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

Photo by Audrey Ichinose

Page 7 of 9

Characterization and Structure

Compare the character of Garrison in JFK and Nixon in Nixon. Do you think that the portrayal of Nixon has greater depth?

Different motive, different objective. I never set out with JFK to make a character study of Jim Garrison, whom I knew and I admired. I used Garrison as one of four threads. I mean the movie is hung on Garrison because, first of all, he was the only public official to do something about the damn thing. Based on his book, there was the story of a family that was falling apart. But if I had gone into the family life in detail, the relationship between Sissy Spacek and Kevin and the children, the movie would have been five hours long, because there was no way that I could do Dealey Plaza, the Oswald background, and then of course the Mr. X character based on Fletcher Prouty, played by Donald Sutherland. I couldn't do those other stories. So the movie was crafted in a way that welded together four disparate stories into one. It's a very interesting, almost nonlinear kind of film, kind of postmodern in the way it was made. But a lot of historians missed the point of the movie. First of all, if you see it once, sometimes you misperceive. The second time, it's very clear that it doesn't say anything about a hundred corporations or a hundred people getting in a room and conspiring. It's much more intelligent and sophisticated than that.

But secondly, the movie itself is about the veil of reality that we have around us. The whole first 45 minutes of JFK is based on television perception of Kennedy's death at Dealey Plaza. If you look closely at the movie, it's all television, television, people are reacting. It's very interesting, because that's the way we got it back in '63. And the rest of the movie is the tearing down of that veil. And the technique of the movie is done in that deconstructionist style -- what is reality? Question it. Think for yourself. You never know. Everything is subject to manipulation: your life, country, murder. And as such it becomes really a portrait that puts you in the mirror looking at yourself, which is a disturbing portrait. That's why, at the end of the movie, Costner turns right into the camera and he sort of says, "It's up to you." It's an old '30s technique but it's powerful. So I fished up these new techniques and I think people were shocked and they said, "You invented fake footage and passed it off as real." Not so. What is real? We still have a hard time discerning what is real in this Warren Commission mess that they did. They didn't examine the body. They didn't really do any kind of job at an investigation. Hoover and Dulles were appointed on the Warren Commission. That was a joke. That's like asking the fox to watch the chicken coop. And there was ultimately the ballistic suspicions that arose from the impossibility of taking that kind of shot from that window. And the Zapruder film, by the way, too, which is one of the great historic documents of all time. It's one of the great moments in history.

Right, and I think you were the first one to actually show the couple of frames where the bullet has its impact.

We tried. We did a lot of high definition work, we slowed it down but I'm sure we could do even a better job right now.

But weren't you the first one to show the scenes...?

We slowed it down. It was shown briefly here and there. It was shown on TV but never examined in the detail that Costner examines it in the movie.

Are you surprised at yourself at the depth of your portrayal of Nixon? It's almost sympathetic in places.

Yeah, I think too much so sometimes. But you know that was a different purpose. Again, we were trying to go to the root of power, the root of this man who had this power, who inherited it over the dead bodies of the two Kennedys, and what he did with it. And at the end of the day it was really clear that a lot of the problems of Richard Nixon were really personal. He distorted himself, in a sense. Instead of taking grace from power and doing something better with his power, he distorted it into a darker side. That's what was interesting about the man. That's why we sort of sought to do his background, his mother and his father, where he grew up. The deaths of his two brothers is a crucial issue in his life. What made this man, this Richard II character (really he's closer to that than anything) who America inherited? And he almost took the kingship, like Richard II did in the Shakespeare play. Actually he took the kingship and made it into a mirror. That's what he did. It was all about Richard Nixon, it was never really about the country. I find that a fascinating thing. In a sense I think you could say that all men of power do that. I think Lyndon Johnson was very vain, I really do. I think that Lyndon Johnson was like -- was it Snow White who said, "Tell me who is the fairest in all the land"? I think Lyndon Johnson had a lot of that. But Nixon was the supremely complicated version of Lyndon Johnson. I think Lyndon Johnson did not have the brain power wattage of Nixon or Kennedy.

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