Speaking Freely: Oliver Stone

what this is all about is your right to freedom of speech what made America great is an independent vigorous press if a jerk Burns a flag America is not threatened political speech is the heart of the first am for expressing their religious belief no it's the time to make Justice a reality for all the [Music] Our Guest today is one of America's most thoughtful most honored and most controversial filmmakers Oliver Stone welcome to the show thank you you know one of the things that strikes me about your career is that no one ever says your work is substandard the criticism is always that it's too good that movies like JFK and others mislead people that that that you might create um misimpressions about what real history is all about um it's a different kind of criticism of of somebody who makes movies isn't it totally different standards the JFK movie is it was a hypothesis and it was always stated as such to say that it falsifies history is is is erroneous claim because the movie never sets out to say that it is history right it raises the question of what is reality more likely what is reality why do we buy certain things it makes us rethink what we hear from the state media and rethink it you've had a a remarkable career and it seems like I have to say one more thing I'm sorry to interrupt you no problem just because it's an important thought you talk about respect from them towards my work but you let you neglect it to say there's also a very strong portion of the reactions are not even are silence M and no reaction uh so I find myself sometimes strangely enough having to built up a record of work to be denied denied uh the the films are not even seen I've become a nonperson in a way I want to talk about that I'm curious though about JFK because it seems me that you know you've got all kinds of credibility in the industry everything you know from Midnight Express on you're you're a hot commodity a talented guy and with JFK it's almost like a fulcrum there I mean that's the one where I think you took the biggest beating and the public perception of you shifted is that your sense of things I would say that was a water shed yeah and why JF okay as opposed to you know other F films you've done I don't think I even realized at the time how comp How Deeply the picture addressed the a nerve button for the country not just about the conspiracy to kill the president that becomes a full that becomes a litmus test of whether you're conservative or liberal so you don't have any intelligent discussion about what actually happened that day it's about are you a conspiracist or are you not a conspiracist which is an ultimately boring question question as far as I'm concerned two people sitting down for dinner are conspiracist you know that it's the nature of Life uh but uh the bigger question that you ask is eludes me what was that well the whole issue of why it was JFK as opposed to other films which which also had tough subjects was it something about JFK I mean you later did Nixon and got negative reaction to but was there something about Camelot that made that particularly because I think in a larger sense it just questioned American history who is George Washington who is uh what is the American Civil War about what was World War I and World War II about it started to open up that whole area I noticed that Eric foner has a book coming out called who owns history this year that was a comment that I kept saying at that time who owns history we're the upper class with the and they the the Press is bought for and they basically are limited in what in their response to anything that they box everything in their categories so it's very hard to really have free free speech I don't expect free free speech to exist anywhere in the world that's Utopia it's all relative and America is better than most countries uh Athens was better than they say Persia but you know Athens was very contemptuous contentious people were driving each other out of an exile so there was never pure free speech I don't think and yet you've had I mean you've had your way with free speech from for decades you've made movies that said what you wanted to say being criticized for it is not was uh I pulled back a little bit on Nixon because I was scared Natural Born Killers after JFK knocked me for a loop again you know I set out to make an action Summer movie and it turned into a parody of satire that was condemned and reviled by and misunderstood so that really knocked me for a loop and then on Nixon you know you know you get gunshot every we're all human I did say things about Nixon I felt but I found myself again there being prejudged as I was on JFK the Nixon people people condemned the movie wholeheartedly without even seeing it including the children and and Disney's daughter because it was Disney release blasted the film so it hurt us uh the sad part is when you see the movie those people who like Nixon may find that he is much better in the movie than they think and whereas those who didn't like Nixon hate him anyway and they won't go to see the movie so very few people went to see the movie and and more distressingly the Press reaction was so muted some critics literally I can tell you you won't believe this but of the let's say 100 critics in New York the go see movies they run checklists of who who who came when they show it in New York and I'm surprised the amount of people who didn't even bother to see J Nixon and fled from it like it was oh no I don't want to get involved you actually pulled your punches on Nixon there are things you didn't can you give an example of that well I think the best example would be that Anthony Summers who wrote an interesting uh actually a very interesting book on MAR Monroe and another interesting book called conspiracy on Kennedy Irish investigative journalist wrote uh a Nixon biography that came out '98 99 it was ignored by the American Press totally ignored they they wrote about the scandals they wrote about him beating his wife taking drugs which is Sensational as tabloid stuff but the real Scandal of the book is the true behavior of Nixon on the on nuclear matters International matters being drunk being being drunk and being out of control Power Summers goes much further than my movie and if you remember