Oliver Stone: I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered f...

One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.

Oliver Stone

movie should joy

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

Oliver Stone

experience past thinking

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

Oliver Stone

fusion beautiful beauty

I'm not an activist. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a dramatist. My strength is to tell a story, to find a way to tell a story that makes it exciting. Our Untold History was a huge challenge. Snowden was no piece of cake, because writing code and breaking code is some of the most boring stuff you've ever seen.

Oliver Stone

boring challenges writing

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

Oliver Stone

divorce insightful thinking

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

Oliver Stone

process directors looks

I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.

Oliver Stone

experience real men

There are a few versions of the Alexander movie on video, only two that matter. One is from 2007, and then the one from 2014. It's called "the Ultimate Cut." That is the best version in my opinion. I was unsatisfied with the original theatrical release. It was rushed. It was my fault. I accepted it. I always felt it should have been done the way Tarantino did Kill Bill. I thought, we should release this in two parts with an intermission. But at that time, in 2004, it was impossible.

Oliver Stone

opinion cutting done

I was trying to find out what happened in my lifetime, because I was an older man. We lived through two terms of George Bush, and I was wondering, "Is he an exception to the rule, or he is a continuation? What is driving all these wars? What is driving this attitude of aggressiveness and militarism?" I got my answer - and it was a shocking answer. I found is this whole strain of history, this whole school has been denied by the media. It is a bizarre blindness, because we are such an intelligent country. It's bizarre that we can't get our own history straight.

Oliver Stone

attitude war country

Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.

Oliver Stone

envy underestimate jealousy

Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.

Oliver Stone

team football war

You've also heard stories about how the military-industrial complex really does prefer Hilary Clinton because they know that she's not nuts like some of the Republicans. She will do what they bid. And what they want is basically to stay healthy.

Oliver Stone

republican clinton healthy

If you make the movie from your heart and it stands over time, that's what matters to me.

Oliver Stone

what-matters matter heart

Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.

Oliver Stone

hunters movie home

Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States' Big Brother attitude toward the world. We need countries to say no to the United States. The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities, cyber abilities. And the world is in danger with our tyranny.

Oliver Stone

brother attitude country

I didn't like my classmates at Yale. George W.Bush was in my class. I didn't know it then.

Oliver Stone

classmates

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

Oliver Stone

impossibility hell reason

I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that... it'd be that Don Quixote feeling, that I'd have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you've got to do it. That's the only way you can do things.

Oliver Stone

ambitious one-day feelings

Every day that you get up, it's some kind of victory if you're making a good product, or working on a project that can only help mankind.

Oliver Stone

victory kind helping

My schooling was very conservative. I went to Trinity School, and then to the Hill School, which is a boarding school, then to Yale. My parents got divorced in that period, and I realized I didn't have a life anymore. I was the only child, so a three-person family breaks apart. I ended up very conformist, very scared, very lonely. I couldn't go on with Yale, just couldn't do it. I'd been doing too much of that for too long. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want, which was to go to Wall Street and join the crowd there.

Oliver Stone

wall lonely children

I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent.