OS: I think when you kill presidents--when you kill Martin Luther
King and Bobby Kennedy and you get away with it; when you have J. Edgar
Hoover in office for 50 years and he's a raging madman who prosecutes
anyone who he sees as subversive to his way of American life; when you
have Lyndon Johnson as president; when you have wars in Vietnam that are
genocides; when you create a Cold War mentality that breeds
defense-minded expenditures of the sums that we had--then there is a
corruption that follows.
The fabric of society is warped. It has been increasingly warped
since World War II and we've locked into it and now we're paying for it.
We're paying for it morally and spiritually and economically. Cause and
effect. It had to happen. We did not throw the money into the cities,
into architectural or spiritual wealth. For this country these things are
lacking now.
PT: Most of your films are violent. What's your opinion about the
alarm over excessive violence and explicit sex in films and TV
programming.
OS: I always maintain that violence has to be real, as real as
possible. Violence is obscene when it's fake. So that's the line you have
to be aware of when you see films that are just violent redundantly for
the purpose of excitement and sensationalism. I think that's wrong and it
demeans human life.
That's not to say sometimes you can't have a sense of humor about
it, too. I'm not being a blue nose but I do find films such as [Arnold
Schwarzenegger's] Total Recall, for example, get ridiculous--you have so
much murder that you numb out to it. I'm doing a film about it now called
Natural Born Killers that I hope if it's good will be a satire---a
commentary on violence in America, on murder and what the American media
makes of it. But the concept is satire. There will be a filter; you're
looking at violence as opposed to celebrating it.
But violence is, as they say, as American as apple pie. I'm not
saying we should run from it. There is nothing worse then television
violence-people die so easily on TV! They just drop dead. If you're going
to kill somebody, show the effect of the killing. Make it powerful, make
it real, so that people really understand. Violence per se is a good
dramatic tool, it always was. Violence is a good theatrical diversion. It
is a necessary conceit to give pity and terror. But it should be used
sacredly. Violence should be sacred.
PT: But young minds will not be able to easily distinguish between
violence with a moral purpose and mindless violence. And one of the
things about the tone of your movies--maybe because of your state of
mind--is the anger of life. So that somebody could say, "Well, gee, you
know you decry violence and yet all of your work addresses it' Maybe you
say that you are doing it in the right way, but somebody else would say
you're still doing it.
OS: In response to that, I'm not so sure that art should be safe. I
think when you enter a theater, it's your choice. It should not only be
sacred, but in the concept of sacred is the concept of danger. You are in
danger when you see a film or a play.
PT: And a child?
OS: If you're going to let your child see a certain film, you have
to take that into account. That's a decision between the child and the
adult. It seems to me wrong to punish all of society for the sake of
children, by saying let's ban all violence. That's a form of censorship.
We have a lot of that in America. We have a tendency to let the tail wag
the dog. All I can do is make my movies as strong and authentic as I can.
I'm aware of the violence.
PT: In 1988 you supported the idea of legalizing all drugs to take
the mystique and the criminal profit out of them. Do you still feel that
way?
OS: Yes. Such fear, such compartmentalization of society has been
created to the point where prisons are housing so many drug offenders now
that the prisons themselves have become breeding cells for more drugs.
The ghetto-ization and wreckage of the inner cities--I have a feeling
that in some way the government poisoned that well itself. That it wasn't
a natural decay. That they poisoned the inner cities.
PT: To what purpose?
OS: I think a lot of it was political and economic and there was a
stimulus to turn over the inner cities to minorities for tax-base
reasons, for school reasons, for health and education reasons. And to
flee from the cities. There was a natural move away.
I also have to say that it's not just one party at fault. I was in
Gary, Indiana, recently and I talked to some local black judges there.
Gary was ruined in the late 1960s by a black mayor who came in and so
terrorized the white community with his statements that they all fled.
That politicization of race occurs in this country whenever people get
elected on the basis of their statements on race, sexism, and morality.
It used to be a German phenomenon but now it's an American
phenomenon.
PT: If you could be the architect of U.S. drug policy, what would
it look like?
OS: First of all I'd probably reduce the DEA and put the money into
education and health care. I would legalize everything and give pharmacy
prescriptions on heroin and cocaine. I would return cocaine to medical
usage, to kill pain.
PT: There's no concern on your part that you run the risk of people
turning to drugs?
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
