Oliver stone quotes

I'm interested, I suppose, in tortured power.

The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

I feel like I am what I am.

I love films. I love fiction films, too. I do. I love making them, but it has to be the right one. Hopefully, I'll never become a director for hire. It's horrible to make a film that you're not really interested in.

There are a few versions of the Alexander movie on video, only two that matter. One is from 2007, and then the one from 2014. It's called "the Ultimate Cut." That is the best version in my opinion. I was unsatisfied with the original theatrical release. It was rushed. It was my fault. I accepted it. I always felt it should have been done the way Tarantino did Kill Bill. I thought, we should release this in two parts with an intermission. But at that time, in 2004, it was impossible.

You always try to find the right style for the movie. That's the key.

[When making movies I] set out to be authentic to [myself] and to put it down the way [I] feel it and know it and interpret it. And then others sometimes key into it and get it.

All the Greek mythic heroes had gone east, but they were myths. Achilles was a myth. Perseus, Theseus, Hercules... they probably existed in some form. But they all went east. That's where a Greek went to make his bones so to speak. And Alexander the Great was the first man who actually went east not to plunder, not to loot and come back to Greece - which is where the Macedonians wanted to go back with the money. He stayed. And he became half-Eastern.

If you make the movie from your heart and it stands over time, that's what matters to me.

Venezuela is a democratically elected government. These people who keep protesting are sore losers.

The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.

It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.

I think John F. Kennedy was the last great hope. And that's why I dwell on that subject. He was someone who could stand up to the militarist element in our society.

I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone.

I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.

I think our life is a series of adventures.

Get the overall. Some of my films may have been crude at times, or tough, or missed the points, but I've tried to get the overall in. I think that's more important. You may miss a thing or two, but you move faster. If you can do it in three takes, do it in three takes.

I'd like to be honest to my time, and I lived from 1946, and I want to understand why our country, which I love so much, and was a great country when I was young, it seemed, became this monster vampire on the face of humanity- a vampire squid, to quote Matt Taibbi, sucking out the juices of all mankind. Why? It's a basic question.

I believe in intermissions. I lived through this experience with JFK and Nixon. JFK should have had an intermission. It should have come right after the Donald Sutherland scene, because then there's just too much information flooding in. You need a break. Same on Nixon. It was a long film, but I couldn't help it, with that kind of subject.

I'm trying to understand my life. The one that I've experienced.

Сyber-warfare is obviously the future. It's a real concern, but we lie so much about what we do that it's hard to know what's going on unless you really follow it.

Every day that you get up, it's some kind of victory if you're making a good product, or working on a project that can only help mankind.

Each year, the The U.S. Army & its contractors SHOOT, STAB, MUTILATE, & KILL more than TEN THOUSAND live animals in cruel training exercises.

I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that... it'd be that Don Quixote feeling, that I'd have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you've got to do it. That's the only way you can do things.

The first casualty of war is innocence.

Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.

Gore Vidal said "Nixon is us, we are Nixon." I think we have to acknowledge that combination of idealism and sleaze; we want to be better than we are, and we sometimes don't face up to the real questions.

Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States' Big Brother attitude toward the world. We need countries to say no to the United States. The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities, cyber abilities. And the world is in danger with our tyranny.

A lot of the good cameraman who we used are doing television work; they're doing commercials for a lot of money. And the commercials look incredible. But what's it about? I made three major commercial campaigns. I enjoyed it, I experimented with it, and at the end of the day I felt no satisfaction. It was like having a fast food lunch.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

I see films in theaters, and I enjoy films. I enjoy the art of storytelling, and the different ways to tell them.

I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.

I can't tell you how many times at the breakfast table my dad would curse out Franklin Roosevelt. I love my father. He was an intelligent man, but he really didn't like regulations of the Roosevelt style, or the taxes. He was an Dwight Eisenhower man. And that's what Eisenhower did, committed to breaking down the program.

The only home I had was with Warner Bros. during the '90s. I made four movies with them then. Natural Born Killers, JFK, Heaven and Earth. Any Given Sunday was the last. And that was the end of the Terry Semel/Bob Daly regime.

I'm a dramatist. Dramatists have a right to look at history and interpret it the way they see it.

There's an electrical thing about movies.

We are seeing entertainment become politics and we're seeing people acting out in ways that are extremely violent and destabilizing. No rules apply. We're in an era of no rules now, it seems.

