Oliver Stone in conversation with Michael M. Bilandic
BY
Michael M. Bilandic
A conversation with Oliver Stone spanning his decades-long career about Hollywood, the American media, the current state of the world, and how little things have changed.
Natural Born Killers plays 7 Ludlow Friday, January 20.
Controversy has always followed the work of Oliver Stone. It’s perhaps inevitable when a filmmaker dedicates their entire career to a relentless pursuit of The Truth. And especially when they do so in opposition to powerful institutions, such as the US government. In 1994, Stone set his sights on the mass media; in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, he offered up a scathing indictment of American tabloid journalism with Natural Born Killers, which stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as Mickey and Mallory Knox, a serial-killer couple who become overnight celebrities by going on a cross-country murder spree. Robert Downey Jr. shocked audiences by revealing a previously unseen capacity for sleazing it up as Wayne Gale, a crazed reporter with an unhealthy true crime obsession who tracks their exploits. The film’s extreme violence, satirical tone, and surreal visual style raised the eyebrows of censors and O.G. culture warriors alike, boosting its status as one of the most infamous Hollywood releases of the ’90s.
From early on, though, Stone came out swinging, winning an Academy Award for his script for the prison drama Midnight Express in ’78, and penning the game-changing gangster hit Scarface in ’83. He would go on to win Best Director and Best Picture for the first of his Vietnam War-era films, Platoon, in ’86, and then direct far too many classics to list in total here—for starters, there’s Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), The Doors (1991), and Nixon (1995). In recent years, Stone has slowed down with the narratives and focused on a series of politically minded, highly provocative and ambitious documentaries, like The Untold History of the United States (2012), The Putin Interviews (2017), JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (2021), and his latest, Nuclear Now (2022), which will be out this year. He also released a critically acclaimed memoir, Chasing the Light, in the summer of 2020.
In the last days of 2022, I had the pleasure of Zooming with the legend himself. He graciously humored my digressions and offered insight into a wide range of topics, spanning his entire career.—Michael M. Bilandic
MICHAEL M. BILANDIC: I was just telling our friend Gabe that you were the first person to speak to my class at NYU, two weeks after 9/11.
OLIVER STONE: I really spoke to your class two weeks after?
MB: Yeah. Maybe not exactly two weeks, but shortly after. I moved to New York for film school in August, 2001. Then, all of a sudden, this historic event happens. Everything gets cancelled. It’s total chaos. And when they finally bring classes back, they tell us our first visiting lecturer is Oliver Stone. You showed up, you’d come straight from Ground Zero.
OS: Was it a small class?
MB: It was pretty small. Everyone was arguing about geopolitics, Afghanistan, commando units, Bin Laden. And the late underground filmmaker Nick Zedd stormed in and made some unclear accusation about Natural Born Killers (1994) ripping off War is Menstrual Envy (1992). I have no idea what his angle was, but the whole experience was a memorable introduction to film school. Are you still involved with NYU?
OS: I gave a screenwriting scholarship to NYU. Every year people get a certain amount of money if they win the prize as a screenplay writer. I was trying to develop the screenplay aspect of NYU because when I was there, no one took a screenwriting class, except me, maybe five other people. They never had screenwriting as an understanding. Cameras, yeah, but they were not into screenwriting. Anyway.
MB: Education, and particularly the teaching of history, has been a major theme throughout your career. I especially love The Untold History of the United States. In the intro, you describe the disappointment you felt reading your kids’ history textbooks as a catalyst for embarking on your own American history survey. Simultaneously, I’ve been dying to ask you about Dream School (2013-2014), the reality show you were on, where celebrities like you, David Arquette, 50 Cent, and Suze Orman teach a group of high school dropouts in a highly experimental classroom environment. You’re trying to explain the nuances of World War II and Vietnam to these disaffected zoomers. I’m curious about your thoughts on teaching history. Also, what was it like being on a reality show, when it’s a genre you’re so critical of?
OS: I did that years ago! Is it still on the air?
MB: It’s floating around.
OS: It was very strange. That was not satisfactory. I tried.
For Untold History, I came under the influence of my friend, Peter Kusnick, who is a teacher of American history for 30, 40 years now at American University. He’s a very bright man, and a liberal—a real liberal, not a phoney liberal. He’s not a Hillary Clinton liberal, he’s—he studied history. Unfortunately, America has not studied its role in World War II. [In the show] we made the point about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan; it’s crucial to understand why we did that, and how that happened. And we’ve been lying about it for 60, 70 years, just lying about it… This history is crucial. And as you can see, I stopped making movies at a point, and Untold History took three, four years to make. It was just a mess, trying to put it into a film version. I’m very proud of that, I’m glad you pointed it out. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, trying to tell the true history of the United States from 1898 to now.
