OS: Confront me? On the set? I think my wife confronts me. My child
is always insulting me (laughs), demeaning me, which is sort of...I think
children exist as funnels of humor. We take ourselves so seriously, and
then a child comes into your life and totally undermines all your
efforts. They totally undermine all your seriousness and all your
gravity. They have no respect for adult dignity, as you know. They run
right over it. Your son comes up and says the most outrageous thing to
your face.
I think that's good. I think that's the clown effect in life. My
associates who have been with me long enough will confront me and fight
me and yell at me. And I will yell at them. Those people who come on to
the film who are new-probably because they don't know me-will not be
confrontational at first. But then I try to encourage open discussions.
Try to.
PT: How do you deal with going from a Yale dropout to being who
Oliver Stone is today? How does your ego stay in bounds?
OS: I try in my head to stay innocent in my approach to new
material. I think research keeps you humble. I think field work, going
out and talking to people, hearing the dialogue and writing it is a
humbling experience because you have a blank page. You're sitting there
alone and you have no friends, no allies. You're basically with yourself
and you have to Put it on the page, and each page is blank. There is no
prejudgment, no for or against; the page is not carrying you. You have to
put it there every day. I think writing is a key to that growth. It's a
spiritual growth that goes on throughout your life. It's a lesson that
you repeat again and again, it seems to me, until You learn it.
So yes, I'm more secure than I was when I was a kid. Because I have
success. I have the trappings of wealth but in my heart I feel that this
is still a very insecure business. That each film is a tremendous risk
and that you have to go for the risk. You have to gamble all on the film,
and if you lose people like me take a big beating. Because there's a lot
of people who want to see us fail. Anybody who is successful in America
has a lot of envy and jealousy. It's a psychological condition of this
country, in part promoted by the media. The writing about successful
people is mostly negative unless you're one of their darlings.
PT: There's a statement in Hollywood that it's not enough to
succeed, you have to see your friends fail as well. Is that it?
OS: It's best not to think about it.
PT: I have one question about the Kennedy assassination for you. If
there was a conspiracy to cover up the truth, why are all the news media
in on it?
OS: I never said that.
PT: I know. I said it. I'm Puzzled, because it seems to me that
there would have to be some sort of collusion among the people who aren't
talking about it.
OS: I think it goes back to I.F. Stone's line about the press being
like birds gathered on a telephone wire. One of them goes away and then
they all go away; when one comes back they all come back. There is a
sense of laziness, a general consensus that there is no merit, nothing to
be earned by going back into that case because it was so disputed at the
time.
Dan Rather even said that J.F.K.'S head moved forward instead of
back [in response to the fatal gunshot]. He's a joke. He hasn't done
anything but benefit from the case for the last 30 years. I went on his
show and they grilled me for over an hour. I very studiously went out and
fielded every question. By the time the goddamn thing was cut together,
they cut me down to 35 seconds of bland bullshit. So if they're really
serious why don't they get into the specific stuff?
PT: Do you think Dan Rather believes the Warren Commission? Do you
think he wants to believe it?
OS: I think he is a psychologically disturbed man--you can see it
in his eyes on TV every night. The man has got some problem. I can't tell
you what his motive is, but it goes to the top of the managing news
departments of CBS, NBC, and ABC. All these years they've been kind of
weird. When they came and interviewed me, they were trying to crack me.
Every question was to try and get me to make a mistake. And I couldn't
believe the way they cut it. They imply that I was a Hollywood
fanaticist, a little crazy. I'm very aware of that the cutting of this
was very Machiavellian. I think it comes down to the editors; CBS, NBC,
they never give us the truth. We're talking Pravda and Isvestia
here.
PT: Why have none of the Kennedys ever spoken out on the Warren
Commission?
OS: I think they're scared. I think when Kennedy was killed there
were so many ghosts in the closet that they knew they would be hurt if
there was an investigation done into Jack Kennedys behavior patterns--not
only with sex and drug use, but also what would come out about the Mafia
dealings and trying to assassinate Castro. I think there was a lot of
dirty laundry.
As often happens in life, maybe the guy was killed for reasons that
you would like to seek out but you worry about the other reasons, the
other things coming out, too. I think that certainly motivated Bobby
Kennedy, who before he died did say very clearly that he was going to
reopen the case.
PT: You imply a connection between Bobby's and Jack Kennedy's
assassination.
OS: Absolutely, absolutely.
PT: Same people, same motive?
OS: I think so, I think so.
PT: Where does all this lead us? What road are we going down, in
your mind?
Tags:
angry young man,
born on the fourth of july,
drugs,
ferret,
filmmaker,
fourth of july,
hard time,
hippie,
jfk,
media,
movie,
Oliver Stone,
politics,
potency,
push pull,
railing,
sixties,
stuart fischoff,
tyrant,
wild palms
