The Jordan Harbinger Show - 411: Oliver Stone | Writing, Directing, and Surviving the Movie Game

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) is a film director, producer, and writer known for tackling controversial political issues in films like JFK and Platoon. He is also the author of Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game. What We Discuss with Oliver Stone: The lesson Oliver learned about humanity -- when he was a cab driver prior to becoming a world-famous director -- that still rings true for him today. Why Oliver chose to serve in the infantry during the Vietnam War when a lot of his contemporaries (including several presidents) did all they could do to avoid going. What happened when Oliver snuck an obscene amount of LSD into his uptight father's scotch one night. The projects Oliver has had to abandon in recent years, and why some of his earlier films would be impossible to make now. Oliver's candid thoughts on Vladimir Putin, the CIA, cyberwarfare, and the culpability of the American media in current affairs. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/411 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspiruality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. We've been lied to. The public has been lied to. And they've created false narratives, constantly, and false criteria. And on that basis, we've gone to war.

This is what's crazy. Who's to blame? If our media was honest and asked these questions, we wouldn't have been in these wars. And a lot of people would be alive today. We'd be a far healthier country. We'd be dealing with a climate crisis, which is really fucking important,

instead of dividing ourselves, being distracted. not pay any attention to the biggest problem of all. And it could all be dealt with rationally, but they never do this. It's just impossible to be logical here. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Entrepreneurs and astronauts, spies and psychologists, and even the

occasional legendary Hollywood director. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. Today, legendary director Oliver Stone is with us. Oliver has directed Midnight Express, Platoon, JFK, Snowden, Scarface, and Natural Born Killers, Need I Go On? On this episode, we get inside the brain of one of Hollywood's most iconic and controversial directors.

We'll also discover some of Oliver's political beliefs which may even overshadow his film career, and we'll also explore the creative process and some of the side effects of a life lived in Hollywood. Spoiler alert, it involves lots of cocaine. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and celebrities every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company.

Now, here's Oliver Stone. You were a cab driver, and I'm wondering if you learned anything about people doing that job that maybe ended up in your movies. Because I know 18 months after that, you win an Oscar for Midnight Express. So it didn't really develop in a vacuum. And Cabby sees some weird stuff. I would say overall, my impression is that people are good. People are honest. People care.

I don't get a, the Joker's viewpoint of humanity, you know. I get a feeling that people behave. Sure, a few people stiff me for fares. they'd take me out to some suburb like Queens or somewhere, and they'd stiff you. But most of the people were pretty good. It was a hard job because I was writing in the daytime walking back home at late of night. It was across town so I couldn't take the bus or subway. It was freezing cold at night.

If you live in Paris or London, the streets are curved and all that, so you don't get all the winds that come off the river. And in New York, they go straight geographically down, like linear to linear progression. Boy, it's fucking cold at 2 in the morning when you're coming back. I was making 35 bucks a day, roughly, on a good day, 40 bucks sometimes on New Year's Eve, maybe 45. You know, it wasn't big money, but it was good money for that year, 1973, too. We used to beat the cab company as we could. Yeah, we would get paid in cash sometimes.

You know, we run it off the meter. But they caught us. They caught me a couple of times. Taking the fare and not reporting it, basically. They'd have undercover cars in traffic. So you never knew if you didn't have the meter up and you had a customer, you were in trouble. Oh, I didn't even think about you. they just were trying to match the meter.

So they would look in your car and see if you had it up. No, they'd tell from outside. The eyes could see. Oh, wow. If you had a customer and you didn't have the flag up, they'd get you. And I got fined once or twice. And of course, you have the whole professional cab drivers like the Peter Boyle character and taxi driver. You know, you have those kind of guys and you say, oh, I don't want to ever become that.

I'm just doing this temporarily, right? But you get worried sometimes. Yeah, year 10, you're thinking, is this still my temporary job or is this my forever job? Listen, I thought about that a lot. You read those passages. I mean, I love waiters that are good. They really are important to our blood supply. It's important.

But I was scared, terrified of becoming a professional waiter. Yeah. Because a lot of those guys did start as actors or opera singers or whatever, and then over time. It can be scary. And I think there's a whole lot of unmet potential, especially today, given how bad our educational system has failed everyone. I mean, people say, like, do I have unmet potential? Or is this really my potential?

And I thought, oh, you know, it's easy to say. Everyone thinks they have unmet potential, but it's kind of true. I mean, there's a lot of people that you can tell have raw material. I volunteer a lot inside prisons. And you can tell that some of those guys, if they hadn't been born into absolute squalor and then been essentially devoid of opportunity from day one, they would have been entrepreneurs, business owners, super talented singers, dancers, writers. There's so much talent locked in there. I used to feel when I was younger, I mean, I'm not sure about now, that there was no choice in life. If you did not have a scientific, technical education. Your choices were very limited. I always felt that the soft sciences were not really going to get your jobs. Yeah, you could work your way into something. You can bullshit your way into something. You could say you have a degree in social working or something like that. But I always said, I really wish I had a mathematics. My father was good at mathematics. He was a broker and he really was smart. I knew what smart was. I mean, I was surrounded by a lot of smart people when I was young, but I didn't have that ability. So, for

For me, it was writing, unfortunately. I didn't have a voice, singing voice. I couldn't play an instrument well. So if it was writing or busts, you know, that was it. And I knew it kind of after the Vietnam thing. And I was writing for those screenplays, all those years of what, 10, 12 screenplays I must have written before I got Midnight Express. You had a bit of a tumultuous upbringing. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, it's in the book. Yeah. Well, yeah. And a lot of this is in a book. We're trying to sort of get people to get really interested and then go out and buy it. The name of it is chasing the light, right?

And it came out a month ago or so. I had a very good upbringing, very sheltered in New York City up until about the age of 15. They sent me to boarding school. I think they knew something was coming, but I didn't. I thought they were happily married. I really was very pleased with my family, and they were violently divorced. It was a horrible story cheating on each other. Both sides, it broke apart my world because I was the only child, so there were only three

people in the family when they divorce and the mother goes back to another place in Europe. Father stays in, she was French. I was really, in a sense, on my own. I mean, my father was there, but I didn't want to live with him anymore. I was kind of depressed about it all. And I flunked out of Yale, basically. I ended up first time in Vietnam as a teacher for two terms in high school. And then I went to the Merchant Marine. And I traveled around Asia. I learned a lot. Wrote a book. It was not successful. It was not accepted for publication, but I had my heart in it and then flunked out a second time and went off to the war, which changed me for good. I mean, I came back from that experience, and I was kind of disoriented and numb and alienated. At the age of 22, I went back

into film school at NYU, which was a whole different, a vocational education, but I can't say it was an education in liberal sciences, which I got later in life, making a thing called Untold history of the United States. I really did study hard with professional historians, the history of the United States. Film school, one of your professors was Martin Scorsese, and what was he like 26 years old or something like that? Yeah, he was older than us. He was a star student. He was the celebrity, so to speak. People knew that he was going to make it because everybody's goal was to make it in the film business and make films. And he'd made one feature, and he was about to make mean streets about to. He was very energetic, very strong opinion. He saw film like a religion,