I was lambasted for having Nixon drinking and slurring and using dirty words well the Le the recent transcripts released through Cutler's efforts Stanley Cutler's efforts have revealed a man who's far more profane than any character I drew and if you I was criticized for that right but there was no apology I've been right on a lot of stuff what's odd is that you're your films you know they get challenged for a lot of reasons particularly you create scenes that none of us can know whether they exactly they're true or they're hypothetical scenes um and yet I think there's a good case to be made that you're a revisionist in terms of history and and virtually every generation of historians have revisionists that's what they do they rethink what the previous generation of historians um said why not quite right I always Define myself as a dramatist doing historical drama which is quite legitimate and it's been done for centuries and I don't know why I'm held to another standard is if I'm a documentarian but I try to keep to the spirit of the truth a lot of research goes into it who knows what happened behind closed doors with Nixon and Kennedy you have to go inside and use your imagination but you should be based on research and and a thorough knowledge of what he might have transpired uh I I never consciously sought to distort anything have you ever to combine condense make it work but stick to what I think Nixon meant and what Kennedy's death meant Etc so in JFK and Nixon you never put a scene in that you knew to be untrue that's not the same thing okay I I put in a scene in Nixon where Dean and uh hunt meet on a bridge that was untrue but the fact was that the truth of the matter is that uh Dean paid money to hunt through lawyers so there's always go-betweens but you don't have time in movies to shoot all the go-betweens so and the telephone call so what do you do in a movie you make the choice I said well I'll put them on a bridge together and I'm going to have one pass the money to the other and blah blah blah so is that untrue yes is it a distortion of the truth no because they uh uh Dean gave money to hunt so that's the question I've never seen anybody any filmmaker spend as much time discussing your work in as thoughtful a setting I mean if you go back and look at clips and articles there are 32 page articles in which you're doing q&as and responding to the the community of historians I wanted to mention this book Oliver Stones USA published by the University of Kansas uh press this is a book in which a lot of prominent historians criticized uh provided additional perspective on your work and also praise and praise and then you responded to it right which uh and and you feel good about that volume I put a lot of work into it I I worked uh I gave up almost half a year and uh you know I wanted to put it down on the record because it so much has been distorted and we should talk about Distortion is is just as damaging to censorship uh as uh it's just as damaging to free speech as censorship because Distortion rules the media has um can't get any story straight was it historians or the media distorting in your view both uh uh Stephen Ambrose is Shameless in his Distortion of what I said in nion and many of the JFK people in repeating that I have a scene where JFK where Lyon Johnson acknowledges shooting Kennedy are are not watching the movie that I made uh it's very clear that the conspiracy to kill him that is depicted in the movie comes from a small click but they obviously a powerful click I don't know who did it I'm hypothesizing in this movie I know you've been criticized by people who said you're teaching an entire generation of false history Howard wrote me a beautiful letter he's a great historian in his way many people disagree with him but he said you know the art is subversive it's emotional it raises it challenges the official truths of the establishment and he says how the hell can you posit that anybody comes to a film with a blank slate what are they stupid they were uneducated by the state everybody comes to the JFK movie if anything buying the 20 years of propaganda we sustained from the Warren Commission uh so I'm figh ing against a huge lie to begin with whatever poor weapons I can manage to make people think about what they read think twice all my victory is to make people think uh that's all now no harm in that Socrates idea the same thing and why can't films be more Socratic most American films right now are really in a rot they're buying into this militarism they're buying into this easy answer to all questions it's very depressing to me because um all my films all my body of work ultimately if you think about it including Natural Born Killers was intended to make people not only enjoy the movie but to think about it are there topics you would like to make I would have liked to have done Martin Luther King it was a character study and there you talk about pre-censorship this is a lot of that goes on as you know in JFK Washington Post pre-censorship mhm who had a stolen first draft of a screenplay we were working on the seventh or eighth Draft when this guy showed up now that's unfair and then he completely tore us apart in a Sunday article huge article based on the first draft um I'll give you another instance what happened to be the FBI guy a monster in my opinion his name is uh worked out of the New York office he came after us when we were doing a TV thing on TW really want to talk about that and he was quoted in the New York Times saying I was a scumbag blah blah blah profiting off the uh uh the grief of the victim's families the grief of the victim's families we interviewed a hundred Witnesses who were never interviewed by the FBI and you know I mean the the grief of the victim's families is basically from his attitude is you know shut up you know you heard the story it's over here's the flowers here's the funeral I feel sorry for him for those who are not familiar with it because it made a brief Splash you had a deal was it ABC Mr yeah a brief Splash you raised a good question on Friday afternoon I get a call from the times I got about 20 minutes to respond to a complex issue about what's going on and I don't know what's going on because the network is Shifting very fast it took three days after the