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Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Matt Zoller Seitz’s ‘The Oliver Stone Experience’

With The Oliver Stone Experience, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz has authored a massive, all-encompassing examination of the life and films of director Oliver Stone. Styled as a lengthy, career-spanning interview, The Oliver Stone Experience finds Seitz and Stone going back and forth through Stone’s filmography, from early student films all the way up to 2016’s Snowden. Mr. Seitz describes the result as “an Oliver Stone movie about Oliver Stone in the form of a book.”

The Oliver Stone Experience is out in bookstores on September 13, and we’re honored to host an exclusive excerpt for you to check out below. The following segment is from the chapter discussing Stone’s 1986 film Salvador, which marks its 30th anniversary this year. It was Stone’s first truly successful film as a director, following 1974’s Seizure and 1981’s The Hand, and was released the same year as Stone’s Platoon as part of a two-picture deal with Hemdale Films. Previously, Stone had made a name for himself as a screenwriter, penning such films as Scarface and Year of the Dragon.  In Salvador, James Woods plays boozing photojournalist Richard Boyle, who, along with his cohort Dr. Rock (Jim Belushi), finds himself in El Salvador during the country’s civil war. Woods’ character was based on real-life, and by Stone’s own description “crazy”, photojournalist Richard Boyle, who co-write the script with Stone.

Images from The Oliver Stone Experience (Abrams), courtesy of Oliver Stone and Ixtlan Productions


OLIVER STONE: With my own money I paid Richard Boyle, and we went down to Salvador, in Central America, and I was down on my luck. Nothing had come from Scarface or Dragon, except for problems, and Platoon had been heartbreaking. So I said, I’m just desperate, desperate. I went up to San Francisco and I saw Richard, who I’d known through Ron Kovic [the subject of Stone’s film Born on the 4th of July], and Richard was a funny character, running for Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. He had no money, was living out of the back of his broken down MG, his girlfriend was living in a trailer.

On my way to the airport, he had stacks of loose pages in the back of his car, and when I asked, What are these? he went, Oh, those are my Salvador stories! I said, Let me read it! I read it and I was really magically transported. I was like, This is great fucking stuff! It wasn’t a screenplay, just a series of his adventures in Salvador, but it was great!

I brought the guy down in early ’85, I guess. My wife had our first child, Sean, who was literally crawling around on the floor while Richard and I hacked it out—I was writing, making notes, doing my structure thing and having fun with it, and Richard was drinking everything he could! He drank the fucking baby formula out of the icebox. My wife was like, “I want him out of the house!” He was trying to fuck the nanny, too! He was the ultimate bad houseguest! I think he did fuck the nanny! I know that Jimmy Woods did.

Where else do you meet people like that? Where else do movies come from? This one was about the life adventures of a maverick! Well, Boyle was a maverick journalist—he wrote a book about it, Flower of the Dragon.[17] It was about being on a forward base in Vietnam when a mutiny of soldiers took place. Separately, he was in Cambodia at the French embassy right to the bitter end, when the Khmer Rouge came into Phnom Penh in ’75. He’s always been a bit of a thrill seeker, too, but at the same time he believes in justice, and he’s fought for it, and written about it. He’s a definite left-winger. He ran for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and he lost. He was strange. A scoundrel, yes. Jimmy hated him. But I think Richard was always the spirit behind the movie.

So we go to Salvador, and we concoct this plan—it was insane! We met with Colonel [Ricardo] Cienfuegos, who was the chief spokesman for the Salvadoran armed forces, and we were going to get the whole Salvadoran army on our side!

 

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: Wait, what? You’re telling me that you went to El Salvador in the 1980s to try to get the army of El Salvador to help you make your film about how bad the army of El Salvador was?

 

It was an amazing con game, and we really played it! We went to the offices in Salvador, and we had no money! We were trying to make this movie with nothing!

 

Did anybody in the government of El Salvador actually read the script?

 

Yeah, but it wasn’t the real script. We gave them dummy scripts! We were going to go to Mexico to finish it, but we wanted to get their approval first, so we could shoot as much as we could there.

