Joe Rogan Experience #1511 - Oliver Stone

all right here we go thank you very much for being here i'm a really big fan so this is an honor for me i'm really really excited i'm really excited about your book i'm really excited about just your films the untold history of the united states which i think is fantastic i mean that is that's one of my favorite things that you've ever done and and so thorough and so interesting but um the book first of all look how good you look in there on the cover there that's an old shot done handsome bastard look at you looking good there what year is that from it was 1968 november i just come off the last mission in vietnam wow it was on a hilltop we got stuck uh in the rain in the ashow valley it was the first cavalry and uh we really the helicopters couldn't get in for 11 days it was awful wow we had leeches everywhere we and the enemy we didn't know where they were but we felt that they were going to close in it was but it was too wet ultimately for them to close in but they knew we were there so we were praying the whole time was kind of nerve-wracking because it was my last few days you understand i was supposed to get out of there with d-rose leave the country i was due out i had volunteered i had volunteered for an extra three months in order to get out of the army three months sooner wow in other words they had normally you had to serve uh if a two-year deal you had to serve six six months stateside on the back side of it so i didn't want to do that because i was going nuts with the rules and the regulations and i'd gotten into some trouble with that so i extended in combat for another three months and that ended up in this mission how much did your time serving impact your your directing and you like you you've had these life experiences as someone who's just a filmmaker they really can't draw upon like you you've had actual combat experience and when you're making movies about combat i mean that has to be a gigantic advantage or at least it adds layers to it that are almost impossible to create to recreate for someone who's just trying to imagine what it's like yeah and that was very important when we did platoon i was trying to get the exact distances and what and the amount of firepower is not as usual it's not as intense generally speaking as the movies make it yeah and that's the problem because the movies have so much to pl you know so much to show they bring the enemy much closer they they condense things and they they amplify as much as possible now i did that too here and there so i'm i'm guilty too but i think overall it's way overdone and uh the newer stuff that's come out since 2001 you know with the patriotic stuff and heavily militaristic stuff is way off way off and uh people don't die that way like you know in the uh type of films like mark wahlberg made or you know those kind of films they're just way way overdone anyway and what in what way like well what was the name of the lone survivor yeah was that the name of it yeah yeah they get dropped off whatever and 10 guys and they managed to kill how many taliban for each guy you know how much of that was based on i mean it's all about marcus latrobe i haven't had a chance to talk to marcus although i'm friends with him but i don't know how much of it they they monkey with everything whenever they make way overdone it was way overdone what i've heard and what's been reported is that they you know they got trapped right away it was pretty quick the ambush went on and they got they got the [ __ ] kicked out of themselves and uh you know i can't i can't be i don't remember exactly the details but he did get away and yeah some people did scam scam but it doesn't look like it does in the movie where everyone's a hero right that is a problem and that's one of the things that i really loved about platoon everyone wasn't a hero i mean the the tom barringer character yeah he existed it's in the book yeah it's based on a guy called sergeant well i called him sergeant barnes but he wouldn't use his real name real guy getting shot in the face and was uh scarred distorted kind of handsome like that but he was a serious guy and he knew what he was doing he was the leader of the platoon see i i made clear that the the leaders of the platoon were not really the lieutenants they were the the platoon sergeant and the squad sergeants and uh they were very important in our lives so i barely saw officers i was dealing in the jungle you deal with what's right in front of you so the sergeant was crucial barnes is a crucial character so is the other character sergeant elias played by william defoe was the in another unit that i had combined four different units i was in three combat units i combined them into one one unit one platoon for this movie purposes so the willem defoe character was also based on a real person yes he was he was based on a guy i knew in the lerps long range recon patrol who was a great guy he was an apache kind of an apache mexican mix i'm not quite sure what he was because i didn't get to know him that well but i admired him because he had that life grace of a guy who fought a lot had been around he'd been he'd been in before he was on a second tour and very much a love a beloved figure and he was killed after i left the unit uh he was killed about a month later in a friendly fire accident now friendly fires met we talk about it in the book quite a bit you know because it's also underestimated people never the pentagon cuts it all out especially in the movies that come from the pentagon approval right they they don't like to emphasize how difficult how often i would say 15 to 20 of our casualties in that war were friendly fire wow now that's not just ground fire from when you get into a jungle situation you're close to people you don't really know where you're shooting sometimes you don't know where where the incoming fire is is coming from so it's quite a mess it's chaotic the radio people are screaming shouting noise confusion and a lot of fear yeah that was highlighted for us when the pat tillman incident very important one pat tillman who is this uh spectacular athlete decided to postpone his nfl career and and go over and serve and was killed in friendly fire and it wasn't really reported that way for a while that's absolutely correct which is the point is that they don't they really don't want the parents to know what's really going on so if imagine if imagine 15 maybe 20 percent are dying from that friendly fire that this is not just ground fire this is of course bombing and certainly artillery fire because that is often misplaced it's not that easy to get the coordinates down in a tense situation where you you can hit your artillery 20 miles away 40 miles away has to hit you has to hit the spot when you're making a movie like platoon and this is in many much much of it is based on your actual real life experience how much preparation is involved then how much how much is it different than when you're making another movie because this is something that's intensely personal to you obviously yeah how much preparation well i got i got a great combat advisor he'd been there as a marine dale dye uh he came in out of the blue and uh he he was a real lifer type so he remembered all the details in of uniforms and uh fire and the and uh the fire power i mean it's it took a lot of details to put this together uh but the preparation was i'd been doing it for ten years i started the picture in 1976 i wrote it i wrote it it wasn't made it was rejected by the by the uh powers it be the first time and then it was uh it was considered great great script but too re you know too realistic a bummer a downer if you remember back in the 70s they had apocalypse now and deer hunter yeah those were big films and mythic beautiful films but they were not realistic then they had sylvester stallone to his rambo series where he goes back and fights the war again do those drive you crazy yeah although the first one was pretty good uh but the first one was different they're playing up the you know the whole sympathy card the pity card yeah i don't buy that you know that there's a lot of that veteran feeling that you know it was we were we were beating we had our hands hide behind our backs and we couldn't win and that kind of thing believe me uh it was a badly conceived war with a lot of misinformation i go on in the book and talk about the lies that were spread by the military the propaganda that were winning the whole time they were using the body counts heavy body counts we'd say well if we're killing so much so many of them they're not going to be that many left and but on the other hand as the years went on more and more of them kept appearing so they the vietnamese were indestructible in a way they were like ants they were they were fighting for their independence they're for their land man it was their country and uh they never gave up ever i mean you could have nuked them and i that's what curtis lemay at one point suggested you could have dropped a nuclear bomb it wouldn't have done it wouldn't have made the difference thank god they didn't but uh america went to extremes to win that war with poisoning the the bombing the bombing of not only vietnam laos and cambodia was intense intense bigger bigger than by far than world war ii for this crazy war well it also it set a precedent for our lack of trust in the military a lack of trust in the government that guides the military particularly in how they deal with the veterans that are dealing with things like agent orange or you know people that have uh come back that were that were sick where they denied that this was part of the problem sure we didn't even have ptsd we didn't know what that was but it started to prop up when i got back and i talked about it here a bit about ptsd which i'd never heard of but i think we all had it what did they call it back then shell shocked or yeah i guess so but that wasn't it was not a diagnosis diagnosable but it was not an ailment that you could officially catalogue because if you did the army would be admitting to a huge amount of insurance problems and all kinds of medical problems that would they would have to cover so it was you know it was something that there was no word for it but frankly uh to get back to the issue of the original question was the platoon was rejected on for these two it almost came to be again in 1983 it fell apart again and it's a heartbreaking story it's in the book and uh it's resurrected i mean i forget about i just put in the closet after those movies came out i said dad they don't want to know about vietnam and in this country they really forget it it's not going to happen fine i live with it i was moving on with my career i had midnight express i had scarface i was uh i had other things in my life but uh michael cimino who had directed the deer hunter told me he wanted to produce it with me as the writer as a director and that we would it would we would resurrect it because he said vietnam's coming back i i said that's nonsense i don't think it's gonna come back he said look at stanley kubrick's pictures he's gonna make a picture it's called uh full metal jacket and uh it did it took three years or two years for him to make it but the fact that he made it certainly gave us some impetus to make we made it very low budget and uh by the way it was made by the same company as main salvador my previous film they made him i made him back to back in mexico and the philippines uh back to back financed very low budget by hemdale a british company led by a gentleman named john daly who i might who was my mentor how much credit name in the book so we were nothing film out of nowhere i mean we were the bottom i mean we're in the philippines and making a film that nobody really knew much about and at the bottom you know we were struggling to get it made and there was a weather problems there was all kinds of logistical problems but we'd been through hell on salvador as i described in the book in mexico so we were a unit by this time we we got used to the difficulties