through that hell, now look, here’s something that’s going to be 10 times worse for his tribe.
Yeah, I mean, I always kind of interpreted that shot as “out of the frying pan, and into the fire.”
That’s exactly what it is, it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire. It’s really one of the most horrifying punchlines I’ve ever seen to an action film, that shot. It’s great! And, you know, this is a guy who I think if you pressed Mel Gibson on whether the forced religious conversion of the natives in South America was a good thing or a bad thing he’d probably say it was a good thing, he’d probably say it was an altogether good thing, because he’s an extremely conservative Catholic. But as a dramatist, he doesn’t present it that way, he presents it as an “Oh, my God! You thought you were in trouble before — here come the Spanish.” [Laughs]
It’s interesting, again, to bring it back to Oliver Stone, to hear him talk about, as he calls him, Jimmy Woods. There’s a quote, “Jimmy is great, I’d rather talk to Jimmy than some left-wing bore.”
I love that.
Or talking about going up to Charlton Heston, saying “I think you’re a legend, I’d love to hire you for a film.” This is one of the things that gets me in trouble with some of my conservative friends sometimes: I do have a lot of respect for Oliver Stone, just as a filmmaker, as a dramatist, and it is — he is what he is, politically. And I think “JFK” as a piece of storytelling, as a piece of filmmaking. As a, like, historical document is borderline nuts.
[laughs]
It’s great, interesting work. … If there was something you could say to try and bridge the gap between Oliver Stone and the right, what would you say? If we wanted to build a bridge?
Oliver Stone is more willing to listen to you than you are to listen to him.
I think that’s fair.
And also, he’s concerned about the long-term fate of the country. And he has been for 30 years. And he thinks there’s, you know he’s a religious person. He’s a Buddhist. He meditates every morning in front of a shrine to the Buddha. I’ve been to his apartment — his apartment in New York is filled with basically texts on Buddhism, you know. …
There is a spiritual side to him and a lot of his concern with U.S. foreign policy comes back to karma — he talks about that in the book. He says, you know, you can’t wreak havoc for prolonged periods of time against other people without it coming back around and destroying you. And he thinks that that’s what has been happening ever since 9/11. As he calls it, it’s blowback, it’s spiritual blowback. … And that conversion sequence in “W.,” that moment where he becomes, he accepts Jesus as his personal savior — he’s not kidding with that. Oliver Stone is not kidding with that, that scene is no joke. He actually means it. He thinks George Bush is an idiot, but he does not doubt that he is a man of deep faith. And that’s a little hard for liberals to reconcile, you know? …
And there’s a wonderful moment where, there’s a moment in “Nixon” where Nixon visits the Lincoln Memorial to talk to a bunch of hippies who have gathered there to protest the war. And to me, that scene is the essence of Oliver Stone: that scene is Oliver Stone’s entire career. You know, Oliver Stone actually likes talking to everybody. … I’m not going to make a case for the guy as a perfect person. But I think he’s trying harder than a lot of people who think that they’re better than him.