The Press Box - Media Movies: ‘Salvador’ With Oliver Stone

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Bryan is joined by film director Oliver Stone to discuss his 1986 film, ‘Salvador.’ Stone talks about meeting journalist Richard Boyle, working with actors like James Woods, covering topics such as American foreign policy, filming in Mexico, and much more! Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Oliver Stone Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox Friday. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. We've got a big show this week.

It's a new episode of our Media Movies series. And our guest is Oliver Stone. Now, you know Oliver Stone movies like Platoon and JFK and Natural Born Killers. I want to take you back before all that. To the year 1985, Stone is in his late 30s and he's mostly a screenwriter, having won the Oscar for Midnight Express and having written macho-violent movies like Scarface. At this point, Stone had only directed two movies, both of them unsuccessful, and he was desperate to become a director of,

full time. And it was a journalist who got Stone back into the director's chair. The journalist's name was Richard Boyle, and as you'll hear, he was a character. Stone decided to make a fictionalized movie about Richard Boyle's exploits covering the Civil War in El Salvador in the 1980s. Boyle in the movie would be played by a fast-talking James Woods, and Jim Belushi played a friend of Boyle's called Dr. Rock. The movie has what we would come to know as a trademark Oliver Stone's speech about American foreign policy. Pretty funny if you follow James Woods on Twitter these days. And the making of Salvador, as Stone called the movie, was absolute hell. But the movie got made, and if Stone was still figuring himself out as a director, the movie turned out really, really well.

Now, if you haven't seen Salvador, that's okay. I think you'll be interested in the story of how you turn a real-life reporter's adventures into a movie. And how someone like Stone navigated what turned out to be an enormously important moment in his career. Here's Oliver Stone on Salvador. Oliver, how'd you first meet the journalist Richard Boyle? Richard Boyle was a friend of Ronkowitz. I met him in 1976 when I was engaged to do born on the 4th of July, that first draft for the producer.

That version never got me. I got to make it almost 10 years later. But Boyle was a friend of Vietnam journalist. He'd been there and hanging out with Richard at the sidewalk cafe in Venice. And I liked him very much from the beginning. I didn't know on that day that I met him that I'd be making both movies eventually about 10 years later. Yeah. And he's a guy who you said he'd been a foreign correspondent in Vietnam and other places.

Yeah. He was always a little bit short of money. He was always and had unpaid parking tickets. He was an Irish rebel. I mean, for example, he was thrown out of Vietnam because of his reporting, which was against the government. I mean, he was critical of the government and they were very sensitive and threw him out of the country. And then he came back in and he covered near the end of the war. He wrote a book about it, a mutiny of the American troops at Firebase Pace, I think it was called.

And it's a lovely book. It's called Flower of the Dragon. It's about the end of the war and the American morale. breaking down. He wrote that book. And then he was in Cambodia, and he was actually one of the last Americans kicked out of Cambodia just before, right after Sidney Schanberg got all the glory. And he used to kid me about it. He said, Shanberg got all the glory. Of course, he got the Pulitzer Prize. I got nothing. But he was reporting for Pacific Radio, Radio Pacific News, the Pacifica News, the California outlet, progressive outlet. It's a line you left in the movie.

I was there before until after Schanberg left. Oh, I forgot. You're right. You've seen the movie recently. Yes, he always used to say that. He missed his glory. Richard was one of those oddball. He was very much the Hunter Thompson Moll, but he never got famous.

People who knew him, knew him. Ron Kovic loves him. I loved him, but he was a handful on Salvador, you know. He was always grubbing for money, always looking for a deal and angle. he was a character. How did you discover the material that inspired the screen? Oh, yes. I was up, I was at my, I was at a low point in my own life, screenwriting, and I had some success, certainly a lot of success with Midnight Express,

but Conan, the Barbarian and Scarface, but I was not happy because I wasn't directing and I wanted very much to direct, so I decided that I wasn't, I couldn't fit into the Hollywood business, and I basically used, I used my own money to start projects. And I was up in San Francisco talking to Richard, who had a lot of life experience. And it was fun because he was a character onto himself. And as I left San Francisco that day,

he drove me to the airport and his little broken down MG. And in the back seat there, that little jump seat, there was a bunch of pages loosely binded. And I asked him what it was. It was oil stained. And he said, oh, yeah, just some notes I wrote when I was down in Salvador. It didn't really make a big deal about it. So I said, well, can I read them, you know?