of making low-budget films in between the time you wrote it in the time it actually got done was there ever any effort by the studios to try to water it down or to try to doctor it up and sure no that went on quite a bit uh everyone read the script at one point or another everyone rejected it so and when it finally almost got made with cimino in 1983 uh we thought we were in we thought we'd get it made now but uh the uh the resistance to it at the very end with the mgm was supposed to be the distributor and henry kissinger was on the board of directors along with uh hague alexander haig you remember him military guy secretary of state very bad tempered they were both on the board and whether they went to that board i don't know but that's what the story they cover their ass by telling me we can't make this movie we can't distribute this movie because the board would be against it now sometimes they they tell you that without checking but in this case i don't know so as a result the film fell apart again this was a heartbreak did you ever think like maybe i can move it a little bit or change it a little bit or would you just spend it the pentagon said to me uh forget it we're not going to help you at all this thing is completely distorted they were upset as hell about the fragging i mean that's to say really you know what fragging is yeah yeah there was a lot of that towards the end i mean it started in 67 8 but there was more and more discontent when lyndon johnson pulled out of the presidency in march of 68. that was a big moment i think all the soldiers everyone kind of knew that this thing was not going to work out and who wanted to be the last guy to get killed in vietnam right and so i think 69 70 were more and more fractions more fraction fractious and there was more and more incidents at one point there was a pentagon document that came out i've seen it that said this situation in in the army is getting so poor so bad the morale is so low that it's it resembles is beginning to resemble the french mutinies in 1917 in the world war one that was a big concern of the pentagon they knew the thing was not going to work it was cracking from within so we we gave more and more let's say more and more uh credit to the vietnamese south vietnamese and saying that they were going to take our place we're going to put more money we put a fortune into the south vietnamese army like we're doing now with the afghan army it's interesting when you look back what year did platoon come out 80 it finally made it out in 86 86 december when when you really think about it you're only talking you're not talking about that much distance between that movie coming out and the vietnam war ending i mean in terms of how we look at the world now i mean if we look at it's 2020 if we look at 2000 that doesn't seem like 2003 that doesn't seem that long ago but that's kind of the timeline you're looking at and so in a lot of ways it was probably very fresh in a lot of people's eyes particularly people in the pentagon it was quite something when it came out it was a you know it was a it was like a bomb went off i mean we went around the world first of all it wasn't just america this film played everywhere and was i guess it was a shock at the time because it was more realistic than any warfield that they had seen and of course it was dirty it got you know i mean it was that we had drug use in it or which was you know the description of the division there was a division in the uh army we were we were draftees many of us so it wasn't all volunteer you know and it wasn't all like gung-ho at all it was a split and i just i described i showed this split as much as i could uh i would be in the i joined the camp with the people who i would say were anti-authoritarian i wouldn't say they were anti-war because we didn't have anything like that going on it was just the army sucks the man sucks you know a lot of the black troops knew this so there was a lot of dissension with the black troops too because when martin luther king got killed in april of 68 that had that had negative impact over there so there was a lot going on in the country and people were seeing it feeling it and um new troops were coming in all the time from the country draftees so we were you know you get a feeling for what's going on did the move did the movie feel different to you than anything else you've ever done in terms of your obligation because i really do think that that was the most realistic at that point for sure war movie ever made and the the one that left people with the most conflicted feelings and just this this feeling of as much as you can relate in a film with notable actors you you you showed the horrors of war in a way that i don't think it ever been portrayed before in a film well we got the details right i mean when you see a dead body and you see it being lifted into a helicopter that's really looks like a dead man and yeah the pain of death i mean you feel the danger it's it's never what you think it's going to be it's always comes up in another way it's like sloppy sometimes in battle and that's what i don't like about a lot of the movies the battle is often just confusion breaking down things don't work it's like mike tyson said you know your plan and goes out the window and you get hit in the face it's that's the way it goes it never pla see the americans had a methodical way of doing it we go into the jungle we send the little guys into the jungle they meet resistance pull back bomb artillery do anything take minimum casualties that's not what the marines did but that's what the army's idea was and that it works to a degree but it eradicates the whole the bombing is is very sloppy and not only do you have friendly fire but you have a lot of civilians killed too imagine when you finish your final cut of that movie and it got really it had to be a very strange almost like you're releasing a child you're you i mean it was it had to have been so much more personal and so much so much more significant i'd been through so much i really i didn't i didn't think it was good i thought it was a good movie i thought i was a good scriptman i didn't i didn't expect anything i had just done salvador which was about a dirty civil war down in uh in the central america in which america again supported some pretty bad guys some death squads and i showed that and that picture had not done very well because it had been america had been very little in no interest really in the central american issues of the 1980s remember they sent an easter revolution in nicaragua there was a lot of turmoil in guatemala turmoil in honduras where i i went down there to research el salvador and what i saw in honduras was the beginning of another vietnam that's one of the reasons i really committed to salvador heavily when i saw the troops the american troops now there are women men and women young in uniform many of them national guard troops reserves they were there building up for this i think it was pretty clear that reagan was going to attack nicaragua in some way but it never happened because of a fortuitous accident when the cia got busted for flying a cargo cargo over nicaragua and it was a huge scandal that led to the iran contra unraveling with reagan so reagan was unable to do what he wanted to do in in nicaragua although we had mined the port we'd done everything possible supporting the contras all that pissed me off in other words it was like 20 years after the war 15 years after here i am back in central america i'm seeing the same thing young guys like me in a country yet you know just believing what they're hearing from their superiors so you felt like this obligation to not just release salvador but also release platoon as in platoon your experiences showing what the vietnam war was really like and with salvador saying hey this is happening again yeah i did them simultaneously except i didn't really believe i didn't believe platoon was going to work yeah come out so i didn't have much faith in it well when it did come out how much of a surprise was it when it was a giant hit well i knew that in the moment put it this way the shooting was you could tell from the young people the actors and the their enthusiasm for this they there was a hunger uh to me they were so delight delighted to become so soldiers for the purposes of the movie we trained them on a 24-hour basis for two weeks and it was a it worked i wanted them to get no sleep and and dale dye helped me with that we we put them in a pivot training situation but a real one i mean where you don't sleep and you you're basically pulling sentry duty all night kind of you have you split your duty with foxholes three guys and dale would stage attacks and stuff in the middle of the night so they were nervous and they were they were tired beyond belief which is good that's where you want them so how did how did you plan this out so when you were when you were about to start filming you had it in your head we have to make this more realistic what's the best way to do it and no no from the beginning from the beginning the way i cast it i wanted i wanted young people as much as possible in the in the roles people who were fresh who didn't look like they'd done other movies right and types they were based on everybody i knew in my platoons people from the south uh a lot of people from the south the people from the midwest a lot of inner city people uh chicago especially uh st louis new orleans um and uh you know californians and i tried to mix it all up but the whole idea from the beginning was that we're going to make this with our little bit of money we're going to make this as realistic as we could so we planned it that way and we the camp worked we got the full cooperation of the philippine army and some shitty helicopters that they had but very dangerous ones but at least that was it was a start had that ever been done before the camp the the idea of having them live i don't think so because that had bothered me a lot in the field maybe in the old days but i don't i don't know one no what what made you fall on that like why was that well i'd lived it right i'd lived it so i wanted them to above all i wanted them to be tired irritable it gives you a sense of what it's like you know there's bugs there's a heat it's it's a jungle and it's uh how did they respond to that at first they were a lot of bitching there was a sag uh sag the unions and you you have to have 12-hour turnaround so a few of them quit really yeah wow and we replaced them because i had a long list waiting list of people that i'd seen over the years wow actually charlie sheen was the younger brother of emil emilio estevez who was my first choice to play it in 1983. and after the movie went peeled back to 86 emilio had gotten older and i went with charlie who came of age about that time was my age when i was over there oh wow so he was 19 20. so you know that's what i wanted those faces once you get the faces you can train them and uh behringer and dfo were the oldest and they that helped enormously they were this you know anchors of of the operation when the film was this gigantic success did that how did that feel to you did that validate this idea that you had and it shocked it shocked me it shocked me i mean for years this had been rejected 10 years you know i mean i i was sick of it i was saying i'm not going to make this movie because it's going to go wrong you know i didn't think it was possible but because of this you know kubrick picture and the support of the english company uh john daly they they wanted to make it this is news for me because all my life i'm fighting to make a movie against somebody's wishes all of a sudden i got some people on my side that's a big that's a big difference and the enthusiasm of the cast and dale dye and all these great people and my cameraman everybody they loved it and we made it and frankly we finished it we did it on budget and 50 was 50 days we went 54 days but that was in we had the money in the in the in the that 10 contingency we finished it in 54 days and it was tough