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

Photo by Audrey Ichinose

Page 3 of 9

Experience, Sensation, and Catharsis

I'm curious, did your experience in Vietnam make it inevitable that you would work with historical materials in your movies?

I think that anyone that lives through his life is going to end up dealing with his history. And his history sometimes inter-reacts with public events. And I think often in my life, my private sector has kind of come into collision with the public sector. And I'm looking back on my life and I realize that the toll that I had to pay, or that my generation had to pay, to get through that period was unnecessary. It was unnecessary because it was all a series of expedient political decisions by Johnson and Nixon. And it changed the course of our lives and time forever. And it's hard to get back, because once you've lost that spot of innocence, perhaps, that you had when Kennedy got killed and then Nixon performed his acts, his sinister designs, all that shaped us to the way we are now. You too. I'm -- we're all shaped by it. Life became what it did in America as a result of that, and that's what's fascinating. How do you avoid it? You make movies about historical periods so that you can avoid it. You can make, I guess, comedies where there's no social inter-reaction -- although even Ace Ventura Pet Detective posits an economic strata: that Jim Carrey has to exist in an economic level. He's never running out of money, even if he's a cable guy. In any film there's always a historical implication.

One can say, in a way, that your experience gave you a view from the bottom up. What is quite amazing about Platoon and about Born on the Fourth of July, it's really the experience of the people, the soldiers who felt these decisions from the bottom up. Would you comment on that?

That's great. That's probably perhaps one of the most significant things I learned over there was that there's sort of a perceived life that you get when you're raised. College students get it, you read it in books; your thinking is perceptions that have been taught to you. Very Pavlovian in a way. And when I got to the infantry, I really saw life smack up in front of my face. It was a non-cerebral exercise. Six inches in front of my face -- survive! You have to rely on your sense, your smell, your sight -- all your senses come into play. Tactile. As a result, you never can get quite back. Once you get into that path, it's very hard to realize, the perceived opinion path -- that which you hear from others -- is never ... It's a question of what is authentic in your life, finally. What are your real feelings? How do you really feel about the way you are? How you are alive, what you are here for -- once you ask yourself these questions (they're all Socratic ones, I guess), once you get into that arena, how do you go back into believing what "they" tell you?

I think you really believe, and you seemed to indicate this in a speech at Berkeley a few years ago, in recording the pain and the suffering, that that is an entrée point for the audience to experience a catharsis, and for the American people, in the case of your movies, to experience the trauma that was Vietnam.

Those are heavy words, Harry. You know, you don't set out to do that. You set out to be authentic to yourself and to put down the way that you feel it and you know it and you interpret it. And then others sometimes can key into it and get it. But a lot of people can see my movies, and they tell me they enjoy them or they don't, but they don't get into deeper analysis. Some people will say, "I was very moved by the picture," but may not even understand what feelings were working on them. Natural Born Killers, for example, evoked a very strong negative feeling in people. And I thought that that is the same thing to me as positive, because it's just a working out of feeling, that they were vomiting, regurgitating at the picture. People who saw Born on the Fourth of July were healed, they said that they were healed because they felt that they were restructured. I don't know how true that is. But the films work at you on an emotional level and you make of it what you can. And catharsis, you know, what is catharsis to me? It's an old academic term, first of all. Does that mean you are supposed to go to the play and live all your life in front of your eyes as it flashes before you? You participate with the protagonist and at the end of the deal you're cleansed in some way because you've been moved and terrorized, and so you're cleansed by having felt those emotions. I suppose that would be the most perfect definition of it, so if that could happen in a movie that would be great. It would great. And these movies are like Greek dramas. These are Greek dramas. These are shards on the Greek vases that will endure. I hope movies endure.

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