Matt Zoller Seitz - The Oliver Stone Experience (Text-Only Edition)

by RAMIN BAHRANI

by KIESE LAYMON

by MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

EXCERPTA Childs Night Dream by OLIVER STONE

Sugar Cookies

Seizure

Midnight Express

Conan the Barbarian

The Hand

Scarface

Eight Million Ways to Die

Year of the Dragon

Salvador

Platoon

ESSAY Sense Memory: Platoon Through a Veterans Eyesby JIM BEAVER

Wall Street

Talk Radio

Born on the Fourth of July

The Doors

EXCERPTBorn on the Fourth of July by RON KOVIC

ESSAY A Matter of Characterby KIM MORGAN

JFK

Heaven and Earth

Natural Born Killers

ESSAY The World Belongs to Savages: The Oliver Stone Crime Filmby MICHAEL GUARNIERI

Nixon

U-Turn

Any Given Sunday

ESSAY Surrender to the Primordial: Oliver Stone, Poet of the Idby WALTER CHAW

Alexander

World Trade Center

W.

ESSAY To Hell and Back: The Spiritual Cinema of Oliver Stoneby ALISSA WILKINSON

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Savages

Untold History of the United States

Snowden

Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers, The Untold History of the United States. These works, by Oliver Stone, are giant films, iconic films of exceptional artistry and social, political, and metaphysical power. If an alien being came to earth and felt confused as to where it was, these films would stand like monoliths, like massive pools of human reflection, the way we consider great works of literature and dramalike Lord Jim or Death of a Salesman.

Very few filmmakers anywhere in the world can claim theyve made films that captured the mood and ideology of an entire decade of their society. If I step outside my apartment, stop any random strangers, and say, Greed is good, theres a good chance they will know exactly what I am talking about.

Many know Oliver Stone as a political and social filmmaker whose work has often created polarizing controversy. As a filmmaker myself, I know Stone as one of the most important filmmakers of the last forty years in American cinema or globally, for that matter. His blistering writing, frenetic staging, bold and muscular use of camera, multi-format shooting techniques, and astonishingly innovative editing have pushed the boundaries of how films and television are made. His films have inspired a generation of filmmakers, and I am one of them.

The first Oliver Stone film I saw was JFK. I was a teenager, maybe sixteen, and wasnt fully invested in cinema yet. I went because, like so many, I sensed that this was an important film.

Not only was I riveted for three hours, but I left the cinema with a feeling that I was walking through shadows, and at any moment could be pulled into them by forces too powerful for me to fend off. The film was a fever dream of bewildering energy and masterful craftsmanship. Stone knocked us into a nightmare that was cleverly presented as a detective story.

The structure is so simple and single-minded, yet so elaborate and complex. Jim Garrisons goal is to prove there was more than one shooter and to ask who else was behind the assassination. For three straight hours, the film piles on facts, details, questionsin 35 mm, 16 mm, Super 8 mm, color, and black and white. That a film of such scope and complexity could move so relentlessly toward one simple goal is mind-boggling.

Technically the film is a marvel. The editing of JFK is wholly original and revolutionary for mainstream narrative film-making. Stone sometimes cuts to a shot for three seconds or even just three frames (images we may have never seen or need to see again!) to build the framework of both the film and Garrisons case. I will always contend that the greatest modern American directors who are also master editors are Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone.

After seeing JFK, I quickly dived into Stones films, starting with Platoon (how did he make Salvador that same year?!), a film so authentic that it was obviously made by a man who had fought in the war. What struck me most about Platoon was the mood in the soldiers campthe authenticity of the music, the sets, the language, the issues of raceand the total chaos of the men in the jungles. The battle was happening everywhere and at all times. There was no clear sense of where the enemy was or who was shooting at whom. Sometimes it was too dark or too blindingly bright for the men to understand what was happening. The soldiers staggered about like zombies, burned out by lack of sleep, zapped of all energy and patience by the bugs; the slightest itch could make them pull the trigger and kill anything or anyone for any or no reason whatsoever. This was not my generations war, but Stones film made it alive and visceral in ways that haunted me.

This aggressive, chaotic sense that anything could happen and the entire world was out of control remains a central quality in many of Stones greatest films, and Born on the Fourth of July is no exception. The films hero, Ron Kovic, arrives on the dusty beaches of Vietnam and is immediately blinded by the sun and sweat in his eyes. The 360 degrees of chaos is made palpable by Stones fast-moving camera with CinemaScope lensing. I had never seen the camera move on that lens with that speed in any film prior to this. The impact was intense and unforgettable.

The sequences of Kovic in the hospital are worse than any of Kafkas dreams, and all the more terrifying as we know they are based on reality. The film is epic in scope, deeply personal, political, and metaphysical. The camera movements, editing, use of sound and music, and deep attention to production design, color, and transitions over decades are the work of a masterits surreal that Stone made this epic tour de force and Talk Radio just a year apart, as if he had some mysterious twin who has been directing every other film for him!

Stone returned to Vietnam to make his moving and philosophical Heaven & Earth. Then, he pushed the techniques he had been developing to radical extremes and new heights in Natural Born Killers, a film that left an indelible mark on American cinema and is often cited among the top ten most controversial films of all time. Although Stone was in his late forties by the time he made it, the modernity of