uh and we got out of there just in time because the monsoons came and in the editing right away you could feel that people were reacting to it in a different way we edited it there was no we we edited a little bit but you know we played with it playing with it you massage it but right away i would say from the first screening on you could tell people were responding saying this is real this is i've never seen this this is real so it it took care of itself in a way i mean they didn't put much money in the distributing company was orion pictures existed that they they put a they said we'll give it a quality release a few theaters at christmas in 86 and it opened huge first day in new york there was a line of veterans young me you know veterans already looked young i mean not world war ii enters young veterans they were around the block at the lowe's aster and uh i wasn't there but people told me that they were they went in quietly there was a mute and they sat through the film and very little talk very little anything not a lot of the gung-ho stuff you hear and at the end of it they were quiet and they some of them wouldn't get up out of their seats quite a few of them were sitting there still in their seats you know some were crying it took off uh and then it took off like i can't i've never you know it's a phenomenon you rarely see in the world it's like the top third highest grossing film in america that year and it was it was a blockbuster because no children are allowed in you know and you don't have much of a woman's audience at first so you don't figure on these things you know it it took off and kept going and then the women started to come in the third week as it was getting more and more talked about there was no stopping it and then even when you went to places like paris or london you know people cared it was unbelievable well it was a masterpiece and is it is that your finest moment in your your proudest moment you feel like as a filmmaker well it's one of the highlights of my life and it it's the climax of this book the ten chapters here lead up to that because my story starts in 76 i'm in new york i'm broke depressed written 12 screenplays nothing's happened i've come close a few times nothing's going on and my marriage has ended my first marriage and looks i haven't accomplished in my life the things that matter so at the age of 30 you kind of wake up you say you know what can i do my grandmother dies i talk to her i go and talk to her on her death bed she's she's dead but in france they let them my mother was french she said they they they lay them out and i was talking to her and just i think it's a very moving scene where he communicates with her because she loved him and his own family life was quite disturbing in many ways it was for him a traumatic divorce between the mother his mother and father and he goes into uh he goes into this what happened in it's about a family too it's about how a family life can break apart you can become a child of divorce so uh his life kind of falls apart and he goes up you know hence he goes to vietnam as a teacher and he goes joins a merchant marine there's all kinds of things that happen comes back to school goes back to yale university drops out again he writes a book writes his first book about his experiences i did this before back in 1966 i was 19 years old didn't work out it was rejected it was ultimately published about 1997 it's called a child's night dream so i was a writer from the beginning i i think before i was a director and uh when that was rejected i just said [ __ ] it you know i'm i'm too full of myself i'm too much of a narcissist you know i can't write about myself so i joined the army uh and volunteered for combat and for vietnam i didn't want to miss it you know i wanted to see it right away because for the experience no i wanted to get to the bottom of the barrel i wanted to see what what this country was about i you know i was i was inquisitive i was i wanted to know what life was about i mean i'd grown up relatively sheltered you know i went to uh my father made a living on wall street he was a republican eisenhower supporter he was in the lieutenant colonel in world war ii where he met my mother i mean he was a a strong republican and all his life i grew up in that ethic but it really it's something that when i went to vietnam he had never been in combat but when i saw what i saw over there coming from a sheltered existence relatively it was shattered the look the glass was shattered it was just i wasn't like i couldn't take my father's word for it anymore on anything so i had to learn from myself that's why what was different from your father's perceptions of what it was supported the war like many many people did for several years until he got older and then he came around one day and he said you know i think it's a i think you're right i think it was it's a futile thing because uh the whole idea of the cold war he began to question it at the age of uh 70 about 65. he said you know what what difference does it make uh this domino [ __ ] he said uh you know the russians have a sub off long island you know they can they can nuke us from anywhere it does it doesn't make sense to play this uh zero-sum game of fighting for land fighting for one country or another intervening in other countries he began to question everything so uh and i was too so i didn't change uh i know you're going to go to later in my life but basically i didn't change until i went to this trip in honduras which i just told you about with my friend richard boyle for salvador in 1985 i went down there and what i saw in central america confirmed that we were doing it again we were going into these countries we didn't know what the [ __ ] they were about we didn't and we were fighting these in most cases the interests of most of the people the majority of the people they had a revolution in in nicaragua because it was so corrupt major revolution in 1979 and uh the we've been opposed to that new regime ever since so when you first when you entered into the army when you signed up did you did you have clarity about this did you would you just have this idea in your head that you needed to find out no what it was like no no i had no clarity i was i wanted to get out of new york i want to get away from my the whole my parents were divorced my father i want to get away from my father i want to get away for everything i knew i knew i didn't like yale university i was in the class with george bush you know i come from that generation of donald trump george bush bill clinton it's the same generation but i don't identify with those people because maybe they they didn't have that sense of service at all i did i had a sense of patriotism about that yeah but i think call it i really think it was misplaced but i felt that i owe my country something that i can't work just for myself the reason why i keep going back to this it's so significant that you had that moment in your life when you were involved in vietnam and you were in combat duty because all of your films although there are these big commercial successes they all have a message i mean midnight express even scarface there's there's a message in these films that's based on real live scenarios that took place that a lot of people are unaware of you know a lot of people got their education about uh cuba releasing prisoners to america based on scarface i mean that's how a lot of people found out about that that's too bad because i wish we had more can more study of what's going on in the world more contemporary studies well that's again what i really loved about the untold history of the united states it's a fantastic piece that you put together you want another chair you can slap that chair right there yeah excuse me no worries um but you that that's something that's really flavored your life is that your your work is not just commercial you don't you don't just put out these commercial success but they are commercially successful but you balance it with a message whether it's jfk or or whether it's platoon all of them there's something to them that resonates with people in answer to your question about whether i was clear no i wasn't clear i was here's what i felt at the time i said look i've been i wrote this book it didn't work it's i spent two years putting that together my whole life's on there it's not of interest to a publisher so therefore i'm going to go into this army and i'm going to go to this war and i'm going to let at that time i was a good christian i'm going to let god sort this out and uh he'll decide in other words i put it that's how you felt in some way yeah so if i'm not meant to come back i won't wow and i went under those conditions so you know you have to realize a lot of people at 19 are suicidal in nature yeah and we know this from the facts now now that we're talking about it you know it's in this country in america we have a surf fight of of suicide among 1920s 21s and it's uh sad but that's where i was it was spiritually desolate and frankly it got cleared up over there in the sense that i came out very grateful to be alive having seen a lot of death i had been wounded twice and i got in the bronze star and done 30 30 or more uh helicopter missions seen quite a fair share of combat which i described in the book i came back alienated and numb i didn't come back as a protester but uh confused how did you feel about that with my father oh fighting with your father sure of course i gave him lsd one time ever did on purpose did he know yeah didn't he know you were giving no he didn't know i'd give it to him but he knew that he was on something you know [Laughter] how did you do that i just was slipping in his coffee no it is scotch ah even better how much quite a bit he was strong though yeah he handled it he's drinking he drank he drank whiskey every day of his life so yeah he was a tough guy but he was great he was like swaying to the music and oh wow i mean sex fantasy wow did you tell him about it afterwards like no actually but over the years we he knew i kind of after a while he figured it out i guess i was a long-haired wild kid right right talking black talk to him did you feel like you had to do it because like you you knew what kind of an impact it would have on him and open source i was fighting with him no we were fighting about the war fighting about everything like i just didn't like his ideas and wanted to destroy his mindset oh wow his mindset was okay we this vietnam is a mess but his mindset was but we can learn from it we can get armaments we're going to build up our knowledge for the next war that was his thinking right see he came out of that generation of world war ii he was his father was wiped out in the in 29 and his first job was as a floor walker he didn't have anything he worked his way up on wall street a very hard worker research in the back offices so when we the war was the war second world war was the highlight of his life he says he comes back from the war and america faced this problem you know what are we going to do with all these men and now we got the women working how are we going to employ all these people everybody seemed to be scared of another depression they thought we're going back into that so there was this militarized economy that we had and they kept going it basically kept going and built up by 19 we it ended in 45 by 1950 51 we were back in korea where we were building up again so the whole concept of an enemy was important to the american economy and uh the soviet union of course fit the bill although they were our ally in world war ii and them did most of the fighting they became our our biggest enemy right away right away there was no hesitation about us it was often a political decision you know to have an enemy to create fear and to keep the militarized economy that we have and it got eisenhower talked about it he was the one who built it up the most but we're getting ahead of ourselves no no no we're not i mean it's fine um but my father came from that generation and he believed firmly that russia