Director Oliver Stone was
in the same freshman class at Yale as George W. Bush, the subject of Stone's scathing
new biopic W.,
but it's an understatement to say they took divergent paths. While Bush
enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard, Stone dropped out of school twice,
then volunteered for Army combat duty in the Vietnam War, which he left with a
Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Stone's Vietnam experience set the course for
his filmmaking career, which has always been intensely political and
provocative in its big-picture engagement with American life.
After breaking through
with his Oscar-winning screenplay for Midnight Express, Stone made the horror
movies Seizure
and The Hand,
but the more he engaged in the key events of America's past and present, the
more respect he received. In 1986, the considerable achievement of Stone's Salvador, a gritty look at Central
American dictatorship, was overshadowed by his deeply personal Platoon, the first in a loose
Vietnam trilogy that includes 1989's Born On The Fourth Of July and 1993's Heaven &
Earth. In
addition to his war films, Stone has done biopics on Jim Morrison, Richard
Nixon, and Alexander The Great, and offered his perspective on conspiracy
theories (JFK),
economic chicanery (Wall Street), media-fueled violence (Natural Born Killers), and national tragedy (World
Trade Center).
Rushed to release just
before the 2008 presidential election, Stone's latest film, W., follows George W. Bush's
tragicomic journey from the frat-house to the White House, ending just before
his 2004 reelection. Josh Brolin plays Bush with uncanny zeal, and he's joined
by a star-studded ensemble, including James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush, Elizabeth
Banks as Laura Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Thandie Newton as
Condoleezza Rice, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, Scott Glenn as Donald
Rumsfeld, and Toby Jones as Karl Rove. Two days before its première, Stone
talked to The A.V. Club about Bush's legacy, the challenge of dramatizing an
administration not known for its transparency, and W.'s daddy issues.
The A.V. Club: Your film Nixon was made 20 years after
Richard Nixon left office, and this film is about a sitting president. Are you
sacrificing perspective for immediacy here?
Oliver Stone: I would argue that it's an urgent
situation. The Bush Doctrine, although Sarah Palin may not know what it is, is
currently in place, and it's a very dangerous policy. We're in three wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and what [Bush] calls "The War On Terror," which is in
whatever country he wants it to be in. He defined himself as a war president
after 9/11. He found his character, his definition. So it's very serious for
America. It's a time for filmmakers to step forward, if they have something to
say. And I would have had nothing to say other than my opinion if it hadn't
been for the researchers, the investigative reporters who broke the ice. That's
kind of, for me, the price of loyalty, when [former Treasure Secretary] Paul
O'Neill broke the ranks, and [former specialist on terrorism] Richard Clarke
wrote a book. [Bob] Woodward did four books; the third one was, for us, the
most telling one, State Of Denial. Ron Suskind did the other one, The One
Percent Doctrine,
and he just wrote The Way Of The World. Jane Mayer did The Dark Side, Michael Gordon wrote Cobra
II, David
Corn and Michael Isikoff wrote Hubris, Frank Rich did a media book. This is all great. You
know, there's not that many, really. There's only 10 or so books like that.
None of them are the definitive word, but they at least get into the process of
sorting through all the bullshit that was going on. So this is not the
definitive movie. This is the beginning. There could be other Bush movies by
other people, and they may be very good, but this at least starts the process
of that whole march to Iraq, up to early 2004.
