Stoned Again

"We pride ourselves on our freedom, and yet we're the most conformist country in the world, and the most scared, and the most 'We're Number One' obsessed. What man would look at his dick all the time to check how big he is? It's like a lack of security, if anything."

Yes, Oliver Stone is back. Seated on the edge of an incongruously pink and flowery sofa in his hotel in London (where he has been holed up for weeks putting the finishing touches on his new movie, Alexander), Stone is bracing for a return to public life after a four-year period of semi-self-imposed exile. At fifty-eight, he clearly has done a lot of living -- and it's all there in his puffy features, which switch from gloomy, conspiracy-tinged rumination to goofy gap-tooth grin with a speed that can be startling.

Stone has long had a talent for shocking audiences and critics. With Alexander, he's likely to do so again. Outwardly a Gladiator-style sword-and-sandal biopic, the movie still has its subversive side -- principally because the film's central love story is a homosexual one, between Alexander the Great, played by Colin Farrell, and fellow soldier Hephaistion, played by Jared Leto.

Nor has Stone lost any of his appetite for incendiary, outspoken opinionating. Indeed, as our conversation, which began in the days leading up to the presidential election, shows, Stone has become only more of what he always was: a man unafraid to speak his mind. We started with Alexander, before moving on to that other empire-builder, Stone's former Yale classmate and newly re-elected president, George W. Bush.

It's amazing that the love scenes in Alexander are between two men.

Yes. But we gotta deal with it. You can't walk away from the fact that pre-Christian worship of multiple gods did not involve the judgments that the Christian and Jewish philosophies brought. The movie doesn't come down for it. It comes down for the idea that this is the man that Alexander loved, and he was desperate for love and trust. He never had it. And he searched all his life, through men and women.

Yet you don't show any sexual contact between Alexander and Hephaistion. Why not? Were you tempted?

Not really. Because you only need five words. Alexander says, "Stay with me tonight, Hephaistion." And you get it. If you don't get it, fuck you, it's your problem. We may have had a few takes of them kissing, but it wasn't my intention. The movie is beyond homosexuality. It's about everything: mothers, fathers, lovers, children, your relationship to the gods, your relationship to your ego, to power, your generosity -- it's just about being alive.

Olympias, Alexander's mother, played by Angelina Jolie, is a pretty tough lady and a major prod to her son. Makes me curious about your mom. What was she like?

I couldn't have done anything without my mom. Her energy is phenomenal -- strong, optimistic. She gave me the perhaps distinctive energies I have.

Is she still alive?

Oh, yeah. She's a Bush supporter.

You're kidding. That's a mind-fuck.

Yeah, she's fallen for the whole security-state thing. She reads the New York Post, which is always tearing her son apart.

You're a child of the experimental Sixties. Have you ever had a gay experience yourself?

Oh, I can't say. Because ROLLING STONE is read too much, then it gets around to Page Six. You know how it goes -- it's a sleaze culture we live in.

As a filmmaker, you've always been a guy who hasn't been afraid to take the leap. Is it harder to make movies with a strong, individual vision these days?

Yes, because they -- the studios -- are making too many movies. It's lucky if a vision or two gets through that system. When you develop the scripts, they cut 'em down, cut off the extremities.

To make them less expensive?

No, to make them less controversial. They like the "wild" idea, but all behavior inside that idea has to conform to political correctness. A man can't do this. A woman can't do that. A child is supposed to be treated this way. And when you do show these "wild" things, you have to send clear signals that this is "not right." So I find American movies suffocating, and I think a lot of people do. It's like Soviet realism.

So the conservatism of the political atmosphere has pervaded Hollywood?

There's a tremendous kind of consensus in America -- it's gotten worse. Conformity was always a problem in school for me in the Fifties. You got this rigidity, this repression, and it's playing out now. I think my generation is very disappointed. What happened to those wonderful guys who were saying things in the Sixties and Seventies? They got subsumed, and I have to feel that the media is complicit. Like a development committee at a studio cuts off the extremes of a script to bring it to the middle, the media does the same thing. It just doesn't allow Howard Dean to be Howard Dean. One ridiculous shout! They clip the edges off.

Do you feel that has been done to you? After years of being in the headlines, you've been almost invisible for the last four or five years.

I'm one of many people in our culture who have been cut out. After September 11th, I talked to Norman Mailer on the phone. He said, "We're all going to be gone in a few years. They're getting rid of us."

How did this happen?

America had great energy in the Seventies. But now the corporations have pretty much bought everything, so even though there's a record number of entrepreneurs, the beauty and vitality have gone out of things. It's hard to get enthusiastic. Go to a magazine store: You see 400 magazines. They specialize, specialize, specialize. Everything has been broken down to its microself. Inertia results. It becomes too small, too specialized. It's happened to movies. There's no responsibility, no friendship. We all work for giant corporations. Your friends are only your friends in fair weather because they might be axed tomorrow if your film doesn't make money. It's a fear-ridden society, and anyone who says and does anything is in jeopardy.

