The cinema of Oliver Stone

Front matter

THE CINEMA OF

Art, authorship and activism

IAN SCOTT * HENRY THOMPSON

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

I

3 4 5

War Politics Money Love

Bibliography Index page vi vii ix

160 197

243 293 299

Figures t Lou and Oliver Stone, Hong Kong, February 1968 page 29 2 Oliver Stone, Vietnam 34 3 Oliver Stone, First Cavalry Unit, Vietnam, August 1968 4I 4 Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, Hiroshima, 2013 66 5 Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone on the set of Wall

Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 128

6 Shia LaBeouf, Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas on the set of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 130 7 Benicio Del Toro and Oliver Stone on the set of

Savages (2012) 142 8 John Travolta, Taylor Kitsch and Oliver Stone on the set of Savages (2012) I51 9 Colin Farrell and Oliver Stone on the set of Alexander (2004) 179 r0 Protest against US military installation, Jeju Island, South Korea, March 2013 239

1r Oliver Stone, Sun-jung Jung and their daughter Tara, Berlin, February 2000 241

All figures reproduced by permission of Ixtlan Inc., 12233 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90064

Preface

From the outset, the research and writing for this book have benefited from an ongoing and intimate collaboration with the filmmaker. On one level, this depth of engagement from Oliver Stone should come as no surprise. All through his career, Stone has shown willingness — and indeed a deep interest — in engaging with academic and journalistic debate about his films and their contextual significance. For him, being actively involved in the afterlife of a movie and the discussions that it generates is part and parcel of the filmmaker’s responsibility. For example, he directly accepted an engagement with the American Historical Association concerning its debates over the merits of JFK and Nixon, recorded in Robert Brent Toplin’s Oliver Stone’s USA. He also was involved in detailed discussions about the academic commentary on Alexander outlined in Paul Cartledge and Fiona Rose-Greenland’s Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander.

However, Stone went even further with our project. He gave his time and energy over a significant period, thus committing his life and work to the long-term and sustained investigation of him and his films. He provided hours of interview time over many meetings, roughly within the space of five years of his working life. To assist with this process, we wrote up pre-interview notes outlining the issues to be covered at each session. In response, Stone never arrived unprepared. Invariably, he had read the notes and had his own written summary of what he wanted to cover by way of reply. His spoken responses were rich in detail - more than we could

3: | PREFACE make full use of in this text — and so we have taken the decision to publish the full transcripts verbatim. In addition to this personal commitment, Stone provided full access to all of his production files, enabling us to spend many weeks working at Ixtlan’s offices in Santa Monica, California, where all of the files were retrieved from storage and reviewed.

In view of the degree of access, it is a legitimate question to ask how a critical distance between authors and subject could be maintained. No doubt, Stone’s previous work with scholars helped here. He understood that there would be — and always have been — differences of opinion on topics, and he seemed to rather embrace that fact, almost as though it was borne of a career where disagreement from critics had become so instinctively second nature that he welcomed it back like an old friend. His only concern was that we should work with the facts and tie any conjectures firmly back to that factual base. Stone never sought any editorial input to the project. He understood from the outset that our independence as authors would strengthen the book. The unwritten contract — such as it was — was that the faith implied in such openness and disclosure would be answered with a professional assessment done to the best of our abilities. We have sought to honour that aspiration, but leave it to the reader to judge. Stone took up the invitation to read a final version of the manuscript, which allowed him the opportunity to highlight any factual errors and to respond further on any of the debates if he wished.

Acknowledgements

This research and the writing of this book was enhanced in no small part by the help given by Richard Heffner, Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers University, USA, and one-time chair of the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA). Sadly, Dick died in December 2013, but his professional advice and knowledge of the inner workings of the film industry, as well as the personal friendship he offered, were all crucial components in the progression of this project.

Several people at Oliver Stone’s production company — Ixtlan Inc. — in Santa Monica, California provided invaluable assistance with the progress of the research. Thanks are due to Morgan Marling, John Cooper, Evan Bates and Janet Lee. We owe a particular debt to Evan Bates, who supported and facilitated the project from the outset, arranging interviews and set visits; and to Janet Lee for her help with materials, permissions and seeing things through to conclusion.