I'm not an activist. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a dramatist. My strength is to tell a story, to find a way to tell a story that makes it exciting. Our Untold History was a huge challenge. Snowden was no piece of cake, because writing code and breaking code is some of the most boring stuff you've ever seen.

My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.

I'm a history person; I love history. But I am conditioned by the present.

One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.

Conspiracy nut, leftist, madman. These are terms of dismissal so you don't have to listen to the argument. It would be healthier and more fun to hear what someone has to say.

With television, the image has been degenerated, no question. With the internet, commercials... people are much too cynical about image. It's stale. And all over the world, not just America.

The beauty of history is that historians have the ability to find patterns, the big picture. When you make a movie, you try to find that. I'm doing in the cinema what historians try to do in their own media.

I don't want to make a half-assed film. It's not my area of expertise.

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

People are still living in the moment, and they feel the passion of now.

I was trying to find out what happened in my lifetime, because I was an older man. We lived through two terms of George Bush, and I was wondering, "Is he an exception to the rule, or he is a continuation? What is driving all these wars? What is driving this attitude of aggressiveness and militarism?" I got my answer - and it was a shocking answer. I found is this whole strain of history, this whole school has been denied by the media. It is a bizarre blindness, because we are such an intelligent country. It's bizarre that we can't get our own history straight.

We could learn a lot from the ancients, and we should go back there.

I think you can maintain two tracks. I think you have to. That's what this kind of filmmaking is about. If you're not aware of the limitations of what you're up against... it's like a general: you have to know your artillery and you have to know your infantry. You have to know what you have. You have to marshal your forces and use them well. It comes down to the personal and the intimate, but at the same time you have to have the big picture.

Horses are very difficult to shoot.

In digital, you can maintain the quality.

Unfortunately, the truth is that people do go scot-free and it's unfair. A lot of the top drug people who have been arrested are also free.

My protest against digital has been me saying, "What's going to happen to film?" The result is that Kodak is out of business. That's a national tragedy. We've got to keep making film.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.

I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.

Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them - maybe that's what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.

Nixon identified himself as a crisis-laden man. He'd reach levels of victory and then he'd plunge into defeat. He was vice president, then he lost to Kennedy, then he lost the California governorship. Then came a great comeback and then he blew it again - and the next comeback, after he lost the presidency. He was a man who needed the feeling of walking the precipice.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

I've changed my style constantly, so I'm not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter. But you learn as you go, I suppose.

Just because we live in a Christian era doesn't mean we're all Christian, necessarily.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.

What scares me most about the media is that so many of them don't realize that by presenting and highlighting certain issues, opinions, and perspectives over others, they can manipulate and control people's beliefs in subtle ways.

I've seen my kids' work at school, and I think they're better than when I was young, 'cause I was brainwashed into anti-Communism. This is a much more interesting view of history than I've ever seen, and I hope to God it works. It's classic history, classically told. No talking heads. Just pure archival footage and a storyline.

What I've experienced, I'm trying to put in a narrative form, I suppose, to say that it does make sense in this way.

I went to Vietnam, and I was there for a long time. [Using marijuana] made the difference between staying human or, as Michael Douglas said, becoming a beast.

Each actor requires a different language.

You've also heard stories about how the military-industrial complex really does prefer Hilary Clinton because they know that she's not nuts like some of the Republicans. She will do what they bid. And what they want is basically to stay healthy.

What needs to happen is more of a global understanding, and I believe the United States can work as a global partner and not be the hegemon.

I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.

I'm more comfortable with simplicity as I get older.

There is this thing about time that you can't see at the time you're at.

Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.

My home in Hollywood is not a home. I do a film here, a film there, as they want it. I don't have a relationship. Like, Warner Bros. has a great relationship with Clint Eastwood and takes care of him.

Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, and why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. Valour pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, the HELL with you!

I think everyone has the same question on their mind: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

When I'm working with another writer, I tend to make a lot of effort. When I collaborate with a writer, I'm not interested in credit, but I'm feeding him stuff all the time that I feel is important to shaping the script.

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

A life like Nixon's is filled with shame and filled with glory. He loved to quote Teddy Roosevelt: "He was a man; sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but he was a man." I love that line.

JFK was leading the world, leading the United States into a new position with the Soviet Union. He was calling for the end of the Cold War. He would have been reelected in 1964 because he was vastly popular.

Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams.