AVC: Have you thought about what your film will
look like in 20 years? Will the Bush legacy have changed in a way that might
have—
OS: No, I think he's left his place. He left our
nation disgraced, in tatters, bankrupt. I don't know that we can maintain this
military domination of the world at the $800 billion and higher budgets given
to the Pentagon per year. There's no way. This is an insane time we're living
in, and our actions are insane—breaking treaties, criminal court, getting
out of the Kyoto protocol. This guy was on a tear from the beginning. Some
people would argue it was Cheney more than Bush, but you're asking about
perspective. And I would say to you, we have three acts in the movie. It was
not done as a Bush presidency only. It's not an eight-year movie. It's a movie
about a kid in his 20s, a man in his 30s and 40s, and the final act is the
first three years of the presidency. So it's a different structure. We have a
lot of information about his past from Bill Minutaglio, who wrote First Son, and James Hatfield, who
wrote Fortunate Son. The governorship is known about, so we have perspective
there from time on his early Texas years. The only thing that was missing from
the puzzle was 2001-2004, and that came, as I said, from those books. We
started writing the movie in early 2007, and we made it very fast, as you know,
when my other movie [Pinkville] fell apart. It was about the My Lai massacre, a
second look at it. But that didn't get financed at the last second. It fell
apart. And I jumped into this because we had been working on it very quietly on
the side.
AVC: So it's safe to say there was a rush to
get this film put together before the election?
OS: I think there's an immediacy to the situation. I
think the movie leaves you with the idea of "How did this guy get elected?" We
think we know Bush, everybody's got an opinion, but we don't really know him.
We don't know how he got to be president. The average person of the press knows
more about him, but the average person doesn't. And we're getting that
information out there to a fairly large public. And they're gonna wonder, "Who
is this guy I voted for? I didn't know how he got elected." I think you feel
empathy for him at times, and there's nothing wrong with that, because I think
we make you walk in his footsteps, and I think we represent the way he thinks
and feels. I think we're accurate with what we've read. I also think we give
you an impression of how Cheney thinks, and Rumsfeld, and Powell, and how this
war happened, and what the concept of the Bush Doctrine is. I think it makes
you think about where this country is now, and where it's going to go. I really
do.
Let me also just clarify one thing that may be
misunderstood. I have a final cut, but the film was made under different
conditions with foreign investors, for the most part. And the contract is very
clear. I would make an effort to finish in October as fast as I could, but I
had a right to continue the process through January. I could see the movie
coming out when he was leaving office. People would say, "He's gonna be gone,
and it doesn't matter," but I totally disagree. I think his policies are in
place, I think his legacy will overshadow McCain or Obama. They're going to be
existing in his shadow for a long time to come. He is not going off the scene.
This is a character for all time. You couldn't make fiction like this. This
guy's a major war president. People don't recognize it, but he sees himself as
Lincoln, as Truman, as Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill, or as George Washington
even. I think he sees himself in the biggest light as changing the world.
AVC: What might viewers take away that changes their
feelings on perhaps Obama or McCain?
OS: When we started this movie, I think [Rudy] Giuliani
was the [likely Republican] candidate and Hillary Clinton [the likely
Democratic candidate], so that wasn't really our goal. We're not that specific.
We're making a movie that I hope lasts 15, 20, 30 years. This movie can be seen
then as a window into the mindset and policies of the time, and into what
America was thinking. There's a certain John Wayne aspect to George Bush, the
sense that you may loathe his politics, but he has a tremendous screen presence,
and you like him in this kind of awkward, cantankerous way where he sticks to
his guns at any cost. He never
admits he's wrong. That's very Western-hero-style. You know Red River, The Searchers.
AVC: So that cowboy image isn't just an image,
but who he really is?
OS: He bought into it. He really did create that
persona. He does say at one point in the movie, "I'm not gonna be out-Texaned
or out-Christianed again."
AVC: Your version of W. seems easy to
manipulate, yet determined to be "the decider." How do you reconcile those two
sides to his character?
OS: I think that he has limited intellect and limited
interests intellectually. He professed not to have read much until recently,
when he discovered history. He seems to lack empathy with history, with empathy
with those outside of his experience. He seems to personalize everything in a
narrow sense. Stuff like, "I met Putin, I looked in his eyes, and I saw his
soul." That's what his foreign policy comes down to. It's Manichean, it's good
vs. evil, and it's very clear in the movie. In contrast to that, he has a huge
ego. That's more in conflict with evangelical teachings than anything, because
with evangelicism, you give up your ego when you become touched by the Lord.