It's an interesting. I knew it was a war was going on down there, a Civil War. So I took them down to L.A., and I read them. And I said, this is it. I knew right away, this is the movie. This could be the movie we could make together at a price, him and me, and keep it very low budget and break all the rules. Of course, we were crazy.

I mean, it was really desperation time. If I had known what was in front of me, I would probably re-examined my mind and gone to a psychiatrist because it was a gigantic job we were undertaking, which is to go to a civil war and to enlist. What Richard's plan was to enlist the government to give us all the military support in favor of, because we were writing the script that was, of course,

right wing and anti-rebel. And then at the end of that process, we would go up to Mexico and shoot the other half of the movie, about the rebels. That was his idea. And I thought, frankly, I was desperate enough to believe it. And what popped out to you about those stories? Why did you think it would be a good movie? Oh, he was living on the edge. I mean, not only was he at several adventures. He knew everybody down there, but he also had a, had a relationship with a beautiful woman who was almost, I would call her, almost a typical small town Salvadoran woman with a child with two children.

And the children are part of that story, as you know. Well, actually, I'm sorry, one child and her brother was murdered in the movie. A brother was murdered. So she represents a lot of what the average person down there was facing. And that's an important part of the story. It's not just the story of an American journalist. It's a story of what a Salvadoran local has to go through. and stuff like getting a sedula in order to walk around.

I mean, you need to vote. You're pretty monitored by that. In those days, you were very monitored by the central government. And if you didn't have the right credentials, man, they could kill you on the spot or put you in jail. It was a very dangerous situation for everybody. So you see the opportunity to write about this journalist who's not the conventional heroic Hollywood journalist.

This is not Sidney Schenberg in the killing fields. Not at all. This is somebody who's drinking, who's smoking a little pot and going down there and kind of getting into something that you understand sort of but doesn't fully. Well, he needs some money. You know, he talks as one of his friends into accompanying him down there to much to the friends regret. And, you know, he's promising him for sex for nothing, very little money, all kinds of women, all kinds of drugs. You can do anything you want in Salvador, no rules. And to some degree, it was true.

You know, you could pretty much do anything you want to get somebody killed for five bucks. I mean, that was the Richards come on. He was known in the community as a bit of a nut. And, you know, when you talk to journalists, legitimate journalists about him, they laugh. But at the end, on the same time, he did turn out product. And Radio Pacifica, I think it was called that. three Pacific news and they, they liked him. But he was running out of money in the beginning of our film,

and he was trying to, you know, tapping as many loans as he could get. And you could see had some, he'd made it. He'd cashed out on everybody pretty much. So you decided to make the movie, decided to write the movie, and you move Richard Boyle into your home in Southern California? For a while until my wife threw him out. He drank the baby formula one night. drank the baby for him.

So he's up there sitting there drinking, drinking beer in your living room. And at some point, he runs out of beer and reaches into the fridge and grabs baby. At that time, I mean, it was three, four o'clock in the morning. He was probably well gone. He didn't know what he was drinking. Richard was an Irish that wooden leg, you know. He could go all night. And he didn't need much sleep.

He, you need people like that. life. I mean, where else, you don't get journalists like that. The truth was that Richard could see the situation. Wherever he went, he would live indigenously. He would settle into a hotel for five bucks a week and the lowest level, and he would learn from that level. So it was a different kind of journalism, you know, but it was real street level. And I think we lack that. When you get into these high-flown, you know, publications, they go to the countries. They deal with the highest levels of people and so forth. And so it just not, it doesn't give you a truth. picture of what is like at the bottom.

You mentioned your career being at a low point, which may surprise people who have coming at you now after so many movies. What was your career like in 1985? Terrible. I was very depressed. My father was dying. And I had a wife, a child, a new child. And I was not happy doing scripts for other people because they were all getting distorted. There was things were changing. Couldn't control the output. come the product. It was a system that wasn't really working for my creativity. And I had done films many years before as a film student out of film school. I did a feature film. I controlled it with my, I did my own film, a horror film. It was called seizure. And I wanted to go back to

that system where I could make, I could be responsible for the final product. So you're trying to, and you don't think Hollywood's going to let you direct a movie at this point? No, because I had done the hand, which I think is a good film with Michael Kane in 1981, it came out. And it didn't do well at the box office. And I thought that they gave me, you know, there was a lot of takedowns, a lot of, you know, kind of like you see here he is, the hot shot from Midnight Express. And here he has his chance and he blew it. You know, that kind of attitude. And it's true, I got a lot of heat and people, it wasn't like I was in demand by any means, although I was offered scripts. I was being offered scripts as a screenwriter, but that was

not what I wanted to do with my life. So I had to change things. You didn't want to do the path where I'm going to be a, I'm an A-list screenwriter and go down and do, you know, you'd done Scarface by this point. You'd done the first draft of Conan the Barbarian. You did not want to keep going down that road, you wanted to be able to control the material? That's correct. That's correct. Screenwriters, you know, maybe they eventually direct if they're good, good, but, you know, I think they get burned out a lot of them. And your late 30s by this point, you wrote in your memoir that if you didn't think if you made your mark as a director before 40, you might not get a chance to do it.

