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"Will Oliver Stone see success with his George W. Bush biopic?
After JFK and Nixon, Oliver Stone takes on George Bush. Don’t expect a presidential pardon
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Chris Ayres

Forty-three years ago, two men enrolled at Yale University. One of them dropped out a year later, volunteered to fight in Vietnam, then made a movie about his experiences entitled Platoon. His name is Oliver Stone. The other dodged combat and went on to become the 43rd President of the United States. His name is George W. Bush.

If all this sounds like the premise of a Hollywood blockbuster, then it is – sort of. The movie is W., a Bush biopic that – and here’s the twist – is directed by Stone. It will be released in America a mere 19 days before the 2008 presidential election and is the Times Gala film at this year’s Times BFI London Film Festival.

Of course, with Stone being a peacenik Buddhist liberal and Bush being a militaristic evangelical Christian Republican, the result isn’t expected to be in any way flattering to the departing leader of the free world. Then again, the pair have an awful lot more in common than you might think. Both, for example, are world-famous hedonists. Bush’s cousin once confirmed that the President is “a riot” when loaded up on beer. Stone’s Hollywood parties, meanwhile, were once described by a participant as “basically pagan Rome, AD26”.

Both have also been accused of lying to advance their careers: Bush on Saddam Hussein’s WMDs; Stone on the circumstances of John F. Kennedy’s death. And both have suffered from what can be described only as biblical-scale “Daddy issues”. Bush Sr cracked the whip so hard that Bush Jr once challenged his old man to a “mano-a-mano”. Stone’s father hired a prostitute for his boy when he turned 16. Hence Bush invading the country that his dad had declined to conquer 12 years earlier. Hence Stone spiking his father’s whiskey with LSD.
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But that is where the similarities end. For while Bush exits the White House a pariah, Stone hopes that W. – a $30 million project funded partly with Chinese money because no big Hollywood studio would touch it – will salvage a career that has been taking on water for more than a decade. Indeed, Stone’s previous movie about an American president, Nixon, cost $44 million to make and recouped barely a third of that at the American box office. This time, Stone is betting that the saleability of Bush’s failures will serve to guarantee his own success.

When I meet Stone at his office in Santa Monica, the 62-year-old film-maker is rubbing his eyes after another epic editing session. W. is being made under extreme pressure: only 46 days of shooting, a mere 300,000ft of film (as opposed to the usual million), and barely two months of post-production. A tall order for a movie that jumps back and forth in time and promises to tell three stories – the Bush bum years, the Texas governorship and the presidency – simultaneously.

“I’m not sure that we’ll succeed,” Stone concedes when I ask why the very same electorate that has made Bush the most unpopular President in American history would want to hand over money to see a two-hour biopic about him. “But this movie is not for the 12 per cent who still approve of him – it’s for the other 88 per cent. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything in the movie that the other 88 per cent would have any reason to detest. It is a human portrait of a man, not meant to insult people who believe in what Bush believes in.”

This, claims Stone, is why he made W. – to understand, to walk in the man’s shoes. “It’s my job . . . if I’m dramatising his life . . . to step above my hate,” he says.

Stone never even knew that he’d been to Yale with Bush until the two men met at a function in 1998. Stone says that the then Governor of Texas knew more about him than the other way round.

Republicans will almost certainly use W. as an opportunity to burn Stone as an effigy of the liberal media. But Democrats might also very well attack him – for giving them a bad name on the eve of the Most Important Election, Like, Ever. But Stone can’t seriously be afraid of exile. That fate befell him a long time ago, as is demonstrated by the location of his company, Ixtlan Productions, a long and sweltering drive away from the all-powerful studio lots of Hollywood and Burbank. Stone lost a lot of friends during the mega years. The blow-ups, the manipulations, the bollockings – they’re part of this town’s folklore now.

He also lost his second wife, Elizabeth Cox – they divorced in August 1994, the same month that Stone’s Natural Born Killers was released. It was Cox who revealed the insanity of Stone’s upbringing in New York by a French mother and Jewish-American father (the original family name was Silverstein; Stone’s real first name was William). “That little boy didn’t stand a chance of any sort of normal life,” she told a reporter.

Stone had married his first wife, Najwa Sarkis, an attaché at the Moroccan mission to the United Nations, when he was working as a yellow-cab driver. Stone now has a third wife, Chong, a Korean, with whom he has a daughter, in addition to his two sons with Elizabeth.

Ixtlan’s offices are housed within a space-age campus of tiny production outfits and rent-by-the-hour editing suites, yet manage to be absurdly plush for all their utilitarian surroundings. The floor is covered in a yellowy-beige carpet of such a luxurious pile that I entertain the thought that during one of Stone’s more spectacular acid trips he might have killed and skinned a pride of lions and sewn the manes together. The chairs in the lobby are gold-leafed, like thrones. Behind them, on a wall the colour of arterial blood, hang framed posters for Scarface, Wall Street, Platoon, and JFK. Looking at them you think, my God, this man has made some of the finest cinema of all time.