A number of Oliver Stone’s present and former associates were happy to give their time for interviews both on- and off-set, for which we are very grateful. Thanks are due to Bob Daly, Eric Kopeloff, Moritz Borman, Tod Maitland, Paul Graff and Christina Graff.

Abbreviations

Assassination Records Review Board British Academy of Film and Television Arts Classification and Rating Administration Collateralised Debt Obligation

Credit Default Swap

Central Intelligence Agency

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Drug Enforcement Agency (US)

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Film Packages International Government Communications Headquarters (UK) Home Box Office

Immigration and Customs Enforcement International Monetary Fund

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Motion Picture Association of America National Football League

National Security Agency

North Vietnamese Army

Paramount Communications Inc.

United Artists

Writers Guild of America

weapons of mass destruction

‘Oliver Stone is still a mystery — to me too.”

‘I don’t want to make a silly movie. | don’t want to make it for the wrong reasons. | have a storytelling sense and a sense of drama, and | want to continue.’

Oliver Stone: the remaking of a maverick filmmaker

To examine the welter of publications about writer-director Oliver Stone over the last thirty years is to enter a netherworld where the divisions between fact and fiction, and truth and objectivity often blur, if not break down. Assessments of Stone populate the entire spectrum of writing — academic, popular, critical and journalistic — and run from near-deification to outright denunciation. The details reveal a filmmaker who has been exposed possibly more than any other artist in Hollywood’s history to a spellbinding mixture of praise, speculation, conjecture, criticism and downright denigration. The titles alone tell their own story: Oliver Stone’s America: Dreaming the Myth Outward; Oliver Stone’s U.S.A.: Film, History and Controversy; and Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker. Stone is not just a director, not just an artist, not even just an auteur. Rather, he has come to represent an adjective that says something about the era of Hollywood filmmaking that he has worked in, and even more about late twentieth and early twenty-first-century American history that he has repeatedly visualised and constructed on screen. All of it has been accompanied by a running commentary virtually unheard of with

N | THE CINEMA OF OLIVER STONE regard to other filmmakers. ‘[H]e has attracted greater controversy and more passionate criticism than any of his contemporaries. The plaudits and condemnations come in almost equal measure,’ confirm Andrew Pepper and Trevor McCrisken in their work on Hollywood’s historical movies.‘

Therefore, very few analyses of the man or his films begin without the words ‘controversy’, ‘inaccuracy or even ‘outrage’ and ‘exploitation’. Albert Auster, talking of arguably Stone’s two most provocative pictures, JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995), encapsulates the prevalent feeling:

The initial reception of both films by the American media was hardly what one might call restrained or polite. Even before film critics had their say, journalists, political commentators and assorted literati weighed in with critiques of the films.’

Auster rightly locates that recurrent historical period of the 1960s and early 1970s as a central philosophical component of the two pictures and of Stone’s revaluation of the country, right in the heart of the Cold War era. As he notes: ‘Taken together, they presented Stone’s mythic interpretation of American history and politics since the 1960s.”° It is this analysis of the personal — not to say provocative — commentary allied to historical re-enactment in Stone’s pictures which has been fused together for so long in assessments of the director, that one could be forgiven for thinking it was the default position of all critics on Stone, right from the off.

In fact, Oliver Stone’s career was never as outrageously contentious as this when it started, neither was it even at the putative height of his artistic and commercial powers in the decade that spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s. From unlikely writing credits for The Hand (1981), which he also directed, Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) and 8 Million Ways to Die (Hal Ashby, 1986), to the more lauded and/or cultish work for Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983) and Year of the Dragon (Michael Cimino, 1985), Stone’s early career CV gathered together solid and praiseworthy credentials that lined him up as a filmmaker with something important (and occasionally outlandish) to say. The somewhat over-the-top nature of several of the features above certainly could have their extravagance and virtuosity laid at the door of their respective directors, Milius, De Palma and Cimino: each of them an auteur, each coming out of the New Hollywood circle that emerged during the 1970s, and each with an outlook, sensibility and fascination for certain topics that Stone easily shared, and to which he subsequently devoted himself. All three were important influences on Stone’s acculturation as a director. Indeed, the connection and mutual regard help explain some of the determinants that made their screenwriting protégé’s career, if anything, even more flamboyant, extreme and ultimately successful, than their own.

