Oliver Stone has transformed from a sought-after screenwriter with explosive names (Midnight Express, Conan, The Price of Power (Scarface)) into a filmmaker determined to tread on patriotic nerves (Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, JFK..). .) and at the same time producer of excruciating and chaotic audio-visual passages (Asesinos natos, The Doors…) before reaching the insignificant current no-man’s land that displaced him from the bronchial throne. A complex and strange personality in the Hollywood underworld. In Search of Light, a book that shares an indisputable expressive enthusiasm with much of Ston’s work, giving hints (sometimes camouflaged) about himself in the first chapter of his (sometimes more exaggerated and sometimes nauseating) autobiography, and also, much of it consistent A handful of inconsistencies caused by the belligerent ego of someone who could always bring the life of Alexander the Great to the big screen without the slightest sense of irony. Stone, who won an Oscar for best screenplay for The Express… and best director for Platoon and Born, has been on the big screen for years, so the publication of his memoirs reveals the life and work of someone who started out as a Reagan sympathizer and eventually attacked Reagan. This is a good opportunity to review. TRUE.
Stone (New York, 1946), in which Martin Scorsese gave public support to his distinguished student to make a 16 mm, black-and-white, dialogue-free short film, somehow chose a title for him for his book. it connects with the spiritually positive messages that cap off some of his darkest works (Platoon, before going any further). And to understand that, you have to go back to Stone’s first film, which is worth remembering (Salvador, a hellish take with a massive lack of money to make it work, an antagonistic star like James Woods, and an approach with “obvious revolutionary sympathies”). I was forty and I ran out of rice. I know. I made too many enemies and burned too many bridges with my provocative personality. We shot until the forty-second day in six challenging six-day weeks. The Mexican team goes on strike more than once. They were right: money often arrived late, production was chaotic, almost impossible, and we left Mexico the same day with great noise and silence, leaving a trail of creditors behind. But important shots were missing. “We raised the last few hundred thousand dollars and barely managed to catch our last significant chance at 7:42 p.m., just as the light was descending from behind the mountain overlooking this scorching desert on the outskirts of Las Vegas. That’s where the title of my book comes from: In Search of Light. That’s what it feels like to me.” which I haven’t stopped doing.
“Cinema gives, cinema destroys,” Stone warns, as he rearranges his memories around an emotional bonfire that illuminates the idea of “achieving your dreams at all costs, even with empty pockets.” It’s about taking shortcuts and improvising; It’s about finding your way in life and figuring out how to make movies and take them to the movies, without knowing where the next heel, the next monsoon, or the next scorpion sting will come from. It’s about not taking no for an answer. “It’s about lying like a scoundrel and hanging on through sweat and tears to survive.”
His book deals with his childhood in New York with his parents, a Jewish stockbroker and French Catholic: their divorce devastated him, the Vietnam War with its massive web of official lies, and “I tried to come back from it.” Thanks to the filming of Platoon, he is now forty years old. This is a coming of age story. It is about failure and loss of confidence. And it is also about early success and arrogance. It deals with drugs and the times we live in, both politically and socially. Dreaming is about dreaming of what you want to achieve and never giving up trying to make it happen. And of course it is full of deceptions, betrayals, scoundrels, heroes, people who bless you with their presence and those who destroy you the moment you turn your back.
The truth is, “I have never felt such emotion and adrenaline as when I had nowhere to die. A lower-class English friend of mine once confessed to me: ‘The only thing money can’t buy is poverty.’ Maybe he meant ‘happiness’ instead of poverty, but the point is that money gives you an advantage, and whether we want it or not, you’d be more human without it. In its way, it’s like going back to the foot infantry to see the world from a grand perspective, where everything is – Whether it’s a hot shower or a hot meal – it’s truly appreciated.
Thoughts on happiness and misery, fear and success abound. About his creative demands and creative tendencies. On his addictions: “He loved cocaine like a baby loves a stuffed animal or an adult loves ice cream.” The most delicious thing is the experiences during shooting. There is not much “gossip” about the stars and their colleagues, but Stone gives some stories that help better understand some decisions or situations that directly affected the development and outcomes of some films. What happens at the end of Midnight Express is particularly revealing; the imposition of revenge and a happy escape that has nothing to do with what Stone has planned. On Conan, his intentions were very different from what director John Milius wanted (“he drooled: he loved blood and the crunching of bones and worshiped the sword with the monasticism of a Japanese samurai” and Scarface threw him over the edge of a cliff. An indecisive Brian de Palma (“he wasn’t the most energetic of men” “) and real chaos with terrible shooting. South Manhattan had its pros and cons, too, with a Napoleonized Michael Cimino (megalomania in a small package).
This is the human condition: “We experience good moments and terrible moments, but the latter are indelible for us.” In my opinion, the journey from cradle to grave is too long: too much happens to us, too many characters to cherish, too many things forgotten or misremembered. You have to be attentive to understand these timeless moments and what they mean. This is the greatest pleasure I feel when writing: to appreciate again, to love again. In this regard, my daily flashes were very helpful in reconstructing what I was thinking at a particular moment. There is no greater satisfaction than a well-written paragraph: it’s something you value more as you get older. As he writes at the end of Detachment, “We were not fighting the enemy. “We were at war with ourselves.”