Ricardo Cienfuegos was our main ally. He got us in with all the military people. I met all the big shots in the military. Cienfuegos was a good guy. He was killed the day I got to New York. And on the front page of the New York Times, there was a picture of his body on a tennis court, draped under an FMLN[18] flag. That was Ricardo! That was bad news.

So there went our plan. Another setback. Poor Cienfuegos! I gave the script to Gerald Green in there, and he loved it and immediately went to Daly. Daly literally came to me, and I remember a conversation we had in early ’85, where he said, “Which one do you want to do first, Oliver? Salvador, or Platoon?”

 

So the studio was going to make both movies, and it was just a question of which order you’d prefer to shoot them in? That’s quite a reversal of fortune from what you’d been dealing with earlier.

 

After all those years of shit!

 

And in the end, the movies came out in the same calendar year!

 

I made a mistake at that point, because I should’ve said, Let’s do Platoon first, but I was scared because of the curse that had followed me on two different productions, so instead I said, Let’s do Salvador—it’s timely and Platoon’s never going to happen. I said we could do Salvador for two, three million, and we couldn’t, but anything to get it made.

So he said, You have my blessing, go! And literally, we went.

I wanted to put Boyle in it at that point.

 

To play himself?

 

Because he was so crazy! We did a screen test, which I have somewhere—it’s hilarious! Richard, because of the drinking, was one day green, one day red, and the other yellow! He could never have the same skin tone! But he did do the screen test, because he wanted to fuck all the girls! John was very nice, he was like, Oliver, don’t you think we should use an actor? I thought, “OK,” so we went with Martin Sheen.

 

By that point Sheen had played dark or crazy before: Badlands, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Apocalypse Now, and The Dead Zone. So why’d you end up going with Woods?

 

Because Jimmy Woods walked in to play Dr. Rock, we went to dinner somewhere, and the whole dinner, he talked me out of Martin Sheen! Martin was having problems with the violence and the sex anyway, since he’s a very clean-cut, Catholic guy. Jimmy, ironically, ended up hating Boyle anyway, because Boyle was so insane. Jimmy likes order, he’s a very ordered guy, but insane. Boyle was insane, too!

What was that shoot like?

 

I’ll never forget the shoot. It was one of the most insane shoots I’ve ever been on in my life. Gerald Green takes all the money from Daly he can get: 3 million. He decides to cash in on it overnight and make another movie off that money. So he has a sweetheart of a deal at the Mexican bank, puts all the money in, and the next week they devalue the currency and the 3 million is worth like 2.4 or 2.3! We lost 800,000 dollars! It was a mess! Everything possible went wrong! The crew quit five times. Mexican labor crews are very tough. Woods was complaining from beginning to end. The conditions were tough—you saw the picture, it was a mess! We ran out of money, got kicked out. Literally kicked out of Mexico.

 

Why?

 

We hadn’t paid the crew! I like Gerald, he got the movie made, but at the end of the day it was so painful. But John, because of his success, put up another million to finish this damn thing. I told him I had no beginning and no end but a great middle, so we finished shooting in San Francisco, for the beginning, and the ending in the desert of Las Vegas, so thank God I didn’t shoot the beginning or the end first, because they would’ve cut the middle for sure! (Laughs)

But the last scene, I didn’t know what I was doing! I took all these vehicles out in the desert, and I’ll never forget, the new production manager had all the money in a briefcase, and somebody opened it and it was like Treasure of the Sierra Madre—the money was flying around! It was insane! We finished the last shot as the sun went down.

 

And then it was ready to go?

 

Orion looked at Salvador during the editing process, and said, “It’s too violent, it’ll get an X rating, we’ll never take it.” It broke our hearts and that was hard, because we needed a distribution deal. But things were changing with the video revolution. Daly had more confidence, so he said, “I’ll form my own distribution company.” And he did! We fought like cats and dogs in the editing room, though. Daly wanted to control some things and I refused. It was a catfight there, because it was a violent picture, the first cut three and a half hours, and I had to get it down to two!

 

And you did.

 

Two ten, or something like that. But some scenes got butchered in the process. I had people giving blow jobs under tables in the movie, stuff that was just insane.

