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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And I think the SMRs, hopefully, will be there by 2030. Hopefully. I know Westinghouse is working on one, and General Electric. They have good stuff coming. What do you think about China? China is great. They're doing so much in terms of building, not only nuclear reactors, but they're building... I lament their use of coal still. Yes, that's very evil.
But they are doing better and better and better, and they're amazing, some of their buildings. Amazing. They're the future. You're saying China's the future. It looks like it. They're doing the best, most modernistic work. And I have high hopes for the rest of the world. I mean, if you go to your countries, I mean, go out there to the stands.
Go out to that, you know, I did a documentary about Kazakhstan. It's an amazing place. It's very future thinking. A whole new generation. building things, creating new cities.
That's the way you think. Movies are a bad deal. Every time you have to make a new business every few years, it just doesn't work. You make a movie and they don't accept it. They don't understand it. It's ahead of its time, behind its time, whatever. It's not that easy, you know. So you spend two, three years of your life making a movie. I don't think it's an economical business.
I wouldn't go into it for that reason. You go into it as an artist, and frankly, you say, I want to make this. My passion is here. It's the most important thing in the world to me right now, and blah, blah, blah.
No, it didn't work for me. It doesn't work for me because you have to have a certain, he does what he does. You have to admire him. He was my teacher at NYU. Scorsese. He's lasted this long and he's great. He's good. Listen, he's made his deal.
I was paying attention. How about later on?
Yeah, my father would always talk about, we could have done it better, meaning there was something wrong with the hole in the movie and the hole in the story, the logic, the logic of it. But then you become too logic-ridden, and sometimes that undercuts you.
And that's happened to me, I made films so, in a way, they wound themselves into a complicate, a knot by the third act, and then you gotta get out of the knot.
You saw The Hand, my horror film, and Seizure, my first film out of NYU. Okay. Yeah, no, but I had written Midnight Express, so he knew that I was on my way in that business, and I'd written a Conan and my screenwriting stuff.
No, I never saw it with him because my dad was, you know, he was an economist. He was very much a Wall Street man. But even at the end of his life, his conservatism was vanishing. He said at the end of his life, he said, you know, we made a big deal about Russia all my life. That was the thing of the Cold War. It was a really big deal. He scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.
So by the end of his life, by the late 70s and early 80s, you know, after the... Well, Reagan, it's true, he was in the middle of the Reagan era, but even Reagan started to let up after the near scare of Abel Archer in 1983. We had a near nuclear war with Russia. It was ridiculous. It was out of fear.
And after that, if you remember, Reagan and Gorbachev got together in 86 and started the whole process of detente, which we've forgotten about. But we almost had a moment when we banned nuclear weapons completely from the earth. That almost happened. They'd reached a friendly moment when Reagan was a very affable man that way. And he said, why not? He said, why not? Why don't we get rid of them?
And then, of course, the guy's on his spot. That's my father. And the guys behind him said, no, you can't do that, you can't. But George Shultz was in favor of that. He was the Secretary of State at that time. So it's possible. I mean, we can think differently, but sometimes we close up into our balls of fear.
No, that was based on the fact that we had all those scandals and all those young people were starting to make money, you see. My dad was the old Wall Street. I pictured that in the picture with Hal Holbrook and the father figure of Martin Sheen, who was a union leader. The younger crowd was amoral. A lot of them were into the business. People were making... Big money.
I mean, I don't know if you remember, 83, 84, 85, people were making millions of dollars at the age of 28, 29. That was outrageous. We never had even seen that kind of money before. Young people were supposed to, you know, you don't make big money until you're 40s, 50s, right?
Yeah, that was a penny stock crowd, but they were never mainstream. They were the sidestream. The people I'm talking about were mainstream. They were joining the mainstream, and they were controlling the stocks. We had those people. They were coming on.
And if you look very closely at the whole, the Gordon Gekko types ended up being the banks by the 2010 period when I did Wall Street Money Never Sleeps because that was the idea, is that the independent traders became this, by 2010, had so gamed the system and so inflated the system that they were the new chiefs. What do you think about Joseph Kennedy? What about him? I like him.
I mean, he did amazing stuff. He created a clan. He nourished his kids to become leaders. And he was a very good father in the end. He turned out to be a very good father.
No, he was the progenitor of a family. I admired John, as you know, and Robert very much, and Ted too, as well as the sisters.
Showing 221–240 of 314 · page 12 of 16
← Previous
Next →