When Oliver Stone burst
onto the American movie landscape in 1986 with Salvador, he quickly
established himself as the enfant terrible of Hollywood's
boy-genius directors — and at 40, he was a mighty big baby. He worked
out his preoccupation with his own Vietnam War experiences in a trilogy of
films — Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July (both of which earned him
Academy Awards for best director), and Heaven & Earth — while he had
already made use of his drug experiences in screenplays for 1978's
Midnight Express (for which he won his first Oscar) and the 1983 remake of
Scarface with Al Pacino.
Now Stone is back with a film about what would seem the unlikeliest of subjects for him: professional football. Any Given Sunday, which opens Dec. 22, stars Pacino as an aging football coach, a character who very much resembles Oliver Stone. The original idea was presented to Stone by co-screenwriter John Logan as "King Lear in the NFL," and though Lear's daughters have been replaced by surrogate sons, played by Dennis Quaid and Jamie Foxx, it remains much more a Shakespearean tragedy than a conventional jock movie. Stone had completed the 25-minute prologue of action footage, which re-imagines pro football as a rock video, when we met at his office in Santa Monica. It was Oct. 19, and Stone was still frantically editing Any Given Sunday to reduce it from 2 hours and 50 minutes to the 2 hours that Warner Brothers required.
Q: It's already late October, and two months doesn't seem like a lot of time to cut nearly a third of your film. Are you going to make it?
Oliver Stone: It's mid-October. Don't say "late." You're one of those media types that's always looking at a clock. I would always get confused by the media [as a kid] because the covers of the magazines would say "November," and it was only July.
There's no trouble. It's just a question of having intense concentration to polish the diamond that is there. People don't understand. They think directors turn out these long movies at Christmas to win awards, but there's no Oscar chase here. You don't make it longer on purpose, you make it longer because you have to tell the story. There's always this delusion that it's an ego thing. Not true. Nixon did take time, and this shouldn't take as long, but it does. And in defense of that, I could say, "Look, you watch football, it's a three-hour popcorn festival in which you see an hour's worth of football." And the angles aren't even that good. We're going to give you on-the-field action that you've never seen before. It's hyper-real.
[Stone's assistant enters to retrieve a bag left by his previous guest, an old friend from the director's days at NYU Film School.]
OS: Go through it first, see if there's a tape recorder in there. Just kidding, just kidding. [He snorts a laugh at this reference to his own reputation for paranoia.] It might have been a bomb, you know?
Q: Right. We tend to associate you with cinematic bomb-throwing subjects like war, drugs, rock and roll that are part of the cultural ferment. Why on earth are you making a movie about pro football?
OS: It's so emblematic of America right now. The prices of teams have jumped practically as high as movie companies — $700 million for the Washington Redskins! That's a pretty good con job. They've been successful getting the value of the teams up because of television. Football has been really eaten into by television, and corrupted — as television has corrupted much of the American way of life. Television has destroyed the game of pure football that I knew as a kid in the fifties.
Q: I would have thought you were carrying signs for Adlai Stevenson in the fifties, not Bronko Nagurski.
OS: Building up all this mythology about the World War II generation — I think it's a complete fraud. I don't agree with Tom Brokaw and those people about the Great Generation. If anything, they hated more. Their generation led to the disasters of the early sixties, with Kennedy being killed, and divorce, the hypocrisy that led to the sexual revolution. They taught us the lying. They taught us the conspiracy theories about China and Russia as a Communist monolith. It's a lotta s**t that they laid on us.
Eisenhower was a bad president, an awful president. And Truman was smoothed over by [biographer] David McCullough and turned into some hero. He wasn't a hero when he founded the national security state. They call us the Baby Boomers? I think we're the Baby Losers.
[Stone suddenly seems to realize his political passions have overwhelmed his game face, and his shoulders droop, as if the air were being let out of a balloon.]
But there I go again.
Q: Before you came under the thrall of JFK in the sixties, who were the gods of your world when you were growing up in New York?