you know, and he talked about it like that with great spunk and humor and excitement. The classes were fun. He was teaching sight and sound. He was one of maybe five to ten professors that were all good, you know. It was a very sharp place in the 60s. It was a new science, a new art form, so to speak. Nobody really had studied film. It was ridiculous. We all thought we're seeing movies and we're getting a degree. That's kind of, what's wrong with that? Plus, I was getting the GI Bill, which paid for most of the tuition. You weren't even drafted to go to Vietnam, right? You wanted to go, which is not the usual story that we hear. You know, we hear people saying, oh, I got flat feet. I couldn't go to Vietnam, even though I was drafted. Well, most of my generation, yeah. But the people

around me in my schooling, absolutely not. Very few of them went. With that, you have to include Bill Clinton. You have to include George W. Bush and Donald Trump. All those people were my contemporaries. In fact, Bush was in my class at Yale, and he went on to be a mediocre student, and he got a crazy kind of deferment through his father out of Texas. The Air National Guard, I believe, in Alabama or something, and he screwed that up, too, and they covered all that story up. And when Dan Rather actually revealed something about what happened there, he got fired. So there was a big cover up in a way to Bush was a very poor student and a poor strange that these guys always want to go to war. The guy's like the other guy, the chicken hawks, you know, the Dick Cheney's and the George Bushes, at least you could say in Trump's favor that he hasn't actively pursued a war, but he, you know, he's close sometimes.

And Clinton, of course, bombed Yugoslavia and did various things, but didn't seem to think twice about expanding NATO after the Gorbachev-Ragan Treaty. That was a big deal for me. Anyway, I went to Vietnam because, as I tried to say in the book, partly suicidal. was a death instinct. It was like I have no place in the world. What I was saying to you earlier about not really being educated or trained, and that the fact that the book that I'd written, which was finally published in 1997 as A Child's Night Dream, I was a book writer, really, and I really wanted it to succeed. When they rejected it, I felt like I was overreaching myself and then I was out of line. I had to learn the world, the way the world really worked. And I wanted

to go to the bottom of the barrel. I didn't want to go to school, back to school. I didn't want any special treatment. I wanted to be in the Army. I wanted to be anonymous, and I wanted to be infantry. And I wanted to go Vietnam because I didn't want to get bored to death in Germany or South Korea. I wanted where the action was. I was a young, active man. I had a different impression of war from the movies and, of course, from television.

American society is very violent. You see it in all the media, even in the 50s. Let's not kidding around. They were massacres. They weren't as bloody as they are now, but it was always violence. the threat of balance, that was what made movies and TV go for me. And I went there under that basis. So I didn't blame anybody, and I didn't bitch about it. I was fatalist, and I ended up serving 15 months, most of them in a three combat platoons, one in an auxiliary

unit in Saigon for two months, but the rest in the combat, in the field, in the south, in the 25th infantry, in the north in the First Cavalry. It's amazing that you, you know, you volunteer and there. And I heard you started to take photographs, which then led you into film. Or were you interested in film before that, and photography was a little detour? No, that's at the very end of my tour the last three months when I sort of knew what I was doing as a soldier. I bought a camera at the PX, and I, Pentaxis, I remember, and I took pictures because it was a beautiful country, amazing country, the rainforests, the sense of perspective, the green was amazing in the monsoon season. And, of course, getting things wet was a real problem. So you can't ride

anything in the field. You can't keep notes. Generally speaking, it dries up. It gets wet. Everything gets wet as a soldier. So I put a camera in a little plastic bag and I hauled it around. I got some great shots. I know that when you came back, you ended up with a federal smuggling charge for marijuana. Was it just like everybody smoking grass in Vietnam? Was that just, no, no, no, no. It was very much of a white, a red-blue thing. No, the black soldiers with me were, I mean, not all the black soldiers, but certainly I was hanging out with a bunch of heads. They called them back then, and the juices, the juices were the guys who drank booze. They were a lot of white southern guys on typecasting, but that's sort of true the way it broke down. Now, the black guys were

really cool, and they really helped me get through that war because, you know, it wasn't there at war. They were cool about it and fun. And the music, they had great music. They had Motown going big back then and jazz and Mongo, Santa Maria, all that kind of stuff. They were playing in the back, in the hoochers. They had their own hooch. We had secret hootches where we smoked. It showed it in platoon. You know, guys dancing together. There was a femininity that we missed, you know. We didn't have ladies. So it was this wonderful kind of bond that grew up between us. They didn't owe me anything. And I was, I'd never met black people before my life. I came from New York City privileged. So it was quite an introduction to another group of people. And I thought

they were really cool, much cooler than the white guys who most tended to be uptight. It saved my life. Because it kept me human, kept me human. And that's really hard to do in a situation like that where you're in a front line unit. And some of these guys are real assholes. I mean, you have no idea what some of those master sergeants in the Army were like. They're lifers. And they'd been around a long time.

And they're all looking for making extra buck. They're all looking for promotion. They're cracking down on you for every bullshit rule they can get you on. So there was a lot of tension. And I got an article 15, stuff like that. What's that article 15 again? I've heard of that. That's a disciplinary action.

It's short of a court martial. What did you get an article 15 for? You know, it was a stupid thing like my boots were not bloused or my clothes were, I was in from the field, you see. I was combat vet. And at that time, I was posted in Saigon as an auxiliary MP, military police guy guarding barracks at night, which is a tough job. And they didn't like the way I dressed and the way I looked and my attitude.

So they bust you. And I made a deal with him. I said, okay, fuck you. I'm not going to take Article 15 because it's going to lead. to some time, and they're going to add that time to my time. So I went back to the field. I made a deal and said, I'll go back to the field, and you dropped their charges. That kind of thing. People were making deals all the time. When I was an auxiliary policeman, I happened to be in the MP headquarters, and I saw all the posters for the guys, this is 68 now in January, February, no, February, March

68, all the guys that were wanted on the wanted list, you'd be surprised at the amount of black market shit going on, deserters, GIs who had disappeared and were living in Saigon with their girlfriends and making a bundle of cash. It was all kinds of schemes. It was kind of an interesting subculture. It was a black guy that was famous. He'd been out for two years roaming around the Saigon docks, and he made a fortune in money. You see, PX was a big racket in Vietnam. They built a few of them. They was like, we built Las Vegas over there. People would go there, and they had all kinds of inside deals, especially the master sergeants. They got busted in a major scandal after the war came. It came out. They would buy cars, televisions. They'd buy anything they could from the PX. And then

they'd sell them, resell them at a profit to all kinds of Vietnamese collaborators who were racketeers essentially, very smart to Vietnamese. They saw us as a buck, you know, that's what they saw the USS. They were suckers. We were the guys who were bringing a huge amount of money to the country. They didn't give a shit about what was going to happen. They were just trying to score. People were into a short-time survival over there, you know? Very smart people. They were into these rackets. I mean, we're talking about millions of dollars.

