Oliver Stone

• Born: September 15, 1946
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

The 1980s marked for Stone the end of his apprenticeship as a writer of scripts for other directors and the beginning of his own career as a filmmaker. Since that time, he has gone on to continue establishing his talent through both directing and producing several films and documentaries.

Born in New York City in 1946, Oliver Stone largely spent his college years serving in the military. However, he began the 1980s writing and directing his first feature, a horror film called The Hand (1981). Afterward, he spent the next five years writing screenplays for other filmmakers, including Conan the Barbarian (1982) for John Milius, Scarface (1983) for Brian de Palma, Year of the Dragon (1985) for Michael Cimino, and Eight Million Ways to Die (1986) for Hal Ashby. Writing for such talented directors prepared him to craft better screenplays for his own films. Stone had served in the US Army for fifteen months along the Cambodian boarder in the Vietnam War. He was wounded twice and was awarded a Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster, as well as a Bronze Star for valor. He returned home a changed man. It was not surprising, then, that as a film director he eventually turned to the war for material.

In 1986, Stone released his third feature-length directorial effort, Platoon, the first of what would become a trilogy dealing with the Vietnam War and its effects on those who fought in Southeast Asia. Platoon focused on the day-to-day combat experience of infantry soldiers, and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) dealt with the experiences of returning vets as they worked to reintegrate themselves into American society. Heaven and Earth (1993) would complete the trilogy. The three movies provided perhaps one of the most devastating critiques of the war on film. The two films released in the 1980s helped fuel a larger reassessment of the Vietnam experience and its aftermath that became one of the hallmarks of American cinema in the 1980s. This reassessment led to an increasing number of films critical of US overseas engagements generally, especially when they interfered with the domestic social and political environment of another country.

Stone’s social criticism did not stop with the Vietnam War, however. In Salvador (1986), released before Platoon, he explored the involvement of the United States in Central America and provided a vivid portrayal of a foreign policy both devastating and dangerous in its execution. Wall Street (1987), dedicated to his stockbroker father, exposed the financial excesses of the stock market during a period of widespread corruption and insider trading, practices his father deplored. The line “Greed is good,” delivered by Michael Douglas portraying Gordon Gekko, the principal offender in the film, could have become a mantra for the period.

Working steadily into the twenty-first century, Stone further displayed his versatility as a director through his work on films such as The Doors (1991), a biopic about the famous rock band of the sixties and seventies that received mixed reviews; JFK (1991), one of his most defining films that revolves around a conspiracy theory regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; the controversial Natural Born Killers (1994), which stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as serial killers who attract great media attention; the biographical drama Nixon (1995); the football drama Any Given Sunday (1999); Alexander (2004), an ambitious take on the great Macedonian military leader; a drama focusing on fictional characters trapped in the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 titled World Trade Center (2006); and the crime thriller Savages (2012). From 2012 to 2013, his documentary series The Untold History of the United States, covering the period between World War I and Barack Obama's presidency, aired on Showtime, highlighting his ability to work in this genre (he had already produced and/or directed a handful of documentaries by that point). Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the infamous National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in Stone's 2016 drama Snowden. In 2017, Stone released The Putin Interviews.

In 2020, Stone released his memoir Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Gale. His honest account of his life was praised by the New York Times. In 2021, Stone released the documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. During the same year, he produced the eight-hour film Qazag: History of the Golden Man. In the film, Stone interviewed Kazakh politician and former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. During a 2023 interview with Russell Brand, Stone stated that he regretted voting for Biden because he worried that Biden would start World War III over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, Stone produced the documentary Lula about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Impact

Oliver Stone became the most famous American director of politically focused films of the 1980s. His films were often brash, angry, violent, and confrontational, and they usually dealt with controversial subject matter. As a result, Stone simultaneously became one of the most admired and the most reviled filmmakers in international cinema. He won two Academy Awards for best director, honoring his work on Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He has continued to direct films that are at times controversial and typically complex.

Bibliography

Beaver, Frank. Oliver Stone: Wakeup Cinema. Twayne, 1994.

Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Oliver Stone. Continuum, 2000.

Lang, Brent. "Oliver Stone on New Cannes Documentary ‘Lula,’ Donald Trump’s Trials and Money in Politics: ‘Corruption Is a Way of Life’." Variety, 18 May 2024, variety.com/2024/film/news/oliver-stone-cannes-documentary-lula-donald-trump-trials-hugo-chavez-1236008565/. Accessed 20 May 2024.

Salewicz, Chris. Oliver Stone. Orion Media, 1997.

Silet, Charles L. P., editor. Oliver Stone: Interviews. UP of Mississippi, 2001.

Stone, Oliver. "Oliver Stone." Interview by Chris Wallace. Interview, 11 Apr. 2016, www.interviewmagazine.com/film/oliver-stone-1/#‗. Accessed 20 May 2024.