Oliver Stone watched and listened in silence as Manoj Kumar spoke at the Mumbai Film Festival 2010 where they received Lifetime Achievement awards for their contributions to cinema. After Manoj Kumar finished, Oliver Stone embraced him spontaneously.
Stone has been feted by other greats: Satyajit Ray named him as one with a crystal-clear vision; Akira Kurosawa called him the most gifted director after Sir David Lean and William Wyler. His latest film, “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps”, had just released in India. A hard-hitting saga about the global economic downturn, the film created waves but not like his earlier classics, “Wall Street”, “Platoon” and “JFK: The Assassination”.
“There is nothing new to say about ‘Money Never Sleeps'. Almost everything is known by now. But, remember, finance is playing in the background; it's really a classic storyline about the age-old qualities of love, trust, greed and betrayal. Those are the predominant themes in the 1987 movie, and they stay in the foreground of this one but the background changes. If you think about the rest of my films, I think there is a similarity: ‘World Trade Center' was set against 2001, and ‘W.' against the Bush administrations.”
Amazing story
Why a sequel projecting the aftermath of the cruel recession? The thinking director answers, “In 2006, we had Stephen Schiff write a good script, but it was celebrating the hedge fund culture. You know there were Russian hedge funders in Monaco or Monte Carlo and a scene with a guy who had a submarine in the harbour of New York. It was James Bond stuff, and it was just rich people. 2008 gave it a definition, a sense of karma, that there had been some reckoning in the system. Allan Loeb had a script; in 2009 I read and liked it. It had a hook, a good idea, but it was basically still on hedge funders. So we changed it to bankers; tried to make it more about the situation with banks. It's an amazing story, when compared to the earlier one, because it really is about the failure of banks in the United States to maintain the system.”
Known for extracting the best from his performers, Oliver Stone relooks the performance of Michael Douglas in “Money Never Sleeps”. “Gekko was never meant to be a hero. Nor is greed good, it's a vice. But it is part of human nature. I think people exaggerate when they say they want to emulate Gekko. I think it was more of an attraction to the market rather than Gekko. But there is a certain irony to it; Gekko, who was shallow and superficial but a charming anti-hero, became a hero. It shows you that our secular values have been distorted over time.”
Ask him about working with leading actors like Willem Dafoe, Kevin Costner, Michael Douglas, Angelina Jolie and he smiles. “I want to do the best possible work with that actor because it's clear that time is short for everybody. Each chance to work together is a great opportunity. I hope Michael goes on to make other films. I think he's a great actor.”
His “Platoon” is considered one of the best films on the Vietnam War after Francis Ford Coppola's “Apocalypse Now”. He becomes very nostalgic as he says, “Trying to understand world events like Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, Central America, economics, football, and 9/11 gives me the sense of working in an urgent currency that stimulates me. On the other hand, I think of myself as a dramatist. The action in the foreground and the story of people's lives dominate. I cannot make a movie about background events as that would be a documentary. The foreground is crucial.” However, he is silent about whether the Vietnam War was a correct step and about how Hollywood treated filmmakers with Leftist sympathies.
Future plans
What's next, you wonder? Stone answers, “My next project is a 12-part, 12-hour documentary called ‘ Untold History of the United States', which will be out on television abroad and here on Showtime this year. It represents almost three years of work. It's one way of telling history that our children do not know. I find that our history puts American interests first; a sort of isolationist's history. I think it's important our children have a more global view of the United States and its position on the world.”