We're still worth millions. All over the country. It was a big racket. The whole war, officers would come over there, and they would go there basically to get promoted. They would stay in the rear. They'd be treated like kings, you know, dying on white tablecloths, the best of everything for generals in this. But a lot of them were, you know, into some kind of game. They'd get promotions.

Those guys were not cheating. And they were not trying to steal money because that was a bigger racket for the sergeants and the lower class people. But if you're an officer, you want to get promotions. You want to get battle. You want to get as many medals as you can. They phony up the reports. As a whole war was just phony body counts, phony actions. Most of the battle actions were completely exaggerated. The post-battle reports, exaggerated. We killed 152 NVA. Bullshit. You know, they killed villagers, and maybe they had a few NVA in there. That's what happened a lot. That's what Milai was about. Milai in March 68, 500 plus civilians killed. Not one enemy bullet was fired. I researched that and almost made a movie about it. They wouldn't let me, though. They wouldn't finance it.

Who's the they? They, they, they, they, the fucking financial set. It was 2007, eight, nine. That was a mili. I did a lot of work on that. Didn't work out. The Milai massacre will link to that Wikipedia and the show notes for people that aren't sure.

Is that where that famous photo is from of the little girl walking down the road? No, no, no, no, no. That was a bombing somewhere. Okay. A napalm bomb or something. She got burned or something. I just remember it's a naked little girl standing in a road really upset. It's a video, actually, and I don't know if it's a photo.

I don't know. I thought it was shot by that wonderful. Nick U.T.T. I think he shot that. Only she told me that. Yeah, I don't know. Vietnamese war photographer working for the U.S. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Oliver Stone.

We'll be right back. And now back to Oliver Stone on the Jordan Harbinger Show. You know, the appetite for drugs, not to belabor the point, I'm just kind of stuck on this. Like, the appetite for drugs in the United States, it seems like a lot of people get into it. You said that in the friendship with the African-American soldiers saved your life. I mean, it seems like a lot of people are getting into or have been into drugs since they've been invented, essentially, or discovered, in order to fill like a spiritual vacuum or to sort of fulfill something that maybe you had lost before you even got to Vietnam. No, no, no.

I was pretty innocent. I never really smoked grass. I mean, once or twice. I did it for the first time. I did two things for the first time in Vietnam. Started smoking cigarettes, which stayed with me until I was about 33, and started smoking dope. And I loved it.

I kept going with a dope. I stopped a cigarette at 33, but I kept going with a dope. In fact, I got into not then, but they started to get heavier. The whole scene got heavier. Cool cigarettes. Remember cools? Yeah, with a K. They were gray.

Yeah, with a K. Cools were menthols. And they were like, for me, the strongest menthol there was. And you do that after a joint. And we really give you a buzz. That's why Kool was very popular among the black soldiers. Very popular. I think they still are.

Like, there's a Dave Chappelle skit where he says, why do black people smoke menthol cigarettes? And the person goes, I don't know. And he's like, that's the right answer. I don't know. Why do we do that? It's like a super popular thing. I don't think Salem is the same thing. No.

But anyway, what was I going to say? Yeah. But then after 69, afterwards. really, heroin started to come in because heroin was around, various versions of it, you know, opium, whatever. That started to be more of a problem in 69, 70, 71, and that was when the whole thing started to change. More mutinies, more resistance to the officers. By 71, the Pentagon issued a report that said very clearly, and you can find that report, that the situation in Vietnam of the troops is demoralized and it's reaching a level that resembles the French mutiny.

of World War I late in the war that was covered in Pass of Glory. I don't know if you ever saw that movie. The mutinies of World War were the French soldiers who refused to fight sometimes. And that was the same thing was going on in Vietnam. Richard Boyle, my co-writer and a friend from Salvador, he wrote Salvador with me, wrote a whole book called, I forgot the name, I'm sorry, but Richard Boyle's book. He wrote about a mutiny there. There was a lot of them, much more than you know. Also, well, you don't know about Vietnam.

And I tried to cover it in the book. I said there were three lives in that war. Friendly fire. Friendly fires. Soldiers soldiers accidentally killing each other in these complicated war situations. Small firefights, big firefights. The jungle is asymmetrical. You don't know who's firing, where, what's coming in, what's going out. I would estimate 15 to 20 percent of the casualties in Vietnam were from friendly fire. That's from small arms, artillery, planes, bombs. I believe my first wound, I was wounded twice, came from friendly fire. I write about that in the book. It's important because the Pentagon always covers that over. They don't want the parents to know their little boy died from friendly fire.

Wow, what a waste, right? But that happens all the time, and it's part of the ridiculousness, the lying. Second thing was the killing of civilians, which I went into. I talked about it with Mila. The third thing was the great big lie of all was that we're winning this war from the beginning. They were saying that we're winning this war. It was all lies. The body counts, the assessments, of enemy divisions. CIA was doing all this. They were the leading the war. They were the leading strategists.

They were making the strategy for the war, and they did a horrible job, as usual. CIA has been involved in every war we fight, every losing war. They didn't have as much to do with World War II, which is kind of interesting. Maybe they should just stay out of it. Yeah, Mike goes smoothly.

It depends. Yeah, I think the nature of intelligence agencies and conflicts is something that's quite interesting for me as well. I'll tell you with the Milan. I did this research, for Milai, for example. True story. It was investigated by the Army itself, which is amazingly honest. Ray Pierce was a three-star general. He never thought anything happened to Milai. I thought it was all bullshit complaining. And that's the attitude he took into it. He did the investigation. And he wrote up the whole thing. It's available.

Now they've redacted some of it. And he busted 28 indictments, 26 or 28 indictments against all the way up the mili chain to the general of the division, Koster. He indicted Koster, who was a three-star general also. Unbelievable story. And of course, they threw out gradually, they threw out all the 27 of the indictments and they got Cali, the lieutenant, first lieutenant, as the only guy I think ever served time. And he was pardoned quickly by Nixon. Dirty story. Yeah. The point I'm trying to make is that it's all lie. It was a big lie. And don't tell me it was good intentions like Ken Burns wants to say it's bullshit. It was a lie because that's the basic nature of man is to cover his ass. They said, this is a crazy war, so what? I'm going to make money, I'm going to survive,

you know? These are the ways people think. But you got back to, this whole thing started when you asked me about my drug bust. So, just to make an innocuous story. But the irony, I come out of Vietnam, and I'm completely zonked, and I'm back in civilian society. I'm pre. No one's telling me what to do. I don't know a soul. I wander down the coast from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Oregon, California. I can't handle the stage. It's just too much for me right now. So I going over to Mexico, carrying my Vietnamese grass, which I'd smuggled back from Vietnam. So I was guilty in that sense that I brought some grass back from Vietnam. Go to Mexico, get bombed, laid, all that stuff, crazy few days, come back in a zoned out and come back at midnight, trying to cross

back the border in midnight, carrying the same grass, of course, I get stupidly busted. Federal smuggling charge five to 20 years. Oh, my God. That's a crazy punishment. How much grass are we talking about? Two ounces. That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. Maybe less. Unbelievable. Of course it is. Yeah. And that was the beginning of the drug war.