In 1991, as the Persian Gulf War was beginning, you said that war changes the consciousness of the country. How is the current Iraq War changing the country?

It's corrupting it in every single way. The only positive thing that comes out of it is some research in medicine and defense-related stuff. The fact that we still have the biggest dick because we fought the battles -- a lot of people live off that. But that's only power. What are we number one in besides that? Certainly not in manufacturing, education, quality of life, health care or the environment. Eventually, this war is going to break the bank. We got Saudi Arabia and Japan to pay for our last one [the Gulf War]. What are you going to do? They're going to tax people like me out of the fucking book.

Why don't you make a movie about it?

The remake of The Manchurian Candidate should have gone all the way. I wanted to do it, but they wouldn't let me. In my version, it would have been Barbara Bush as the Angela Lansbury mother figure -- the mother bitch, mother hen. It's a great story, because George W. Bush is the Manchurian Candidate.

It's dangerous these days to speak out as you are. Don't you fear being labeled an America hater?

I feel it's a beautiful country, but the people are living on borrowed time. It's not just Iraq, it's the whole Bush adventure. It's a radical revolution in American thought and ideas -- the notion that we are an empire, and that by setting the rules, we set reality. That is, to me, a complete perversion of natural law. On every level. The treaties, the courts, commerce, morale, war -- the whole kit and caboodle. The world has strongly expressed its disapproval, but America doesn't listen or even hear it because it's cut off by the media satellite curtain that they put up. I've been away from America for two of the last three years, filming Alexander in Morocco and Thailand and doing postproduction in France and England, so my Iraq War was over here, and in those countries you saw endless footage, and I was horrified. From the get-go it was a disaster; it was never reported correctly in America. The lies got bigger and bigger, and as you know, the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. Goebbels said that.

[After the election, I spoke to Stone again, this time on the phone from Los Angeles. He blindsided me with his calm, resigned reaction to Bush's win. Partly, you sense that Stone likes to be a contrarian; but as a competitive man himself, he also clearly has respect for anyone who could prevail in the bloody life-or-death battle that is modern presidential politics.]

So how did you feel when you saw Bush win?

A couple of my friends really got bummed out. I didn't. I kind of expected it. I just didn't feel that Kerry would win. There's something too elegant about him, too refined. You have to think back to Mr. Kennedy and how he almost lost too. And the thing about Bush -- and we have to give him credit -- he's a fighter. He has proved he had more guts than we thought. I mean, he went through a tremendous bashing. To be in his shoes, I would've destroyed myself with doubt. Most of us wouldn't be able to function. He was able to put it aside and keep going. He's a strong mother. So I'm not going to belittle Bush. There might be something there that I didn't see.

I can't believe I'm hearing this from you.

My hope is that we all move on. The door is closed. There are going to be conservative judges, conservative legislators, more prisons and a bigger military-security state. Those are givens. My deeper fears are that the country will go bankrupt in some way. Well, it already has. But I'm afraid we'll be called on it, like a Third World republic. Like what we did to Argentina. If Bush keeps on scaring the world, there's a possibility that the blocs would align against him: Europe and Asia and China. It could become an economic war where the dollar becomes some kind of a banana-republic currency. That means everybody's life would be affected. All our holdings. Our American worship of private property would be in jeopardy. There would be a strong undermining of it from the most pro-private-property men of them all!

That would be ironic.

But if Bush goes domestic in his second term and adopts Social Security and tax reform as his major issues, I think that will lessen the tension abroad.

What about the role of religion in this election? Is the religious right directing this country now?

The religious right was the base of the party back in 2000, too. And they've never given up on the justices and putting them in. They will get them in. We have to accept that. Listen, it's not the worst of all worlds to reverse Roe vs. Wade, but people have things out of proportion, because people will get fucking abortions if they have to, somehow. That's age-old.

You've just endeared yourself to the feminists yet again.

I'd hate to see it overturned, and women should have that right, but they're going to overturn Roe vs. Wade. End of story. Live with it. Move on. Abortion is not the be-all, end-all of the world right now.

Yet you're not ready to give up on the country and go live in Paris?

Not at all, no. I do believe in the international world, I believe in planetary consciousness and all those corny Sixties things. I do believe that we are all one. OK? John Lennon was right, and we have to maintain that message. But we have to deal with the short term, too. I'm pulling for Bush. I want to believe in his good side, like I did in Reagan. With Reagan, I kept saying, "Believe in him, believe in him," although I kept having nightmares about Nicaragua and what he was doing abroad.

So your reaction to this election is to be a realist and not lament what we can't change?

Yes. Exactly. I don't want to live the next four years in bullshit regret. I'm a doer.