Yeah, a lot of filmmakers make it at 30, you know. I was late, but I really had a dream. And I think that's what the book is about. It's about a realization of a dream. Stick to your dream. At 30, it looked bad. It didn't look like it was going to happen. And I always thought 30 would be the demarcation of my life. It wasn't.

So the book deals a lot with those between 30 and 40. But it also goes back in time to my parents growing up in America in France and what the nature of the Vietnam War was like for me. The screenplay for Salvador's credit. to both you and Boyle. How to get written? It got ridden with sessions. Very quickly, I was doing most of the writing. Richard was doing talking, the talking, telling me these incredible stories.

And I thought they were great, potentially great. It was one thing after another. The screenplay originally was long, probably three hours long, with very violent, very sexual. I wanted to go all out, break all the rules. As I said, I wasn't going to be restricted by the Hollywood parameters. they did restrict me because everybody read the script and now I can't do this. It's just anti-American, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because we had, you know, we took down the American involvement with the death squads. And then it was too violent and people were being killed left and right. It was too

sexual. Everything was wrong with it. And truly, I stuck to my guns. We made the damn film because of an English producer who came in and saved my ass because our scheme down in South, in Central America, who didn't work out. Our advisor, our military advisor, was killed. He was shot on the tennis court by the rebels, FMLN. And that was a real setback, but it wouldn't have worked anyway. It was just a, we were totally dishonest about the script. We had two scripts, you know, dummy script and the real script.

And it would have been a mess, I think, to get into this thing. And so John Daly from England and Gerald Green, they came in and they saved the the product because they loved it. They loved the script. And John was a fighter. He was a you know, he'd been on the, he'd been a boxing promoter in Congo. He'd been one of the promoters of the

Alii fight. He'd seen the world. He was a rough guy. He was in a merchant marine. He knew people behaved like he laughed. He loved this stuff. Because it's real life. It's real behavior. And people in Hollywood were loose, had lost touch with that. They couldn't, that rawness of Salvador was not for them.

And in fact, after we made, you know, We made the movie. The script was turned down repeatedly. And John went ahead for distribution, turned down repeatedly for distribution. That's very important. And Zod had a choice. He could have dropped it and moved on. But he made the film with me for a very limited amount of money.

And that's a story unto itself, the way the money goes. And I wanted to write all that up for young filmmakers to understand the independent film process and how films get made and how much money you need and how you have to budget things. Yeah. It was an up and down struggle. But even then, nobody would, in the distribution system, would actually support the film in the American side. There was no interest. And when we actually made the film and we showed the first cut at three hours to an American distribution company, they said no.

They actually shut down the screening. It was a very depressing experience. John went ahead and thank God. He had guts and he actually distributed the film himself as a small company. It was one of the, in that time period when Hollywood was changing and there was new video releases and smaller films were getting some attention. However, we didn't do anything. We didn't do any business. Nobody knew about us. And actually, but John went ahead and financed platoon right after that back to back for a little bit more money. And I made, as I was making platoon, Salvador began to be recognized.

it began to be recognized. And as I wrote in a book, it started to get some attention. And believe it or not, we ended up at the end of that year with Academy Award nominations for the screenplay and for Jimmy Woods' performance

in Salvador, as well as nominations, many nominations for Platoon, which is like a dream for a young film director, a dream. So when you're working on the Salvador script, you did two or three scenes per day.

You wrote two or three scenes per day. For people who don't know about writing movies, how fast is that? That's, you know, it's been done. I think movie writing sometimes you can get, there's two ways to go about it. You can go about it and say, look, I got to get it down, the idea, the vision, the treatment, the whole feel of the thing. I'd rather do that than to cross the T's and the eyes and give it, give the reader a sense of where you're going. We did it that way. We did the big, the big strokes. And it got, as you get, closer to shooting, we made it tighter and tighter.