They didn't call it that then, but Nixon had just been elected, and he was coming into Bean, and he was going to call the drug war. But that prison was filled with, it was supposed to be for 2000, it was for 5,000 Hispanics and black people mostly in that jail. I've never seen it. These were all young people. They should have been in the military. None of them gave shit about that, you know.

It was a whole other culture that I saw. It was in America with a K, brutal treatment, putting these people in jail for nothing, nonviolent crimes was the beginning of that system. That's what I was facing. They were going to, you know, wrong judge I would have gotten five years, probably first time offense I was a veteran, but I got out because basically I paid the public assistance lawyer, my father paid him to come and see me, which he hadn't showed up. He didn't show up for 10 days or 8 days.

And finally I got my father on a phone. He said, where you been? You know, you got out, blah, blah, blah, two weeks ago, three weeks ago. I never heard from you. I said, I'm happy to be home. It's great. and I'm in trouble. Oh, shit.

Yeah, exactly. I'm in jail. Oh, yeah. That's a great phone call to get from your kid after he gets back from Vietnam, right? I imagine his face, yeah. My God. Did you ever experiment with psychedelics?

Oh, yeah. Sure, starting over there. Where did you get it over there? Was it just acid? Listen, people are smart everywhere in the world. You know that. Yeah. There's always some guys who got something.

I actually did it in Australia. I'm an R&R. I did it. Australia was a big LSD place back then. There was a guru. like a Tim Leary type who was leading the Sydney Brigade, and it was wild, and there was all kinds of stuff happening. It's beyond the Ken. People don't know those stories, but they're very interesting.

You know, like the story I tell you about being an MP and all the deserters in Saigon. It was a whole underground culture as there isn't every war, underground culture, people living differently. Nobody conforms all the time to the demands of the army. They mock it. They go outside. And that's the American way. Do you remember the dirty dozen? It's more like that.

Yeah. Of course. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. Guys were schemers. Guys were schemers who are always doing things, trying to figure out angles. There's always a schemer in the platoon. I heard you once put LSD in your dad's drink at a party. That's a bold move, man. Yeah. Why not? Because he needed it. What do you mean? His attitude on the war was fucked. He was a Republican. He was solid. He'd been in World War II. He was a lieutenant colonel. He thought the war was a good thing at the beginning. And then he realized it was not. what it cracked out to be. So I was really pissed. I mean, we had a lot of fights about everything. And at one point, I just was fed up and I put a heavy dose of orange sunshine into his scotch. He loved to drink scotch at night. We play in chess and I put it in, man, I really dumped it in.

And he got so fucking high. I loved it. It was great to watch. He never knew it was me because we moved on to a dinner party and he took me to and there was other people at the table. So he never knew what hit him. He did know something had been given to him. but he never blamed me. Years later, I think, two years later, he said, you know, he kind of had the feeling. And he enjoyed the trip, you know, in the end of the, it was a sex trip for him. He enjoyed it. It broke through certain barriers he had.

He had fantasies about black women. And he told me all about it, you know. He told you about it during the trip. No, no, later. Oh, okay, okay. I was like, that's a little more than you bargained for if your dad's tripping out. And he's like, let me sit you down and tell you about. Well, I wanted to change his thinking, you know, but maybe he was going to that direction.

You know, like me. I had gone to Vietnam. I was talking like a black man at that point. I was smoking cools, you know, I was into my marijuana hit. That's really funny. I mean, it couldn't have been that hard to figure out. You're playing chess with one person and you suddenly start tripping on acid. No, not a right way.

You don't go up right away. It takes you sometimes 30 minutes. But that's the giveaway, right? I've been at this dinner party for an hour. Yeah. And now I'm super tripping. Where was I an hour ago, playing chess with my son? And I have a glass of whiskey.

I'm not sure he made that connection because he didn't know the rules of LSD. Oh, yeah. Sure. No, that makes sense. Also, he'd been drinking a bit that day. too. It was a Saturday. But he was a tough guy, and there's some funny incidents. He started eating Oreo cookies, and the girls, the party started broke up into a dance, and he was watching the dance from hanging onto a tree. And that's where the black girl fantasy started. They were

dancing through drums out of the Congo, he was saying. Yeah, he was definitely, that was a good dose of acid if he saw people dancing out of the jungle or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I heard you kicked your cocaine habit while writing Scarface. But that seems like the opposite time to kick a cocaine habit. I think a lot of people started their cocaine habit after watching Scarface. Yeah, I guess I do things backwards. I don't know what it is. Yeah. No, like cocaine, it was not a good drug for me, a bad drug. I started. In Hollywood in the 70s, it started to get very hot. A lot of the younger people were doing it. I got sucked in and after they, basically after Midnight Express was a big hit, I sort of got into the bubble champagne. I was working, but I was certainly,

enjoying my life and I didn't really, I was trying to feel it out. I was meeting famous people. I always wanted being offered deals, screenplays. It was a fantasy. God, you have everything you want. I mean, money, drugs, girls, it's everything evil. Yeah, yeah, everything that can corrupt you. And I enjoyed it. I really did. I enjoyed the shit out of it, but I did the drug out of party instinct and it was fun. And that's what I thought, energy thing. It was a good energy thing. And then take it more seriously than that. And then after the hand, which I wrote and directed, which is an interesting horror film, I think you should go back and see it with Michael Kaine, but it didn't work out for me commercially. And I was shamed by the so-called official establishment. I made

a horror film about a severed hand, and I allowed myself to be shamed, which I regret. I regret doing because it is a better film than what they made it out to be. But the point was my second wife and I started to do cocaine, but I got addicted. And the addiction is. terrible. You're not a control. You don't have control of your whole system anymore. And that's the end of your enjoyment as well. So it really turned into a nightmare for, I'd say, almost a year. And my writing deteriorated. I could tell. I was still sentient enough to tell that my brain cells seemed to be affected. I felt that. And also I had some objective, a producer I was working with, told me it wasn't as good as screenplay. I wrote writing a screenplay for him. It wasn't as good as he thought

it should be, blah, blah, blah. And of course, I got bailed out in the sense I could, I was surrounded. My friends were doing it. That's the problem with cocaine or any drug like that. You get surrounded by Amelia, and it's hard to get out of it. But salvation came in the sense that I got a call to go down to Miami from a producer who had worked with me before, Marty Bregman, and to work on the research and to write the screenplay for Al Pacino Scarface. And of course, it was about drugs. So it was no problem for me, I did the research stone. Yeah, I've been researching this exact drug for a really long time. I know a lot about it.

Yeah, I didn't boast about it. Sure, obviously. I actually took a trip to South America before that and hung out with some heavies. Really, they had great Coke down there. I mean, like, you know, talking about, I forgot how strong it was. It was pure. It was so pure that I would fall asleep on it, that kind of pure. Sometimes the pure stuff really knocks you out.

Did not know that. Didn't see that coming. I think you can research that one. Yeah, I'll have to Google it. Anyway, I really learned a lot, and I got into the criminal side of it, which was important, and snorting it with them was part of that. Once I had all the facts, I said, I got to get out of here. I can't write this in Miami.