was really invading our country threatening it they were in our schools they were in our state department i mean he wasn't joe mccarthy but there was a lot of that mentality nixon was like that yeah hoover was pushing it and i grew up terrified i grew up terrified that dad why why why why do we let the russians do that that kind of mentality of being besieged uh and uh so my father and i fought a lot as you can imagine because you know i got kicked out of he take me to a restaurant i'd i'd have an american tie it was made out of american flag right and the restaurant owner would kick me out because you know he thought it was disrespectful he'd been an ex-marine that's interesting you can have an american flag anything now and you're respectful that's weird like you get an american flag hat or a t-shirt and oh come on this was a different world this is still the uh this is the height of the you know still the 70s the older people were were offended by that yeah that's it's interesting how that shifted right like now the more american flags the better on everything socks underwear nothing nothing is respectable yeah it's different it's so yeah it's really weird it's kind of been bastardized what was it like coming back and seeing the protest though and and and seeing these people that were your age that were you know angry at people like you who had had been over there i didn't have any horror stories i didn't see that you know baby killer that's been exaggerated i think by people looking for you know looking for revenge right i mean someone yelling baby killer yeah the soldiers right none of that i mean i think there was a discomfort i went back to new york society which was i didn't have any veteran friends in new york my friends went back to small towns in tennessee and kentucky and georgia and enter chicago so i never i didn't see them until i made platoon and well i think the problem was it was indifference people didn't care they didn't give a [ __ ] i mean most people were making money it was the 60s man people were getting jobs there was all kinds of new liberating ideas the world was on fire and i think people were thinking about the vietnam was an afterthought unless you were directly involved with a relative at least in new york very little occasionally people would wonder why why did you go over there you know like i was an outcast why did you waste your time get ahead make some money it was the donald trump was was the donald trump generation you know that kind of a feeling make money there's a thing about your films though that i think i can keep getting back to this but because you did go over there it's almost like in your films like you have something you have to tell people but you yeah it's like you have to give them medicine but you got to give it to them in sugar i don't think of it that way i wanted to i take thorny subjects yeah but they're entertaining too because i want to know what happens next like you i think you have an interest in so even political matters can be fascinating yes who else would do nixon's life right i mean come on he was not the most popular guy no he's an honest man for me it was a challenge yeah uh same thing with the jfk murder i mean it was so so gnarly that one's extra complex right because you took some liberties there to try to move the plot along yeah but liberty's in the spirit of the of the i didn't violate the truth right in this i mean i had to combine characters and so forth that is a complex story that the story of jfk's assassination is very complex because i i can learn a lot from a person in what their opinion is like what do you think happened well lee harvey oswald acted alone you get these very specific character types where these people have these predetermined patterns that they plug into sure and the lee harvey oswald acted alone is one of the weirder ones yeah sure that is one of the weirdest arguments and when when i talk to them about the magic bullet you know like and they go well that's actually been proven that that can happen i mean that drives me nuts yeah sure because i'm a guy who shoots guns i'm a hunter and i know what happens when bullets hit bones it doesn't ever come out like that ever and also you i think you know it was a hell of a shot well a hell of a shot can happen i don't think it's that bad of a sh i don't think it's that big of a deal i think that's overstated there's many things that are overstated one of the things that's overstated is the scope was off you know people always say well scope was off well [ __ ] anything can knock a scope off you can drop a gun in the evidence room and the scope's off that's that's nonsense that's people who don't understand guns but the bullet hitting those two people and finding its way onto connolly's gurney magically with very little distortion the boat at all is straight up horseshit and the fact that that that still gets touted as being well this is actually how it could have happened and weird things happen with bullets sure weird things happen with bullets but one weird thing that never happens with bullets is when they hit bone and shatter bone they always distort always yeah i'm making it i made a documentary it's almost finished about we went back to the case again taking all the information from the assassination records review board that came out of the film they passed an act the jfk act congress did was amazing and they allowed the board to exist for five years and they went through a lot of detail they weren't out to prove anything but they would they found a lot of little detail that we put into this documentary which i think you'll love i'm sure i'll love it it goes into it into ce399 the bullet but also goes into so much else on the autopsy that's screwed up the two autopsies the one in bethesda and also the one in dallas there was no one in dallas well they they they did yeah they did an examination yeah of what happened to him in examinations in dallas everybody saw a huge gaping wound in the rear right of his mr kennedy's head yeah and that was covered up mm-hmm yeah there was um there was also the reason why they needed to make that magic bullet work the guy who got hit under the underpass oh yeah it was just a i know you're i could see your enthusiasm yeah yeah and also you know come on i mean if you're an infantryman you it's a you can't fire three shots like that why aren't you not firing at him when he's coming towards you if you really if you're serious it's very unlikely but possible i mean it can be done the shot can be done but that's one of the least ridiculous things about that story is whether or not one person could have pulled off those shots i don't think it'd be done i think the world's best marksman couldn't do it i remember reading something about that no it's a hard shot it's a hard shot but hard shots can be made hard shots three shots in that time period depending upon how much he trained for it depending on i mean i've i've know some people that are spectacular marksmen that can do some ridiculous [ __ ] and do it so fast he wasn't but he was also trained and if he depending upon how much training he did between his time in the service and his time actually getting ready to shoot kennedy you can get a lot better i don't know how much training he did i mean you could take someone who's three years ago a terrible shot and then he they kill someone well he couldn't have done it he's a terrible shot look three years ago he was a terrible shot well if that guy was training the entire time well i don't think the rifle look it can be done but again whether it's likely or not that could be debated but it's the least ridiculous thing about that story well wait till you see the documentary because we we go we i think we pretty much prove that there's no chain of evidence on on the rifle either no no i'm sure i'm sure did you read david lifton's book best evidence years ago yeah yeah that's what got me into the kennedy assassination somebody gave it to me a friend of mine a musician friend of mine when i was on the road and uh i re i read it unfortunately all day right before my stand-up comedy shows that night and i was so depressed yeah i didn't think anything was funny and i went on stage i had a terrible show and then uh i had to shake myself out of it for the second show because i was bummed out i was like i had never considered it before i'm like jesus christ they killed the president they covered it up yeah and we're paying for it to this day because i think mr kennedy was one of the really on the road to being a great president i think he did a lot of great things that people don't even know and we put that in the documentary what he was actually doing in africa people don't know what he was doing around the world in asia in cuba obviously south america what his plans were people don't understand that it was a big divide between lyndon johnson who he he was about to get rid of him as vice president for the next election there was a big divide in thinking between kennedy and johnson kennedy was without doubt pulling out of the war there was a directive we we bring it up in the from the uh uh a sec death conference in hawaii from earlier that year it was pulling out he made that very clear well there was also the northwoods document which is really crazy shocking when you actually because this is not speculation or any kind of conspiracy theory this is all from the freedom of information act signed by the joint chiefs of staff they were going to blow up a jet airliner and blame it on the cubans they were going to arm cuban friendlies and attack guantanamo bay they're going to do all this to get us to go to war with cuba and it was it's it's stunning that this this is an this is an actual plan by the united states government vetoed by kennedy wasn't there a plan also to fly a plane into a building as i remember i don't know if there was there was a plane a plan to blow up a drone jetliner they were going to take a jetliner fly and blow it up in the sky and and you know attribute all these deaths to that that came about actually the northwoods came about as a result of the movie because that was what they was found by the assassination records review board really yeah wow that's one of many documents that have come out that's why it's important for my safe space peace of mind to finish this thing it's kind of like okay this is the end i have to just put down the evidence because i couldn't do it in a film right that's what i was going to get to like what what is it like when you have this passion for this story and this is a critical story in the history of the united states and a clear piece of i mean it's it's a clear historical record of an assassination of a president and most likely who i mean i don't know who do you think was behind it i think i'm not gonna you know get a little sued because they're all dead but i think that alan dulles has to be looked at a lot closer and i think he was no longer in the cia but he had a tremendous amount of influence and i think he needed some organized very organized top people to help him so i think it could have been a group of people that were involved in that maybe involving certain people in the pentagon too because there was an awful lot of strange things that happen yeah he certainly had some ideas that didn't jive well with the people that were in power dallas was fired by kennedy let's call it a spade which had never been done this was a shock to the american way of government i mean we come from a pro-military system and here was kennedy questioning it and then uh you know when after he was killed i mean it was insane for lyndon johnson to appoint him to the warren commission where he managed to control pretty much the hearings and who who was heard who wasn't married and what the cia was delivering to the was a joke it was transparent a joke there's a couple things that are joe arlen specter being the guy who comes up with the magic bullet there he's another joke yeah there's there's a lot of that that's just very disturbing it's one of those things