In person, Oliver Stone turns out to be a lot like you’d expect from watching his movies. A big, swarthy guy with a 5 o’clock shadow at nine-thirty in the morning, Stone burns with intensity, frequently bursting into a gap-toothed, devilish grin.
He speaks purposefully, and fast. But even though the director of JFK and Nixon has a hard-earned reputation as a troublemaker, fond of rooting around old Washington cover-ups, don’t ask him about any of those 9/11 conspiracy theories percolating all over the Internet.
“So fucking what?” an exasperated Stone replies. “If you look at the forest instead of the trees, what’s happened since is far worse than what happened that day. Any conspiracy, whatever it may be, is not nearly as relevant as where we are now. We have more deaths, more terror, more fear, more debt…constitutional breakdowns—we’ve got everything going on!”
Another journalist tries to ask a question, but Stone is on a roll: “Give me one and a half, brother—I want to say more about this. There is a conspiracy that everybody seems to be missing, and it’s pretty overt. Richard Clarke got it, and so did several other books. There are a bunch of people running the White House who ignored all the normal traditions of the State Department and C.I.A. input, and they simply went their own way with their own information inside the Defense Department—and then they went to war.”
Now there’s the Oliver Stone we all know and love!
But don’t expect any of this in World Trade Center—his resolutely apolitical, surprisingly “Hollywood” movie…
To continue reading the Philadelphia Weekly interview, click here. For a review of World Trade Center, click here.
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