MB: It’s so ambitious. I can’t even imagine the process of putting it together.
OS: The 12 parts take us from 1898, up to Obama [being re-elected] in 2012. People always say, “Why don’t you do Trump?” Well, you know, it’s not that simple to go back in. It takes money and time. But I do think it’s clear we’re on the wrong path. It just didn’t have to be this way, you understand? We have a strain of aggressiveness in this country. I don’t know that we can overcome ourselves, control ourselves.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
I suppose I’m a rebel at heart. I’ve lived that role, to some degree as a moviemaker. And it’s been tough, because, you know, at times, they’ve given me praise, but at times they really hate me because I am trying to say things as they are.
MB: Metrograph is about to screen Natural Born Killers. I love movies like this where there’s a sense of chaos in front of the camera and behind the camera, and you can just feel it, you know? The prison break scene is a perfect example. It’s explosive. You’re watching it and you’re enjoying it, but also trying to imagine the reality of Tom Sizemore, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, and all these actual inmates playing it out in the moment. What draws you to creating these chaotic scenarios? And how do you feel when you’re in them? Do you feel blissed out and calm, or is it a frenzied adrenaline rush?
OS: I love chaos, and I love energy, chaotic energy. And when you can control it to some degree, it makes for a powerful picture. It’s in The Doors, too, if you see it. It’s in the war scenes, and in several movies, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July. The chaos, the madness of the situation—rock ’n’ roll breeds that, mob scenes breed that, public frenzies, like the January 6 insurrection. We saw it in Born on the Fourth of July where they’re having civilian protests against the Vietnam War. I love that stuff. And I love to get an entire movie set up to this level of madness where you sense the crowd, and the extras sense it, “Wow, it’s really happening.” So many of those people who did The Doors in ’91 said to me, “Wow, this is my first time experiencing the ’60s.” [Laughs.] I can’t say it was the ’60s but certainly it felt like it was a Jim Morrison concert, right?
Now, I saw a movie a few days ago, Babylon (2022) which, it’s ridiculous because [Damien Chazelle] lost touch with reality. I’ve read a lot about the 1920s, they didn’t have orgies like that. I mean, orgies existed, orgies happened for a reason, Cecil B. DeMille did the best orgies we know, in The Ten Commandments (1956), but Damien Chazelle—I liked the movie, it had many good things in it, but that opening was overdone. It was [hands gesture dramatically outward] everybody’s fucking everybody, it doesn’t work like that. A reason has to be established. You shouldn’t lead with the chaos. The chaos should come later, is what I think.
MB: On the topic of orgies, there’s a great movie someone’s going to have to make, and I would love for it to be you—about the FTX drama. These polyamorous nerds in the Bahamas, wreaking havoc on the crypto market, everyone theoretically scamming each other, and with so many political implications. Wall Street and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) reflected their moments so perfectly. I don’t know how much you’ve been up on this scandal; is it a story you would be interested in pursuing?
OS: I mean, I’ve done two Wall Street movies, and I don’t see myself going back into that. And it takes a lot of energy to make a movie, you can’t do it lightly. Also, you can’t chase the news. Never chase the news, it’s ridiculous. I came very close because of Snowden (2016), because of 9/11 with World Trade Centre (2006), and my George Bush movie [W, 2008]. I mean, I never gave up on following the news, but I don’t want to follow it too closely.
MB: I’d like to go back to the idea of prison breaks for a moment. I’m interested in the part of your autobiography where you describe living in the East Village in the late ’60s on 9th Street between Avenue B and C, in an apartment painted entirely red. At the time, you were writing a script called Break, the title being inspired by The Doors’ “Break On Through (To the Other Side).” Supposedly it has a crazy prison break in it, which is something you would explore in later work, like Midnight Express, and Natural Born Killers.
OS: Have you ever read it? Did you see the script?
MB: I haven’t.
