Oliver Stone answers questions the same way he makes films. Throw him a subject and watch him go, like a dog with a bone – a gnawing blur of tangents so frantic it tires you out just looking at him.
Take the following. In Any Given Sunday, his dissection of American football released on Friday, leading man Al Pacino delivers a heated address to the Miami Sharks, imploring them to “heal as a team, or die as individuals”. Does the monologue reflect the sentiments of this most eternally worked-up of directors? Stone’s brow furrows.
By the time it smooths again, seven minutes later, there is a reply: “Yes, it is my speech – a speech I’ve developed over many years.” En route, he’s also spoken about his lecture tours of US colleges, his Yale education, and the way Vietnam attracted him to cinema. Oh, and his stint at film school, where he was taught by Scorsese; corporate power structures (“a diminishment of humanity”); Pacino’s devotion to his acting roles; new technology (“Soon, body parts will be cyborgian”); the doleful pessimism of his last movie, U Turn; and the “staggering beauty” of a perfect touch-down. And then, suddenly, he’s right back where he started.
“So, yes,” he nods, “Al’s making a last stand. He’s saying, let’s be human together. Let’s dig in as a team. Which is really one of the major themes of the film.”
One of many. While Any Given Sunday’s storyline concerns coach Pacino, team owner Cameron Diaz and maverick quarterback Jamie Foxx, anyone familiar with the bulky 53-year-old behind the camera will be unsurprised to find subtext after subtext emerging from the plot. The film starts with a virtuoso account of a football game; after that it’s straight into two-and-a-half hours of meditations on parenthood, accusations against big business, and caustic asides on the broadcast media. All, of course, coated with the outraged sincerity that’s become Stone’s hallmark.
Which isn’t to say Any Given Sunday is a failure; in fact, it’s possibly Stone’s best work since JFK. It’s just that, if you’re after a fresh insight into its creator, you’ll learn nothing. Here, as always, certain concepts are to be cherished (honour, integrity, comradeship), others despised (big money, Machiavellianism). It’s been that way ever since he returned from the Vietnam war.
I wonder whether he feels that little has changed since then – if the Sharks of Any Given Sunday are really being ripped apart by the same dark forces that destroyed Charlie Sheen in Wall Street and Platoon, and extinguished Anthony Hopkins’s Nixon.
“Well,” he says, “the critics in the States were a little grudging.” He stares out of the window, apparently immersed in an entirely different line of inquiry. “And the sports writers really clamped down on us. I mean, I’m not going to say it was a conspiracy – but the National Football League hated the idea of this movie. And the writers work with the NFL: they’ve got to get in the locker rooms, they’ve got to talk to the players. So I know memos were sent to certain people saying, ‘Don’t attend any premieres, don’t co-operate.'”
He’s not being rude. Oliver Stone simply talks about what he wants to talk about. Sometimes that coincides with a journalist’s questions; sometimes it doesn’t.
I try to rephrase the question, but he’s off again, on to Italian- Americans in south Florida, mother love, the logistics of cutting films for TV. In life, as in his movies, you sift through the barrage, through the pirouetting logic. Separating the film-maker from his films is impossible.
Not least because both have a serious image problem: Stone and his movies are both widely perceived as didactic and overbearing. What is endearing is his naivety about the vitriol that follows in his movies’ wake, and the conviction he brings to the screen even when the results prove addled (as in The Doors, or Natural Born Killers).
There’s a similar naivety in the way that he talks about his private life. Last June, he faced ridicule after being arrested driving through Beverly Hills high on enough medication to open his own pharmacy. Yet he’s genuinely puzzled when his reputation for hedonism comes up.
“How do you know I’m a hedonist?” I tell him you hear stories. “You hear stories?” He shrugs. “Well, I enjoy my life. I don’t want to be a pig, but I enjoy my life. And I don’t hurt people. I’ve hurt some people emotionally, but I’ve never killed or wounded anyone, except in Vietnam, and that wasn’t a civilian, it was a soldier. As a matter of fact, I saved a couple of civilians … There’s a few things I’ve been. Hedonist. Moralist. Conspiracist. Misogynist – which I hate because, God, I love women.”