Most obviously, Cimino’s Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter (1978) set the benchmark for a grittier and more politically refined assessment of the Vietnam War that Stone built upon in a personal fashion, first with Platoon (1986), and then Born on the Fourth of July (1989). This latter production, which would later become the second part of Stone’s trilogy about the conflict, echoed Cimino’s own sense of despondency and fatigue with the war during the early 19708, with his story hitting the screens more than a decade before Tom Cruise’s Academy-nominated performance as real-life veteran, Ron Kovic.

De Palma’s directorial influence should not be dismissed so easily either. For in the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981), there is the ghost of a homage to previous Hollywood genres and a hint of the violence and sociopathic behaviour that Stone would focus on in films such as Natural Born Killers (1994) and U Turn (1997). With Milius, there was a unifying of these themes and subjects. As a script contributor to some of the Dirty Harry series (1971-88), to the gangster movie Dillinger (1973), and as a writer on Apocalypse Now (1979) for Francis Ford Coppola, Milius produced a similarly conceived set of features, ideas and characters that he too wanted to bring to the screen in a particular way, just as Stone set out to do once his own career was well under way in the 1980s. Yet even in the midst of these shared dispositions, Stone’s apprenticeship as a filmmaker had complex layers and a growing independent streak. Milius liked the Conan script but opted not to shoot it in the form that Stone had intended, and there was no collaboration between director and writer during production. In the case of Scarface, Stone had written the script before De Palma joined the project, although in this instance the director certainly did share w | INTRODUCTION

A | THE CINEMA OF OLIVER STONE his writer's vision of making the movie almost operatically violent. Nonetheless, even with these addenda, the formative influences of Milius, De Palma and Cimino are unmistakable.

That Stone’s reputation and influence superseded these directors in time is not merely a story about commercial viability or, indeed, better filmmaking — although with only a few exceptions from the other three, both assertions were true — so much as it was Stone’s constant and uncanny ability for a decade or more to capture the zeitgeist of the American condition and make it cinematically vivacious, exciting and vital. Stone’s name became a byword for controversy because of an accumulation of issues, debates and situations that thrust his politics, personality and pictures into the spotlight. Not the least of these confluences was the era itself. Often, when people speak of Oliver Stone’s cinema, they do not associate it with the 1980s — and if they do, it is only perhaps to reflect on the fact that some of his best movies were made during that decade. Stone’s oeuvre is seldom seen as a commentary on, or a reflection of, the age itself; but Stone should be linked more irrevocably with the era of the 1980s than with the 1960s or 1970s. Why? Because of the condition of the country, the fallout from the previous ten years of trauma, and most importantly, the overarching presence of Ronald Reagan during the decade.

Stone’s disregard for Reagan is legendary, and it informed the most scorching indictments in his filmmaking during the decade. From the condemnation of Central American foreign policy in Salvador (1986), to the inexorable rise of ‘shock jock’ celebrity culture in Talk Radio (1988), by way of the financial ‘masters of the universe’ satire at the heart of Wall Street (1987), Stone took potshots at every angle of Reagan's political philosophy. That the man left the White House in 1989 as one of its most popular ever incumbents, and that films such as Born on the Fourth of July seemed to capture for some audiences the essence of Reagan's idealism (in as misguided a way as the appropriation of Bruce Springsteens Born in the USA had been during the Republican president’s 1984 re-election campaign), only confirms a need to reappraise the director, the films, the politics and the era more generally, especially in light of Stone’s subsequent career.

