Oliver Stone Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Audrey Ichinose

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A Distinctive Art Form

What is distinctive about movies as an art form?

That's a very tough question, because painting is sensual too, so you can't say it's the only sensual experience. So is music, so is architecture, so is sculpture. So that's not a definition. Drama, play writing, is also live. But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing. Montage can create a three-dimensional space, a three-dimensional aura, great sensuality. There's an electrical thing about movies. And I've noticed it, because I've written a lot of things that I've been able to direct and see how it works, and I am amazed constantly. That's part of the reason I'm fascinated by the process. Often something that will work on paper does not work when you see it on film. It sounds like a contradiction, but sometimes stuff that isn't so great on paper will be dynamite, it'll be electric, because something -- the look of an actor, the sensuality of a touch, the caress, an angle, the camera catches the light in a certain moment of time and it's just, what I call, magic. So those are elements that are very electric, stormy.

I always consider that when you tell a story on paper, you read it. It takes a certain amount of time to read. It has a given length, sort of a real time. But there's something about movies that always amazes me, their transcendence of time. You can in one second, in one frame, see something that will spark you as divine or genius. I suppose you could say the same thing about reading. You can read a book and say that it felt like it all took place in 20 seconds of my life, I just saw it, it's a mood that I will remember forever. That's what great art is to me, the remembrance of it. You see, it can be a very great experience but unless it somehow registers in your consciousness in some form inside the witness, it does not succeed on my terms. So that's what it is about movies. It's like, what do you remember? What is it that happens in movies, when you work so hard and all of a sudden it just makes perfect sense in a 20-second scene or a three-minute scene? That's the scene that everyone will remember. You remember those great things in those movies.

Do different people see different things in those great scenes?

Absolutely. I believe in the blind man and the elephant here. I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations. Everyone is a critic, everyone can do it better. My father used to kid me. Whenever we saw movies when I was a kid he said, "We could do it better, kiddo." He'd always examine the movie because everyone thinks they can do it better. Everyone is a movie director in their own mind. So there's a million opinions.

Isn't there something about the compression of information in a scene?

That's what I am trying to say. Tremendous compression. It takes pages to read and to understand, but when you see it, it takes less than 30 seconds or 60 seconds to really get it. Because all of a sudden you're in history. You're in Michael Collins for example, you're in Ireland, in Dublin in the 1920s, and you get it. You understand that all mankind has struggled in this same way, that there are classical verities that are true. There was a very good caveman movie called Quest for Fire, which I love, but movies tend to optimize, make optimistic, the realities of life. Things are harsher, whether it's war in Platoon or caveman existence in Quest for Fire, or history. In Man for All Seasons, it looks very fine, but the people probably stank to holy heaven. They had terrible breath and terrible dentistry and doctoring, and people died and there was all kinds of things like that that are not in movies. You don't smell the stink of the medieval ages. Greece, for example, has never been rendered honestly in its sensuality or its homosexuality. You don't see these in movies, the truths to a large degree, and so in history too. It's very hard to get behind the canvas and go in. You can, and in those moments that you do, that is when it comes alive. I hope, I really believe, that people know in their primal unconsciousness, which Jung talked about, there might be those moments that we all recognize from history. We feel that is right.

The history you actually participated in?

The collective unconscious memory of the human race. In fear itself, the concept of fear that we all experience when we run into objects that frighten us. Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them -- maybe that's what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.

Even the doctors talk about the fight-or-flight syndrome, human anxieties about fleeing or fighting. And that is getting evoked.

Aggressiveness is perhaps based in defensiveness too. Perhaps the reason we are aggressive is we're alive. We all have nightmares, we all have really horrifying fears. Mine may be being eaten by a giant snake or something. Perhaps I was in some ancient time. I'm terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily. My son sits there and he's amazed that I just can't watch some of that stuff that he watches. It's partly, probably, the fear of being eaten by a giant lizard.

Is that why, sometimes, there are scenes in a particular movie that people remember and they want to see them again and again?

Exactly. Everyone has different reactions. I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it. Whereas the reverse is also true. So the movie critic thing is a dangerous thing because an opinion ... whose opinion is it? Consider the source. And also, how do we criticize a movie in terms of its achievement or acknowledge its objective? Do we say, "This movie, I may not agree with the objective, but this is what the objective is and the filmmakers are trying to do this." That would be an honest criticism, it seems to me. Not, "How disgusting, this is a terrible subject." Or, "No one should be allowed to see this." There's this censorship going on, and that's not genuine criticism.

What happens to us when we watch movies?

I think you get in touch with your dream life, definitely. Or the collective dream life. There's something going on there. Sometimes you're watching the eyes or the chemistry, or some aura that's coming off of the actor. That's why we have movie stars, I presume. It doesn't matter what they're in, people want to watch them. There's something, perhaps, primal about that. I guess what I'm talking about is something in the pre-brain, the dream-life brain of human beings.

In film -- what is it Howard Hawkes said? -- that the camera loves some people and some people have a presence.

Absolutely. It's clear to all directors. A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

Next page: Experience, Sensation, and Catharsis

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