where you go over that subject and you just leave in this state of discomfort and unease and it's very hard to relax afterwards way too scary i can't wait i love look i love like i said i love the untold history of the united states and i think you do a great service uh with that that series where you you illustrate in a way that's both entertaining and very thorough all the pieces that were moving and all the things that took place i really we really worked on i we had a professor of history uh peter kuznet work with me five years we spent on that wow we rewrote it it was really a non-profit kind of enterprise but i really had to do it it's amazing i don't think it gets nearly the credit that it deserves a lot of people like it though it's great i love it it's available on netflix yes yes um when you're doing can i take a pee yeah yeah go ahead we can break it yeah yeah yeah no worries good thank you we'll be right back ladies and gentlemen uh the uh so we're back yeah the i mean you were asking me about we're back yeah you're asking me about you know why why i get attracted to these kind of subjects and they don't seem attractive on the surface but when the more you get into them the more they can be exciting so i am a dramatist at heart i'm that really that is my what i do best which is to dramatize situations take something and bring it to life so take taking the kennedy murder it was extremely uh challenging and uh i knew it could work i felt like it could work and it was a surprise yeah like platoon i mean basically how can you take this war is boring there's a lot of details i was in four different units you know time not not much happens and then suddenly things happen it's not that easy to make it happen in a movie time movie space so i took two different sergeants from two different units and i imagine what would they be like if they were in the same unit they would they would clash one would be the the law and order guy and as a guy who believed in what he was doing and he fought it viciously and the other guy is the guy who was an anti uh who's a rebel who was like a bit like my own character my father was much of a law and order guy my mother was very much a rebel and i i kind of put that into this conflict because i saw it in every platoon there was people who were like doing marijuana people who were doing alcohol you know there was that split kind of and a lot of the black guys i hung out with were doing marijuana and they were doing music the music was unbelievable but they had a different kind of music than the oaky music so it was all the split in these platoons i saw constantly black white and country city sensibilities a very important point is that i found over time that the law and order guys often were the most racist in terms of coming down on the vietnamese civilians because we used to we had we did jungle duty but we also did a lot of civilian villages search and destroy search and whatever search was search them we find stores weapons this that not necessarily they were cooperating but sometimes they were forced to but a lot of guys screwed with them you know didn't like the vietnamese at all which was not the black problem that was you know that was more of a it was a white problem so i found there was a lot of that going on and i i couldn't that was not my thing and i just really didn't like what i saw it's a lot of cowardice too can only imagine and that's a shock education i mean you talk about like a no escape just thrust into this completely volatile chaotic world and then introduced to a bunch of different people that you weren't around yeah and then when i got out i got thrown into jail yeah it's in the book too you know fought for for federal smuggling marijuana coming back from mexico how much did you have just an ounce or two really that's it federal smuggling for announcements i've taken some vietnamese grass home oh yeah but i never went home i just went right to mexico so it was a few days later i was in the jail wow called my father and said hey dad you know i'm in trouble i said why haven't you called me where you've been for the we knew you got out two weeks ago at fort lewis and i said well i said dad you want to hear where i'm at you know and blah blah blah and he got me out he got me out with some money wow without it i would have been sunk into that prison it was awful prison was filled with blacks and latinos i mean there were 5 000 people in there for 2 000 beds that was the beginning of the drug war nixon was had been elected but had not yet declared that war on drugs but it was filled most of them are nonviolent crimes you see yeah and i saw that that side of america coming out so we have a lot of law and order types here yes well that law and order stuff was instituted when they they passed that sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970 oh god yeah well they what what they were trying to do is they were trying to squash the civil rights movement that's a big part of what they were trying to do they were trying to make everything incredibly illegal schedule one so that they could have a reason to infiltrate these groups and start arresting people and break the groups up that's absolutely correct yeah and j edgar hoover was still around unfortunately he was a lot of influence on this marijuana had been the devil drug what a fascinating character he was yeah just you know they never got him yet on movies no no god almost impossible to really get i i really wish there was more i mean real personal footage of all the crazy [ __ ] that he was actually into yeah we can get an understanding of how nuts it was that this guy was in charge of spying on people and lyndon johnson you have to ask you know did lyndon johnson really believe the [ __ ] he was talking about the the black civil rights movement had a communist basis that the communism was supporting it i mean that was very much hoover's thesis yeah well they that was a great way to get people motivated to see your side of things back then you know yeah during the the whole cold war scare and the red scare it's like communism being a motivating factor for any group yeah yeah no so when you put together jfk you have this film that is about this incredibly important subject but yet you want to make it interesting and you want to make it a great film and you succeeded in doing that but what is what is that like doing that balancing act of having so much information to tell yeah like that story's so complex it was three hours and 10 12 minutes and uh i got it through the system which is unbelievable i'll tell you how later but at the time i was i needed the protagonist and the protagonist and who was the guy you know yeah the only person who ever brought any kind of charges publicly was jim garrison yeah in new orleans he was a district attorney and i read his book he wrote two books and i actually got to know him and uh he was a man who like 20 years after he did this and went through hell came back to it and wrote another book and that's the book i bought in other words he was devoted to this subject like you are he believed a lot more than me he'd been a patriot in world war ii and he'd served in korea he'd been he'd been sheep i mean he'd been called every name in the book he but he for as a patriot he firmly believed that mr kennedy was killed uh by these intelligence forces and he went after it and in those days you just couldn't do it you couldn't prove a covert operation right he got killed by the press killed and that's and we've now we've found out a lot more about why what was going on we know a lot more facts about how the media went after him with [ __ ] a lot of [ __ ] accusations and made him look as bad as possible well kevin costner did an amazing job of playing him in your movie too he was the basis of that once you get a costner in the middle of it then you can start to move you've got an interesting central character then you bring in all these crazies that you re you read about people like jack lam and walter matthau all the lunatics around new orleans dallas involved in the war against cuba yeah and you get the and then so i wanted then i wanted the lee harvey oswald character which was to tell a little bit of his story so i had two stories garrison and oswald i got to know marina i didn't you know the attracted a lot of the oswald story not enough of it but there's more now but it's some he seems to have been definitely in the employ of the cia when he went to brochure the first time and when he came back again he was there's too much evidence of it yeah and we want to bring that out too but uh that story becomes and then the third story would be the daily plaza the actual assassination so garrison's not there he has to go back into the past to to find this out right so yeah that thread that whole dallas section is part of the it's part of the structure it starts the movie but it also we go back to it at the right time and at the climax we go back to it for the final time the way the way it probably happened see so then that's three stories and the fourth story if you want to know the truth in my thinking at that time was a donald sutherland a business he comes into the movie at the halfway point and he gives garrison a lot of new information because garrison thinks he's dealing on a local level he thinks he's dealing with something that's in new orleans he's not sure what beyond it so he and now jones says it's a much bigger story which sends costner into the last act going to dallas and it's too much for the costner character he you know yeah he's blown away by it he knows he's up against forces and much larger than he ever thought and this truck who was the what was the motivation for the donald sutherland character fletcher prouty he was a lieutenant colonel in the air force he was the focal officer between the cia and the pentagon an old timer world war ii did a lot of service and he was in charge of basically providing the cia with military equipment for covert operations he worked in tibet he worked on a lot of the operations in the 50s and the late 40s we had operations going on in ukraine ukraine at china tibet he was he trained tibetans in the the colorado mountains and many stories he's written several books you should he was a he was a keen observer of the differences that were going on he knew dulles used to brief him and told me stories about then everything changed after kennedy was guilty so you got you got to meet him oh yeah yeah oh yeah i hung out with him yeah garrison too i mean both of these were authentic men and fletcher described you know the difference after november 63. he felt it right away he left the pentagon a year later it was over there was something that changed in the country and sure enough we were in vietnam faster than you can imagine with combat troops yeah another crazy character in that whole that the whole historical record is jack ruby oh yeah he's a he's a very strange one and uh i just read a book called uh chaos by tom o'neill it's about the cia and uh manson in the 60s oh yeah i know the book yeah it's very interesting but ruby is in that book as well because ruby was actually visited by i forget his name jolly something jolly what's his name charlie west jolly west thank you um who was the central character in mk ultra who they believe was involved in these various uh see yeah that's a plastic cell that comes off my arm don't worry about it i'm listening uh but he was a central character in uh the cia's use of lsd during the whole operation midnight climax in san francisco and they ran a free clinic in haight ashbury that's connected to manson where they were giving people lsd and running studies on them yeah he went to visit ruby in prison and ruby who had shown no psychological trauma or distress after he left was a mess curled up in the fetal position on the ground and was thinking they were burning jews in the streets and literally was in a psychotic state and they think they dosed him up while he was in jail yeah he seems to be the mob connection to this thing yes yeah you can put