Stone’s success aside, Hollywood was going through a broad commercial renaissance and expansion in the second half of the

1980s. Acquisitions of cinema chains, company mergers and an expanding breed of franchises tied into further products and merchandising all spoke of a newly-emerging global entertainment complex. While the artistic credibility of the New Hollywood cohort of filmmakers from a decade previously might have dissipated to some extent, the rehabilitation of Hollywood financially, and the soaring revenues of its most popular movies — starting with ET (Steven Spielberg, 1982) and continuing on through Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) and Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) — made the mix of commercial sensibility and political credibility a heady and successful concoction for directors such as Alan Parker (Mississippi Burning, 1988), Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket, 1987) and of course, Stone. Born on the Fourth of July ended up the forty-first highest grossing film of the 1980s, with Platoon only just behind in forty-third place. Together they earned more than $300 million worldwide, in addition to critical adulation.

What linked these filmmakers together was that each was acutely aware that their films could remind cinemagoers of the consequences of the political era that they were living through, as well as synonymise that legacy with the New Right agenda of the 1960s, Civil Rights and Vietnam. Social and political dislocation remained pertinent for these directors, even though their films often became caught up in the maelstrom of high-octane, entertaining, feel-good pictures that attracted young people in particular back into cinemas during the decade, and which headed much of the box-office lists generated during that time. Stone was a vital component in that appraisal. As Frank Beaver describes it, Stone’s films throughout the Reagan years carried a ‘subtext of urgency ... suggesting a compulsive creator with a mission.”

However, by the time the 1990s were underway, Stone’s brand of politically and commercially engaging cinema seemed less attuned to the emerging popular mood. Allowing the pictures alone to do the talking for him became less viable. ‘Stone [went] to great lengths to try and justify the historical perspectives he has placed on film and to answer the condemnations he has received,’ suggest Pepper and McCrisken.® Those efforts principally revolved around the mammoth accompanying books which acted as companions

“ | INTRODUCTION oO | THE CINEMA OF OLIVER STONE to JFK and Nixon. Clocking in at more than 500 pages each, the books were less often remembered for having pro- and anti- voices, historicism and observations concerning the presentation of Kennedy’s assassination and Nixon's fall from grace and then from office, than they were for being extended bids at convincing his audience that Stone was right about the historical theses that he presented in these pictures. Did the change in decades, and hence alteration in the political atmosphere, have something to do with the way that the films were conceived and the reception around them handled? Certainly, the Clintonian, post-Cold War 1990s seem a more halcyon interlude now, looking back: a coda to the 1950s where the imminent threat of total war was replaced by the strategic anxieties of individual campaigns.

As the Cold War ended, and even allowing for interventions such as Bosnia and Somalia, the 1990s could be seen retrospectively as a staging post: the calm before the storm of 9/11 and the Bush Doctrine that followed.° In that temporary lull, Stone’s attention did not waver, but arguably that of the American audience did; caressed first with the hubris that washed in after the first Gulf War and the embrace of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history thesis;'° and later with the celebrity scandals of O. J. Simpson and Michael Jackson, together with easy political distractions such as the Monica Lewinsky story.” Stone’s history in Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Nixon was wholehearted and demanding, but the end of the Cold War had untethered the USA and left the past not as prologue — as Stone’s adopted Shakespearean quote from the end of JFK advised — but as just that: history. Was it any wonder that he lost traction in the mood of the times? Moreover, a related and potentially even bigger issue for him was the voguish style of cinema being employed.

The force of the truth/fiction, artist/historian binaries that swirled around the director in those years, for example, lost its force as audiences adjusted to the new world order and sought different and less contested cinematic narratives away from Stone’s acerbic treatise. Pepper and McCrisken do a fine job of outlining many of the scholars and critics who supported Stone’s agenda in the early 1990s. They argue that his politics could be seen as visceral and aesthetic, as much as it was ideological and historically authentic. Quoting Jack Davis, they identify Stone’s talent for making people ‘experience history not on an intellectual level but on an emotional one’. They go on to identify the danger in this approach too, which more often than not results in audiences ‘feeling’ history rather than ‘thinking’ about it — but was Stone at fault here? His media commentaries and book response with JFK and Nixon were designed to support his case, but they also seemed to suggest that he anticipated that danger, as well as a need to encourage a thinking and critical edge to the reception of his films.