Then you notice the accompanying displays of oped columns and political cartoons, in which Stone is excoriated for factual inaccuracies and antiAmericanism. And you think, this is how he chooses to begin his working day: by walking through an exhibit that might as well be entitled My Indisputable Greatness, And How They Persecuted Me For It.

These days, Stone conducts business looking like a cross between a professor and a safari guide – wilted shirt, dangling spectacles, handsome in a dishevelled way. His is a smile that’s too demented to be gentle, but it’s trying, it’s trying hard.

His eyes shift around a lot, always deflecting. The voice is low and calm, but with a hint of something unspeakable being held at bay. The only time it rises in irritation is when I wonder ifW.is primarily comic in tone. “It’s a comedy only in the sense of tragic comedy,” he winces. “You laugh in your mind, because Bush is a goof-ball, because he’s awkward, but at the same time he has a stubborn-ness, a John Wayne ethos, an anger, an impatience, that make him fascinating. You may hate Wayne’s politics, but you may well enjoy his company on screen.”

It remains to be seen how sympathetic Stone’s Bush will turn out to be (the trailer caused me to splutter with laughter). The director certainly has a habit of making his villains more likeable than his heroes – just look at Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. Much of it will be down to Josh Brolin, an unknown when he was cast but now a solid A-lister thanks to his role in last year’s Oscar winnerNo Country for Old Men. Brolin’s co-stars include Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice and James Cromwell as Bush Sr.

“I think Josh gives Bush the benefit of the doubt and makes him charming, which I think he is,” Stone says. “I think he is a wonderful salesman, charismatic to many people and he has a politician’s ability to touch and reach, which his father never had. So he did outdo his father – as a salesman.”

Stone has said repeatedly that if Bush had fought on the ground in Vietnam he would never have gone to war against Iraq (he also maintains that if Bush had been president during the Cuban missile crisis, “we would have been in a nuclear war. Definitely. Wiped out. We wouldn’t be here talking.”). So I ask him what he makes of John McCain. After all, the Republican presidential candidate was both a supporter of ousting Saddam and a long-time resident of Vietnam’s “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp.

“I think McCain’s a very special story because he was never a soldier,” Stone says coldly. “He’s said he never saw the results of his own bombing. I saw the damage we did, I saw the corpses, the decay, I smelt the flesh, I saw people who’d been napalmed, people who’d been killed by shrapnel, mutilated. I saw horrible things. McCain was a prisoner and he has a siege mentality. He doesn’t see a balanced portrait of cause and effect – there’s something missing in the man, mentally."

And McCain’s running-mate, the moose-wrangling, gun-toting Alaskan beauty queen Sarah Palin? “She’s very ignorant. Ignorance is an American characteristic. To me, Palin and McCain look like a poster for a San Diego news channel.”

Which brings us to Barack Obama. If Stone believes that the Government conspired to kill John F. Kennedy – as his 1991 movie JFK suggests – then surely he must also believe that those same forces would go to work on a liberal black president. Stone nods, but says it’s less likely. “In those days, with Kennedy, you could kill somebody and that was more palatable because we’d done that abroad with many people: it was in vogue, it was part of the James Bond thing. Now you don’t need to kill – the media can kill for you.

“And I don’t think Obama could [frighten] the Pentagon in the same way. Kennedy was shaking things up: with Cuba he was ready to sign a deal, with Vietnam he was pulling out, with Khrushchev he was signing a deal.”

While the subject of war continues to fascinate Stone, the biggest issue of the 2008 election – the economy – just seems to depress him. But it’s not enough to make Stone want to direct the long-anticipated sequel to Wall Street. “It’s so tragic, it’s a repeat of the market of the Eighties, but much bigger,” he sighs. “I don’t even think a Gordon Gecko could exist in 2008, not as an individual buyer or seller. He’d have to work for a bank. Those [Wall Street] guys – they pigged out, man, to a degree that I never thought was possible.”

All of which raises the question of what Stone will do after W. He’s still working on a sympathetic documentary about the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. His interview with the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is off the table (although Ahmadinejad quietly retracted a statement calling Stone part of the “Great Satan”). As for the fate of Pinkville, Stone’s movie about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam – billed to star Bruce Willis – that was jettisoned amid the troubles at Tom Cruise’s new incarnation of the United Artists studio.

“It was a bad experience,” Stone says. “I don’t like working for a company that’s fearful – it infects everything. I’ve managed to make 17 movies the way I wanted to make them in an atmosphere free of fear. I don’t want to be sweating it every day, having calls from some executive saying, ‘We can’t show a bullet in a baby’s head’, or ‘How much massacre is there going to be?’”

Although Stone says Pinkville might be rescued, there will be no more war movies from the master of the genre – especially not about Iraq, which he says is too much of a “bummer” for Americans to handle on screen. Besides, he says: “I’m older, I can’t go out and do a war film, it’s exhausting. I’d get killed, probably. With W. I’m interested in the mindset of war.”

W. is the Times Gala film at The Times BFI London Film Festival on Oct 23 2008 and is released on Nov 7 2008"