[IMG:L]One may think of Oliver Stone as a tyrannical artist, but in person he’s just a smiling, giddy kid excited about movies.
In a private boardroom on the Warner Brothers studio lot, Stone saw high definition footage of his Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut for the first time. The plasma screen showed a high definition version of Alexander’s first major battle sequence, and Stone widened his eyes to take in all the vibrant colors and detailed pixels.
While the regular Alexander DVD offered the theatrical, a director’s cut, and the “Final” cut, Stone now offers his fourth and final vision in the Blue Ray and HD DVD format.
Hollywood.com: Why has Alexander been the movie with more alternate cuts than any of your previous films?
Oliver Stone: DVD gave me a creative freedom I’ve never had before. This was an unrated, three hour and 45 minute cut, which would have been unacceptable in theatrical exhibition terms. They just don’t do it anymore. I grew up in the 1950s, when we had road shows all the time. In the old days, it was like two hours and then you get out [for intermission] and think about it 15, 20 minutes. You breathe and then you go back in for the resolution in an hour and a half. That was the right length to this movie. It always was. It was in the script. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it quite that way. I was trying to arbitrarily make this movie three hours or less.
[IMG:R]HW: The “Director’s Cut” was actually shorter. Why did you do that if you wanted it longer to begin with?
OS: About two and a half years after the film was released was when I worked on this, during the editing of World Trade Center. I was finally able to come to peace with myself to letting the whole script express itself. It has a different pace, this film. The emotions come out differently and the intermission I think comes at the right spot. When Ptolemy and him are in the mountains and they’re deciding to go into India, Alexander says, “We must make an end. We must find an end.” Then we go to intermission. It just is the right feel. Anyway, that’s been the reaction. I wish it had been a larger screen but the color was stupendous and the sound I think would be great on a large screen.
HW: This really is the final final director’s cut…
OS: Yeah, I can’t do anything more. This is it. I called the second one the Director’s Cut because I thought that would be the end but in fact two and a half years later, I would call this Revisited. What else could we do? But this is it. I promise you I won’t be back. All the footage is here. This is the film I’m happiest with. DVD does give you that. I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens. It’s a shame people have to watch DVDs with the lights on in a television type situation where people are wandering in and out of the room. Movies are different from television. You cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.
HW: Did you approve of your son Sean Stone’s documentary on the making of Alexander?
OS: Sean was courteous enough to show it to me before and I made some suggestions, only for filmmaking reasons. I was embarrassed about some things in it but I said, “F*ck it. I’m going down anyway with this movie. I might as well take the whole thing.”
[IMG:L]HW: When did you know you were going down? How do you keep going once you felt that way?
OS: I don’t know. I felt the same thing on J.F.K., that this is going to be the end of me. I really did, because it was another three hour plus movie. The dialogue was cerebral. There were enormous amounts of difficulty. It was a complex screenplay and a very complex edit. I didn’t think it would make it. I was amazed that it not only did, it resounded. It went around the world. J.F.K. was a huge hit. I guess that emboldened me to keep going but I knew that one day I’d come to this point where you’d make something so outrageous, so ambitious that you couldn’t possibly [survive]. Nixon was a setback for me financially, far worse than Alexander. Alexander did well abroad and will make money for its people, its participants. Warner Brothers is doing well with the DVD. I’m saying Nixon was the biggest setback because we spent $42 million. I think it was and we grossed $13 million. I love that movie. It’s one of the most ambitious movies I’ve also made on the political scene but it just did not take. I guess the character of Nixon was not attractive to American people or foreign people. So that was the worst setback financially. People who write about my setback with Alexander are wrong. My worst period was Nixon, Heaven and Earth and U-Turn. Those were the three least performing films that I’d directed.
HW: You used to be the go to guy for conspiracy theory. What are your thoughts on today’s issues?
OS: Listen, I think it’s almost [that] the obvious has been missed, which is the conspiracy these days has been so overt. You don’t need to hide it. There’s no need for covertness. If the president of the United States has been caught leading us into war under false circumstances and everyone knows about it, that is a conspiracy. And no one seems to have impeached him for it.
HW: With your interest in long form stories, have you ever considered television, maybe a miniseries for HBO?
OS: I produced films for television including Wild Palms back in ’97 on ABC, which was pretty advanced for its age. I would work in television if I had no choice. It’s not a hot medium. It’s a cool medium. People walking out of the room, the lights are on, your wife is talking or your husband is talking during it, or your kid. It’s just mind boggling. It’s a medium in which you can miss something and come back to. A film, ideally, is not. I make my films like you’re going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.
[IMG:R]HW: You don’t see shows like Lost and Heroes forcing people to take more of a film attitude?
OS: Well, they have. Television has usurped everybody from film. So have commercials, by the way. In a sense, we’ve democratized the image. We’ve taken the techniques. If you look at the techniques, for example, of Natural Born Killers or J.F.K., they’re all over commercials now, all over TV, all over the place. I’ve seen it so constantly that I feel like it’s a degeneration. There’s no point or purpose for it. To the contrary, stylistically, I would go the other way like a World Trade Center where you really concentrate on the acting and the lighting, the story. This is what we are. We’re storytellers. There is reason for stylization but let’s do it better than television. For some reason television bores me, even the best shows. I’m not a Sopranos fan.