OS: Oh, man. It’s a script. It’s insane! It’s my first script I ever wrote. At the end—I wrote two, three versions, and the last one, I think, was the most surreal. He goes to Vietnam [as a soldier]; he dies in Vietnam—he gets killed, by American soldiers. He goes to the underworld, the Egyptian underworld. And he’s judged the old way by the Egyptian gods, very tough. He ends up, I forget how exactly, but in a prison in California, facing smuggling charges—which I did. And from there comes “the break.” There’s no hope in going through society’s methods; there’s no hope listening to conventional thought, because in conventional thought all the bad guys were in Vietnam as soldiers, you see? So he ends up in the American prison. And he breaks out of the American system, all of them break out, and that’s sort of his liberation. So I suppose I’m a rebel at heart. I’ve lived that role, to some degree as a moviemaker. And it’s been tough, because, you know, at times, they’ve given me praise, but at times they really hate me because I am trying to say things as they are.
MB: You certainly took a lot of heat for the tone of Natural Born Killers. It was really interesting re-watching it and thinking about the challenges of satire. Entertainment and politics, these days, seem to have morphed into one. We had Trump doing a borderline Andrew Dice Clay impersonation, and even Zelensky’s a former late-night comedian. Natural Born Killers, and W, really succeed in finding humor in all the madness, but it feels like such a challenge to approach serious issues from a satirical angle today when everything’s blurred into entertainment or “content.”
OS: Well, first of all, it may seem that way to you, but it’s always been that way. We had Ronald Reagan in 1980, who was an actor, and people were saying the same thing you’re saying now: if an actor can get elected—and a B-actor, according to many people—then what’s the meaning of politics? So they always say that. Trump is an aberration—but no more so than Reagan was. They made much too much of a frenzy out of Trump; they blew up everything he did into this massive disaster for the country. It’s all hype. I agree Trump had many failings, but we feasted on it. And as a result, we don’t think. This is, again, the control of the media—they tell you what to think, and they tell you how to think. Well, if you really think this through, Trump is a minor inconvenience compared to what Bush Jr. did to this country. What he did in 2000, by setting up the War on Terror, starting a war across the globe with some 70 fucking countries, to create this concept, the United States is going to be the dominant country in the world, and “you’re either with us or against us.” That is a stupid fucking policy, completely self-destructive. We’ve spent more and more money chasing more and more bullshit, starting little brushfire wars everywhere we can, sending troops everywhere. It’s been a nightmare. It all goes back to Bush and his group. To ignore that is to miss the whole point of what’s going on in the 21st century, to me; to concentrate on Trump is ridiculous.
Going back to Natural Born Killers, at the time I said it’s a satire because it’s not realistic. In the sense that, if you look at the violence—I was criticized repeatedly for the violence—the violence is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s comic violence. In Born on the Fourth of July I showed what one bullet can do to a spine; it can destroy a spine and destroy a man’s life. So I’ve been very realistic in my violence, in Platoon, and Salvador (1986). But in this one case, I exaggerated everything in the movie to make the point that our society was completely fucked. At the time it was the O.J. Simpson trial, and I was disgusted with it. There had been a series of things that happened in the ’90s that had been sensationalized in the media—murders, a woman cutting off a man’s dick was all over the headlines—it was National Enquirer stuff that was being put on the front pages. I noted that; I read this draft by Tarantino; I bought it—I bought it from the producers, not from him. And I changed a lot of it because it was shallow—to my mind, it was shallow and I wanted to go deeper. But I thought it was a very good surface story. The film was controversial from the beginning because Tarantino was always objecting to anybody who changed a word of his script—you know, his bullshit, he is the greatest of all time, and no one can touch what he does. But we changed it because he’d sold it, he didn’t own it. So anyway, we made the movie. And it was misunderstood from the beginning, misunderstood completely—partly that’s because of PR, partly because Tarantino was attacking the movie. But if you look at the movie—now is a good time to look at it—you’ll see a lot of what we were talking about has certainly come true in our media.
Salvador (1986)
MB: It’s undeniable.
OS: The American media has glorified violence all my life. To begin with—before Natural Born Killers—on television, the emphasis, the ratings, were on violence for the most part. Shows, Westerns, where people bang, bang, you’re dead. That was the most popular form of communication in America, killing somebody. It got out of hand in the ’90s. And it’s gotten worse, and worse, and worse… The American media is the most dominant, pervasive, controlling nanny state I’ve ever seen. I can’t stand it. As you know, I’ve been fighting the media for most of my life.
MB: At the time you were also critiquing a culture of gossip and a culture of surveillance. And this is before social media?! Then that arrives and everything you’re arguing just gets exploded; every little thing becomes sensationalized, and whatever goes viral is always anger inducing. You’re on Instagram and Twitter, what’s your relationship with social media been like?