The broader change that Pepper and McCrisken pointed to was real enough. As the 1990s proceeded and the new millennium dawned, reliving, feeling and experiencing the past became increasingly important to society at large, arguably more so than actually studying it. Indeed, who could argue that historians themselves, certainly on television and film, were not adopting a similar trick and making the study of history popular, if not populist, once more? The issue for Stone and his style of filmmaking was that much of this popular exploration of the past was being played out in Hollywood with the emphasis on not simply feeling the past, but feeling good about it: a trend solidly exemplified in popular pictures such as The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992), Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) and Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995), as well as The Patriot (Roland Emmerich, 2000).

The waves of controversy rolling in for JFK and Nixon during the 1990s did not interrupt the idea that Stone should, could and did have provocative things to say about the past, and about academic as well as mainstream accounts of it. If nothing else, he strongly countered the idea that cinema was merely an entertainment medium, whatever its pretensions; ironically enough, an idea that probably sat far less easily with Hollywood executives in the 1990s than it had done a decade before. Nevertheless, there was a mismatch here. Stone’s instincts were taking him in one direction towards historical enquiry and reassessment, while the country was moving somewhere else. Audiences who thought that indeed they had reached the end of history, were finding less use for contested versions of the past.

In the 2000s then, Stone’s filmmaking altered along with his outlook in the wake of 9/11. That link between cultural influence through box-office vitality, political commentary by way of studio allegiance to the director's vision (Stone’s relationship with

N | INTRODUCTION oo | THE CINEMA OF OLIVER STONE

Bob Daly and Warner Bros. in the early 1990s was crucial in this regard), and just some unknown capacity to spot the trends and desires of wider society which then can be communicated through a story or historical period, were no longer as much of a vital confluence as they once were in Stone’s filmmaking. Alexander (2004) and World Trade Center (2006) seemed perfectly in line with tastes and predilections for the return of the ‘sword-and-sandals’ historical epic and, after 2005, a harder-edged, more resonant assessment of the nation five years on from 9/11. These were productions that followed in the wake of successes such as Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006).3 However, not only did these films precede Stone’s, they also garnered more critical and commercial attention and somehow seemed more fiery and resolute than his efforts. Gladiator's conventional ‘honourable man seeks justice for himself and Rome’ narrative was uncomplicated by any deeper historicism than a reconditioned and CGI-ed Coliseum, and played well with audiences both at home and overseas. On a reported budget of $103 million, it took $187 million at the domestic box office and a further $258 million outside the USA. Nominated in twelve categories, the film won five Oscars.

By comparison, Stone’s Alexander offered a more complex biopic of the enigmatic progress of Alexander the Great, incorporating all of the inevitable unanswered questions that history throws up along the way. The consumption by mainstream US audiences of the original 2004 release (it was subsequently re-edited no less than three times) was complicated further by Stone’s decision to confront the issue of homosexuality with his central character. Be it in spite of (or because of) such a portrayal, the film did not fare well at the US box office, taking a mere $34 million on a reported budget of $155 million. (The film’s nomination for six Golden Raspberry (‘Razzie’) awards" did not help its profile either.) Overall, Alexander was rescued commercially by its performance outside the USA, where the reception was kinder and the picture made a further $133 million.

In the comparison of World Trade Center with United 93 — the story of the final moments of the commercial airliner hijacked by terrorists that was headed for Washington, DC, but which eventually crashed in a field in Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001 — the contention was one of aesthetics more than historicism. One could have imagined Stone making a very similar film to Greengrass’s with such a script and raw material. Instead, there was a perceived conventionality to his take on the attacks which, in World Trade Center, took the form of following in the footsteps of real-life Port Authority policemen John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (Nicolas Cage and Michael Peria) as they battled into, got trapped in and then buried amid the collapsing towers on 9/11. The film follows their rescue and eventual rehabilitation, casting its gaze across the eyes of heroic first responders battling the fires and destruction of Lower Manhattan on that day.

Not for the first time, Stone’s treatment of the subject-matter wrong-footed critics and supporters alike. The narrative sub-text in Alexander anchored the film around a bisexual leader immersed in a Middle East military conquest when the USA was engaged militarily in Iraq. Such analogous conflict certainly suggested to many a polemical intent. By contrast, World Trade Center was absent of polemics at a time when the Left was beginning to question the foreign policy direction taken by the Bush administration in the halfdecade since 9/11. Therefore, taken together, the two films invited the ire of social conservatives on the one hand, and the disdain of liberal supporters on the other.