But we wanted to keep the dialogue raw, real, the way people talk. And I think we did a good job of that. Jimmy Woods, of course, brought another element completely to the script, because he was a professional actor. At first, I was going to use Boyle as himself, which was an interesting idea. And I did a screen test, which I described in the book, chasing the light. You'll see the screen test was hilarious because he was not an actor, but he was a funny guy. As I said, he was changing color in the screen test because, frankly, he'd wake up one day and he'd be kind of reddish in the face from drinking.

Next day, he might be greenish from being sick. It was never reliably the same skin color. And that's very tough for an actor. You have to have the same skin color every day. And I was surprised to learn that you thought of Martin Sheen is Boyle in the first thing. Well, he accepted the role, and he certainly was a legitimate actor. So when we moved off of Boyle, we moved to the actors, Martin was one of the first who accepted. He accepted it.

Other people would be shocked and I even read it. And then I met Jimmy for the other role of a Jim Belushi role, and he ended up being, he wanted the main role. That's very much Jimmy, and he took it. He convinced you, no, no, no, Martin Sheen's not the guy to play Richard Boyle. That's right. That's right. Yes, because Martin was too Catholic for this. That was his argument, too Catholic.

Jimmy was a Catholic, but he was a lapsed Catholic. He has such a wonderful, fast-talking manner, right? If the character's a schemer, James Woods can play a schemer. A schemer and a scammer. Yeah, and for somebody who was short of money, as the Boyle character was, you look at James Woods and he looks like he's missed a few meals. Yeah, I can see that definitely. We started him up in San Francisco, and he did look very ready.

I would think Boyle did a lot of kind of, a lot of different kinds of journalism. By this point, he's a photojournalist in the period you're covering in the movie. Yeah. And I would think that took pictures. Yeah, the very obvious way to do this would be he's going to go to El Salvador and he's going to discover truth through the lens of a camera, right? That's the, that's the hackneyed way to do this story. But you did not write it exactly that way. Well, he was both.

He was a journal, you know, he was, he's a hand me down. I mean, he went to write stories and at the same time take pictures and sell what he could. He was a stringer, somebody who just turned it in and he'd make a few bucks. And you need leads. He knew the, he knew the other journalists, so he had leads and not. And he has a few fights with the journalists, as you remember, with a more legitimate journalist. But that's the way you have to do it. You have to do it on your back.

And he knew the guy who got killed was John Savage, John Hogan. Hogan was killed down there, but I forgot the first name. I'm sorry. Yeah, John Hogan, Newsweek. Hogland, yes. Yeah, he knew him. And they go hunting together for leads.

When you're writing a movie like Salvador, how much do you assume the audience knows about the events? Nothing. And they ended up, they knew nothing about it. And unfortunately, there was a very little interest in it. That's where I made my mistake. I thought that people would be interested in the Civil War down in the Central America. Here, there was all these things happening.

Nicaragua was falling. There was a, there was revolt there. There was revolts in Salvador, in Honduras, in Guatemala. And it was all on fire down there. And I thought there would be significant interest, but I was wrong. And if you look at the box office over the years, there's very little success for South of the Border stories, very little success. actually no interest in the civil war, which was on our doorstep. And of course, because I'd been in Vietnam, I saw the similarities that we were fighting the same kind of war, an ideological war against basically reform, against unions, against land reform, against teachers.

And you said when you wrote the script, you called it the style adjut prop cinema. Why that style? Well, make no bones about it. I mean, that's what it was. I had been very influenced in my film school years by Zee in Battle of Algiers. And I thought, let's make it urgently. Let's make it documentary style. Let's make it like it's happening right now and make it raw, raw, raw, which I tried to do.

And I think I succeeded. But there was no interest in the film. But eventually, it found its way. You see, when Platoon came out, I guess that gave it legitimacy. And people saw it over the years, but not enough. still, it did well. In the end, I can say, it did well and got Oscar nominations. Can you believe that Boyle was nominated for an Oscar?

He's sitting at the Academy Awards there in another row, of course. And it's just surreal. He was trying to figure out, if I win this, how can I cash in on it? He ended up cashing in on this whole deal because no name is mentioned, but he had got a job. He finally got a job, a legitimate job. at a professional university in California, in the California system,

as an associate or whatever, adjunct professor of film in one of these colleges that you see all over the map. And he actually held that job for, I think, 15, 20 years. So you go down to El Salvador. You talk to these military guys, as you said, you ultimately decide that it's just going to be too crazy

to try to make the movie down there. I wasn't used to learn that the military guys liked you because you were the guy who wrote Scarface. Yeah, they loved me. I got treated like royalty down there as the writer of Caracottorda. Scarface. That is the Spanish word for Scarface. They thought I was we macho.

