In the November issue of Maxim (on sale nationwide on Tuesday, October 21), Oliver Stone, the maker of such incendiary dramas as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, and Wall Street, sits down with Pulitzer Prize winning author, Charlie LeDuff, for a candid discussion about his new film W.
The film was shot in six weeks in the hot Louisiana summer and edited over the course of the next two months in Los Angeles so that it can be released just weeks before the presidential election. The media, the political right, and the White House have reacted predictably. They say that Stone, the bleeding-heart propagandist, is trying to swing the election to the Obama side with another of the director's historical fantasies. But Stone tells Maxim that this is untrue. "Why release it before the election? Because Bush is still around. I think if the ghost leaves Washington in January, you ought to give him a nice exorcism. He's not going away. Bush is still very young. He's not going away."
Oliver Stone on W: "The movie's not a smear job. I wouldn't want to spend a year of my life making something that is demeaning to somebody, being malicious. That's the wrong approach to art. It's not a political film, but a Shakespearean one. It's a film about George W. rebelling against his father, doing better than his father, believing that he's stronger than his father, and outdoing his father...and it's about the colossal mistakes he made and the lies he told. In a way it's Oedipal. One can say he did kill the father because he did destroy the legacy, the name. It's a big thing with the Bushes."
James Cromwell (who portrays George H.W. Bush) on W: "Sure, it's a political film. It would be horseshit to say it's not. If this is not a political film, then I'm sorry. I'm completely lost. If it's fiction, it doesn't lessen the impact on the cost of war, the waste, the horror. If anyone has the cojones to pull that off, it's Oliver Stone."
Josh Brolin (who portrays George W. Bush) on W: "I was like everybody else--thinking that W. was going to be a heavy-handed, leftist view of our current administration. But what I read in the script was a fair and compelling life story of a man who eventually became president of the United States."
Dana Perino (White House Press Secretary) on Oliver Stone: "Oliver Stone is known for being about as accurate a historian as Gilligan was a navigator."
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