your arm back back yeah it's uh no ruby's uh his contacts alone he goes back many years to the 40s he was quite a he was mobbed up completely and didn't want to do it he was forced into doing it why do you think he was forced what do you think it was i think he was scared about what well i have never followed that in depth because the you know people say organized crime killed them i don't believe that because they didn't have the power to pull this thing off i think that they they're an element to it you know you wanted somebody to rub out oswald right probably oswald was intended to die there on that day you say there's a lot of things that point in that direction but he didn't and he couldn't be allowed to go it's crazy that they got jack ruby to do it i mean they they killed off everything that oswald said in that station police station is gone yeah it's uh hearsay but uh what he said in the corridor outside it's very interesting and um we know that ruby was there so ruby i think was pushed into this thing because he had to make it was a quick operation we got to get to him you know and it's really crazy the story plays out 12 years later when on the geraldo rivera show dick gregory brings his supruder film and introduces it to the american public and then they get the chance to see kennedy's head going back into the left yeah and everybody's like what yeah that's disgusting story but you know the on on the on the ruby affair don't forget that you also he was urgently asking the warrant commission to get me to washington i want to talk to jesus yeah what he knew he didn't know everything i don't think anyone knew everything they he knew his part of it so the whole idea was how can you get cancer out of the blue like that so suddenly yeah so suddenly and die so quickly now there again there's a lot of cancer experimentation going on at this point in the 60s sure doctors and the mlk cancer too there was a huge huge uh experi there was a doctor in new orleans i forgot his name but working on it and david ferry was one of these people who knew him fairy had a lot of mice and he was operating on his might he was using his mice as cancer feeding them huge doses of cancer the idea was that they said they were going to kill castro with it uh you know inject castro with a needle and kill them because they'd make it so strong and they're getting this cancer to play they're building up through these mice a cancer that was so powerful that could kill i mean i heard everything on this film but that seems to be truth to this do you feel like you're going to put it to bed with this documentary in your your mind like you can it's the best we can do i mean i have jim d eugenio working with me he's he's followed this thing like he's a fifth generation researcher and he's very very up-to-date but uh when is this coming out it's i don't know yet i don't know if we can get it out we're gonna try now when like scarface is another movie like we were saying that that that is the introduction for a lot of people uh they a lot of people especially outside of miami really just didn't understand how crazy things had gotten there and i have a good friend of mine who's an ophthalmologist who did his residency in miami and he would tell me stories like he was there in the 80s when all the crazy [ __ ] was happening and uh just he was like it was a war zone you go you would just everybody was you just everybody coming in was shot people were all coked up and all these overdoses and well that's i think there's a lot of sensationalism in that you know america likes war they like they like to play up the the machine guns and all that that was 1930 chicago time magazine went out of its way to sensationalize it and i i was there i saw you know it wasn't wild that way in the sense of shooting in the streets would happen rarely but they happened people would be gunned down families were killed drunk dealers went after families of each other so yeah there was a lot of that kind of internet sign warfare well my friend saw it because he was in the er you know so oh i've seen it he's doing his residency there so he was seeing it i think in any american city there's a lot of shootings every week that's true especially right now right but definitely there was a new element it was it was the colombian element and the mariolitos came in some of them uh cubans who were gangster element out of cuba yeah and it got bloody when the the colombians were not playing around so there was a lot of cut throats they used to they used to shivantos uh colombian necktie yeah that's right that's right yeah and when i was there i heard about a couple of these guys uh it was interesting because i was working both sides of the case i was trying to get to know the the crime element is more than so i knew all the the lawyers and i went over to bimini one day to uh to to get some real information about them because they couldn't in the u.s they were scared to talk so i i located through a defense lawyer a couple of some guys in uh in bimini i went down there and i met with them and they were talking it because that was bimini was another kind of world there was the government was on the take there i think and they had a lot of speed boats flying going out of there every night at the hotel towards the you know bimmy's very close to miami and i i was doing coke at that time and i got with my wife i mean she was my cover yeah and i you know and i hollywood screenwriter he wants to talk to you did midnight express they like that you know they want to know about the business but then in the middle of this we're all coked up in the hotel and you know the way conversation goes and i drop a name uh just like that you know a guy i talked to well he'd been a defense lawyer when i talked to him but in the past he'd been a prosecutor because prosecutors often flipped to defense attorneys to make more money so when i mentioned that name two of these three guys got really uptight and they walked they excused themselves went in the bathroom and i i said i [ __ ] up i knew i'd [ __ ] up and i didn't know what was going to come out of that bathroom you know if they thought i was some kind of cop some kind of underground informer because they did they hated that prosecutor that put them away and put one of them away so a few minutes went by there and it was pretty hairy but i think i was paranoid but because they came out and they didn't have guns in their hands but they they cut the meeting off and you know i went back to my room they were staying in the same hotel all night i was tense because i you know i knew they could come and get me it was their hotel they owned them they owned the island right but it was nerve-wracking and i got out of there first thing in the morning the whole point is you say the wrong word sometimes and you're dead that's that's the kind of tension i wanted for this movie i put it into the scene early in the picture where mr pacino goes in to make a pickup make a trade and uh he says you know he senses something's off in this meeting and you and it becomes that blood bloodbath with the dismemberment you remember yes and yeah the chainsaw the chainsaw yeah yeah i was going to bring that scene up yeah there was a chainsaw murder at one point yeah there's something about the way you filmed that was so excellent because it was obviously gory and disgusting but you didn't have to show it i didn't direct it i wrote it right brian de palma did a great job directing it grand opera no that's right he did an amazing job that's right you when you are talking about someone who is in that world when when you're trying to make a film about a guy who is in that world who is not a good guy you you're your main guy al pacino tony montana is a bad guy but he's the hero it's a very strange movie well yeah it is because he is a hero because he's free in a way he's a free man that's where people liked it people white people did not like that movie when it came out i was disappointed at first there was the blacks and the latinos in the inner cities that went and they loved it and also people white people who were doing some drugs they would that was the kind of audience we had we were a bad boy movie so the movie would didn't do as well as they'd hoped because it cost a lot of money went three months over budget uh it was a very tedious shoot i was there the whole time but over time the film garnered a reputation and made money for the uh big money for them well it's become this iconic drug war movie i mean it's it's the movie for gangsters right which is bold yeah yeah in fact wherever i go i'm in the world i mean i pretty much people oh you wrote scarface you know i can i got into salvador i got into the fascist party that way so i could do some research some research yeah they thought i had muy cojones when you're writing about a movie or you're writing about a guy like tony montana how do you you you did you walk this fine line of uh telling telling the story accurately but actually making him likeable in some strange way well he's not a hypocrite you see he tells the truth as he says even when i lie he's uh he's a man who's free unto himself and i think that's what worked because the people around him are so corrupt i mean the cops are corrupt in miami the system the the bureaucracy that pressed down on by the way let me let's be honest let's talk about the drug war i mean this is an invention that's come about that's a disaster it's a bureaucracy of enormous billions of dollars of being wasted on fighting drugs with this super dea and now the ice and all that whatever they want we always create wars we call a war on drugs war on poverty war on this war on that we make that's a problem we make too much of a bureaucracy i noticed this in vietnam it bothered the [ __ ] out of me because we were sending five people non-combat people over there for one every combat person we had an infrastructure las vegas of the of the of material we had pxs we had everything we wanted they sent cars over there a lot of this stuff was you know sold on the black market in the end by by master sergeants making a buck on the side you know there was a lot of [ __ ] going on crime stuff and uh the vietnamese were benefiting from it they loved the americans of course they loved us it's the same thing afghanistan iran it goes on and on and on it's like we create these super bureaucracies around events so what happened in the war on drugs is the same thing and then i think that pacino is a hero because in a way he sees it all he sees it's all [ __ ] and he he calls it out and i think people i think a lot of people just picked up on it they knew the war on drugs was a lie yeah well most people today at least have a sense that it's not going well you know you know back then they thought how many countries how many countries have we pissed off how many countries have we told hey you got to do it this way we're coming down there we're going to bust you speaking of geraldo did you ever see the footage where geraldo was in afghanistan and he's walking uh through the uh poppy fields that are being protected by us troops yeah sure and it's on fox news so he's trying to do this weird propaganda job of explaining why in order to get these poppy farmers to give us information about the taliban we have to somehow or another protect their crops so we've got american soldiers it's a crazy story well then you find out that spectacular growth of heroin like heroin just heroin sales and heroin use worldwide went up in an amazing manner yeah this was going on by the way in the 1980s when we were when the we were supporting the mujahideen against the russians yeah that's when it started they were they were fighting for their poppy fuels yeah we're talking about billions of dollars here billions and it's not like some of these drug dealers we don't even know their names but they're well known in the pakistani afghani world yeah some of them are unbelievably rich but it's so transparent the the poppy fields being guarded by u.s troops and that's a new one and them talking about it