Oliver Stone Experience

Seitz Matt Zoller

Description

Stone himself serves as guide to this no-holds-barred retrospectiveaan extremely candid and comprehensive monograph of the renowned and controversial writer, director, and cinematic historian in interview form. Over the course of five years,A Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver StoneA (Midnight Express,A Scarface,A Platoon,A JFK,A Natural Born Killers,A Snowden)A andA New York TimesA bestselling author Matt Zoller SeitzA (The Wes Anderson Collection) discussed, debated, and deconstructed the arc of Stone's outspoken, controversial life and career with extraordinary candor.A This book collects those conversations for the first time, including anecdotes about Stone's childhood, Vietnam, his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his continual struggle to reinvent himself as an artist. Critical commentary from Seitz on each of Stone's films is joined byA originalA essays from filmmaker Ramin Bahrani; writer, editor, and educator Kiese Laymon; writer and actor Jim Beaver; and film critics Walter Chaw, Michael Guarnieri, Kim Morgan, and Alissa Wilkinson.A At once a complex analysis of a master directors vision and a painfully honest critical biography in widescreen technicolor,A The Oliver Stone ExperienceA is as daring, intense, and provocative as Stones filmsait's an Oliver Stone movie about Oliver Stone, in the form of a book. Both this book and Stones highly anticipated film,A Snowden, will be released in September 2016 toA coincide with Stones seventieth birthdayA (September 15, 1946). Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz:A Mad Men Carousel,A The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads,A The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, andA The Wes Anderson Collection.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 13 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683351900
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Contents
FOREWORD by RAMIN BAHRANI
INTRODUCTION by KIESE LAYMON
PREFACE by MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Chapter 1 Rejoice, O Young Man, In Thy Youth 1946-1969
EXCERPT A Child s Night Dream by OLIVER STONE
Chapter 2 Who s Gonna Love Me? 1969-1970
Sugar Cookies
Seizure
Midnight Express
Chapter 3 The World Is Yours 1979-1985
Conan the Barbarian
The Hand
Scarface
Eight Million Ways to Die
Year of the Dragon
Chapter 4 We Fought Ourselves 1985-1987
Salvador
Platoon
ESSAY Sense Memory: Platoon Through a Veteran s Eyes by JIM BEAVER
Chapter 5 Break on Through 1987-1991
Wall Street
Talk Radio
Born on the Fourth of July
The Doors
EXCERPT Born on the Fourth of July by RON KOVIC
ESSAY A Matter of Character by KIM MORGAN
Chapter 6 Through the Looking Glass 1991-1994
JFK
Heaven and Earth
Natural Born Killers
ESSAY The World Belongs to Savages: The Oliver Stone Crime Film by MICHAEL GUARNIERI
Chapter 7 The Darkness Reaching Out for the Darkness 1995-1999
Nixon
U-Turn
Any Given Sunday
ESSAY Surrender to the Primordial: Oliver Stone, Poet of the Id by WALTER CHAW
Chapter 8 By Steel and By Suffering 1999-2008
Alexander
World Trade Center
W.
ESSAY To Hell and Back: The Spiritual Cinema of Oliver Stone by ALISSA WILKINSON
Chapter 9 The Freest Man 2009-PRESENT
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Savages
Untold History of the United States
Snowden
ENDNOTES
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD RAMIN BAHRANI
Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers, The Untold History of the United States . These works, by Oliver Stone, are giant films, iconic films of exceptional artistry and social, political, and metaphysical power. If an alien being came to earth and felt confused as to where it was, these films would stand like monoliths, like massive pools of human reflection, the way we consider great works of literature and drama-like Lord Jim or Death of a Salesman .
Very few filmmakers anywhere in the world can claim they ve made films that captured the mood and ideology of an entire decade of their society. If I step outside my apartment, stop any random strangers, and say, Greed is good, there s a good chance they will know exactly what I am talking about.
Many know Oliver Stone as a political and social filmmaker whose work has often created polarizing controversy. As a filmmaker myself, I know Stone as one of the most important filmmakers of the last forty years in American cinema- or globally, for that matter. His blistering writing, frenetic staging, bold and muscular use of camera, multi-format shooting techniques, and astonishingly innovative editing have pushed the boundaries of how films and television are made. His films have inspired a generation of filmmakers, and I am one of them.
The first Oliver Stone film I saw was JFK . I was a teenager, maybe sixteen, and wasn t fully invested in cinema yet. I went because, like so many, I sensed that this was an important film.
Not only was I riveted for three hours, but I left the cinema with a feeling that I was walking through shadows, and at any moment could be pulled into them by forces too powerful for me to fend off. The film was a fever dream of bewildering energy and masterful craftsmanship. Stone knocked us into a nightmare that was cleverly presented as a detective story.
The structure is so simple and single-minded, yet so elaborate and complex. Jim Garrison s goal is to prove there was more than one shooter and to ask who else was behind the assassination. For three straight hours, the film piles on facts, details, questions-in 35 mm, 16 mm, Super 8 mm, color, and black and white. That a film of such scope and complexity could move so relentlessly toward one simple goal is mind-boggling.
