#1511 - Oliver Stone

Look at you.

Looking good there. What year is that from?

It was 1968, November. I just come off the last mission in Vietnam.

Wow.

It was on a hilltop. We got stuck in the rain in the Ashao Valley. It was the first cavalry and the helicopters couldn't get in for eleven days. It was awful.

Wow.

We had leeches everywhere. And the enemy, we didn't know where they were, but we felt that they were going to close in. But it was too wet, ultimately, for them to close in. But they knew we were there, so we were praying. The whole time was kind of nerve wracking because it was my last few days, you understand, I was supposed to get out of there, Wadiros, leave the country. I was due out. I had volunteered for an extra three months in order to get out of the army three months sooner.

Wow.

In other words, normally you had to serve. If a two year deal, you had to serve six months stateside on the backside of it. So I didn't want to do that because I was going nuts with the rules and the regulations, and I'd gotten into some trouble with that. So I extended in combat for another three months, and that ended up in this mission.

How much did your time serving impact your directing? And you've had these life experiences as someone who's just a filmmaker they really can't draw upon. You've had actual combat experience, and when you're making movies about combat, I mean, that has to be a gigantic advantage, or at least it adds layers to it that are almost impossible to recreate for someone who's just trying to imagine what it's like.

Yeah. And that was very important. When we did Platoon, I was trying to get the exact distances and the amount of firepower is not, as usual, it's not as intense, generally speaking, as the movies make it. And that's the problem, because the movies have so much to show. They bring the enemy much closer. They condense things and they amplify as much as possible. Now, I did that, too. Here and there. So I'm guilty, too. But I think overall it's way overdone. And the newer stuff that's come out since 2001 with the patriotic stuff and heavily militaristic stuff is way off. Way off. And people don't die that way in the type of films like Mark Wahlberg made. Know those kind of films, they just way overdone anyway.

In what way?

Well, what was the name of the film? Lone survivor.

Yeah.

Was that the name of it?

Yeah.

They get dropped off, whatever, ten guys, and they manage to kill how many taliban for each guy.

How much of that was based on. I mean, it's all about Marcus Latrell's life. I haven't had a chance to talk to Marcus, although I'm friends with him, but I don't know how much of it. They monkey with everything whenever they make way overdone.

It was way overdone. What I heard and what's been reported is that they got trapped right away. It was pretty quick. The ambush went on, and they got the shit kicked out of themselves. And I don't remember exactly the details, but he did get away and some people did scam, but it doesn't look like it does in the movie where everyone's a hero.

Right. That is a problem. And that's one of the things that I really loved about Platoon. Everyone wasn't a hero. I mean, the Tom Behringer character.

Yeah, he existed. It's in the book. It's based on a guy called Sergeant. Well, I called him Sergeant Barnes, but he had a. Wouldn't use his real name. Real guy getting shot in the face was scarred, distorted, kind of handsome like that. But he was a serious guy, and he knew what he was doing. He was the leader of the platoon. See, I made clear that the leaders of the platoon were not really the lieutenants. They were the platoon sergeant and the squad sergeants. And they were very important in our lives. So I barely saw officers. I was dealing in the jungle. You deal with what's right in front of you. So the sergeant was crucial. Barnes is a crucial character. So is the other character. Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, was in another unit that I had combined four different units. I was in three combat units. I combined them into one unit, one platoon, for this movie purposes.

So the Willem Defoe character was also based on a real person?

Yes, he was. He was based on a guy I knew in the LURPS long range recon patrol, who was a great guy. He was an Apache, kind of an apache mexican mix. I'm not quite sure what he was because I didn't get to know him that well, but I admired him because he had that life grace of a guy who fought a lot, had been around. He'd been in before. He was on a second tour and very much a beloved figure. And he was killed after I left the unit. He was killed about a month later in a friendly fire accident. Now, friendly fire is. We talk about it in the book quite a bit because it's also underestimated people. Never. The Pentagon cuts it all out, especially in the movies that come from the Pentagon approval.

Right.

They don't like to emphasize how difficult, how often. I would say 15% to 20% of our casualties in that war were friendly fire.

Wow.

Now, that's not just ground fire. When you get into a jungle situation, you're close to people, you don't really know where you're shooting. Sometimes you don't know where the incoming fire is coming from. So it's quite a mess. It's chaotic. The radio, people screaming, shouting, noise, confusion, and a lot of fear.

Yeah. That was highlighted for us when the Pat Tillman incident happened.

Very important one.

Pat Tillman, who is this spectacular athlete, decided to postpone his NFL career and go over and serve and was killed in friendly fire. And it wasn't really reported that way for a while.

That's absolutely correct. Which is the point is that they really don't want the parents to know what's really going on. So imagine 15, maybe 20% are dying from that friendly fire. This is not just ground fire. This is, of course, bombing and certainly artillery fire, because that is often misplaced. It's not that easy to get the coordinates down in a tense situation where you can hit your artillery 20 miles away, 40 miles away, has to hit.

The spot when you're making a movie like platoon. And this is in many, much of it is based on your actual real life experience. How much preparation is involved then? How much is it different than when you're making another movie? Because this is something that's intensely personal to you, obviously.

Yeah. How much preparation? Well, I got a great combat advisor. He'd been there as a marine, Dale Dye. He came in out of the blue and he was a real lifer type. So he remembered all the details of uniforms and fire and the firepower. It took a lot of details to put this together, but the preparation was. I'd been doing it for ten years. I started the picture in 1976. I wrote it. It wasn't made. It was rejected by the powers it be the first time. And then it was considered great script, but too realistic, a bummer, a downer. If you remember back in the 70s, they had apocalypse now and Deer Hunter. Yeah, those were big films and mythic, beautiful films, but they were not realistic. Then they had Sylvester Stallone do his Rambo series where he goes back and fights the war again.

Do those drive you crazy?

Yeah. Although the first one was pretty good.

The first one was different.

They're playing up the whole sympathy card, the pity card. I don't buy that. There's a lot of that veteran feeling that we had our hands tied behind our backs and we couldn't win and that kind of thing. Believe me, it was a badly conceived war with a lot of misinformation. I go on in the book and talk about the lies that were spread by the military, the propaganda that were winning the whole time. They were using the body counts, heavy body counts. We'd say, well, if we're killing so many of them, they're not going to be that many left. But on the other hand, as the years went on, more and more of them kept appearing. So the Vietnamese were indestructible in a way. They were like ants. They were fighting for their independence, for their land, man. It was their country, and they never gave up, ever. You could have nuked them. And that's what Curtis Lemay at one point suggested. You could have dropped a nuclear bomb. It wouldn't have made the difference. Thank God they didn't. But America went to extremes to win that war with poisoning. The bombing of not only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was intense. Intense. Bigger by far than World War II for this crazy war.

Well, it set a precedent for our lack of trust in the military,