So I thought about going to France, which is where my mother was living as well as my grandmother. It was a wonderful kind of place for me because it was winter there, and it was the people where they were not into Coke at all. and I had no friends there who did it, and the food was great. So it was a great chance to break the habit. And I did with my wife. And although I did it after that, I never really was addicted again, ever, which means you need it and you can't say no.

I can easily say no and walk away. So I don't claim to be an angel or anything. Yeah, no, of course. I mean, that's what makes the story is interesting, right? And it's also what makes, like, looking at someone's background, like, you're as interesting is because we go, okay, this isn't like a guy writing in a vacuum. somebody has maybe not a giant scarface pile of cocaine, but has certainly probably seen something

like that at some point, right? I saw a lot of people get hurt. Yeah, I saw a lot of people get hurt. The saddest thing it was to see some beautiful actresses who came to Hollywood with great looks, you know, you'd fall apart on cocaine. Their looks would fall off. And that was sad to see. We hear a lot about China censoring movies these days, in Hollywood censoring movies these days, actually, for either the U.S. or for China. What do you think of that? As a creator, what do you think of that. Is that just part of the game that you've got to appease the Chinese censors, the U.S. financiers, or what? In a sense, it's always that. You're always a game. What is currently fashionable. It's all censorship in a way, you know. I was running into problems back in 78. I mean, at the

Golden Globes, I was blasting. They were throwing all these cop shows on the air. All the bad guys were colored people or, you know, they were going to jail, or the good guys were triumphant in their virtue signaling or whatever they call it. You know, and I just would, you know, and I just, I was sick of it back then, and I got in the trouble making a speech at the Golden Gloves when I won an award for Middine Express, blasting that kind of culture. And they threw me off the stage because I was incoherent when I made the speech, you know, because I was drunk and coked out. You're always fighting against fashion. I always have my life. I've always gone my way and tried to do things with integrity and authenticity. And it has nothing to do with what's in the air right now, whether it's this fashion, that fashion, you know, there's always. rules, and you have to figure out a way to survive that. I don't remember it being any different.

The Chinese are ridiculous. I've been there several times, and I worked with Chinese. You're not allowed to even mention Mao, you know, Mao, Jesus Christ. Their own history, they deny them. You can't even, I had a script about the cultural revolution, beautiful script. Couldn't make it in China. Even in the 2000 period when they were a little more liberal, couldn't make it because they didn't want to know. They want to keep that away from their citizens. The cultural revolution is what all these generation, my generation went through in the 60s in China. You couldn't tell a story about it. Berlucci managed a little bit of it very effectively in Last Emperor, which I love, but it's just not allowed. And then it got worse as the 2010s came around. I'll tell you a story.

I was hired to do an Olympic Games commercial back in whatever it was. They had the Olympic Games in China, 2008. For my commercial idea, I wanted to do 200 Chinese faces from the streets. it was about the Chinese face and my interpretation of it. One day, the sense, I picked out the 200 people from the streets. I'd gone out and done all it. And one day, the censors showed up. And they asked me what I planned. And I showed them the pictures of the people that I was going to shoot. I was open about. And they got upset because they looked at it and they said, well, we have to talk about this. They came back and they said, like 80% of them were canceled because they didn't have the right Chinese face. Oh, gosh. So I said, fuck you. And I, you know, I walked away. That's typical of the

the censorship that filmmakers have to go through there. That's their custom. That's the way they are. This is a very tough society. They don't fuck around. It's a tough society. It's all I can say. And anybody can get a good film made out of it.

Bravo. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Oliver Stone. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you've just heard so you can check out those sponsors for yourself, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

And don't forget, there's a worksheet for today's episode. That link, as always, in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our discussion with Oliver Stone. Do you think you could make a movie like Platoon now? Do you think an American studio would touch a movie like that these days? No, not with friendly fire and killing civilians. No, it's impossible now. Did you read this book?

2017, Matthew Alford, he's a co-writer. It's called National Security Cinema. Read it. He goes into detail on some 800 movies the Pentagon has worked on. Goes into detail on it. And he goes into detail on the CIA working in Hollywood. You have no idea the influence, how deep they've gotten, partly because, well, the military thing is money.

They have big money. They can lend you enormous amount. They can give you soldiers. They can give you equipment. It saves a lot of money. It can be up to $50 million they can give you in some of these pictures. Wow. And that's important for producers. I mean, you don't have any idea of the films that were affected by this. The films I made as well as some other people, not very many, were all outside the Pentagon.

They condemned my film. They blasted it. They would never cooperate with it. Same thing with born on the Fourth of July. Same thing with heaven and earth. Salvador never in no way. No, these films couldn't be made. You understand? This is a very rigid society. as bad in its way as China. After 2001, when everybody was suddenly singing the patriotic song, how, you know, we've got to fight back and revenge, revenge, we're going to take on the world, all that crap.

The George Bush bullshit, that was over. That's when they passed the Patriot Act. Everybody got on his tin soap opera, the horn, and started announcing, you know, was wearing American flags everywhere. Presidents didn't used to wear American flags on there. You're too young to remember. It would be ridiculous. It'd be a joke to wear an American flag.

I've been. No world leader. Where is that? Only in this country where you got a lot of tin horn patriotism. I never heard that term, tin horn patriotism. I guess it makes sense, though, right? Like just sort of lip service. Is that what that means? Yes, yes, lip service. Yeah. They're the George W. Bushes. Talk big, and then they fuck up their National Guard commitment completely. They lie and they cheat. And they see, that goes on a lot. This is what I'm talking about. This is what war is. Don't you think it's going on in Iraq, Afghanistan right now? Don't you think a lot of people are making money? A lot of people are cheating. it's the standard. Soldiers might be really good.

The unit might be really good, but what are they achieving? You know, they're going out and killing a few civilians, or they're fighting some kind of monster in their head, but they rarely see the enemy. They don't even know who the enemy is half the time. I heard you set the explosives yourself on platoon. I don't think they'd let you do that anymore either. No, that was a special case.

It was a low-budget film. We were in the Philippines. Nobody cared. It was a B-film considered a B-film. We came out of nowhere. We were a $6 million film. You know, they used to make the exploitation films in the Philippines. It wasn't not much expected. I had no choice. We had very few limited staff.

We had a good special effects group from England, but they were overstaffed. They were complete understaffed rather. They couldn't keep up with the amount of explosions we had to do in this movie. So I blew them because I knew where the actors were going to go. That sounds incredibly dangerous and incredibly fun. Well, the helicopters are more dangerous. And I write about that in the book. You've got to get close to the blades. You've got in the air. You've got the currents. You're overweight on the helicopter, and we almost went down. I described that incident. And actually a few years, a year later, a Chuck Norris film, that's one of those same choppers went down because the

maintenance is poor. They're a good army, but they just don't have money. Right, yeah. To maintain them at the level they need to be made. And one of those choppers went down and nine or ten people were killed. Oh, man. In that, your film unit. It was very scary. Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas said that you were essentially willing to compromise your relationships with actors in order to make the best film. And I kind of compare that to interviews here on the show. You know, I see a lot of interviewers and journalists. They ask softball questions. They basically try to get their show guests to sort of be like entertaining or be friends instead of having a real conversation. And in my mind, it's about putting the audience first. And I wonder if that's how you think of your films as well.