I had balls. And they loved Tony Montana. You know, because he killed people who got in his way. And they, he was, he pronounced himself anti-communist. But in Starface, of course,

it's not quite that way. But anyway, he was anti-communists. and killing communists was one that was all about for them, if you want to think about the wars down there. They thought that anybody who've agitated for reform, whether he's a teacher or a farmer, it was a communist if he complained. And there's a lot, I mean, it still goes on. You know, in Colombia, for example, I mean, they kill people left and right, the paramilitaries for years now who profess any kind of reform.

How did you settle on Mexico to shoot the movie? That was the retreat to sanity. After when you've been down south of Mexico, you understand how crazy it is down there. I mean, all those countries, except for Costa Rica, were turbulent. Guatemala, there was a mass murderous going on. Death squads. Yeah, geez. Mexico was a retreat.

It was a haven. Now it's not, of course, because it's gotten much more violent. But Mexico, in those days, was a wonderful retreat. And we had organized film crews. We had a studio. We had a production coordinator there. Not much money. But we were able, and the business in Mexico was depressed.

So we were able to take advantage of all these depressed prices. And we had great success in Mexico. We shot, we finished the film there. Financially speaking, you've called Salvador a scam. In what sense was it a scam? Well, we started with nothing. We were going to make it for nothing. I was going to make it for a few hundred thousand dollars.

But, and we started with the idea that we're going to get it made, like a film school, this film project, a film student project in NYU. And of course, that ran out of steam quickly when our advisor got killed. And it was clear that it was not going to be easy to put anything in Salvador, anything at all. In the middle of a war, you don't go, you don't go make a movie, you know? No. No, not a good idea. Well, we went out to the rebel territories. And, you know, we, Boyle knew a lot of the generals.

He'd been in Salvador years before. on the soccer war he covered that so he knew the people he knew the generals he knew a lot of the inside people in the military that was our entry card and we traveled around that was quite a trip and it's reflected in the movie you see some of those scenes

with this he's our ass of Richard Boyle is saved at the end of the movie by a military colonel who recognizes them from the old days so yeah Mexico was a relief and even that was as you know from the book

it was very difficult to shoot in Mexico because of our money problems and we eventually eventually we were asked to leave Mexico in the first place it was Jimmy Jimmy was hysterical sometimes about the conditions he was a germaphobe and could not stand anything that was like

you know what I'm saying a germ written or anything like that so he was complaining all the time Mexicans warned him. But the real reason we had to leave Mexico was because of the bills. We didn't pay the bills. And our producer was a,

he was a scam artist. But we got through it. And we got out on the 42nd day. I think we never finished what we wanted to shoot in Mexico. We finished it, the film up in Las Vegas and San Francisco. What kind of toll did the filming

take on you personally? It made me older. It certainly thinned out my hair. I felt like I was exhausted after it, but I was happy because, as I said in the book, I was able to do it. It was my way. And I was able to say the things I wanted to say about imperialism, neo-imperialism, Vietnam more. I said quite a few things in that movie through the eyes of the, through the mouth of Richard Boyle. Yeah, you have this scene late in the film where Boyle, James Woods, is talking to a couple of Americans one is like a CIA guy, one's a military guy.

Yeah. And it's an Oliver Stone speech. What we would come to know is an Oliver Stone speech. But this is kind of the first one, right, that actually got into a movie. That's correct. Well, there were pieces of it in Scarface, if you look, and pieces of it in Midnight Express. And here, though, I didn't cut myself. The thing is that at that time, I never expected that this, that I would be able to do another film again.

I was just, okay, this is a big film, this is my chance. I'm going to put everything I have into it. And that's why I did that. I put everything I wanted into it. Because I didn't want to have the complaint at the end of my life that, well, I made a film, but I didn't quite put everything I wanted to it. I had to get it all out. I didn't really expect work again. And I was quite surprised that John was willing to finance platoon after all the fights we were having on the editing of Salvador, because it was very, it was very important.

very violent, very sexy, and off the charts. I mean, you have to realize this is 1985. The business has loosened up considerably, but in those days, it was still tight. We barely got an R-R-80, barely. So much violence in that movie. That was the nature of my experience there. What was it like to direct James Woods? Excruciating at that time.