The latter seemed especially bitter. The Onion satirical publication took to ‘revealing’ World Trade Centers major conceit: that there was a ‘single-plane’ theory central to the tale of 9/11, and that Stone’s film was about to unleash its story on an unsuspecting world which had not thought about the prospect of one plane crashing into everything!"° Can artists survive everything except ridicule? Was the story no more than an irreverent homage to Stone’s previous power and force? After all, the director himself was no stranger to self-parody. He was perfectly happy in the 1990s to help fellow director Ivan Reitman concoct his fantasy ‘presidential takeover by common man story in Dave (1993), by playing himself appearing on Larry King Live and suggesting — rightly, of course, in the plot — that President Mitchell (Kevin Kline playing both parts) in the White House was no longer the same incumbent as he had been before his alleged collapse and hospitalisation. Time naturally mellows people and adds perspective and, notwithstanding the Reitman cameo, Stone could afford to be more generous in his position than once was the case. Nevertheless, the irreverence, oO | INTRODUCTION d | THE CINEMA OF OLIVER STONE together with the emergence of a new generation of political filmmakers in the early 2000s, did seem to be marginalising a director who was once the fulcrum of polemical cinematic angst in Hollywood. Stone followed World Trade Center with his third presidential biopic, W. about George W. Bush in 2008, followed by a reprise of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), and a tour around the perils of drug dealing in Savages (2012). All three films had things to say about their subject matter, but all did so with noticeably more muted polemics than supporters and critics alike had expected.

Indeed, Stone’s career since the turn of the millennium suggests a director less easily defined than his convenient monikers (‘controversial, ‘angry’, ‘polemical’, ‘political filmmaker’) would have one believe. If it also suggests that Stone’s position as a critical and commercial purveyor of political cinema is no longer as dominant as it once was, one might ask: what is left to say about Hollywood’s most vociferous filmmaker of his generation? This book does focus attention on the period from the late t990s to the middle of the second decade of the new century. However, it does so not counterintuitively or to the exclusion of Stone’s ‘classic’ era, but more as a coda to it: a rejoinder that adds weight and emphasis to the past, and to the overall assessment of the man and his films. It also realigns this later period (the second half of Stone’s career, if you will) with the context of his early films, challenging some of the typical perceptions of commentators that have seen his work as flabbier and less insistent than the earlier years — simply not as provocative as the director was in his pomp.

Certainly, the aesthetic bravado that so infused JFK, Nixon, The Doors (1991) and Natural Born Killers, as well as the polemical responses that characterised Salvador, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, do seem sparser in the work after 1997. The topics seem more diverse too. From ancient historical epics to sports films, to recollections of 9/11, Stone appeared to scour the landscape of American (and world) history and culture in search of subject matter: this when polemics, rhetorical posturing and angry condemnations of US cultural, economic and political imperialism came as naturally to others as they had to him in previous times. However, as filmmakers are apt to do, Stone actually changed direction in the late 1990s — a central theme to be explored here — and self-consciously moved away from some of the bigger questions and larger dilemmas which had occupied his filmmaking for two decades.

In seeking evidence of change within his film catalogue, the variances were as much to do with treatment as theme. Stone’s desire to deal in issues and events of national and international importance was self-evident from the start. With the release of Salvador in 1986 and consolidated by JFK five years later, Stone had reached a point already where he found himself in the role of spokesperson for a nebulous array of liberal and left-leaning political interests in the USA. ‘This critique of the establishment is part of who I am,’ he admitted in interview, and reviewers found the cloak fitted him well.” Critics at the time described the former film as ‘thrilling’, ‘violent and gutsy and ‘a brand of left-wing machismo that’s nearly extinct.” Stone said he liked the ‘anarchy in Salvador, and the camera’s breathless intensity and kinetic energy certainly set a tone for all that was to come, both cinematically and ideologically.