Oliver Stone
speaker
314 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Oliver Stone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think there's a... You know what? In the Renaissance, there's a period when they all talk about Italy and they all talk about Flemish painting. That's what we're in. The movie business was that moment. We have those hundreds and hundreds of paintings. We should enjoy them all.
That's what critics do. I don't want to do that. They say the 10 best, the best. That's such a bullshit. That's not the question. Yeah, it is because you tend to narrow things down. People have to say, I saw that movie, but it's better than that one. Come on, just wake up.
Ask Sean, he grew up in the 1980s. Ask him what, you remember, you saw it 20 times.
But what are some of the films that did less well in the 80s you loved? Countless, countless.
Documentaries are very important to me, and I did 20 of them, or 15, I don't know. But the reason is they bring you back to the research world, the real world, the world that you're actually dealing with people who are live, and you're getting in touch with that aspect of yourself. Whereas if you live on a stage or live with a fictional film, it's another world.
It's artificial, and you're constantly trying to create realities So it's a real challenge. That's why it's important to stay in touch with the real world. And a lot of Hollywood people do not. I mean, the reason I'm into contemporary events, I mean, look at the films I did in the last 20. World Trade Center, W, the film of George Bush. I stayed current. I wanted to know what was going on.
The last one was Snowden. We did it on the cusp of what happened. And it was very important to me to know what was going on in computers at that point. I don't regret that. You know, they may not have done as well because the American century changed. After 2001, we became another animal, you know. And that affected the culture and the appreciation. And the generation changed.
And a new generation came along who didn't know the same things that the 1980s and 70s generation knew. Think about it that way. Is that fair to say that you're an anomaly for that? No, I think I cared about events that were going on around us. And when I see some of the treatment of the current events, Hollywood doesn't care. They don't base their films on that.
They don't want to reflect reality necessarily. Yeah, they'd love to get the money from it, but it's a creation of fantasy too. And the films don't deal with the American century. What did America become after 2001? Those films don't really deal with it. It's another, more imperialist, more authoritarian, more patriotic, more militaristic. I mean, come on. That has to be reflected in movies.
Maybe Gladiator reflects that, but maybe it does.
I meet a lot of Hollywood directors, producers. We never talk about current events because I don't get any sense, a lot of interest in it. We always talk about artificial stuff, which is fun sometimes. It talks about movies. That's another world.
Documentaries as a whole, I've gotten so much introduction to the world through documentaries, meeting Chavez and Castro, meeting the Israelis, meeting Putin, and nuclear energy. That was not about a person. That was about an issue. Come on, that was a very difficult movie for me to make. All I talked to was scientists.
So often it's the importance of it, you know, like to me nuclear energy was very important because we're facing climate change. If you accept that, what are we going to do? Are we providing the solution? And if you study the issue and really study it and talk to people, you have to doubt the conventional idea that we're going to be saved by renewables. It's the first thing that comes up.
People say, what are we doing? We still have, why are we not improving? Why is the carbon dioxide still the same? After all these renewables, after all the trillions of dollars we've spent. Look at Germany. I mean, the whole concept of going to nuclear was caused by that because we have to wake up and we don't. And that's why you have to make something because this is urgent. Look at that poster.
There's not a person, not a face on it, right? That poster. It's not necessarily, it looked like a Walt Disney space picture or something. I'm not going to run out and see that. That's the problem.
Because I had to. Because we're all going to fry. I don't want him to walk around and burn up. It's going to be very tough. Unless we deal with this energy issue, there has to be solutions. Everyone's thinking of the future. There's going to be a solution. We're going to figure it out. Well, we've got to get serious now, back then.
You may not agree with me, and a lot of people don't, but my God, I think it's a burning issue of our day. But beyond Ukraine, beyond Joe Biden and Donald Trump, this is a real, real significant. Look at the figures.
So what did you learn at the end of the documentary? Among other things, the fear was ridiculous because there was none of those accidents really added up to anything compared to the other waste products of other energies such as gas and oil and coal.
New countries are coming into it. Yeah, Russia is doing a very good job of constructing reactors abroad in other countries. They're selling the product. China is doing it. And they're also devised. They're working very hard. China and Russia have SMRs. which are the small modular reactors, they have them. The United States is still working on it. We're way behind.
But I do believe we'll come up with a design for an SMR that will be accepted through our regulation process, which is tedious and costs... That's why it costs so much. We don't approve anything. It's like a bad business, right? We're... We're choked. We don't allow new stuff unless it's fancy and has a purpose. It's just very hard to get new designs in. We have to change our ways.
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