Is it about the audience or is it about the final result being something that you're satisfied with personally? Absolutely. You're right. I mean, there's no question. You have to work with your actor and you have, and there's always give and take, you know, compromise. I'm not. I'm not hard line about anything, as you can see my attitude. I have a sense of humor about it, but I've characterized often as hard line. No, you just have to get somewhere. And it's a director's job to sort of pace it, to know what's working and what's not working. And if it's not working, you've got to solve it.

You have no choice. You're on the spot. So how do you solve it? You don't take the hard approach. You take the let's talk approach. You try to reason this out. Try to get the actor to where he needs to go. Sometimes you've got to put a little stick in there to give him a little

because an actor can relax. He's in his comfort zone, Michael especially. Michael Douglas had been a television star, and I guess you get used to a certain level. And I think he himself admitted that he wasn't pushing himself. That script, the gecko part, was extremely complex with long speeches. We put dialogue in there. There was very juicy, but it was long. And you had to learn your lines before you got to the set. You had to know them like inside your soul. And he wasn't there right away. Yeah, I did insist on that. So this is Wall Street. This is him being Gordon Gecko on Wall Street. Yeah. On Martin Sheen, he was very good. I don't remember any issues with Martin. I enjoyed working with him very much, as I did with Michael eventually.

Yeah, I think they were giving you a compliment, or maybe they were thinking about the way that you worked with other actors. I don't think it was meant as sort of a doing. Well, sometimes it's misunderstood. No question. Yeah. Sometimes you get killed in the press, you know. Sometimes an actor will go public with his complaints. And I don't think that's right because we, you know,

You know, you don't snitch on each other. It's like going to school, you know? Well, yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, it seems like your goal is to get the thing done. Yeah. From your book, it seems like getting a movie done is actually a lot harder than most people think. Yeah, I'm amazed at that. People always say, oh, I didn't realize it was so hard, but I respect movies, and I really

admire them if they're well made, and I understand the difficult. And I don't think people who see them don't, they think it's easier than it is. And perhaps I think that's common, and it's not up to the audience to have to go through the pain we go through. But sometimes the critics who interpret the film, you know, should know better when they tear films apart. Most of your movies, or many, I should say, are about like gangsters, war. Do you think we have more to learn from the dark side of human nature than maybe we have to learn from everyday people? I think we can learn a lot from the dark side, but I think it's important, too, to show the good side where it exists and where the hope can be.

The only film I ever made that was completely black, or two films I made that were completely Black and Hope, without hope, were, I think, talk radio, which showed the darkest side of a talk show host who got killed based on the 80s of character, Barry Ellen Berg. Another one was U-turned, which was a film noir, a real film noir, where everybody dies in the end. You interviewed Vladimir Putin, who's probably in my top five, top five wish list. Okay. I mean, you took a lot of flack for that because people said you didn't push back on any of his assertions. I mean, I guess I understand, not pushing back too hard against somebody who's known as a brutal dictator and you're in his house or in his office surrounded by Russian Secret Service. I assume it took you years to set something

like that up. No? Have you seen the interviews? That's important because a lot of people, yeah. Oh, good. Have you seen all four hours? Yeah, I think I have the first three. I don't know if I have all four. Well, you should see the fourth one because that one goes to the Donald Trump election and into the, and I think it's the most penetrating interview I've ever seen with people. I think so, yeah. Well, there aren't many, right? You just don't see. see that way. No, because every American or English interview I've seen, they dub him, first of all. You know, they put a voice who sounds like a gangster or a thug over the guy who was talking to you and blah, blah, blah, blah, and he sounds like, man mean and nasty. It's not Putin at

all. Putin is a technocrat. Is that what he was? And very logical. And in what he said, everything he said, I asked him some provocative questions. He answered it. I even asked him about, you know, when he was going to give up power, because the president. presidential election was coming up. Sure. And I pushed him on that. And he got upset, you know. When I see Megan Kelly, you laugh.

I mean, it's so superficial because it's framed as an attack to please the American audiences. Like, why did you do this? Why did you beat your wife? That's the way the Americans talk to it. So Mike Wallace approach gets nowhere because it's only geared for American audiences to hear that the newsman has got a point to make. You don't hear about the guy he's been interviewing. It's always like that.

And that's what sucks about American media. It stinks. A French interview would be much more balanced in that regard. Most interviews, even English sometimes, all of the English are a little crazy about the Russians. So that's very important. I think you have to look at them. I think historically they're important. It's an important piece for historians, archivists.

Anyone who looks at those four hours is going to understand the Russian position from 1999 to now when Putin was in office. It's clear what he's thinking. And America has a lot to answer for for that period, a lot. And I'm talking not as a pro-Russia guy or anything like that, I'm talking about as a fair, balanced person. Think about what we did in the period. This is, again, part of my life's work is, what are we doing? What are we doing about our country? I've always pointed to that effect, whether it's Vietnam, Salvador, or any of our presidencies, or this issue, which is very dangerous, by the way, very dangerous because we keep assuming the Russians are going to put up with being

insulted and trashed. And we do it so easily and reflexively. And when you say a brutal dictator, you know what a brutal dictator to me is a guy who puts people in dungeons and tortures him and kills them. I don't see that. I don't see that. It's not that way in Russia at all. They still have a, the internet's free. People can do what they want on the internet. It's just not that way you think it is. The opposition to him, it's legitimate, but it's small. People do like them. And he's been in office for what, you know, they don't have the American president's system. They don't have a democracy like we have. But look at our democracy, it's not exactly working well. It's kind of leaking, you know. Yeah, I agree with you there. I do wonder, though,

like, you've said something like, I hope to one day see in America where we live in a true democracy. Do you hope that Russia one day wakes up and there's a true democracy, or you think a different standard applies? I don't think it's the point, because they never had it. They're working on. You know, what did they have? They had the czar. Then they had this Bolshevik revolution. This system up until 1989. And then it was really an 89 when they started to have, and what happened? The first 10 years were a disaster with Yeltsin. A disaster.

He was a U.S. puppet. He was our guy. And we're going to free up everything privatized, privatized, privatized, privateized. But all the crooks stole everything they could, the Kodroskis, the guy who, what's his name, Brower? Bill Browder. Yeah, one of the worst gangsters of all. He stole everything he could. I mean, everybody looted Russia.

So by 99, it was falling apart, and people hated this Yeltsin regime. It was the United States propped up Yeltsin in 96. He was not going to win that election. That was their democracy, American democracy. It was a cheap. We put him in office. We stuffed them, put money into him, created a balloon candidate, and somehow he got fucking reelected, who knows, as fraudulent as it was.