FBI agent spoke the network caved completely and this is I'm talking about everybody at the network knew that I was making this except except the top top dog suddenly 3 days later you're canceled so I I have no I can't interpret history but something happened so this is a story of tww Flight 800 yeah which is a sham and and you call it I think the title working title was Oliver Stones Declassified was that right yeah it was part of a series that we're doing for very provocative series we're doing for ABC uh about all it's called disinformation it's about the the the way the media spins the world from BC through all of them MH you get a pro-american America First ethnocentricity that drives most people around the world nuts which is why Americans don't understand why there's a lot of fundamental dislike for our arrogance ethnocentricity but in this case uh uh it was just it was never aired what would we have seen on that show you would have seen uh the opposite of 60 minutes would have seen three or four segments a week tick tick tick tick where we went at it a completely different way by letting the real people talk not putting a spin on it but we would not have uh I mean if it had been on the air would we have any new insight into what brought the plane down of course you would have because the Witnesses were the ones who would have brought the inside not me there was actually helicopter Pilots saw it Go Down rocket Engineers people with very mechanical skills who understood what they received it's a very very disturbing very disturbing and as the media conglom rizes get smaller and smaller it becomes more disturbing more orwellian and I do see a Ministry of communication I mean the government is coming in they are uh all when all the American all our boys you know all this fuss that the media made about American Hollywood supporting America it's a very dangerous collusion uh of forces I think these people have to see the America from outside in to understand how dangerous this game is you've had some strong words about what you describe in terms of media control of the information we get I think you you've used the word fascism in terms of a media and government together uh controlling what we see definitely fascism is described classically as the corporate control of the state you know you could argue that we're pretty close to that right now andron is just one tip of the iceberg but the corporations have been the big players and the lobbyist they've driven out the younger the the personal individual lobbyists but I'm curious I mean you talk about the Press sort of being controlled or controlling and yet you've known I'm sure many reporters in your life we're good free Spirits aggressive people um who are pursuing the truth so where is all this happening is there a a filter at oh yeah there's a big what are you talking about Every Time Magazine guy for years was Rewritten by New York there's an editor in New York Washington who rewrites everything the editors control the story I've had so many stories interviews cut or omitted I'm shocked and the the reporter has always come back to me sheepishly and said I tried I really wanted that story to play but they just they give you economic reasons they always give you never know the reasons the reason is because you said something that pushed a button and they don't like that and that goes on with me a lot but I'm sorry for the kids because I'm glad the South Park kids are doing what they should be doing but we need more uh oh boy we have to think differently how do we think differently if we're educated by a model in which America is God's Nation how do I how is that going to work we're self-d deluded America is the center of the world it isn't you know you've tackled a lot of tough subjects never to my knowledge religion have I missed that is that a topic you're yeah that's a tough topic isn't it I think I'm going to do the Mario hair story no I think she's interesting lady she had a crazy life yeah the fact you're doing documentaries now does that mean you will never do a major motion picture again like Nixon or JFK no not at all okay you know there hasn't been a chilling of of investors because of the no no I mean uh it's all how you do it you know if I wrote the script and it was brilliant I bet you people would line up you have to be smart you have to be smarter than the system and unfortunately it's harder for me because I'm very so spotle you know I can't change my name and do another film under another name but uh I will never give up and I love big subjects I'm doing Alexander the Great right now if we can work it out we're trying very hard uh it's a great subject one of the first International Universalist Believers in mating the races in finding world government uh interesting story he was stopped it's fascinating because so much of your work is truly from from the 60s on you reflect I me platoon and and all and so much of your work is driven time to go back and see the whole right now we're in a sty position we're about where we were with the 8 80 to 85 period in the Arts I think I think there'll be a breakage by 2005 I think we'll get bored with bush hopefully most of the U sitcom audience will and uh maybe we can move on I think there'll be a break things change but we're definitely in a retroactive period were there Dynamics in Nixon's story that Oliver North is working again he's back after jail and lying and all the things he did he's back as a commentator at Fox and doing very well yeah um were the Dynamics in Nixon's story that made that a workable as a movie I would Reagan's story be a film I think Reagan story is a great story uh it's a great story because he was he was a great communicator and damn it the man was Charming he had an Irish thing about him we made a movie about him called the day Reagan was shot for Showtime cus noas wrote and directed it was very little money it was brilliant though I urge you to watch Richard Kena and Richard Rus is superb very well done I'd like to talk to you about Natural Born Killers because it's a it's a film that uh provoke strong responses as all your movies do but also provoked litigation um there is a lawsuit there's lawsuit file against you in Louisiana uh after um U person was a victim of a crime that they said was inspired