Not film-maker? “No, never. And if you see the films a second time … I mean, I watched JFK again recently, and some of the technical stuff there is amazing. I will say this in my defence, if you ask people in the street about me, they’re all over the place. They say, ‘Oh, I like Wall Street but I didn’t like Natural Born Killers,’ or ‘I like JFK but I hate Platoon.’ With Marty [Scorsese], everyone talks about Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. With me, there’s no consensus. So I think that’s a sign of me changing, morphing, taking on different subjects in different styles.” It takes a moment to realise that he’s just answered a question I put earlier.
He looks distracted, and seems strangely vulnerable to criticism. He keeps rising to the bait, and can’t quite summon up the calm his Buddhism advises. He bristles at charges of marginalising women (which Any Given Sunday, with Diaz doing her best queen bitch, will do little to alleviate). Surely by now he must know what comments to expect?
“I think the women in my films are a little different. I mean, Joan Allen had an Academy Award nomination for Nixon, Juliette Lewis was superb in Natural Born Killers, I loved Hiep Ti-Le in Heaven and Earth [his 1993 ode to Vietnam]. I mean, what higher homage can you pay than to cast an unknown woman, and make the entire movie about her? Of course, as a result, nobody saw it … I still feel there’s a racism in America about Vietnam. It’s the same with Any Given Sunday. I’m guessing, but if we’d had a white quarterback, a Keanu Reeves, we probably would have made $100m. There’s this systematic hostility to the idea of a black man standing proud.”
All of which might sound like evasiveness or self-justification. Until you recall that Stone’s willingness to pull up the US on its foibles makes him a pariah in his home country. He’s not exaggerating when he says the religious right regard him as a demon.
When the time comes, would he rather be remembered as a visual stylist, a storyteller, or – Sixties child that he is – a rabble-rouser, a dissenter?
“The greatest compliment I’ve ever had,” he says, “was this one kid who told me he watched JFK 17 times, and it really opened his eyes – not in terms of the conspiracy itself, but more in my saying, ‘Think, think about what government feeds us,’ what media feeds us. Which, I have to say, really got lost in the coverage of the actual conspiracy. I don’t know, once I’m older, or dead, perhaps I’ll get a second viewing. A court of appeal. I’d like a court of appeal.”
Oliver Stone, multitasker
Stone the director: After a false start in the early Seventies with the Z-grade horror movie Seizure, Stone made his mark in 1981 with another horror film, The Hand, starring Michael Caine. Once established, Stone immediately launched into politically conscious film-making with Salvador. Platoon, his visceral account of the Vietnam war, won four Oscars in 1987 and levered him into the big league. Then Stone took on the financial markets (Wall Street), right-wing extremism (Talk Radio) and TV-induced violence (Natural Born Killers). In between, he completed his Vietnam trilogy (Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth), and crafted another set about his perennial obsession, the Sixties (JFK, The Doors) and its Watergate hangover (Nixon).
Stone the writer: Before he became a successful director, Stone knocked out scripts for other film-makers. In 1978 he won an Oscar for Midnight Express, in which his trademark combination of hippie libertarianism and suspicion of Asiatic foreigners was established. Scarface, filmed by Brian De Palma, had Al Pacino playing a Cuban immigrant scything violently through the drug underworld, and Year of the Dragon (directed by Michael “The Deer Hunter” Cimino) had a Vietnam vet revisiting “gook” hell in drug-plagued Chinatown.
Stone the producer: Stone’s increasing Hollywood clout has allowed him to put his weight behind other “difficult” projects, such as Reversal of Fortune and Blue Steel, both concerned with overturning prejudice. Other highlights include The Joy Luck Club, the TV series Wild Palms (Stone’s answer to Twin Peaks), freedom-of-speech comedy The People vs Larry Flynt and, recently, Savior, Predrag Antonijevic’s Bosnian war drama.