OS: Y.A. Tittle was my hero. Johnny Unitas and Bob St. Clair were my heroes. I loved the early pro football. And I got to meet all those guys later — all the old-timers who used to play in the days when they had second jobs as car salesmen, liquor salesmen — because I hired them to work on the film. Here I am, talking to Johnny Unitas, it's like being 10 years old again. He was as close to a Greek god as Achilles. They were mythic. You see these old guys and you still get excited in your heart. To me, these guys are unqualified heroes. Because they do something that's so demanding of body and mind, and it's very dangerous. It's a cruel sport. You feel sorry for the vast majority, who are just workers, beating their heads down. Their shelf life is pretty short. These are real heroes for doing that, for trying. At the same time it's gladiatorial because that basic heroism is being used by television, and by business interests, to make their cities stand out.
Q: One of the reasons for the NFL's popularity is gambling. People love to bet the point-spreads. That's not really a part of Any Given Sunday, but do you know anything about that?
OS: The betting is huge. I don't get involved in it anymore, but when I was in my twenties, I used to have to borrow from the Beneficial Finance Company to pay for my f***ing losses. God, they were killers. I think it was 22 percent [interest] in those days. I finally beat these two guys I'd been betting with — I beat the s**t out of them with the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl — and they wouldn't pay up. They disappeared on me. They were two mafioso types, really scary guys, and I was afraid they might come after me. I finally paid off BFC with my ex-wife's help.
Q: In one way or another, your films all seem to grapple with the notion of what it is to be a man, and it's a central theme of Any Given Sunday. Is how to be a man something you struggle with?
OS: I think it's a lesson that takes a long time to learn, and it's a painful lesson. You need vulnerability and hurt and defeat and disaster, the humbling of the gods, to understand fully that you need others. That's what I've tried to show in the movie. At the end, the boy becomes a man.
Q: When are you going to make a woman's movie?
OS: I did one. Nobody paid attention.
Q: You're referring to Heaven & Earth. Were you uncomfortable with a female protagonist?
OS: Perhaps I wasn't able to be as intimate as possible because it was a war story with many aspects to it. We all have our feminine side and our masculine side, and we bring them into balance throughout our life. It's like the moon — sometimes full, sometimes half, sometimes not at all. I think there are times during the month when I'm more feminine, and times when I'm more masculine. As the film was about an Asian peasant woman, there was not a strong emphasis on introspection or some of the things that would be true of a Western woman. So I can see where some of the criticism came from. The next time out, maybe I should try to do something with a Western woman.
Q: In Any Given Sunday, you have two very Western women — Cameron Diaz and Ann-Margret. Have you given them something to do, or are they just appendages to the male stars, Al Pacino and Dennis Quaid?
OS: I worked very hard with Cameron, who I love, and Ann-Margaret. I tried very, very hard and I rewrote all the way through to try to make them work it out as mother and daughter. It was important to me. It would have been easy to have Cameron be a bitch to her mother. That wasn't right.
Q: You weren't always able to work things out so easily with your own parents, were you? Yet you've dedicated at least three of your films to your father, who died several years ago after a long career as a stockbroker. Can you describe that relationship?
OS: It's filled with denial, rebellion, anger, love, and often misunderstanding — the son hating the father for his cultural signifiers. I'm much more emotional with my son than my father was with me. My son is doing far better than me for his age. He's far healthier. I have a good relationship with my oldest son, and my youngest daughter, a little half-Korean 4-year-old. And I'm still seeking a relationship with my middle son. I had a very privileged and protected childhood up until the age of 14 [when Stone's parents divorced], at which point it kind of shattered pretty fast and I was living pretty much on my own. It was a very tough way to grow up, in New York City, believe me. It was not easy for me in those days.
Q: You've set your football movie in Miami. Any chance we'll see Fidel Castro and the CIA involved in a conspiracy to move the franchise to the Bay of Pigs?
OS: Fidel's face emerges at the end of the film on a statue [in the end zone].
Q: Okay, that's a joke, but even when you're making a sports movie, do you see yourself as a provocateur?
OS: My films never say, "Think this way." They say, "Think for yourself." Perhaps you could include "provocateur" in the description, but I think the larger and more generous title would be "thinker" — the questioner in the Socratic dialogue. It would be nice to ask the right questions, instead of all the bulls**t. But it's not intended to be aggressive. It's more like, don't accept the official thinking.