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All my life I have wanted to interview Oliver Stone. One of the reasons why, aside from his
remarkable films, was the fact that he fought in the Vietnam War and he didn’t need to.
At age 21, Stone volunteered to go to war. Prior to that he was in Yale. It was the best education a future writer and director could get at the time. Years later, as a Vietnam veteran, he made a movie, Platoon (1986), that won him an Oscar for Best Director. The movie won three more Academy Awards including Best Picture. Prior to that, Stone had already proven his valor by winning an Oscar for the screenplay of Midnight Express (1978). In 1989, he won yet another Academy Award for Born on the Fourth of July. In a way, I was influenced by Stone’s films, and so I went to cover my first civil
war in Romania later that same year.
After covering two more wars, in Dubrovnik (1991) and Sarajevo (1992), I had a better understanding of
Stone’s movies and his creative mind. And, by then, I knew that wars leave scars in human souls, sometimes forever.
While in Vietnam, Stone was wounded twice.
He had joined the Army in 1967, undergoing infantry training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He went by the name of Bill and was in the 2nd Platoon of Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Infantry. After being wounded for the second time, Stone wasn’t out of action for long.
In April 1968, Stone was transferred to a reconnaissance platoon where he met one of the
men who, 10 years later, inspired him to write the screenplay under the working title Platoon, “before he forgot everything that had happened over
there.” During his 15 months of service in Vietnam, Stone earned a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster and a Bronze Star. But, like I said, the wars leave scars.
Stone (59), is a natural born writer and director, but there are demons he is still fighting to this
day.
Recently he was arrested during the Memorial Day weekend and booked on alcohol and drug charges after
the luxurious Mercedes Stone drove was pulled over at a police checkpoint in Beverly Hills.
Since Stone was under the influence, the officers searched his car and found an illegal drug. The director posted $15,000 bond and was released after spending several hours in detention. He was charged with a misdemeanor for driving while intoxicated and drug possession. This was not his first DUI and drug offense. In 1999, the famed filmmaker was arrested on alcohol and drug charges and, as a part of a plea bargain, he agreed to enter a rehabilitation program.
Still, I love his movies—in particular JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Nixon (1995). Some movie critics claim his films are controversial, and some describe him as a paranoid war veteran who makes conspiracy-oriented films. Since I do not write movie critiques, but I managed to speak to Stone in person, I believe he is a brave writer and director who is not afraid to pay a price for his ideas and ideals. I highly respect his artistic integrity, his open-minded intellect and his hard-working ethics. Stone also wrote notable scripts for Scarface (1983), Evita (1996), and Any Given Sunday (1999), a movie he produced and directed.
It is almost totally unknown that Stone, who was from a wealthy family, struggled to make it on his own
through most of his formative years. In 1964, he entered Yale.
A year later, at 19, he was an English teacher at the Free Pacific Institute, a Catholic school for Chinese students located in Cholon, a suburb of Saigon. By the way, he speaks fluent French, which helped him a lot in Saigon at the time.
Stone taught for a while but quit because he didn’t enjoy being a teacher.
Later he worked aboard a ship, and then sold his first UPI story. He signed on with the Merchant Marine and went to Mexico where he wrote a novel that was rejected by several publishers. Even his script for Platoon was rejected for an entire decade by every studio in Hollywood.
Stone was very kind to me both times when I was able to talk to him during the Bangkok International
Film Festival in 2004 and especially this year. He showed a genuine interest in my roots asking about my origins. Once he found that I came from what was once Yugoslavia, I could see he accepted me with the
profound ease of a man who knows what war is.
I asked Stone many questions at the press conferences in Bangkok, and later on and off the record, but
I did not feel it would be fair to transcribe our conversations into an interview, although I had recorded all of his answers.
My first question to Stone was to compare wars in Vietnam and Iraq II, the way he sees it, and I
remember that he closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead and took his time before he started answering, obviously measuring his every word:
“You are asking me a philosophical question, and because of the nature of it I don’t think I can go
into any depth on that in such a short period of time. So, I will say that there are movies that I made about the Vietnam war that I was hoping had a deeper impact in the 1980s and early ’90s, but when this
Iraq war happened the build up to the war was almost as if there was a collective desire not to remember the Vietnam War in America. It was a very strange time. There was no mention, in those months
building up to this war, of the Vietnamese war.
And what we saw regarding the former presidential nominee John Kerry was shocking to me personally, because it was so offensive to attack a war hero with such ugliness and divisiveness that it only brings to mind how harsh a polarization there is today in America.”
Fascinated by his war experiences and the ways he transferred them into movies, I was especially
interested in Stone’s last film of his Vietnam War trilogy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) —Heaven and Earth.
A couple of years ago I had interviewed producer Robert Kline who told me he had actually showed the book “When Heaven and Earth Change Places” to Stone, who decided to make it into a movie.