I wanted to kill him. He wanted to kill me at times. We had a really, we were like too mad. And then in a quiz and art, he said at one point. But we finished and actually we got a good performance from Jimmy. Jimmy really, really made the film human in his way and made Boyle it funny. And you enjoyed the character. You don't see many characters like that in American films.

I don't know. Have you seen recently? No. They don't have that. And I regret that we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we lack that touch of the street. And he comes in because he's done once upon a time in America. So he's...

Jimmy has... Yeah, but that was not considered a success. His onion field was a bigger success, I suppose, in this country. Yeah, he had... Sergio Lone, he was a big shot. He was a professional actor. We were all amateurs compared to him, and he let us know that repeatedly.

So he's latching on to that power imbalance. I've done... I've done these movies and you've never directed a big movie like this. Yeah, yeah. And you're not going to direct me. And you mentioned the character, Jim Belushi's character, who's named Dr. Rock, this San Francisco DJ who improbably comes down to Salvador with Boyle. How did Woods and Belushi get along on the set?

Not at all. Who did get along? Belichy wanted to kill him because Jimmy is very good. He's done it for years. He knows how to step on a line. He knows the lines and he knows the other person's lines. And he knows how to play for a camera. In other words, if you're two of you in a shot,

he will get the attention of the camera, not the other actors. In those days, he was hungry. Jimmy was hungry. He wanted to, he would sometimes go too far. He would explode off the screen. And you'd have to calm him down and tame him. But there's a lot of talent there.

tremendous energy. You know, Belushi wanted to kill him on one. It was crying at one point. And I think they eventually got along. But, you know, it was, that was okay. I mean, I don't mind that they were fighting because he dragged Belushi down there under false promises telling them that he would have this in Salvador. He never got it.

He barely got out alive. In the movie, they come off as friends who need each other but kind of can't stand each other. That's correct. They're both broke. They're both desperate. Belushi's wife who's left him. No, Jimmy's wife is left, and Belushi's dog has been impounded and euthanized at the so they have no friends left.

They take their broken down Mustang, they just drive it down south of the border and keep going. Yeah. I mean, it's funny when you say, like, that sense of the camera that Woods has where he's positioning himself in certain ways so that he will own the scene and his fellow actor will not own the scene. Yeah, you have to watch. That's amazing. You should watch the scenes in the car driving to Mexico.

I think you'll understand what's going on. Belushi had not done many movies, so this was all experience for him, but he grew fast. And you had a government censor trailing you around in Mexico? Yes. In Mexico in those days, you had to have it, and you couldn't get the license to export the film out of Mexico.

You couldn't get out of the country unless you had an approval. And she was a number. She was a number. We had to seduce her. We had tried everything. I tried to put my best people on her to try to watch her and try to seduce her, try to take her out at night, trying to keep her interested and didn't work. She was especially objective to the violence. And above all, she didn't seem to understand there was a big difference between Salvador and Mexico, being those days. Salvador, in my experience, the streets were filthy and there was a disorganization. the whole system. And that was part of the charm of the film. Whereas in Mexico, they didn't, they were much more civilized about society was at a higher level. And,

and she could not understand why we were throwing garbage in the Mexican streets, you know. And there were vult. We had bultures there in the streets, you know? I mean, stuff like that. You have a big battle at the end of the movie that James Woods and John Savage cover for their various things? How do you stage a battle?

This is your first battle scene, I take it. It was huge. It was so exciting to do. So exciting. I had done nothing like that in my life. It was based on the Battle of Santa Ana, which was a key battle where the United States, where the government, for the first time, was really losing a major battle. And the United States came in at the last second and released weaponry and so forth.

And it turned the tide of the battle. And the government troops succeeded in suppressing the, the attack on Santa Ana, which was a provincial capital, a very important junction point. The rebels came close, but didn't quite make it. And I did falsify one thing. I did put horse charge in there because I said, this is my last film, so I might as well have a horse charge in it. But I got my rocks off doing that, and a cavalry charge of significant proportions.

I had fun. At the same time, it was exhausted. We blew up. In Mexico, we had quite a lot of, they were liberal, and they let us blow up. half of town. We did it with false fronts. We put false stores on fronts and we blew those up. So it looked like buildings were being devastated. It was quite a battle. Helicopters. Helicopters and planes, I forgot. We had planes. Jimmy freaked out. The planes were bombing, stray feeding the street.

