He’s taken on Castro, Nixon, JFK and Bush ... but could tangling with Putin be the undoing of the great Oliver Stone
EITHER you’re born crazy or you’re born boring,” reads a mantra on Oliver Stone’s website. The words accompany a photograph of this powerhouse filmmaker, looking debonair in a black tie and dinner jacket. Regardless of what you think of Stone and his films and political views you could never say he is boring – quite the reverse, in fact.
Nine months ago the LA Times introduced an interview with Stone about his films by observing that he had never shied away from such big subjects as war, political corruption, greed, criminality and hidden conspiracies and had long been “one of Hollywood’s most consistent lightning-rods for controversy”. The headline over the article dubbed him an “ageing provocateur”. Stone, 70, returned to the headlines this week with the release of The Putin Interviews, an ambitious, four-part documentary consisting of interviews with the Russian president Vladimir Putin, which in this country aired on successive nights at 2am on Sky Atlantic – so you may not have seen it yet. The Washington Post, assessing the first two episodes, dismissed it thus: “What might have once promised to be an explosive on-screen matching of wits instead arrives just in time to be colossally irrelevant: an erstwhile scoop made instantly negligible by ... the imaginative and ideological limits of its director.”
Stone also underwent an uncomfortable interview on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show last Monday. The audience groaned and mocked him when he spoke of Putin’s “calmness and courtesy” and that he “never really said anything bad about anybody and, I mean, he’s been … insulted and abused”.
Colbert also quizzed him about an apparent failure to follow up Putin’s bland statement that he would never interfere in the domestic affairs of another country. However, the TV critic Mark Lawson pointed out Stone pressed harder on tough questions for Putin in the later episodes, concluding: “Stone has done a great service to democracy. If the first two episodes are won, in boxing terms, by the interviewee, fair referees would call the third a draw and the fourth, if not a knockout, a victory for Stone in terms of undefended punches.”
Stone was born to a stockbroker and a French war bride. She was a young student with whom Stone’s father, then in the US army, eloped in Paris in 1945. As a young man, Stone dropped out of Yale and travelled widely before seeing US army service in Cambodia and Vietnam.
He was twice wounded and received the Bronze Heart and Purple Star. Early in his film career he wrote the screenplays for such hits as Midnight Express (directed by Alan Parker), Conan The Barbarian (John Milius), the gangster epic Scarface (Brian de Palma) and Year Of The Dragon (Michael Cimino). He deservedly won the best adapted screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express.
His Vietnam experiences formed the basis of his acclaimed war film Platoon, which took best director and best picture at the Oscars. Stone won a second best director Oscar for Born On The Fourth of July – the second part of his Vietnam trilogy – in which Tom Cruise excelled as a paralysed Vietnam vet-turned-anti-war activist.
Stone’s subsequent projects included Wall Street (in which Michael Douglas famously declared “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right”), The Doors with Val Kilmer channelling Jim Morrison and the Oscar-nominated conspiracy thriller JFK, which used the infamous real-life footage shot by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, but which critics said had toyed with the historical record. Any Given Sunday, about professional American football team the Miami Sharks, featured a stirring pre-game motivational speech by coach Al Pacino.
Later, there were films about presidents Richard Nixon and George W Bush. World Trade Center (with a haunting score by Glasgow-born composer Craig Armstrong) depicted two New York Port Authority policemen, who were on duty and trapped in the rubble of the Twin Towers. Stone’s most recent films have been the drugs-cartel thriller Savages, and Snowden, about the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Stone, however, has also made several politically aware documentaries, including three on Fidel Castro, one on the social and political transformations across South America and a “Verité documentary” in 2003 in which he allowed leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority “to speak their minds, ultimately demonstrating just how far apart the two sides stand”. This approach of allowing politicians to speak their minds seems to have been repeated in the Putin documentary. Stone also shot the series The Untold History Of The United States, “a new look at the birth of the American empire”. He and Professor Peter Kuznick co-authored an accompanying 700-page book which set out to probe “the dark corners of the administrations of 17 presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama” and ask “just how far the US has drifted from its founding democratic ideals”.
The New York Times said the TV series was sure to draw ire from both left and right and put Stone in the role “he loves best: provocateur”. Speaking to the LA Times last September, Stone said he was not one of those people who doesn’t reflect on life.
“My life in movies is the growth of my consciousness,” he said. “Every year was an expansion in some way. I never thought I’d make it to 70. We’ll see where we go from here.”