Oliver Stone: 'W': his true story

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

The great American film director Oliver Stone, on his new biopic of President George Bush.

ANDREW MARR: Now it's not only the last stretch before the US election. It is of course also the final days of the US, of the Bush Presidency, which is therefore a time to look back. And if you had to name the most influential American film director of our times, I suppose Oliver Stone would be up there. From the anti-America, anti-Vietnam polemic of 'Platoon' to the exuberant satire on greed is good capitalism, 'Wall Street', Kennedy to Nixon, football to 9/11, he's picked apart the story of modern America. Now he's no fan of the Republican Party, but his latest project, 'W', is a biopic of George W. Bush, which presents a rounded picture of Bush's journey from spoiled rich boy and alcoholic to god-fearing President. So when I talked to Oliver Stone in London last week, I asked him if he agreed that this was indeed a sympathetic portrait.

OLIVER STONE: I would call it empathetic, Andrew. I would say you know I'm not inclined to like him personally and I put my feelings aside and I tried to make this as a dramatist, as a professional - feeling him from the inside out. That's what matters, you know. I think you have to walk his path. And if you can understand him, you'll understand why � what it is, the way he thinks, how he got elected, a little bit about his past, who he is and why we voted for him and where America is now. It's the beginning of understanding - not hostility, not malice. The two ends of the extremes don't interest me. The moderation of the middle.

FILM CLIP: 'W'

ANDREW MARR: You show him being the regular guy.

OLIVER STONE: Yuh.

ANDREW MARR: I mean he is somebody with whom redneck middle America, whatever you call it, can really empathise.

OLIVER STONE: Yuh.

ANDREW MARR: But at the heart of the film seems to me to be his relationship with his father - incredibly difficult, incredibly hard. At one point they're even, he actually wants to thump the guy, they're actually

OLIVER STONE: Yes, yeah.

ANDREW MARR: It's a sort of Shakespearean or at least a dramatist's reading of a political crisis.

OLIVER STONE: It is, but it's based on a lot of evidence of tension between father and son. You hear about it over and over again. Listen, if I was 40 years old and I had to live in the shadow of a man like George W... Senior, who had been a great athlete, who had been a fighter pilot in World War II, had been President and Vice President of the United States, who had been a millionaire in the oil business and had been a goo� a better student than me at Yale, all my life - and I'm the older son, I'm the first son and the second son is brighter, brighter

ANDREW MARR: And you're getting disappointment, you're getting

OLIVER STONE: And I'm the black sheep. You know it's not an easy life. I can understand the suffering. And you have to understand that there is an anger and a bitterness in George Bush which sets up... This is documented, a rather peremptory behaviour pattern, where he's going to stick it out more like his mum, take that temperament - the gun-slinger, the John Wayne approach - where he's going to stick up for his guns even when he's wrong and fight. And that was his nature: he fought back. And for him, going all the way to Iraq and cleaning it out, cleaning out the town of the bad guys, getting rid of Saddam - that was a big move for him. So you have a battle of wills, a battle of contrasts. George Bush wants to win.

ANDREW MARR: One of the things I loved about this film was the sense of the people around Bush, the inner cabinet, and the tensions between them which come across as extraordinarily sharp and fierce all the time - how much that drives policy.

OLIVER STONE: It was, it was a dog fight. And Bush, you know who knows what he really is thinking, but he seems to be preoccupied with his image, with his personalisation of politics; less so with the issues. Bush has a knack for knowing how it will play politically.

FILM CLIP: 'W'

ANDREW MARR: In a way what you've been doing all the way through, it seems to me, is telling the story of your generation, your people, whether it's I mean 'Platoon' where you served I think two terms on the frontline and you told that story; you told the story in 'Born on the Fourth of July' of these guys coming back and being, terrible things happening to them. Is this another part of a kind of grand project as it were, your generation?

OLIVER STONE: It never started out that way. It's all piecemeal. I go � Movies are done year by year and you never know where you're going to be. I mean I have done fiction - I've done 'Natural Born Killers', 'U-Turn'; I've done 'Football Movie', I've done 'Wall Street'. I mean it depends where my heart can go and it's not, I don't have a grand � like Arnold Toynbee to write the history of the world or anything.

