Oliver Stone has accompanied US politics for decades. Strong in opinion and controversial, he also attracts criticism. And he already knows how he would portray Donald Trump.
New York – Oliver Stone likes the role as an uncomfortable oddball, as a brilliant and Oscar-winning filmmaker who goes hard on his home country, the USA.
For some, he went too far when he last showed understanding for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and at the same time described the United States as an unfree country. One thing is clear: Stone won’t quit. This Wednesday (September 15th) he will be 75 years old.
“America has not been the same since Kennedy, because under the surface the secret services and the military have taken over the US government on major issues such as national security and strategy,” Stone recently said in an interview with the US industry magazine “Deadline”. It has been a long time since a president had the opportunity to make significant political changes. Although he voted for the Democrat Joe Biden in the US elections, he does not expect any change in his home country.
A home that Stone has always looked at. For example, in “Platoon” (1986) he denounced the brutal actions of the GIs in the Vietnam War, in “Natural Born Killers” (1994) he addressed the attitude of his compatriots towards violence, and in “Wall Street” (1987) he took it targeting the machinations of the financial world. He moved the work on his film “Snowden” (2016) about the US whistleblower to Germany – also because of concerns about possible acts of revenge by the US secret service NSA.
The son of a Jewish stockbroker, Stone was born into good circumstances in New York in 1946. Together with the later US President George W. Bush, he studied at the elite university Yale, which he left after a year to teach English and history at a school in Vietnam. After a subsequent voluntary military service, Stone learned – back in New York – the film trade with star director Martin Scorsese and also worked as a taxi driver.
The young filmmaker brought the atrocities of war experienced in Vietnam to the screen in “Platoon”. He later took on the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of then US President John F. Kennedy in “JFK – Tatort Dallas” and portrayed Richard Nixon and his involvement in the Watergate scandal in “Nixon”. Stone found many loyal fans with his films, but also met with a lot of criticism.
In addition, he always stood out with a rather friendly attitude towards Russia. Most recently, the British Guardian wrote that Stone made himself a favorite of Vladimir Putin, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and others in interviews with his “non-confrontational approach to questioning autocrats”. And the US magazine “Newsweek” called Stone in 2017 a “professional conspiracy theorist”.
In the “Deadline” interview he described the Oscar-winning documentary about the Syrian rescue workers of the White Helmets as a “pile of crap”, as it portrayed the organization “exposed” by journalists in a positive light. The White Helmets are a volunteer group of civilian guards who are on duty in Syria’s rebel areas. In 2016 the organization was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize. They are portrayed by Russia and the Syrian government as terrorists.
In his home country, the director campaigned for the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – Donald Trump was a thorn in his side. Does he already have an idea how he would portray the ex-US president on the screen? “I would do it as a comedy or satire,” like in his film “W.” about George W. Bush. However, people are also biased when they describe Trump as the worst president in US history. “The worst president was Bush, as far as his damage to the world is concerned, no question about it.” Dpa