openly on fox news and some well don't worry folks this is why they have to do this like it's it's it's one of the weirdest parts of the war yes as was dan rather doing his stand up at the beginning of the war about how he's we're fighting the uh the awful russians they got us going on that you didn't see that cleveland when was that early in the war yeah he was brought the flag to afghanistan you know making heroes out of them actually the guys we supported that we gave the most money was to hector who was a drug dealer we gave him the most amount of aid herkmateer he's like the killer killer warlord it's so strange it's such a it's so strange how history repeats itself in different forms just over and over and over in vietnam there was a whole in laos there was a whole poppy growth yeah and uh the shipping there was cia shipping out air america remember that movie yeah yeah um there was a i was i had a guy on uh who was in denial of this and i showed him the cia drug plan that crashed in mexico with several tons of cocaine in it just a few years ago i'm like this is a plane that had been to guantanamo bay multiple times like this is still going on all that [ __ ] that happened with uh barry seals and yeah you're talking about iran controversy yeah i mean that stuff's still going on that's an ugly story yes very ugly yeah the barry steele movie was okay they got a piece of it yeah but it was uglier than that yeah i mean we were basically reagan was selling arms to iran taking the cash and splitting it with the contras yeah the contras were one of the most brutal brutal groups terrorist groups in nicaragua trying to just they were killing civilians blowing up farms scaring people and we supported them we supported a lot of bad guys everywhere in the world you you have a very comprehensive knowledge of history and is this one of the reasons why you decided to make that documentary series the untold history of the united states because you mean you obviously get some of it out in your films but did you just feel like well yeah i've done a lot of films about subjects around it so at a certain point in my life i said i really like to know more about american history because something's weird here and i think i went to school kind of back to school i never studied i never got a college degree in normal subject matter like history or mathematics i i got a film school degree so i had to i thought i knew things but i learned a lot with uh going back and learning by with historians who were throwing out all the myths for me about american history and i made that film with just uh five years it took to we had to rewrite it rewrite it rewrite it it was complicated we started with the philippines because that was the beginning of overseas and uh we walked we worked our way up through the through the obama administration from 1898 to 2013. ever it's amazing series it goes too fast if anything yeah it's but i think people can watch it two times without and learn each chapter is revealing stuff people don't know about how this country really got off i don't know i mean it got off maybe it got off on the wrong start with earlier but you know it really got off the bent and it's in its purposes and assuming we're the good guy assuming you know this exceptionalism that we have that we're somehow motivated in a different way than other countries yeah that's the that's the the way we excuse it right we're we're the number one superpower we do awful things but better us than them there's no excuse for that no excuse and it doesn't hold up to history and it won't hold up to god either yeah when you're making a series like that is it difficult to edit it down to oh yeah a palatable sort of version i feel like it's i feel like it moves fast you know i can't you can't accuse that series of boredom if anything it just has to because there's decades to cover but i'm so proud of that i think i'm glad you mentioned it's one of frankly it's one of my achievements in my life it's stands up there with jfk for me and platoon now when you've done so much i mean you've had this amazing career between writing and directing and putting together all these incredible films what what motivates you now like what what gets you going when you're trying to make a new project well this book is a lot of work i memoir is this chance to rediscover i went it was going so fast at times between films that i didn't have that leisure time to think about what i'd done and i think by re reliving it each film each film for me is important by reliving it read i'd rediscover a lot i thought a lot about the vietnam war for example and came to a lot of the conclusions that i put here that and i i wouldn't have been so cogent before also i realized that i'm a fundamentally flawed character i mean i understand this for really understand that the contradiction in myself between my my parents my fundamental nature which is you have to do that with yourself you have to look at who you are my mom being who she was my dad being i mentioned earlier the writer director side they're two different people you can't be the same person when you do it writing is very much an inner inner loneliness solitude my father was like that and directing is very much being external being warm being inviting and working with people and collaborating it's a wholly other totally different exercise in your mind and those two i think i think i'm double double-minded i say in the book and i think that's a good thing do you prefer to do both do you prefer to write the film and and direct it or how much how much satisfaction do you get out of just writing a film like scarface or writing a film like platoon and directing it um i think that for me it was the both i mean that's why i wanted to direct i went to film school for that so the writing i'd always been doing naturally and directing is what i wanted to do then i then don't forget editing there's editing process i worked very closely with my editors and then there's the whole process of selling the film which is another another category completely it's called marketing it's a crazy [ __ ] business it's hard you know i've done 20 of them and they're killers 20 films and eight documentary nine documentaries and what am i going to do now i don't know i think there's another book in me that's for sure oh absolutely because this is ends in 1986 the story is not over it takes another it takes another turn as to films documentaries satisfy me do i need to make another film only if i really needed to was the last film you did snowden ah 2016. oh you interviewed him yes yeah we talked about that yeah you you you understood his you understood his uh point of view it's a crazy story for our times that that that this man is persecuted this guy who i think is a hero he's exposed things that are unconstitutional things that no one signed off on he exposed that there's this widespread surveillance of law-abiding citizens who've done absolutely nothing wrong in this data collection and the fact that this man is hiding in russia is to me crazy and i mean i don't know i don't even know if at this point in time anybody could pardon him but it's stunning to me that no one has it's stunning to me that obama didn't it's stunning to me i mean he pardoned chelsea manning um god damn pardon snowden yeah but obama he went after the whistleblowers yeah with a ferocity that was crazy using the espionage act from 1917 i mean it's it was really ugly and he was zealous i mean he he was actually like he did more damage than bush in many ways overseas well it's very counter to his image i mean if you look at the hope and change website do you remember that there's a whole thing about empowering whistleblowers to come out and tell their story oh jesus they had to delete that i supported him at the beginning well he seemed perfect i mean he's a statesman he's a brilliant speaker he seems like an amazing guy but whatever the [ __ ] happens when you get in that office you can't change things you know i mean it seems to be every president since jack kennedy you see kennedy tried on a fundamental level he wanted to change the cia he wanted to change the cold war it seems like you can't get off that path in this country you can't it seems very hard no one's been able to do it so far when you see a story like the jeffrey epstein story yeah which is uh playing out right now right boy you should talk to my son that is one of the craziest [ __ ] stories of our time because it's a conspiracy theorist wet dream no no one would have ever believed there's an island where a guy brings prominent scientists celebrities and politicians to [ __ ] underage girls they film them all and use it to somehow or another blackmail them or did they film they filmed them apparently according to galen maxwell there's tapes you know um i mean there's so much to this story that's so crazy oh for sure so that's going to be the next uh the next mystery well the next mystery is how they're going to kill her that's the next mystery i mean how long is it going to last yeah i mean they're supposed to the whole trial doesn't take place for a year that's a lot of time and that tombs you feel there was a murder from outside for upstate went yes 100 yeah the guys on suicide watch the the film doesn't work the the surveillance cameras don't work and uh michael baden the uh forensic scientist reviews the autopsy and he's like this man was strangled look at the the break in the bone of the neck that's consistent with strangulation look at the the position in which uh he was choked like which which part of the neck that's not consistent with hanging oh there's all the factors point to the fact that the guy was killed and then the fact that i mean the guys on suicide watch and you know how how how is it possible that this guy was one of the most important witnesses in a case against a gigantic number of very powerful people just winds up committing suicide whoops no worries sorry well if i i'm staying away from that directly it's such a mess it's a mess it's a mass but that's one that i would think would intrigue you i mean if at the end of all this when the pieces all fall into place is that something you would think about covering for a film well if i had to write it i had to get very interested in the subject matter it seems uh it doesn't uh you know i mean it's i don't know what it's about i mean if if it's really what they say and there's all these world leaders and blah blah blah i mean it just doesn't really lead anywhere it doesn't make sense i mean the world is much more important places world a sense of world peace and this is the most important issue peace in our time and we are building up nuclear weapons at an incredible rate under this guide trump and it's a huge it's a return to the worst of the cold war and that scares me that's an issue i would like to i think if i were to get involved again in another movie if not a documentary would be that one about the accumulation of arms yeah the building built and the the madness of of our leaders democrat and republican constantly pushing for more sanctions more pressure on our perceived enemies china russia north korea iraq iran and it and venezuela i mean it's just why why are we doing this we don't have to the world could be a much more peaceful place if we take our foot off the pedal is there anybody that has stood out in recent memory as a politician that gave you some hope kennedy oh boy we got to go back to 63. oh obama well i was there i mean obama gave me a hope yeah yeah and i was hoping for clinton too it just doesn't seem to be in the cards in other words the office is not as important as you make it out to be i think there's a system in place it's a system that eisenhower quite well described as the military industrial yeah it's a corporate complex that drives money profit greed that speech is so amazing that speech that he gave on upon leaving office it was a warning yes he he know that he fought he knew that he [ __ ] up he said i leave my successor a legacy of ashes says famous quote eisenhower did not horrible