So when Putin came on, he picked up the pieces, and he really did, and you have to study his record, again, take the time. I have. I've read every book on. Putin that's out there. Well, every book written by a Western hack is going to repeat the same charges that he kills people. Many of the books I've read are written by Russians and translated into English. Yeah, a lot of the Russians who appeal to the West can be very, how do you say, the worst than the Americans in terms of it, criticism. But there's a lot of issues. And Stephen

Cohn can answer every one of them for you. But I don't think you have time here to do that. The point is that he has done a remarkable job, a remarkable job. And that's what he's lauded for in Russia, as well as, you know, probably two. thirds of the world admires him. I hate to tell you, but I've been everywhere in the Middle East and Asia. People say he's good for Russia. So a democracy, yeah, they have a democracy. If he was unpopular like Caesarescu or something like Romani. Chowchasku, yeah. He would be out by now. Yeah, you don't stay in office if you fuck up. That's the Russian way. You can last maybe, but it's not in his interest. He wants to serve. And if he feels that he's not serving,

we'll see what happens. If he doesn't serve their interest, he'd be out. That's the way it is a pressure system. You know, there's a lot of people around him who want the job. He's got pressure from inside as well as outside. So it's not an easy job to stay there. But I don't think he's a brutal dictator, frankly, unless, you know, they tell me he poisons people. Yeah, well, that's what they're saying now, of course. I mean, Novichok, there's been multiple people who've been poisoned by that. Do you just think that's not him? No, listen, I think these are dirty stories, and each one deserves its own history. You've got to trace each one. Going back to the poisonings in London back then in 2000, Litvinov was his name?

Skripal, Litvinenko is who you're thinking. No, that's Skirpaw, yeah. None of those hold water. When you listen to the evidence, like Sherlock Holmes, it just doesn't hold. It makes sense that MI5 or MI6, the British Secret Service is much more involved in dirty hands than Russia. For Russia, also the motive is not there. Why would you do this at a time when, hey, you're just about to make a better deal for peace. Whenever there's a chance to make a better deal with Russia, that's when something like that

happens, whether it's coming out of Afghanistan and they come up with a bounty story, which is which is proven to be bullshit like everything else. It's just all these stories come out at the worst possible time and all those poisonings too. Navalny, same kind of shit. It seems to me that it's, I mean, I don't want to get in all the specifics with you, but everything I know just leads not to that, what would be their motive in doing it? He's been around for years. He's a social media presidents, he doesn't have political power. Why? Why would you make that kind of mess unless you want to screw up the Russian thing and say, look, there's an election. We want to blame it on Trump. We want everything to go against Trump. We want to get him out of office. And I understand that drive.

So we cannot let the Russians off the hook anymore than we can let the coronavirus go away. We have to keep the country locked down and scared because it's better for our chances to get elected. I understand that. It's political, but it's very dangerous to play that game. especially with another country as an enemy. I think you've expressed points like this before with intelligence agencies and having an initial distrust of, or I should say implicit distrust of intelligence agencies. Is it mostly the Western intelligence agencies that you distrust, or is it intelligence agencies and covert ops in general that you distrust?

It's a tricky question, but I'm not an expert on Russian intelligence agencies, although what I've told you about the anomaly alone, which should make you suspect, why are the liberals all of a sudden cottoning up to the CIA. That is stunning to most people who think for themselves. Why? When the CIA has been so badly involved throughout the 70 years that I've been alive for creating a Cold War, making it worse than it is, of course, the CIA didn't he missed completely the fact that Russia was changing under Gorbachev, right? They had no knowledge that the Russian system was changing. That's a known fact. Iraq war, this first one, too, the second one, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Oh, Syria. That's another mess. When you go into

any of these wars, you'll find that we've been lied to. The public has been lied to. And they've created false narratives constantly and false criteria. And on that basis, we've gone to war. This is what's crazy. Who's to blame? Not Russia to blame? Or is it us? If we ask these questions, hardball questions, if our media was honest and asked these questions, we wouldn't have been in these wars. And a lot of people would be alive today. We'd be a far healthier country. We'd have partnerships, partnerships with China. We'd have partnerships with Russia.

We'd be dealing with a climate crisis, which is really fucking important. Instead of dividing ourselves, being distracted, not paying any attention to the biggest problem of all. This is what's so depressing about my era and depressing to be alive. And it could all be dealt with rationally, but they never do this. The media in this country has been co-opted by the state. I don't know what it is, but it's just impossible to be logical here. Well, on that note, I know that you have, I want to be conscious of your time. I know, you know, we've had a little bit of issues.

I would love to hear your ideas and everything on Putin another time. Maybe when I come to Los Angeles, if you ever have a free moment to talk about this kind of thing. Yeah, sure. I am interested in. Well, if you want to talk off the record, sure. Yeah, off the record, not on a Zoom call. But I wonder, in closing, I got to close it with something other than that, right? Is there anything that you haven't been able to make, maybe because you're running into roadblocks like you did was Snowden or other types of hurdles like you would imagine you would with.

movie like Platoon. Is there anything you haven't been able to do? You mentioned Mili earlier. That was a huge effort. We were two, three weeks from shooting. It fell apart. No, that's heartbreaking. You have no idea. There was the MLK, Martin Luther King story. I wrote two-candidative version of it. I was involved in that for twice, and I was dealing with what I knew was the facts, but it's not able to be done. We're politically correct country. Those two come to mind, but certainly I've had many stalls. The Snowden affair was ugly. This is an American hero, legitimate hero. He really did.

He was thinking about our country. He's a patriot in the first order. I mean of a Boy Scout, yes, but he's a patriot of a first order. And what he did is shocked us into a realization that few people have still been able to realize that we're listening in it on everything. It's a new world. It's uglier than we thought. Cyber warfare, he's told us, I mean, we've figured out a lot more about cyber warfare.

Of course, in our narrative, everyone is fighting against us, the Chinese are hackiness, the Russians are hackiness. It goes on and on. We never talk about what we're doing. It's part of the problem. So Snowden was impossible to get done. No money from America. Got it from France, got it from Germany.

Then we got back at the very end. We got a small amount from an American small company that distributed very poorly in this country. No studio would touch it. Now, that's something to you. Here's an American hero, and they're scared of them. What's going on? Does the NSA call up somebody in Hollywood and say,

don't touch this. Well, it's something like that could happen. I know that it happened in one case at one of the studios because the guy who was running the studio was wired into the intelligence agencies. You know, that's just the nature of thing. He's married to somebody who's, the boards are all interlocking. It's very hard to get things made. At MGM, when I didn't try to do platoon, there was Henry Kissinger and Alexander Hague on the board of MGM. I'm not hiding any of this. This is known. I'll never prove that they stopped the film, but they did kill it. It was a very sweetheart deal for them, an easy deal, but they killed it. They wouldn't touch it for this political. I can't prove it, but I know it. Pino de Lorenos also knew it. Listen, this is a tough

game, and they play for keeps, and they've gotten very tough now for people like me. So there's other things. I wouldn't even consider going to try to make. In other words, they turn you off by a chilling effect, you know. Why should I try to make that, right? Right. What would you make if you had no chilling effect whatsoever. I guess I'm disillusioned enough to say to you that I wouldn't even know anymore because it's what I've said to you at this interview is important. If you think about it, listen to it again, you'll see why it's suffocation is in order here. Oliver, thank you very much.