by uh two young people watching Natural Born Killers um what was your reaction when you first heard that your art was being accused and being responsible for this grave injury well no the Press was it's interesting the New York so-called quote liberal intelligencia was calls and after me for and I participated in one unfortunate article in Vanity Fair and the the reporter was a typical liberal in that he tried to divide the responsibility between me and John Grisham Gish had started the whole thing by saying that movies should be Outlaw but should be judged like as as if they were defective products Industrial Products in other words you could sue a Movie Maker uh in the same way you could destroy you could sue a car company for making it defective Fort Pinta very serious uh idea making art into uh material idea that you could be sued so uh at stake was quite a lot and nobody seemed to be aware of it because nobody in the media wrote about it except two or three people in very obscure places it was a serious law Supreme Court turned it down went on for five years six courts still going on but we thank God we finally had a major victory and uh after spending one1 to2 million dollar as Warner Brothers and myself doing time with the uh all the litigation all the waste of energy you know what you have to ask yourself what if it was a smaller company how would they defend themselves there's no way you see we've expect litigation to cost a million dollars it's insane as a result the r the R-rated movie whether it's my movie or Matt and Trey is in Jeopardy because the lawsuit issue can only be handled by big companies when you first heard about this and by the way just to answer specifically your question right the positions on Natural Born Killer and my responsibility I denied responsibility I said how can I take half responsibility with John Gish or how can I take half responsibility in any way the kids were screwed up for years they took drugs one of the killers the male admitted that the girl was making it up blah blah blah and they were they had a history of psychotic episodes and my point is the Bible forced John Lennon's killer whatever you know it doesn't matter what your spark is but they the the issue was distorted in the media the media it's a better story if Oliver Stone and Warner Brothers are half guilty or guilty or run the then just well this is a ridiculous suit they should laugh at out of the courts so it was simmering for a long time and a lot of money and time was wasted and to be clear you won on traditional First Amendment grounds finally after six courts do you know how much paperwork is wasted sure and the money and the time the depositions it's a it's a bloody movie that you intended to saiz in which you intended to saiz bloody movies no no I sat much more than that well society and you name it but uh L the whole culture was screwed in that movie but the violent culture it was a satire and a satire in the sense is not is outsize it doesn't mean funny necessarily some people may not find that movie funny I don't care satire is just outsized grotesque exaggerated so as to make you think so here we have the classic two killers they killed 60 people but even worse than them is the uh is the uh Warden and the media Wayne Gail in his desperate search for profit and of course Tom cmore plays a perverted detective in a way the state becomes worse than the killers I think that really angered a lot of people and then the killers get away at the end that was iing on the cake I was dead meat so what is your take on violence in films when it's not being used as a vehicle for Saar I mean there are a lot of violent movies being made not all of which are art or high art I should say is it too is it too violent what is the culture the me the popular culture which would be the liberan argument um you've had some strong words for the senator oh liberan and uh yeah this is very dangerous because by taking away the R rating they took away the nc7 that belongs that was the adult category that was quite what happened was that the uh Walmart people and the usual conservative elements in the South and so forth started to come up with the concept great concept oh the we can't get a lease in the insurance uh in the mall because of the insurance company because we're running nc17 porno films it's not porno that was another category a nc7 is adult they stole it from us we're the American public we have the right to see nc7 you cannot see sex in America with any significant or the way we can see it in most developed civilized countries and violence has given more play than sex so and yet we don't want too much violence as we as we certainly don't want too much sex so we're really screwed because we're a culture like the Romans in a sense that we're not showing the full range of human activity we're we're it's fascistic means corporate control of the state in a corporate situation nobody everybody misbehaves they get fired Everybody's scared there's no boss who owns my company today right so there's this sort of Conformity this fear and fear dominates the American Social and cultural landscape at this time after what 10 Academy Award nominations and three wins uh you um you've got a wonderful track record and you have almost always used your art to say something but there have also been times when you said you know what I think your quote was I can't always lead with my chin um are you wearing down uh I I fought a lot of battles I think I you know it's I think you save yourself uh now that I know more and have much more experience if I would be stupid not to rethink everything a little bit more but not hopefully overthink it but if there's a battle that I I can add something to and is worth fighting I should still do it right we can't do justice to your career in 30 minutes but we sure enjoy talking to you thank you [Music] kid join us next time as we continue our discussion on free expression and the arts for more information about speaking freely visit our website at www.sp speaking freely. o r g [Music]

Channel: Freedom Forum

Views: 51,770

Keywords: Newseum Institute, Speaking Freely, First Amendment, Journalism, Film Director, Screenwriter, Producer, Interview

Id: AU810F8sU5k

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2015