Oliver Stone

The war in Vietnam is a principal subject of your films. Why is it so important for you?

Well, in a sense, my own war was fought, and I shot in 1986 with "Platoon", and I got it out of my system. I became interested in really the second picture, "Born on the Fourth of July", with Tom Cruise was about what America went through after the war and the veterans who came home, the second war at home. And the third film really resulted because I was looking at Ron Kovic's suffering and I was wondering why we suffer, why do people go through this and what is the meaning of it and how do we overcome suffering. So that in a way led me to the Le Ly Hayslip book because she deals with her suffering. She has been through hell in her life and she, in the context of her Buddhist faith, explains clearly to me the meaning of suffering and why and how we can overcome it. I think that that was a reason, a moral lesson.

She has great compassion. She's learned to forgive the people who made her suffer. She has no enemies. She's a woman who understands both sides. And I think she's a wonderful heroine, an extraordinary person. So that's why I wanted to make the movie. It's not so much about Vietnam as it is about this woman and her epic struggle through life. And I think it can happen to anybody in any country. It's not about a war. It's about peace, too. It's about suffering.

But I would like to add one thing, if you don't mind. I'd like to add that beyond that, the personal story of this woman is the story of America, too, because I don't think America has learned the lessons of the Vietnam War. We continue to intervene in Third World countries. We're the policemen. We go into situations like in Africa recently where we really don't understand what people are feeling and thinking. And we make the tragic mistake of thinking that they think like we think. And they don't. And then I feel that eventually continuing to do this is going to lead to another major tragedy. And America might wake up.

But unless we absorb the lessons of Vietnam, which we haven't, we're fucked. I mean, it's a country that, my country still has an embargo with Vietnam. That means we don't recognize them. We don't even acknowledge that they have suffered. Three million Vietnamese were killed. It was a holocaust, a holocaust. We talk about the German Holocaust, but we ignore the Asian Holocaust. There is a situation that unless you acknowledge the suffering that we imposed on the Vietnamese, we cannot even begin the process of healing, of pardoning ourselves.

So it hasn't gone away, that war, and the lessons of it.

You've been in Vietnam as a soldier. When and why did you change your meaning, your opinion?

Oh, I think my personal story, I changed my feelings and opinions really in the early 1970s during the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate era. I began to question it. But then I was still dealing with the American situation, the American problems, the American ethnocentricity. And after I'd made the two films—it took me a long time to make the films, no Americans didn't want to hear about it—but after I made those two films, then I felt that I really should go on and deal with the Vietnamese side of the problem and what they went through.

Do you feel guilty for this war?

I think I did. I think I got over that. I think we should acknowledge the suffering of the Vietnamese, and that is a very important first step. We should confront our demons. That's not to say that Americans are ever going to apologize. They're not. But at least they can begin the process of acknowledging, of realizing that other people suffered besides themselves. And that's the beginning of a healing process. Compassion is the ability to understand what the other side went through.

Right now in America, all we hear about are the American missing in action still. And this is an ethnocentric point of view. It ignores the larger question of how many Asians died, and it's almost a racist point of view. And we don't recognize Vietnam, and I think that that's a disgrace. We recognized Germany, and within three or four years Germany was rebuilt after World War II. We recognized Japan, we rebuilt Japan.

Your film has a very serious subject. Your hero is a woman from Vietnam, but your film is also a commercial film, a film for a big audience. It's a contradiction for you?

No, no, because movies are made to be seen by as many people as you can see them. There's an aspect of them that movies should be international, they should be global. We are living in a global society. I think nationalism is hopefully a dying force. Although I would preserve local cultures, I'm not against that at all, but I think it's important that we make films that lift up humanity and make us aware of global problems. So one makes the film with the hope of it being exciting and not boring and not too local, not too provincial, and seen by as many people as possible.

Making a commercial film, you are nevertheless in your political direction completely free?

Why not? There's no contradiction between money and politics, or money and freedom of expression. Money is a form of communication. It is an accepted form of communication for centuries. It is a commodity. You use it to act compassionately. One can give money. One can use money to give messages. One can make movies that inspire people. Money works. It's a working system. I think the excesses of money, the grotesqueries of money are bad and are criticizable, but one mustn't throw out the baby with the bathwater because of some excesses of money.

Films cost money. A large concentration of capital is required to make a movie, with period design, costumes, building villages, building rice fields. These are inevitable problems of movies, unless you make very low-budget movies inside apartments about local issues. It's very difficult. So if you have this concentration of capital to make a movie, I feel that you must respect the obligation to try to return the money to the person who put up the money.

How do you see Vietnam today, the communist Vietnam?

I think it's very poor. It's been hurt very much by the embargo, but they're very intelligent people, very hardworking, very spiritual. Unfortunately, the government continues to be a bit of a drag behind the times. It's not ahead of the times. Slow, authoritarian, and communist, and also it's imprisoned many of the leading Buddhists in that country, and I think that's, it's an abuse of human rights, and it's an abuse of spiritual freedom. I condemn it completely.

However, the government can be worked with, and the government, like the Chinese government, it's just part of the process of negotiation. It's not something you condemn in black and white, you have to negotiate.

After your works about Vietnam, about these three films, do you have a moral which you want to communicate about this dark history?

Well, certainly the lessons of Vietnam are many. I mean, it's so arrogant of one country to intervene in another without understanding the real nature of the conflict. And that is true not only for America, but true throughout history in many cases, and to repeat that lesson is valuable. To repeat the lessons of the need for compassion, the need for healing, the need for the path of love is important, even if it sounds like it's an old message, it's an important message. The need for a greater understanding between peoples, the need for moving beyond the nationalism of borders, of countries, America, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, we must, in this new century, spiritual century, hopefully, push beyond narrow definitions of countries and push into a global arena, where we are aware of a global issue, which is the environment, population control, and hopefully the United Nations can function as a peacekeeping force for the entire world, and not just when the United States wants to use it.

My last question, will you make another film about Vietnam?

I don't know the answer to that. Right now I've completed a sort of circle for myself. These are all three eyewitness accounts. I've achieved a lot for myself, I've learned a lot. Each film has grown from the other film. I never set out to do three films. Each film came about because of the previous film. If I ever did another one, I think it might be a more macrocosmic view of the situation: the political war, the military commanders, that kind of an Olympic-size look. But I'm not sure that it would be a commercial idea, I'm not sure.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.