Of all the films, it’s his most autobiographical, he says. That’s a strange statement given that its subject concerns the greatest emperor who ever lived, but then he is also the vulnerable son of all-powerful parents. He first dreamed of making it as a film student, he says, and it was during that midlife period of reflection that he came back to it again.
“I remember feeling like I had lost my way. The book was important and so was Alexander. I do think that what you are when you’re young ... that you must stay faithful to something in there.”
This is one of his core beliefs. His teenage years are still the crucible of Oliver Stoneness on which he draws. They were so extreme, in almost every way. From the emotional barrenness of boarding school (“For years, I thought it was a disaster; it had taken the love out of my life; there was no sense of humanity”), those odd experiences with his parents and sexuality, through the privilege of Yale and finally, apocalyptically, Vietnam. You really don’t need to be a Freudian to read something into this. Elizabeth Stone has put it more bluntly: “That little boy didn’t stand any chance of a normal sort of life.”
He’s gone through various stages of taking drugs, mostly psychedelic ones. “Heavy trips,” he calls them — in Stone there’s a small part of the 1960s that never died. He tells me about being “frightened to death” on one of them. So why did he do it? “Because of the adventure.”
Ah yes. The adventure. That other Stone hallmark. His cousin James says that Stone went to war because “anything he could do to be at the edge, and to experience more than other people had experienced, and to shock, he was likely to do.”
Even now, there seems to be no letting up. There still seems to be this lust for experience, as evidenced by South of the Border. At an age where most men might start thinking about golf, Stone is chasing socialists across South America.
He’s as committed as he ever has been, if not more so. Politically, workaholically. There’s still a relentless drive to work, work, work. It’s coming up to 9pm by the time I leave his office and nobody seems to be making a move to go home. His film editor has been waiting patiently for him in the room next door, ready to attack yet another section of Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America. There’s another documentary on Castro to come — the third part of his trilogy. There are the final edits on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. And then there’s South of the Border to launch in London. And defend from attacks all over again.
I fear for Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America. If his ambition occasionally exceeds his talent, it’s not because his talent is small, but that his ambition is so very, very large. The Alexander comparison is really not as far-fetched as it might seem: he really is trying to remold the world according to his vision. Watch out, world.
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