Director Oliver Stone on his rocky road to “Platoon”

Multi-award-winning director Oliver Stone is a controversial figure in American cinema who told Kim Hill on Saturday Morning about the first 40 years of his career.

The Vietnam veteran’s portrayals of war and violence have proven contentious, as have his political views and frequent criticism of US foreign policy. His new memoir Chasing The Light focuses on the first 40 years of his career and ends with an Oscar for Best Director for Platoon in 1987.

There, he shares stories from inside the making of classic films like Midnight Express, Scarface, and Salvador, and about some of the larger-than-life characters he’s encountered along the way.

A young Oliver Stone on the cover of his 2020 dissertation Chasing the Light
Photo: Provided

Stone says his parents’ divorce took him out of a comfortable childhood and made him feel like the world was not benign.

Stone studied at Yale University but dropped out and briefly taught high school students in Vietnam in 1965, when American soldiers were just beginning to arrive.

“At that time [a gap year] not much to do, but I needed a year off, I was just exhausted. At the time, we weren’t talking about stress … I was lost.

“[My father] I had been to Yale and was expecting me to go through it, I was raised for great achievements, and it didn’t work because I gave up a second time.

“I entered the military because I couldn’t decide what to do with my life, and I thought if I was to be killed I would be killed here, I don’t want to die here by my own hand – I was fatalistic when I went there and woke up there. “

He has participated in numerous helicopter missions, received the Bronze Star for bravery, and was twice wounded. But I have seen Americans behave criminally and kill civilians.

Actors Willhem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger during the filming of Oliver Stone’s Platoon in 1986
Photo: YouTube screenshot

“I came back from Vietnam a different person. You see the worst of it.

“The lie was huge there – the government told us we were winning the whole time we were there, we weren’t. I came back numb, insane.”

Not knowing what to do next, he enrolled in film school and found his way into the film industry.

“It wasn’t easy, I had no connection.”

He’s watching Salvador like the first real movie he made, which was a bit of a baptism by fire, with difficult content, logistical nightmares, and unreliable finances flowing.

“It was the most volatile. Every movie I made was difficult, but it was the most volatile because we never knew if we would make it the next day.

“It was very difficult conditions because there was so much uncertainty. The movie had about 92 talking parts, it was about a civil war, there were massacres – there is a massacre in a cathedral, there were death squads, it was quite a spectacle, and trying to doing it for $ 3 million was crazy. It was a show, and it was meant to be, about an epic civil war.

“But it was a real test of character, because nobody wanted to be successful in America, it was done by an English company. Americans were even then very afraid to talk about what was going on in their own backyards and what was going on; American soldiers were all over Central America at that time too, interfering in those countries. “

James Woods as photojournalist Richard Boyle in the film Salvador by Oliver Stone in 1986
Photo: YouTube screenshot

Once Salvador was done, he began filming Platoon back to back, funded by the same production company.

He says it was luck that current events and public awareness changed in 1986, and that a more critical spotlight turned to the actions of the US government in international affairs.

“In October 1986, just as Platoon was about to come out, a CIA contractor was shot dead in Nicaragua, where we illegally ship weapons, illegally operate their port, do all kinds of dirty things.

“So this story was taken off and led to a surface examination of the Iran-Contra scandal – Reagan was shipping weapons to Iran to fight their war on Iraq and taking the money, sharing the proceeds and giving it to the Contras who were a vigilante group he was supporting to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.

“Some critics have drawn attention to [Platoon] like a special kind of film, a revolutionary film, that they hadn’t seen much of. No one had made a film with that kind of dark humor. “

He made Wall Street in 1987 and its sequel in 2010 because “America’s business is business and you never really see it on screen.”

“There had been some great business films made in the 30s and 50s, but not much had happened in the 60s and 70s, we would move away from this world.

“And I thought it was time to say, let’s take a look at what America is – business and money – where it came from. It was a new type of Wall Street.”

Stone has now made 20 films, and he says a running theme has been manipulation and lying.

“There are a lot of lies in any war – the first casualty of war is the truth, that’s what they say.”

His next projects are documentaries on JFK and clean energy.

US director Oliver Stone in 2016
Photo: Skidmore Gage