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

Photo by Audrey Ichinose

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Dramatizing History (1)

In Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, you were the first one to tell the story, on the screen, of the soldier in Vietnam and what he actually experienced, the soldier when he returned home.

Well that's not quite true. Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies. In Platoon I was authentic to my own feelings as much as I could be within the dramatic form that I was creating.And in Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, I was very close with Ron, still am (or was until very recently) and I asked him to co-write the screenplay and to put his real feelings there. His real feelings about his father and his mother and his country. And he was a very angry man. I see Born on the Fourth of July ultimately as one of my best movies. I just think I like the way he re-integrates himself at the end of the movie. He finds his path, which is not that far from where he started actually, because he was very zealous as a boy but he was very zealous at the end of his life too.

In some ways you're both radical and conservative. Your movies shake people up, but their goal seems to be also to restore the community to itself and its true story.

Again, those are big words. Movies have to make money, you've got to make them so they're exciting, they're gripping, people want to go see them. That's a very hard thing to do because people are more and more jaded, it seems, from the hours of television and the speed of modern life. So how do you make it exciting to tell the story? Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize. I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can. I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling. One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia. And I swear if I came back with that film and put it out there, that I would be attacked on all sides by the historians for having distorted the truth. I guarantee you, if I had been there, that that's what would have happened.

Let's talk about that, because you work between personal narrative and historical narrative. One runs into the problem, let's look at Nixon for example, where you told Nixon's personal story and created a character who's a Nixon for all time. On the other hand, you have historical "facts" in there that may be proven wrong, specifically whether Nixon was involved in efforts to assassinate Castro and other leaders. Thirty years from now, memos prove that he wasn't involved, but at the same time, you've created a great piece of art. How do you want people to look at that movie in the future, when they know that you're wrong about Nixon and his involvement but you're right about Nixon's character?

There's two different questions. First of all, in terms of memos, probably all the memos that will come to light on Nixon's involvement have already come to light. That's to say, his involvement in staff meetings, National Security Council, the people that he signed off on. We know that he was around the edges of it. And that's the most we'll ever find out. The contrary is true. As time progresses, you will see less and less memos. There's no memo that's going to come up and say that Nixon instigated the assassination of Castro. But we do know that Nixon was heavily involved and knew of the invasion of Cuba, correct?

Right.

Here is a very practical man. He's Vice President of the United States, he knows the military, he knows John Foster Dulles, the CIA, he knows everybody. Do you think that when they contemplate an invasion of a country they do not contemplate the assassination of the leader? It's the first thing any semi-intelligent military mind would have to think of. So it's inevitable to me, this combination. Of course they thought of Castro, and they tried. In fact the interesting thing is how close he is. Anthony Summers is coming out with a book next year, its going to be fascinating. Nixon is very close to Bob Mahieu, and Mahieu instigated the plots with the gangsters. But prior to Mahieu, the CIA was doing it on its own, in March 1960. What did Nixon know of [Patrice] Lamumba? What did he know of Guatemala back in '54? Nixon was the most traveled Vice President we ever had. He spent a lot of time hanging out abroad because Eisenhower didn't want him around domestically. If that's the case, don't you think ... he was not wasting his time, Nixon was a brilliant man.

Okay, but question two: Let's say I'm dead wrong, and time goes on. Fine. But you know what I did. I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history. And that was labeled as such. I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation. And I will move on into closed-doors meetings, I will invent dialog, I will create the fabric of a historical drama. I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take. You know, the movie will either work on its own terms, as a drama, in 2100, or it will also be perceived as having been historically perceptive. Shakespeare's dramas, thank God for him, lasted better as dramas than they did as history plays, didn't they? But that's not to say that they're wrong today.

Do you worry about the fact that young people may not know history or read history, but in fact see your movies, know your movies, and come to believe that they're absolutely true?

I hear that all the time. It's an amazingly, to me superficial statement because first of all it implies that the teaching community has failed utterly to share a sense of history with their students. But secondly, movies have always existed to me as illusions. I've always accepted them as such. When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it. Lawrence of Arabia -- I went out and I bought Seven Pillars of Wisdom. When I saw A Man for All Seasons, I read Robert Bolt's book. Every historical film that has been made has been called into question in some way. But generally speaking, the non-literal person, the person who would enjoy a movie, would tend to view a movie as a first draft, would deepen his perception with reading around it. I mean, books are another medium. Books can go into more depth. But don't tell me for one second that a person who writes a book is more objective than a person who makes a movie. I don't buy that, because so many historians have axes to grind and have subjected their own judgment to their own perception and their own subjectivity, and partisanship in some cases. It goes on all the time. And every history, in fact, is an omission of facts, because there are too many facts to put in any history. You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

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