things eisenhower he started intervening much more in other countries than ever he appointed john foster dulles who was a psycho in my opinion as his secretary of state he's like pompeo now uh mike pompeo and alan dulles at the cia they were brothers but anyway eisenhower knew i think he felt bad about what he what he'd seen happen over those eight years i do and i think kennedy was a great help because it was a new man new generation who he changed too kennedy in office he moved more and more to the left as he as he as he stayed in office he saw the problems he couldn't believe what he saw he saw the lies and he was lied to a lot the bay of pigs was the first one but he was lied to about a lot of the other things we get into it's the great mystery right like what happens to a candidate once once they win the presidency and once they're in office like what is the process and well that's where you have to have courage and that's where obama really failed i mean when he appointed hillary clinton as a secretary of state you knew it was over i mean you have to make decisions and you have to you have to go in a new way if you're going to be there and off it's just so it's such a become such a bureaucratized office that it's almost impossible to appoint a thousand people when you come in to work with you that are going to be on your side but as a guy who's a storyteller this is one of the great stories of our time is how impossible it is to to be a president i think it's very hard very hard uh but you need guts you need guts and if you have guts it makes a difference remember kennedy had been in war he saved people he was a hero in that in in the pacific yeah those are the kind of guts you need right um when you put together the snowden movie what what was your aim like what were you trying to get out of that film well i knew it was an important story because surveillance had i never imagined surveillance at this level i realized that it could be every with this new technology we had that it could be everywhere i mean beyond my imagination beyond anybody's imagination and when i did the movie it was to reveal what he revealed which was shocking in its implications we went even further and we showed how the control of information the use of information can destabilize many regimes and they went after regime change became the new the new new modus operandi for the united states it was okay to change regimes we're good at it and the way we did it with the soft power subtle what happened in brazil a couple of years ago typical you know the whole forcing out the president getting rid of the dilma bringing in this well this other guy came in from the right but essentially brazil was completely changed completely changed they're still working at it in venezuela they got they worked in bolivia they they got they got rid of the guy illegally honduras libya libya libya that's the most spectacular failure right well that was one of one it's a failed state now but it was a yeah but uh that comes down to our policy in the middle east yeah when you make a film like that um how hard is it to put together i mean the snowden film is so disturbing because it's it's current right we're dealing with things that are happening right now how how hard is it to put it down and make it this dramatic piece that's going to be enjoyed it was hard you have to judge that for yourself i like the movie i think it's a it's a it's tense and it keeps the keeps the tension throughout the movie uh like of course i got to know something very well i went to moscow several times and met with them oh really yeah how does that get arranged well uh did you put a bandana over your eyes no i've done that too but that was have you yeah that was the terrorist groups in the middle east what was that for that was for a persona non grana it was a documentary i did about uh in 2003 about the leader of the uh plo whoa arafat yeah i did an interview with him wow what was that like i was more i didn't because of my connections i had more contact with the israeli side i was in ramallah so i mean i was talking to netanyahu before he was prime minister i was talking to the leader the ex-prime minister at the prime minister all that and then i went to ramallah which was a capital of the plo there and actually i was there the day the israelis then that the day before the israelis came in and knocked out that knocked out the the lights and their wow they they isolated uh arafat and the ramallah power we we got out at the last second actually but uh we were seeing ram we were seeing arafat and uh showing his side of the equation showing what he was thinking so as part of that part of that i went to see a terrorist group they became quite famous later then they're well known they were young guys and they had their masks and i went at midnight i was more scared of the israelis than them because the israelis could be tracking with their all they have all this equipment you know blow the [ __ ] out of us when we're in there that's what i'm scared of the israelis were dangerous you thought the israelis would do that knowing that you were a failure i don't know what they're thinking you know no i mean i'm not sure they knew what we were doing we saw they saw people going into a underground bunker oh with people with masks and who knows what they're thinking they have great reconnaissance so you have to be careful when you fight them and so they requested that you wear a mask and when they transition no not the israelites but i mean yeah they transported me yes but when i got there i took it off did you but with that decision was that a tough decision to make to let them no not drive you around with a mask on no i was very anxious to meet them they were they were well they call them terrorists but you know who's a terrorist these days right uh yeah you know we can bomb other countries to death and call ourselves the good guys but we kill a lot of civilians around the world with our bombing this that that's true but this message that you have that you you you're not just a guy who makes movies but you're a guy who makes movies and also a guy who's very outspoken about all of these issues in the world uh do those two get in the way of each other sometimes of course yeah of course you know there was people i think sometimes my outspokenness overshadows my work and it might be true for them but well they try to label you both ways too which is really fascinating to me the world is the world is complicated and i uh i did speak out and some people think that's they say i'm a filmmaker stick to being that but you know it's very hard if you care you know this well it's it's very important that you don't and i'm glad that you have the courage to not stick to that yeah i mean i think it's when when someone oh sorry please god snowden snowden that we couldn't get support for it we it was financed ultimately from france and germany and italy and we got some some small money at the end from the us with a small distributor i mean this is the biggest story one of the biggest stories of our time and we couldn't get support from any of the studios we went to all of them well people are terrified of it that tells you a lot about what a mess we're in we don't even have the guts to to talk about stuff we we shut up we censor ourselves we self-censor yeah in the i don't in the 1980s or 90s i probably could have gotten it financed but not now well it's such a tense time and that that issue is so polarizing and i don't understand how it isn't but i i don't understand how it doesn't have universal support by american citizens this story needs to be told i mean even when he was discussed um as a podcast guest a lot of people were saying you should really stay away from that they don't understand they think he's some kind of russian agent it's crazy you know he's very been very clear about it well he's it's very clear when you listen to all of the interviews with him and and then when i got a chance to talk to him myself he is who he says he is exactly a boy scout yeah i mean he has a story and it's a spectacular one and it's it's one of the most important historical moments of our time that we recognize that this overwhelming surveillance state has has existed without us even knowing it and cyber warfare too arranges the old issue of who's doing what to who you know right we're very quick to say they're doing that to us china russia this that they're doing their steel blah blah blah blah blah what are we doing yeah you know you had difficulties in making films but is there ever a film that you wanted to make that you never could yeah sure what is that uh several uh milai me life i got very close we were about two three weeks away from shooting it in 2007 in uh thailand and some of it in vietnam i've been to milan and vietnam great story because the massacre is unknown they don't know we don't people don't know the real story it was investigated that massacre you've heard of it right i've heard 500 civilians were shot down in cold blood babies mother everybody every old people shot and not one enemy bullet was fired not one and we've heard all the obfuscations of that the whole thing was you know basically a misplanned operation because of basically cia it was guiding the war and they were torturing to death some no torturing some poor soul who gave him information that was faulty happens all the time right torture works right torture doesn't work uh and as a result that of the operation they were told that there was nva in that village they were not there so the guys went in thinking they should kill did you write a screenplay for this i no someone else did and i was about to direct it and it was a it almost happened it just ran into the uh fiscal crisis of 2008. okay but that's not an excuse nobody wanted to make it have you thought about trying again i did yeah no no go i also tried to make the martin luther king story years ago many years i worked on it martin luther king is a great story but it's a too tough a story to tell i mean i think there's a lot portion of the black community that's really kind of treats him like a saint a martyr whereas this is more of a human man and his fault you know his failings and this and that but he's a hero in this but you know his relationship with women is fascinating and we were into that whole aspect of it and what happened with that it just never got together never man it might be a good time to revisit that now no i think it's a black filmmaker could be visited right it's definitely moved into that direction i've also tried i tried for many years to do a vita and uh i wrote a script for that but if another director made it how far down the road had you gotten with the martin luther king story twice i would yeah i wrote a uh i mean and someone else wrote a whole script it was i think it's very good but gone you know you can't so many films get planned and not made for every film you do this like five five abortions damn that seems like a great one though yeah i mean he's such a an incredible and important character and boy does a world need a martin luther king jr right now yeah well things are changing all the time well listen oliver i've taken up a lot of your time and i really really appreciate you being here your book is called chasing the light it's your memoir up until 1986. i really hope you make another one because uh you have had one of the most interesting and spectacular lives in show business you're a bad [ __ ] i appreciate you thank you joe i really enjoyed today i i um if this is a clean copy i can give it to you i guess okay what do you what you mean right now i was looking if i had some writing in it oh wait no that's mine says oliver i have to send you one i have one i have one i'm good but thank you thanks for everything appreciate you thank you bye everybody [Music] you

Channel: PowerfulJRE

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Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

Id: QOrOYUxzX3o

Length: 103min 27sec (6207 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020