A filmmaker's credo: some thoughts on politics, history, and the movies - Oliver Stone discusses his movies - Cover Story

My first encounter with the distortions of history, with the power of mass illusion, was when I was eight years old and visiting my mother's relatives in France. Her grandparents and other family members would tell me stories about how they had fought the Nazis as members of the French resistance and about how many of their relatives and friends had literally been put up against the wall and executed. These were heroic tales, and I quite naturally believed them.

It wasn't until years later, when I returned to France in the 1960s and 1970s, that I began to learn that none of the stories I'd heard were true--none of them. Most of the people I'd known as a kid were, in fact, collaborators who had worked for the Germans or else were people who had remained "neutral." I was shocked to discover that I'd been a victim of what we now call disinformation. In the 1970s, books and movies began to appear in France challenging the traditional view of French resistance. And when Francois Mitterrand resigned, we found out that he, too, had a hidden collaborationist past.

Such was my introduction to the possibility of mass denial by people in a society. Then as I grew older, I went through the shock of my parents' divorce. Life, it seems, as it goes on, is about this disillusioning process.

At 18, I went to Vietnam as a teacher, then at 21 I went back as an infantry soldier in the army. During my two tours there, I saw firsthand what the people at home were learning in a much more gradual fashion: that the war was a lie--a lie on a scale so massive that I never could have imagined it.

I had entered the war as a patriot. I supported the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (although 20 years later, we find out that the "incident" which led up to it was really a sham). As young men fighting in the jungle, we didn't really spend too much time thinking about the morality of the war--we had enough to do just trying to stay alive. And so sometimes we killed the wrong people. We hurt. We burned.

Sometimes you don't realize what you're doing or what you've done until years later. Self-consciousness is slow in coming.

And, in a sense, Vietnam veterans were doubly hurt, because not only had we taken part in a very confusing war but, after returning home, we became involved in a second war--a war for which we simply weren't prepared. I tried to show the effects of that in my film Born on the Fourth of July, which was based on Ron Kovic's book. I can't tell you how cold a homecoming it was. Some people were against the war--and we definitely heard from them--but many people were for it. In my experience, however, the majority of the American people didn't really care either way because they were making an enormous amount of money at the time; under Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society had started and an economic boom was underway. But Vietnam veterans--many of them without skills--were denied entry into that economic paradise. So we fought two wars back to back, and the one at home was, in some respects, a struggle against our society's indifference to and denial of the one overseas: a denial of Vietnam, a denial of pain, a denial of people like Ron Kovic and myself.

I didn't know how to deal with my own pain at the time. Eventually I took it and wrote the screenplays for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July relating these experiences. But neither of those films would be made in the 1970s, which was very depressing to me as a young filmmaker because I had hoped that such films would help bring the truth home to people. Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter were made, but they were both more like grand operas: beautiful but very unrealistic. They didn't deal with the stark, brutal, ground-level realities that I and others had known as soldiers. So the film industry became yet another means by which our society denied what was really going on in Vietnam and what was happening back home to the people who had fought there.

This was all very confusing to a young man. I began to think that maybe this is the way the world really was--that maybe I was the one who wasn't seeing the truth. I was young, full of self-doubts, and I began to think that maybe I had gotten things screwed up backward like my father said. There were a few times I almost gave up. It was hard to keep going--very hard.

But then my screenplay for Midnight Express won an Academy Award. That allowed me to continue as a writer in Hollywood. And I had an opportunity to go to Russia and write a screenplay about dissidents under the Brezhnev regime. In nearly a dozen Russian cities, under very difficult circumstances, I met with a number of Soviet dissidents. These people were being jailed for speaking their views. Many were thrown into psychiatric hospitals and drugged; some even incurred brain damage. Nevertheless, they continued to fight with tremendous courage against the Soviet regime. But once I finished the screenplay, nobody in America wanted to shoot it. So here was yet another impasse; once again, I couldn't seem to do the movies that meant something to me.