This is really an interesting interview. I went off the rails early on kind of on purpose and I'm glad that I did because I think it was a lot of fun. What's off the rails mean to you? Just like asking about personal stuff early and going into the drug thing, which I thought maybe I would avoid. But then I was like, yeah, it's kind of interesting. Why not? And it was fun.

It was an interesting. I gave you thorough answers. Yeah. I'm too old to concern to myself. I mean, I'm alive. I'm well. You can see I'm not destroyed by drugs, which is what the propaganda would tell you. I'm not a nut case.

Long live marijuana got me through that one. Thank you very much. Good luck, Jordan. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, I wanted to do. to drop you a little taste of my Darren Brown interview. You may recognize him from Netflix's The Push, where he convinces everyday people to murder someone,

or so they think, through this crazy escalating series of events. He's one of the most well-known illusionists of our time and mentalists and is essentially the UK's answer to David Blaine. His mentalism skills are second to none, and he's really a master of getting inside our heads. Here's a quick bite. I was walking from one hotel to another quite late at night. I was at a magic...

convention in Wales. I was wearing a three piece of velvet suit. Because why not? Because why not? So this guy is, you know, he's really drunk and he's clearly, yeah, looking for a fight. And he's with his girlfriend, and all his adrenaline is kind of, you know, up here.

And he starts shouting at me and says something like, what are you looking at or what's your problem or something? In that situation, you can't respond with, oh, I'm not looking at anything because then you're on the back foot and they've got power. Or, yeah, I'm looking at you, what's your problem? because either way you're going to get hit. But you can just not play that game right from the outset.

So I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. So his reaction to that is a bit of a pause. He's like, what? And I said, oh, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. And I lived in Spain, the walls that were quite high. But here, they're tiny. I mean, there's nothing. So he then, he just went, oh, fuck!

And started crying. His girlfriend walked off. And he sat down by the side of the same. the road. I sat down next to him and started asking about what had gone wrong that night. I think his girlfriend had bottled somebody. There'd been some fight and weirdly then I'm giving him advice. I was talking to a friend of mine about this thing and he, um, he's an artist and used to walk home from his studio late at night through a rough bit of London. And there were always these kind of like gangs on one side of the road, so he'd always cross over away from them. Of course,

they'd always see that and it's always this horrible, uncomfortable, intimidating thing. So we spoke about it and then the next night he crossed over the road to them. and said, good evening as he walked past them. And of course, they left him alone because he just seemed like a strange. Yeah, I don't touch it. He's crazy. He's just weird. Yeah.

Who wants to see a magic trick? For an inside look at the levers in our own brain alongside Darren Brown, one of the world's most legendary illusionists and mentalists, check out episode 150 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Oliver's got stories for days. There were so many comments I saw online and in articles that were. like, yeah, a guy came after him with a machete on the set of seizure. Oh, yeah, that's the one where they ran out of money in the middle. I mean, this is just such a chaotic process. And when you're

directing action movies or crazy movies like this, I mean, it just adds another layer. I mean, the guy was setting his own explosives on platoon. I even read that, and I should have asked him about this, that he directed a porno just to pay the bills, of course. I guess I didn't realize those actually needed directing, but what do I know about the movie business? Oliver told me offline. He said, I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn. And he said that the platoon release was one of the finest moments of his life. You know, I went to Vietnam myself in my 20s. I had a Vietnamese tour guide who just took great joy in telling me how Americans died horribly in tunnels and pits with

bamboo growing through them and stuff. And he would get all detailed. And then he'd go up to me to go, are you having a good time? And I just thought it was the weirdest experience. I mean, the guy was so damaged. Later on, though, on the bus ride back to Saigon, he told me that the Vietnamese murdered his family, so he hates them too. And I noticed a lot of people like that. There were a lot of people that were in their 30s and 40s that just had damage and trauma from the war and the families. The country is still healing from those terrible scars. It's really something that you have to see firsthand, I think, and hopefully nobody here does. War is something that's so damaging and traumatizing that I think the best way to see it is not to see it at all

and to just go and visit a country like that afterwards so we have an appreciation of it, but hopefully never have to deal with it firsthand. Oliver also told me that he stopped reading the news, and now I don't agree with his political leanings mostly, but he did have a good point. He said, I can't exist in the tyranny of now, and I loved that comment. I seldom read news either other than major events, such as regime changes like what's happening in Belarus right now where they're in the process of overthrowing the dictator, which to me is super exciting. He told me that he reads deeper and wants to know the causes and effect of why things

happen and not just read about the depressing stuff while it's happening. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. That's why I choose books over mass media any day. And some of you might be wondering why I didn't push back on his love for authoritarian leaders or countries like Venezuela. I think we can simply read the news, speaking of news, or even talk to a citizen of those countries, to just see how those nations, those governments have utterly failed. And if you don't believe me, take a vacation to Cuba or Venezuela. I have done this. Just remember to bring your own food if you go there and have a will written before you do

because I will tell you, some of those places do not have it together. And look, I'm not shaming Cuba or Venezuela as a country. The people there were lovely, but you can't tell me that everything's fine when there's no internet or you're not allowed to look at certain websites or they run out of things like meat and coffee. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. That is communism. That is an authoritarian regime that is isolated from the world. And it's not the fault of the people. Communism simply doesn't work. I'm not sure how much I needed to belabor that point, and I thought it would ruin the discussion if we kept going down that road, so I opted to simply move on with the

conversation. On that same note, he asked, why would anybody bother poisoning Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who always runs against Vladimir Putin and Russia? Well, he has been under threat for years. He has more support than ever. There was just no reason for me to keep fighting him on this point. We don't argue that the sky's blue or in the Bay Area this month, orange. We have enough evidence and enough sources here to show that if somebody is poisoned by Novichok, which is exclusively deployed by the Soviet Union and now Russia, it's not a secret. Even Russia is kind of not giving any craps about getting caught for this. I mean, the whole world knows it. And Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom, he was attacked and poisoned in London. A policeman was killed. The agents who did it were caught on camera.

and they, when they were interviewed, they said they were on vacation looking at a church in this small town where Scripal lived. So two FSB agents come all the way from Russia on a direct flight, go to this small town just to look at a church spire and then turn around and go home. Okay, I don't think we need to spend too much time arguing this one, right? Anyway, of course I had a great time with this conversation. I'm very thankful for Oliver Stone for coming on. I just had to note that because I know we have a lot of national security people and foreign affairs people who listen to this show and just news watchers and they're going to go, Jordan, come on, man. So I wanted to throw that note in here. But like I said, big thank you to Oliver Stone. The book is called

Chasing the Light. Links to the book and everything he does that we talked about today will be in the show notes on our website. Please use the links on our website. If you buy the books or anything from the guest, it all adds up and helps support the show. Worksheets for this episode in the show notes, transcripts for this episode in the show notes. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube, or there will be soon at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm also at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, using tiny habits, using software over at our six-minute networking course, which is free over

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