ANDREW MARR: Sure, sure. But what it shows is that films, movies as you say, don't change the world, do they, because you know 'Wall Street' set up so much of the criticism which is now unravelling all around us as markets are plunging and you know Gordon Gecko's world has finally crumbled to dust, and yet if people were influenced by 'Wall Street' maybe you know things would have turned out differently.

OLIVER STONE: Well they were influenced by 'Wall Street', but sometimes in the wrong way. Some people � Like with 'Scarface' the same thing happened. A lot of kids came out � They told me this years later when they met me: "I love Gordon Gecko." I said, "Well you know he wasn't the hero of the movie. He was the anti-hero." (Marr laughs) "Oh", you know, but kids were into materialism. They liked his lifestyle, his wit, his fastness. They wanted to be Gordon Gecko. A lot of them became it.

ANDREW MARR: There's a danger there, isn't there?

OLIVER STONE: It's a way of life, you know. No, the movie is very clear - Gecko is doing the wrong thing; Charlie Sheen is the one who does the right thing. But some people miss the point, you know.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah. So what about 'Natural Born Killers'? I guess that would be the most obvious and the most controversial example of that, wouldn't it, where some people felt that you were glamorising violence in a very dangerous way?

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, but 'Natural Born Killers' also sets up an artificial world which was based on the fact that television was becoming more and more outrageous at that time. Crime was entertainment. And what happened in � That was 1993 and what's very funny is it feels that the whole country has become crazier in the sense that politics is now joined, along with crime, as part of the entertainment. And in politics of course there's more violence because Mr Bush has started three wars - I mean Iraq, Afghanistan and what he calls the Global War on Terror. That's significant. That's a lot more crime than Micky and Mallory ever committed in 'Natural Born Killers'. After 9/11 the aura of revenge was politicised. Feeling the need for revenge was taken over by Bush, politicised and �

ANDREW MARR: And yet at the end, at the end of 'World Trade Center', very famously, there's the moment where after the firemen have rescued people they can and so many have died, one of them says you know we're going to have to avenge this in effect; we're going to have to go out there. And at the end of the film in fact one of the firemen at the World Trade Center did join up and did go out to Iraq.

OLIVER STONE: That's correct.

ANDREW MARR: And so there's a sort of implication there that there was something that needed to be avenged; that Americans did need to go to war.

OLIVER STONE: I don't agree with that feeling personally, but I'm documenting that feeling.

ANDREW MARR: Sure.

OLIVER STONE: This is my role as a dramatist. You're asking me as a private citizen. I absolutely abhor revenge. I think revenge is the worst motive. It sets up only more revenge, more violence - violence begets violence. No. But that was the feeling in America and I did � It was a marine who said, "Vengeance". And frankly Bush took advantage of it.

ANDREW MARR: As a private citizen now, what about the election, what about Obama? He seems to be way ahead. What happens if he doesn't win?

OLIVER STONE: Huh, I think there'd be tremendous unrest and difficulty. But I don't think that'll happen. I do think this time Obama will get through, I do. But whether he can make a severe dent in the issue of a trillion dollar, trillion dollar war economy that goes to the military industrial complex, how do you cut the � how do you cut the Pentagon budget? Plus he's more or less committed himself, he's more or less said that he would expand Afghanistan, which raises many questions about another Vietnam there.

ANDREW MARR: You've made films about JFK or the death of JFK and famously Nixon as well as Bush. Looking at the people on the scene now, do you � would you put Barack Obama up there as a potential Kennedy figure or do you think that's going it some?

OLIVER STONE: No, I would � You know I think first of all that we're under the shadow of George Bush. Eight years, it's changed the world. Really we've underestimated George Bush. We really have.

ANDREW MARR: We've mis-underestimated George Bush?

OLIVER STONE: We've mis-underestimated him. It's going to be very hard for Obama to get out from under that shadow. If he does, it would have to be as a Roosevelt or as a Kennedy type figure. I like the man very much and I think he has tremendous integrity and strength. He needs luck.

ANDREW MARR: Oliver Stone, thank you very much.

OLIVER STONE: Thank you, Andrew, very much.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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