Memo from Salvador coproducer John Daly listing specific cuts that Stone would have to make in order to reduce the film's rating from an "X" to an "R."

Memo from Salvador coproducer John Daly listing specific cuts that Stone would have to make in order to reduce the film’s rating from an “X” to an “R.”

It still has an edge, though. It feels counterculture. It’s Fear and Loathing in Central America.

 

It was! It was a real thing.

 

And you have a main character in Boyle who genuflects toward wanting to be redeemed, but it’s pretty clear that that’s never going to happen for this guy—that Boyle is who he is. The confession scene, where he’s promising to reform if he can save his lover but keeps carving out little exceptions for himself: That’s one of the great scenes in your filmography.

 

I didn’t write the scene! I was so angry with Woods that day that when I was discussing the scenes, I said, Just go in there and tell them what a weasel you are!

 

So that’s just James Woods winging it?

 

It is, and he starts with, I’m a weasel! (Laughs) It reads like a made-up scene, but it is him.

He and I were almost killing each other. One day he walked off the set, on foot, into the Mexican wilderness.

 

Was he angry about the conditions?

 

Everything was wrong. Jimmy’s a chronic complainer. I love him now! But when he walked off, we cut off all the cars. I called all the cops and said, There’s a lunatic loose on the roads! Recoup him for us! So we had cops looking for him to bring him back as a madman! He walked for about an hour and a half along the road some fucking place, and we finally got him back.

I mean, every day with Jimmy was rocky. On Salvador he was the lead, so that was tooth and nail. We were like two madmen in a Cuisinart, he said. Isn’t that a great expression?

 

It is.

 

Jimmy was the star of the film, and a bit of a bully. He had the most work experience of any of us, so naturally he knew where the camera should go! And he had a lot of complaints about Mexico. He doesn’t travel well—talking about how he was “stapled to the toilet seat,” that kind of stuff. “This place sucks.” He doesn’t like to travel, he’s anal in that way. His house that he bought was very clean. He had the cleanest house, almost like no one could touch anything!

But he was fun. He was great. He was great in Salvador. He got an Oscar nomination out of it. And he was great in Nixon, don’t forget, as Bob Haldeman, and as the team doctor in Any Given Sunday, giving shit to Matthew Modine. Every time, he gave me great energy. Jimmy’s got the mind of a steel trap. He’s very articulate, fun and witty, much more sophisticated and sexy than people realize, if they don’t see the side of him that women are attracted to. Sometimes he’s crazy, but that’s what makes a great actor. There has to be some craziness there. Jimmy was born that way.

 

You’re very left wing, and James Woods has very right-wing political views, more so now than when you first worked with him almost thirty years ago. Would that stop you from working with him again?

 

I don’t think so. I had dinner with him a while ago.

 

A documentary of you and James Woods having dinner would be very entertaining.

 

We have fun. He’s very smart; people know that.

Stone, James Woods, and John Savage on the set of Salvador in Mexico in 1985.

Stone, James Woods, and John Savage on the set of Salvador in Mexico in 1985.

Do you have conservative friends?

 

Sure. I like [John] Milius, he’s a big conservative. I cast [Charlton] Heston in Any Given Sunday, and I enjoyed Heston. It’s good to hear the right-wingers. I don’t know what the hell they’re thinking—they might be out of their minds!—but I’ll hear it. That doesn’t bother me. It’s fun, you know?

I did three movies with Jimmy, but even when he played H. R. Haldeman in Nixon, he never hit me with any of that right-wing stuff! I was a little depressed after 2002, when he became a little more active as a conservative. And you know, my friend Stanley [Weiser] wrote a 2003 movie about Rudy Giuliani for TV, Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story, with Jimmy as Giuliani. He said Jimmy wanted to change a lot of it; I don’t know what the result was of all that. Jimmy’s Rudy Giuliani devotion was not my cup of tea. But I don’t think I ever had an argument with him about it.