This poignant war saga was told from the point of view of a Vietnamese woman, Le Ly Hayslip. Kline, who produced Heaven and Earth (1993) told me that not only, in part, was the movie shot in Vietnam but that it also was the only American film about the war told from the “other side.”
Here is what Stone told me about Heaven and Earth, in response to my question about his inner feelings while filming this movie:
“It’s hard to separate feelings of a man and a soldier and an artist that I have, because they develop
side by side. It would require a very cold and ruthless personality to disassociate your humanity from your filmmaking. For me, it was the ability to see the other side.
“In the movie, we had two scenes of villagers who are being abused by American soldiers and as well by
Viet Cong troops in Vietnam. So, you’ve got both sides. The pressure on the village people was enormous.
It was really a genocide in a sense that the farming and agriculture was nearly destroyed. The tribes and the farmers were hurt in a deep way. Vietnam was almost ruined and has come back from a disaster, and I admire them very greatly for that. So, of course, you see the damage, you understand the damage. When you are an American soldier, you are living in a bubble. You come to Iraq, you come to Vietnam. You see things, you do things. You don’t talk, you don’t communicate. You go back, and you remember your own experience as an American experience. This movie was a chance for me to learn a little bit about the Vietnamese experience.”
Being a curious journalist I had to ask Stone about his recent documentary film, Comandante, that he did in Cuba while interviewing Fidel Castro. Of course, I was not surprised to read lots of negative articles in the U.S. media about this documentary, and one of the most
repeated arguments was that Stone did not ask Castro any tough questions. When I asked him about the Comandante’s apparent “soft” approach, Stone, usually very considerate and patient, as every
Buddhist is, appeared to be slightly irritated and answered very quickly:
“I think it’d be nice to see the damn thing in America—which has been one of the low points—to have it
blocked from being shown. Well, it’s Fidel Castro in his own words, which is incredible. I didn’t go down there to Cuba as a journalist; I went as a filmmaker, and I asked him big questions about his
life. You can say they were not tough enough, but I don’t think they were soft.”
Most of Stone’s admirers do not know that he practices Buddhism.
And he is very sincere about it. His girlfriend-wife Chong Son Chong is Korean and they have a daughter, Tara Chong. Being a very proud family man, Stone always shows an utmost respect for Chong Son’s Eastern roots. Also, he has lived in Thailand and is very knowledgeable of Eastern traditions and culture. Although he is not a totally devoted Buddhist who shaves his head and wears a robe, he shared with me his thoughts on the religion he practices:
“You practice, you practice, you practice.
If you’re Buddhist, you know what I’m talking about here, endlessly practicing. You also change your practice. There are lots of qualities that go into Buddhism which emphasize the concept of yourself, your own entity, and are definitely different of the Western tradition. I think that most of the religions try to undermine that entity.
“As a result of Chong Son’s influence, I became a student, and I practice as much as I can,
sometimes not very well, but Buddhism has been my religion for the last 11 to 12 years. It is an introduction into Vietnamese Buddhism for the West.
It was wholly rejected, because it’s very difficult for Americans to understand and to appreciate the beauty of the philosophy of Buddhism. To me it is certainly attractive and is healthy emotionally. On the other hand I come from a culture where Western individuality is prized. I have an Eastern wife and I have an Eastern child. And they’ve given me much happiness, so I do appreciate Buddhism deeply.”
Knowing that Stone is critical of the current political situation in the U.S., I did not want to
emphasize that point too much.
But, naturally, when you talk to an artist who is very political like Stone, you stumble over numerous issues that concern someone like him regarding the current administration in the White House, and he was very frank about the role of the media in it:
“Well, in the U.S. we have political problems of enormous proportions. It’s
like George Orwell. I don’t know how many people remember him, but what George Orwell wrote in his book, 1984, has come true in a different way
than he pictured.
The larger the country the more trapped it is by its ethnocentricity, by its ability and its capacity to make the whole country believe one thing. America is struggling with a media that is corporate controlled, and it’s much easier than you think to fool a larger group of people than a smaller group of people sometimes.”
In the end of our conversations, I asked Oliver Stone if there is a movie he made that he is not fond
of today. Stone looked at me with a broad smile on his face that made me laugh, too (see the photo on page 22) and, then, he said:
“The horror film I did in 1981 [author’s note: The Hand”
starring Michael Caine—it was released to generally negative reviews; the sight of a disembodied hand “walking” around struck laughter rather than fear into the audiences.] You know, there’s always that, with
any film, you look at any film and you say: ‘Oh, I could do this.’
But, you know, you could look at a film five years later and say: ‘And that too...’ And you wait five years and you’d say something else. You have to acknowledge that you make the film at the time that you make it. And, that’s your picture.” -e
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