It's a very important issue. What you take at face value is conversion, but
what he does with it? You can be the judge of that.
As for how he gets manipulated… There's a scene in
the movie where he's talking to Dick Cheney, and Cheney lays out this
geopolitical argument, but Bush stops him short and says, "Big thoughts. Big
thoughts." He doesn't care to get into the complexities of it. Bush is a
salesman. He doesn't like to read very much. He wants to get to the voter, he
wants to sell it. He is very much a salesman.
AVC: He seems like one of those highly suggestible
guys, in the film anyway, where you can convince him to follow your will as
long as you make it seem like it was his idea.
OS: Oh yeah. Several times in the film, yeah, like
the whole uranium-in-Africa business. Jon Stewart had a great clip the other
day, where Bush used the same exact body language and almost the same language
after 9/11 as he just did when talking about our response to the bailout.
Nothing has changed. His knowledge has not deepened, only the lines on his
face. It's an amazing clip. The guy doesn't seem to realize what he's saying;
he seems to be very simple. And I think what aggravates people about him is
that he has no ability to admit any wrongdoing. There's just no inner life, the
unexamined life. There is nothing Socratic about him.
AVC: Woodrow Wilson famously said that D.W.
Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation was like history written with lightning. Do
you feel you have a strong hand in determining the legacy of men like Nixon and
Bush? And is there a responsibility that comes with telling a popular history?
OS: Responsibility, history. I'm a dramatist.
Dramatists have a right to look at history and interpret it the way they see
it. We do the best we can. We read everything we could in the limited amount of
research on this presidency. But we did it, we followed it, and I don't think
we ever crossed the line. Everyone who speaks out in this movie spoke their
documented views. That includes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell. You don't have to
change anything with Bush. He's been crystal-clear cowboy. He said what he
meant.
AVC: The Bush administration has not been known
for its transparency. How did you fill in the gaps of what went on behind
closed doors?
OS: I gave you the list of books already, but we did
have to condense a huge amount of raw material and fill in some gaps. We gave
everyone the benefit of the doubt. I think Cheney, we gave him as clear an
argument as we could, and Rumsfeld, too. Powell makes a very eloquent argument,
but he caved in the end. We showed him at the UN, also caving. Repeating the
bullshit. So I don't know where you can say we crossed the line of what the
truth was. It's a rough role, to be a dramatist. In the new age it's been
doubted, the role of dramatists. You know, Frost/Nixon, it's a wonderful play,
but you can certainly say, "Let's not go there."
AVC: W. emphasizes the
relationship between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Is it fair to contextualize some of
what has happened in the last eight years as simply a son acting out against
his father?
OS: I think it's fair. Acting out or trying to prove
that he was stronger, yes, I think that is true to life. But the Bushes would
deny that vehemently, and [George H.W. Bush] has. "Psychobabble," he called it.
But no, I definitely think that relationship played a huge role. I think the
'92 defeat by Clinton was a huge turning point for both sons. The rivalry that
you have [between Jeb and W.], they will deny that to the death. But it
certainly seems to have been mentioned. It's been documented again, and Barbara
[Bush] has made statements to that effect, that their first son was not ready to
be governor. That whole issue, the father's weakness, it's repeated except for
the mano-a-mano battle they have in the end. The son grew to feel that he was
stronger than his father and could not make the same mistakes because he wanted
a two-term presidency. And by "taking that sucker out," [the "sucker" being Saddam
Hussein—ed.], he felt in his mind he'd built the political capital to
take that second term. In fact, a line he said to Woodward—"I have a
higher father than my father." By which he meant the good Lord. And he also
said the line about Reagan. Reagan was a big influence in Bush's life, Bush's
surrogate father. I think that Reagan's his father and Nixon's his grandfather.
That's the way I see it.