Technically the film is a marvel. The editing of JFK is wholly original and revolutionary for mainstream narrative film-making. Stone sometimes cuts to a shot for three seconds or even just three frames (images we may have never seen or need to see again!) to build the framework of both the film and Garrison s case. I will always contend that the greatest modern American directors who are also master editors are Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone.
After seeing JFK , I quickly dived into Stone s films, starting with Platoon (how did he make Salvador that same year?!), a film so authentic that it was obviously made by a man who had fought in the war. What struck me most about Platoon was the mood in the soldiers camp-the authenticity of the music, the sets, the language, the issues of race-and the total chaos of the men in the jungles. The battle was happening everywhere and at all times. There was no clear sense of where the enemy was or who was shooting at whom. Sometimes it was too dark or too blindingly bright for the men to understand what was happening. The soldiers staggered about like zombies, burned out by lack of sleep, zapped of all energy and patience by the bugs; the slightest itch could make them pull the trigger and kill anything or anyone for any or no reason whatsoever. This was not my generation s war, but Stone s film made it alive and visceral in ways that haunted me.
This aggressive, chaotic sense that anything could happen and the entire world was out of control remains a central quality in many of Stone s greatest films, and Born on the Fourth of July is no exception. The film s hero, Ron Kovic, arrives on the dusty beaches of Vietnam and is immediately blinded by the sun and sweat in his eyes. The 360 degrees of chaos is made palpable by Stone s fast-moving camera with CinemaScope lensing. I had never seen the camera move on that lens with that speed in any film prior to this. The impact was intense and unforgettable.
The sequences of Kovic in the hospital are worse than any of Kafka s dreams, and all the more terrifying as we know they are based on reality. The film is epic in scope, deeply personal, political, and metaphysical. The camera movements, editing, use of sound and music, and deep attention to production design, color, and transitions over decades are the work of a master-it s surreal that Stone made this epic tour de force and Talk Radio just a year apart, as if he had some mysterious twin who has been directing every other film for him!
Stone returned to Vietnam to make his moving and philosophical Heaven Earth . Then, he pushed the techniques he had been developing to radical extremes and new heights in Natural Born Killers , a film that left an indelible mark on American cinema and is often cited among the top ten most controversial films of all time. Although Stone was in his late forties by the time he made it, the modernity of NBK makes it feel like the product of a filmmaker half that age raised on trash television. The film s ferocious energy and radical stylization recall Kubrick s shocking filmmaking in A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick was also in his forties when he made that film). I watched NBK again recently, and when Stone cuts to a nightmarish sitcom of Mallory s childhood with the stand-up comic Rodney Dangerfield as the demented father, I was stunned. The film premiered more than twenty years ago, but it feels like it was made yesterday.
Stone talks about the volatile reactions to JFK and NBK as career altering for him. He believes that critics, members of the press, and the film industry unfairly turned on him after these films. Much of this vitriolic harangue has been documented.
But like all great natural-born filmmakers, Stone was undeterred. He remains a beacon to filmmakers to this day. Since NBK he has directed more than ten other features and produced or written about a dozen more. They include the richly impressive Nixon , a character study of Shakespearean ambition, and the football drama Any Given Sunday , a modern mythical version of the ancient gladiators told with startlingly experimental techniques of sound and style.
Perhaps most exciting has been Stone s late interest in documentary filmmaking, starting with Comandante . I was especially taken with the searching quality of South of the Border , where the digital filmmaking and small crew allowed for wonderfully light moments of improvisation with Stone and his subjects. For The Untold History of the United States , a twelve-part Showtime documentary series accompanied by a book, Stone and his collaborator, the history professor Peter Kuznick, spent years researching an alternative to the history that so many Americans have been taught in high school and beyond.
Like Werner Herzog and Robert Altman (someone should please curate a film series Altman Stone-Visions on America as soon as possible! One double bill could be M*A*S*H and Born on the Fourth of July ), Stone keeps generating work, despite the system. And like a good foot soldier, he always finds his way back in-most recently with Snowden , a biography of the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency s illegal surveillance of citizens. It is the perfect character and subject matter for Stone to discover and uncover with his camera.
In the last few years, I have been lucky enough to meet and spend time with Stone. His curiosity, passion, hunger, and work ethic are more intense and energetic than those of most young filmmakers I ve met. I wanted to let him know that his seminal film Wall Street had deeply impacted my film 99 Homes . I wanted to discuss many things, including his early career as a successful screenwriter ( Midnight Express , and Scarface , among others) and the perseverance and determination he displayed after initial failures to launch his career as a director (with Seizure and The Hand ), and how literature played a crucial role in his adventurous life.
This is a man who made pretty much one film every year-sometimes two!-for more than a decade. Not just any films, but wildly ambitious, deeply political, challenging, meaningful fi