I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens... it's a shame that 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, and you cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.

America is the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. And they have equal nuclear ability as we do, because they're precise.

Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else.

I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.

My ego is nothing - look what Alexander the Great achieved. And I felt he was a figure outside time, a figure we don't even understand, because he's frankly pre-Christian, and his concepts of honor go back to Homer.

Bernie Sanders is a disappointment on foreign policy, totally doesn't think about it. But he has the possibility to be more isolationist, which would be good for us actually. We manage to kill several million people on this planet without taking any credit for it or blame. It's a heavy karma we have.

I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.

When I go to the movies, and I have to sit through ten previews of films that look [alike] and tell the whole story, you know that we've reached an age of consensus. And consensus is the worst thing for us. We all agree to agree. That's where we lose it as a culture. We have to move away from that.

In any film there's always a historical implication.

I definitely love history. I'm not formally trained or educated in history, but you could say I did go back to college in 2008 to do Untold History of the United States. That took five years. Co-author Peter Kuznick has been teaching history for something like 35 years, at American University and other places. His group of researchers brought me into contact with a lot of books.

Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.

We have enormous challenges in front of us.

I look at Homer and The Odyssey and all the disparate adventures this guy goes through, and then he returns home and the question is, is he the same man who left?

I guess you could say Alexander the Great was a man who completely transported me and moved me and inspired me because of his idealism, and I'd go back to the Greeks, and I always liked Homer and all the philosophers and their way of thinking and their concept of honor. I think their concept of honor does apply to the modern age, and certain people that walk around are pre-Christian.

Pat Nixon was called the Mona Lisa of American politics. She never wrote anything. Her interviews tell us nothing.

Wall Street is a huge issue. And it's controlling our lives today with this so-called election - we really have no choice. We're really just onlookers. The national surveillance state has not been debated by any candidates, Democratic or Republican. Our wars, our repeated wars - our new war in Syria has not been brought up because everyone agrees essentially that we have to continue doing what we're doing. And maybe even now go back to Libya.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

The past assumes the nature of the present.

I'd rather get past the tyranny of now, where you get judged for something based on what's happening at the moment.

I've changed my style constantly, so I'm not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

Every day that you get up, it's some kind of victory if you're making a good product, or working on a project that can only help mankind. We pray for no destruction, and for the forces of destruction not to take over. We're all divided, but some of us have children, and we are invested in the future and would like to see good things happen.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent. And in the lab, too, the photochemical process was very difficult to watch, because sometimes they were shipping prints that you didn't even know were two points off or three points off. We suffered greatly to make these films, and they'd be out-of-focus, with the sound too low.

You can never judge how the film will be taken; you can only make your best effort, and put out what you feel. How it's read, you never can tell. Or remembered for that matter.

When I make a new movie, I always get stuck with, "That's not an Oliver Stone film." But I don't know what to do about that except just move on.

Anyone can relate to suffering in this world.

I love the act of writing. I like the quiet, internal aspect of it. If I lost track of that, I couldn't direct the same way. I couldn't be a director for-hire; it's just not my nature.

In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.

Cynicism was a school in Greece - the Cynics. Diogenes is a famous Cynic. There was a strong belief in nihilism and narcissism. Those are old schools too.

I am a storyteller, and I do love ideas.

Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it.

Many films are forgotten and deserve to be, but others glom onto the DNA and they keep a share of the collective consciousness. It's a profound question: What are we here for? What is the purpose, the sum effect of our work?

Bin Laden was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who told [President] Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the Saudis.

Every movie requires its own style. Just be honest to the story. Tell the story in the best possible way that is different, exciting and original.

There is a Greco-Buddhist school of architecture and sculpture that you find everywhere in the world. It's fascinating, because Alexander died in 323 B.C. and Buddha existed around 500 B.C. But Alexander met Buddhist-type sages. And they had a different view of the world, as you know. They saw it in circular terms. They didn't need to conquer any land. And there are blond people who live in that region who are said to be descended from the soldiers who stayed. He left garrisons all over the world as he went.

Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.

Concepts of integrity and heroism and honor are still important to the world today. Some people behave well, and some people behave badly.

There was a certain faction in America that had always been pro-Nazi, including the Allen Dulles people. These were businessmen, Wall Street men.

I gave up on America. I read the Times just to find out what they're thinking. I read blogs. I get most of my best information from people who are there, people who write independently. And there's actually very few of them.