Guys from Vietnam, guys like Stanley White—there are plenty of people in my life who are conservative. I know their arguments; I try to listen to them. But I don’t talk politics with friends. They know my politics to some degree, because they know my work, so I’m not about to belabor that. If they ask me about politics, sometimes I get upset, but I’d rather not be. I’d like to have fun with people. Jimmy is great. I’d rather talk to Jimmy than some left-wing bore.

 

Tell me about the style of Salvador. It seems very controlled yet also loose. Parts of it look like it’s a documentary with actors.

 

Robert Richardson[19] had done a documentary on El Salvador, so I liked him. He did his job, and so did Bruno Rubeo,[20] a great production designer. We had a censor, Mexican censor, very sensitive, on the set the whole time. I wanted all the dirt and shit in this Central American town, and she’d come up and go crazy! She’d say, This doesn’t represent Spanish people! So our associate producer, Clayton Townsend,[21] had to keep her off the set, and he did a pretty good job of doing it! We’d have to bargain, cut the amount of rubbish and vultures down, which is what Salvador was like when I drove there. You can imagine: It was crazy.

It was that kind of production, catch-as-catch-can. John [Daly] had full faith. But I was scared that because I’d been on the edge of destruction so many times, they’d have no faith in me to make another movie—that this would be the end of my directing career, that I’d have Salvador and that’s it. But John never lost faith. John kept the faith, and he sent me back to Platoon.

There was tremendous excitement in ’85, doing Salvador, and I felt like we had something. The editing was torturous but exhilarating. The editing of Salvador was very rough and tough, because it was a raw experience. We finished in fall of ’85, and we had a hard time with John Daly. That was his only problem: his control of the editing room. But I was tough, too, and we went back and forth many times. He had the money; I was over budget. So I was indebted to John, and at the same time anxious, because I wanted to make Platoon, but I didn’t want to have a knife held to my throat and say, Well, if you don’t cut it this way, we’re not going to make Platoon. Do you understand? I was the strong guy, I’d hold on to my cut as much as possible, but it was three hours. Too bloody, too violent. It got turned down everywhere.

 

By theatrical distributors? Which means you’re at risk of having your movie go straight to video, which you definitely don’t want.

 

Right. But he decided to distribute it. [Making the film] was always against the odds, and all of a sudden, it opens in April of ’86. It had a thrust of some original, good reviews in Los Angeles—the Chicago Tribune review by Michael Wilmington was great—but in New York, another New York Times guy was saying this was leftist propaganda, that it was Costa-Gavras all over again, which to some degree it was; but it was not a nice review. The film didn’t do any business in New York. Essentially it died on the vine.

If I didn’t have Platoon to lift me up and carry me into that next round, I don’t know that I could’ve gone back. I was pretty depressed.


[17] Boyle went through three tours in Vietnam as a war correspondent. The book Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1972) emerged from that experience. For more on Boyle, see the section on Salvador on page 120 of chapter 3.

[18] Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. An umbrella group consisting of five participants in the Salvadoran civil war. Demobilized after the signing of 1992 peace accords, they became a left-wing political party.

[19] 1955– ; documentary cinematographer who moved over to dramatic features; shot Stone’s films from Salvador (1986) through U-Turn (1997), plus films for Martin Scorsese (including 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead and 1995’s Casino) and Quentin Tarantino (from 2003’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 through 2015’s The Hateful Eight).

[20] 1946–2011; Italian-born production designer on Salvador (1986), Platoon (1986), Talk Radio (1988), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Kindergarten Cop (1990), and Sommersby (1993).

[21] Served in production capacities on Stone films from Born on the Fourth of July (1989) through Any Given Sunday (1999); also produced for director Judd Apatow from 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin through 2012’s This Is 40.

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Chris Evangelista is the Executive Editor of Cut Print Film & co-host of the Cut Print Film Podcast. He also contributes to /Film, The Film Stage, Birth.Movies.Death, The Playlist, Paste Magazine, Little White Lies and O-Scope Musings. 'The House on Creep Street' and 'Beware the Monstrous Manther!', two horror books for young readers Chris co-authored with J. Tonzelli, are available wherever books are sold. You can follow him on Twitter @cevangelista413 and view his portfolio at chrisevangelista.net