Yeah, quite a scene. There's a little moment I love too where Savage and Woods are looking at each other. And I see the cavalry chart. You're talking about coming. And they smile because they're in this horribly dangerous situations. There's bullets whizzing by. They might get shot, but it's great material, right? They have great picture to be taken. And it's almost like in the middle of this, they remember their, you know,

they're journalists. They think of their careers and oh my gosh, you know, I'm like a picture of a lifetime. Exactly. And that's, I think, very accurate to most journalists who are real authentic journalists. Now, I'm not talking about the ones who are hiding miles from the front. You know, these guys wanted to get down there because they needed money. They needed to get pictures.

There was a sad ending to the film and a happy ending of the film? Very, very accurate ending, I think. In those days, America was cooperating with the governments of those countries. And there were so many people trying to get out and cross the border illegally or illegally in any way possible. At the end of the film, as you know, Wood was able to get his girlfriend out with her. children or two children. And they get out through the border. It's such a good moment because they've been through so much that you feel so relieved.

And then, of course, the U.S. border, the border patrols catch them inland. And that happened quite a bit when you get away from the border. You get 20, 50 miles, 60 miles into the country on your way into San Diego or Las Vegas and you'd get stopped. And if you didn't have the proper papers or the proper behavior, you were deported. You were taken back to Salvador and that's what happened to Maria. A lot of these people ended up in refugee camps in Guatemala or various other places. You had to fight for that ending?

The producers didn't want a happier ending to the film? Yeah, that's correct. They'd been through so much. Of course, the Hollywood idea is you got to get a break. They have to have a happy ending. and I refused. Even my wife was against it. And John Daly was against it,

but it was my film and I was going to go down with it, you know. That was my attitude. And I think if I had a happy ending, it might have made more money at that time. I can't say it for sure. You know, there is a formula to these things, right? I like the ending the way it is because it feels raw. So you shoot the movie in Mexico,

you finish up in San Francisco and Las Vegas. And how much of the movie did you think you had gotten at that point. I was happy. I was very happy. I didn't know all the problems I had that I was going to have on editing. I didn't know it would be rejected by everybody. I didn't know it was going to be three hours, but man, I was happy. It was the greatest moment, one of the great moments I'd had. I had never been able to make the film I wanted until that moment. And you look at the finish cut and you think I've gotten the movie, I've made the movie. I won't have. I was on my way. There's a lot of issues. You know, there was a lot of stops. No, I, I fought with everyone to keep the movie intact, to keep the integrity of it intact. As you say, Hemdale winds up releasing the movie themselves. Yes. 1986.

Yeah, which was not, they did not have the ability to release it, but they did it because everybody else turned it down. So, I mean, basically, it was a small release. in April of, April of 86. And I was heartbroken that I had, John was good for his word and sent me to the Philippines, and I was in the Philippines when it opened. And I was reading about, you know, the business was poor.

It opened on the East Coast, mostly. And then in the West Coast is where we picked up business, because I suppose there's a huge Selvadoran community on the West Coast. And they did come out for the film. So there was, thank God for the West Coast there and Arizona. And those places, we did business and then it started to pick up on the East Coast, we got some good reviews. You read reviews?

Yeah, are you kidding? We needed them. Anything we could get, you know. David Denby, New York Magazine, really liked the movie. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He called me, he said, I went from being a bum to be a hero or something. A bum meaning, because I'd been, they thought of me as some kind of right-wing,

uh, uh, violent. extremist. I don't know why, but Scarface, I suppose, and Midnight Express. But as you know, if I'm reading my book, it's more complicated than that. Yeah, and I said Pauline Kale wrote this. She said, Stone writes and directs as if someone had put a gun to the back of his neck and yelled go and didn't take it away until he'd finished, which is not a bad line and fairly correct in this case, I think. No, I think it's certainly true about my work in general. I think I, I, I kept going once I got, once I got,

call it, accepted in this Hollywood distribution system, which is to say get into it, which is to say Platoon actually was distributed and made a fortune. Despite all the problems we had, made a fortune. I mean, talking about worldwide fortune.

John Daly from being a nobody producer had made his $5, six million dollar movie and it was suddenly worldwide business in every country of the world. this, you can't believe the change. A lot of that money was stolen. I never saw most of it. But it was unbelievable change. But at that point, I could get, I ran like, I said, this is a break for me. I made eight more movies in 10 years. I made eight movies in eight years, basically. From 19, I worked steady without stopping from 1986 through 1996. So this is, so Salvador comes out in the

spring of 86, platoon later in 86, and then you make eight more movies. Right. Without stopping, because I figured that they're going to get, they're going to, they're going to throw the net on me and put me back in the nut house. You know, they're never going to let me go on. So I, I hurried. And I actually had success. Wall Street, whoever thought a business movie would make money.