OS: I follow it to a degree, I’m not a hound. It tires me. I’m older, man, I just, I can’t follow all the bullshit. I thought it was interesting when Musk took it over, because he did purge the—the whole thing on Twitter is its government, the government got involved in media. They’ve been heavily involved with Facebook, telling them who the enemy is, what to think, how to think, and telling the same thing now to the Twitter people. Everyone’s cowed by the government, because it’s hard to say no to the big boss. We’re basically a form of social dictatorship, maybe, in the sense that you’re shamed if you don’t go along with the group. Sure, they attack some big targets, but they also scare off the smaller people who like to think for themselves.
MB: Have you been following the Twitter Files stuff? It ties in, I feel, to a lot of themes you’ve explored in your work.
OS: The investigative journalist Matt Taibbi, he’s done a lot of good work. And people like Glenn Greenwald. Many of them have pointed out that the Twitter Files has been government propaganda in this war in Ukraine. And it has. It’s taken all the information that comes to the people who want to make Twitter a freeway for democracy; you can put out information about what the Ukrainians are doing, what the Russians are doing, but anything negative about the Ukrainians is removed by censorship. And you cannot say anything positive about the Russian position, or what even the Russian position is. So we’re telling the people, “This is what you have to think about Ukraine.” This is very dangerous, because we’re not telling the truth to our people. You’re not able to hear it. And this is disgusting. This is not what Twitter was made for. So I go back to my first point that this whole country has been locked up in a kind of social dictatorship. It’s like, you cannot think certain things.
MB: It’s interesting thinking about all of this in the context of the lockdown.
OS: Everybody’s got to have the same attitude about Covid—which is nonsense.
MB: I kept thinking about Talk Radio (1988), with Eric Bogosian playing the controversial radio personality, another of your films which feels relevant to current times. With podcasts, we’re almost back to AM talk radio, or a ham-radio type thing, where people are listening to wild stuff and developing these para-social relationships. It’s funny, I also just watched a documentary about Rockets Redglare; I had totally forgotten he was the killer in Talk Radio, and the guy on the phone.
OS: You saw a documentary about him where?
MB: It took a lot of work to find it, but I can send it to you. It’s from 2003, Rockets Redglare!
OS: It’s funny, I didn’t know about that. But Bogosian, he was very talented. A very good actor. The picture was unfortunately released at the wrong time, at Christmas. It didn’t belong at Christmas. It’s gone the way… but many people like you remember it so hopefully it’ll have some new life.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
I exaggerated everything in the movie to make the point that our society was completely fucked.
MB: I have to bring this up. The deleted scene in Natural Born Killers with the bodybuilding brothers is really one of my favorite scenes in a movie. I watch it all the time on YouTube.
OS: I’ve forgotten the scene, describe it to me.
MB: These two identical twin bodybuilders [Peter and David Paul, aka the Barbarian Brothers] are being interviewed by Robert Downey Jr. in a gym, and they’re describing how they had an encounter with Mickey and Mallory. The couple usually only let one person survive, but they let both survive in this case because the couple were fans of the brothers and only realized who they were halfway through chain-sawing their legs off. It’s revealed they’re in wheelchairs now—but they’re not mad because Mickey and Mallory passed “The Edge” onto them and they can workout harder than anyone else in the gym now because of their disability. I love it. I know you worked with Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian (1982), and in Natural Born Killers the brothers reference Pumping Iron (1977) to Downey. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about bodybuilding, that scene, and working with the Barbarian Brothers?
OS: [Laughs] I enjoyed it. There were a lot of cuts—I don’t know what version you have, but there is an R-rated version, and there’s an unrated version. Do you have the unrated version?
MB: Yeah.
OS: We had tremendous problems with it. Warner Brothers wanted an R version, and they really broke my chops. I had to go back to the MPAA several times, always making more and more [cuts]—it didn’t make any sense. I would say, “What you’re really objecting to is the chaos. You’re not objecting to the physical violence because it’s not really there. You’re objecting to the madness of the movie.” And, you know, that’s not right! Because it is a mad movie, you have to accept that it is a mad movie, like Clockwork Orange (1971) was. But they just couldn’t see the bigger picture. I was already in trouble, of course, with JFK; and I’d done Scarface (1983), as a writer, but I saw all that shit go down. They got crazy on Scarface, and they got crazy on Natural Born Killers. I make this point because they’re haggling over bullshit. When in reality, it’s the madness of our society that they’re not really dealing with. As I said to the press at the time—and they couldn’t understand what I was talking about—I said, “You know, the two killers are not so bad compared to Tommy Lee Jones, who’s the warden of a fucking madhouse, and runs it like a madhouse. Or take a look at Downey, the Downey character is insane. He wants to be a killer. He lives it. He’s living it through Mickey and Mallory, and that’s the media! I said, that’s what’s wrong! And look at the cop, the cop played by Sizemore. So of course I piss off everybody. [Laughs] I said, our cops, our prisons, our media are more fucked up than the two killers. They thought I was crazy.
MB: You see this with the censorship on Twitter, too, where you can’t even put a finger on why they ban certain things. Is it just because this is chaos or… ?
OS: I want to tell you a quick story, because my favorite deletion, and I really wish it were in there, is the courtroom scene in Natural Born Killers with [Woody Harrelson and] Ashley Judd. I think that’s hilarious. Have you ever seen the outtakes on that?
MB: Remind me.
OS: It’s the one where he goes, “Bills and bills and bills.” He gets permission to cross-examine her, Ashley Judd is one of the victims. It’s a touching scene because she is a very good actress and very convincing. And Woody—it’s just beautifully done. You got to watch it, man. It fits beautifully. The reason I took it out was length, and violence. It was too much at the time. But it really belongs in the movie, it’s in the middle—they get busted, and before they go to jail they have this trial. But he wants to be his own lawyer. He cross-examines her—and he stabs her in the heart! And of course [laughs], it’s the worst thing you can do! I mean, they’re going to throw them in the dungeon now! Ashley Judd is a sweetheart—she gets killed, oh my God. How bad can these people be? Right? I love it. I love it. [Laughs] That’s the greatest scene to me, that’s the one I miss.
MB: I just watched JFK Revisited (2021). It sounded like last week they were supposed to release the final files, then it didn’t happen.
OS: They just postponed it in another year. Or something like that. They won’t release the key files. But even then, I don’t know what would be in there. These are CIA people. They all were dealing with Cuban groups, people like [George] Joannides, [David Atlee] Phillips, Bill Harvey. Those are the guys you really want… [Allan] Dulles if possible, but there’s no files on Dulles. The CIA is where, in my opinion, you really got to look, because they were running the whole show, including [Lee Harvey] Oswald.
MB: Alright, last thing. So as we are entering 2023, I’ve been reading all these year-end lists, wrapping up the year. I was curious what your summary of 2022 would be? And what are you looking for in 2023?
OS: Let’s talk film first. As a filmmaker, I finished a very complicated documentary, a scientific one called Nuclear Now, which is on the need for bringing back nuclear energy now, and pushing it because it is the only way we’re going to close the gap with the vast amount of energy we’re going to need by 2050. Hopefully it will be out in the New Year, very early, and people will see it, but it’s a very important thing to me, it’s the most important subject on Earth. So that’s where I am at. Secondly, I co-wrote a screenplay with a partner, which I think is—I cannot tell you what the subject is, it’s not that I don’t reveal what I’m about to or hope to do, and if all goes well I’ll be able to make it in 2023, but it hasn’t been an easy business, that’s for sure. I haven’t done a feature film since 2016: Snowden. I did JFK Revisited in 2019, and Putin [The Putin Interviews] in 2017, so I’ve been busy with documentaries more than features. I’m looking forward to making one more—I hope—as well as releasing Nuclear Now.
MB: Nice.
OS: On the world front, it’s always unstable, the world has always been in change. People over-exaggerate, it’s always a dark time, you know? Americans have a very limited view of the world because they live subjected to the American media.
Now, for 2023, we’re in a shithole. As a country, we keep backing the military, we keep putting a fortune into military spending—and now we’re paying for the Ukraine war, which is insane. Because we started the war, we trapped the Russians into going in there with our policies. In other words, most of the instability in the world is created by us. And we won’t admit it. People in America don’t know about that because they have no idea we’re the provokers—we’re the most provocative country in the world. And as long as we can’t see it, we’re hypnotized. We’re hypnotized by our media. We don’t see beyond our little American periscope.
Michael M. Bilandic is a New York-based filmmaker. He is the writer and director of Happy Life, Hellaware, Jobe’z World, and Project Space 13.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