Again, I, I bucked the odds, but it turned out okay. Turned out okay. It turned out okay. Made money. And then I did a failure called Talk Radio, but it's a great little film. And then I did Born in the Fourth of July. And that put me, God, Tom Cruise and all that, it did well. It did very well at the box office. And then one thing

after another, the doors, the JFK, having an earth, which was a flop. And then natural born killers, my God, what a controversy. And then right after that, Nixon, which is a three-hour, 18-minute movie that I'm very proud of, it's amazing film. What did Richard Boyle think of the finished film, Salvador? He loved it, of course. I mean, he wanted to have He wanted to, well, what's he going to do? He said, you know, anything that would work for him. He got an Oscar nomination for Christ's sake. He showed up in the Oscars and the new girlfriend.

He was so, he was so happy. And as I say, he got a job at the university for a long-lasting job as a film professor. And you thought about doing a sequel where Boyle would go to Beirut? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was a wonderful idea. I wish we'd done it. But we'd been through so much hell on this film that I don't know if I had the guts to face that again.

But the idea, yes, was Boyle had a hundred stories. He'd been everywhere. And we both knew I had been in Lebanon. My first wife had been Lebanese. So the plan was for him to start in Sun City, Arizona. He goes home to his parents for arrest and life in Sun City, which was unbelievable. The scenes are hilarious.

Richard Boyle, who's a chaotic guy in Sun City, Arizona, breaking all the rules. So it goes from there. He can't stay in Arizona. He's lost Maria and Salvador. He goes back to, he goes to Ireland to make a few dollars with the IRA. And, of course, he gets into trouble with the British. But then he moves on to Beirut, which is going on. And there's quite a battle there, as you know.

And he has a girlfriend on the Arabic side of the equation. and Hezbollah, all that. He gets into this mess in Lebanon and barely gets out alive. The Americans, of course, there's the big blowing up the American Marines at that base, 250 of them you're killed. And it was some story, but we never really wrote it. We talked about it, talked about it, but never really put it to paper. I was so busy with the other films, you know, Platoon. Then I wanted to do Wall Street before it was too late.

so I didn't get back to it and then I had to fights with Richard too you know there was some some falling out did he sue you at some point yeah he made it he made attempts to yes he made attempts for money

for money that he was owed from the picture no and I tried to get him paid I tried but there was it was hard to get him paid on Salvador you know I got I made money on platoon so and I brought him to the Philippines I tried to help them out and get him going

but Salvador was Never a money deal. He was, you know, and he paid off for him in the sense that he did have the professorship. Yeah, and I read he ran for a seat in the California State Assembly in 1988, so two years after the movie comes out. And his portrayal in the movie was used against him by his Republican opponent, who said, see, that guy was a sleaze bag in the movie.

You can't possibly vote for him. He was always running for something. When I went up to San Francisco, the first time, to when I got the script, the notes that he written, he was running for board of supervisors in San Francisco. And I would go around with him and see his campaign. What a campaign it was. He came in 13th or out of 14 people on the election.

He was character, though. The election rally, three went to. He was always trying to get in public office because that's where you figured you could make some money. So when was the last time you watched Salvador? Oh, I'd say, a year ago? Yeah. And do you, you know, sometimes writers, when they see an early piece of writing,

they look at it and go, oh, I would have done that differently and that differently and that differently. Do you do that when you watch a movie? Sometimes, yeah, sure. I mean, listen, in the book, I wrote that I know that there are some things that are not that are rough in Salvador. and I knew that there was crudity because also I was a new director.

I mean, it was my second feature film, a third feature film, and I was learning the ropes. But I'm still very proud of it because it's a spirit that's more important than the finesse. Oliver Stone, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian.

Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. A little post script here. Salvador came out in March 1986, nine months later, Stone's next movie Platoon came out, which won the Oscar for Best Director along with Best Picture, and, well,

we've been in Oliver Stone world ever since. Your mileage may vary on some of the more recent episodes. Thanks very much to Oliver Stone. Production Magic is always by Erica Servantes. If you like these interviews, a gentle plea to help me spread the word. I really appreciate it. We've got some very cool ones coming up,

including another tale of how a great book was written, and a visit from one of your favorite ringer people. David Chutemaker and I back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.