Oliver Stone recounts his 1968 Vietnam deployment, where an 11-day ordeal in the Ashau Valley—amid rain, leeches, and psychological strain—shaped Platoon’s raw realism, clashing with Hollywood’s sanitized war films like Lone Survivor. His sheltered upbringing and spiritual crisis at 19 led him to enlist, rejecting Cold War-era militarism. Stone later exposed suppressed truths in JFK, citing CIA Director Alan Dulles’ alleged role in the assassination and the Warren Commission’s bias, while Scarface critiqued U.S. drug war hypocrisy, linking it to CIA-backed heroin trafficking in Afghanistan and Iran-Contra. His films challenge systemic corruption—from Kennedy’s constraints to Obama’s military-industrial complex ties—revealing how power shapes history, not just exceptionalism. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, and that was very important when we did Platoon.
I was trying to get the exact distances and the amount of firepower is not as usual.
It's not as intense, generally speaking, as the movies make it.
And that's the problem because the movies have so much to show.
They bring the enemy much closer.
They condense things and they amplify as much as possible.
Now, I did that too here and there, so I'm guilty too, but I think overall it's way overdone.
And the newer stuff that's come out since 2001, you know, with the patriotic stuff and heavily militaristic stuff, is way off, way off.
And people don't die that way, like, you know, in the type of films like Mark Wahlberg made or, you know, those kind of films, they're just way, way overdone.
was based on a guy I knew in the LERPS, Long Range Recon Patrol, who was a great guy.
He was an Apache, kind of an Apache Mexican mix.
I'm not quite sure what he was because I didn't get to know him that well, but I admired him because he had that lithe grace of a guy who fought a lot, had been around.
He'd been in before.
He was on a second tour.
And very much a beloved figure.
And he was killed after I left the unit.
He was killed about a month later in a friendly fire accident.
Now, friendly fire is, we talk about it in the book quite a bit, you know, because it's also underestimated.
People never, the Pentagon cuts it all out, especially in the movies that come from the Pentagon approval.
Right.
They don't like to emphasize how difficult, how often, I would say 15 to 20% of our casualties in that war were friendly fire.
Pat Tillman, who is this spectacular athlete, decided to postpone his NFL career and go over and serve and was killed in Friendly Fire, and it wasn't really reported that way for a while.
That's absolutely correct, which is the point, is that they really don't want the parents to know what's really going on.
So imagine 15, maybe 20% are dying from that friendly fire.
This is not just ground fire.
This is, of course, bombing and certainly artillery fire, because that is often misplaced.
It's not that easy to get the coordinates down in a tense situation where you can hit your artillery 20 miles away, 40 miles away, has to hit the spot.
When you're making a movie like Platoon, and this is in many, much of it is based on your actual real-life experience, how much preparation is involved in that?
How much is it different than when you're making another movie?
Because this is something that's intensely personal to you, obviously.
They're playing up the whole sympathy card, the pity card.
I don't buy that.
There's a lot of that veteran feeling that we were beaten.
We had our hands tied behind our backs and we couldn't win and that kind of thing.
Believe me, it was a badly conceived war with a lot of misinformation.
I go on in the book and talk about the lies that were spread by the military, the propaganda that were winning the whole time.
They were using the body counts, heavy body counts.
We'd say, well, if we're killing so many of them, there are not going to be that many left.
But on the other hand, as the years went on, more and more of them kept appearing.
So the Vietnamese were indestructible in a way.
They were like ants.
They were fighting for their independence, for their land, man.
It was their country.
And they never gave up, ever.
You could have nuked them.
And that's what Curtis LeMay at one point suggested.
You could have dropped a nuclear bomb.
It wouldn't have made the difference.
Thank God they didn't.
But America went to extremes to win that war with poisoning, the bombing of not only Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was intense, intense, bigger by far than World War II for this crazy war.
Well, it also set a precedent for our lack of trust in the military, a lack of trust in the government that guides the military, particularly in how they deal with the veterans that are dealing with things like Agent Orange or, you know, people that have come back that were sick where they denied that this was part of the problem.
We didn't know what that was, but it started to crop up when I got back, and I talk about it here a bit about PTSD, which I'd never heard of, but I think we all had it.
It was not an ailment that you could officially catalog, because if you did, the Army would be admitting to a huge amount of insurance problems and all kinds of medical problems that they would have to cover.
So it was something that there was no word for it.
But frankly, to get back to the issue of the original question was the platoon was rejected for these two, almost came to be again in 1983.
It fell apart again.
And it's a heartbreaking story.
It's in the book.
And it's resurrected.
I mean, I forget about it.
I just put it in the closet after those movies came out.
I said, they don't want to know about Vietnam in this country.
They really forget it.
It's not going to happen.
Fine.
I live with it.
I was moving on with my career.
I had Midnight Express.
I had Scarface.
I had other things in mind.
But Michael Cimino, who had directed Dear Hunter, told me he wanted to produce it with me as the writer, as a director, and that we would resurrect it because he said Vietnam's coming back.
I said, that's nonsense.
I don't think it's going to come back.
He said, look at Stanley Kubrick's pictures.
He's going to make a picture.
It's called Full Metal Jacket.
And it took three years or two years for him to make it.
But the fact that he made it certainly gave us some impetus to make it.
We made it very low budget.
And by the way, it was made by the same company as made Salvador, my previous film.
I made him back-to-back in Mexico and the Philippines.
Back-to-back, financed, very low budget by Hemdale, a British company led by a gentleman named John Daly, who was my mentor.
I much credit him in the book.
So we were nothing film out of nowhere.
I mean, we were the bottom, I mean, we were in the Philippines and making a film that nobody really knew much about.
And at the bottom, you know, we were struggling to get it made.
And there was weather problems.
There was all kinds of logistical problems.
But we'd been through hell on Salvador, as I describe in the book in Mexico.
So we were a unit.
By this time, we got used to the difficulties of making low-budget films.
And between the time you wrote it and the time it actually got done, was there ever any effort by the studios to try to water it down or to try to doctor it up?
So when it finally almost got made with Chimino in 1983, we thought we were in.
We thought we'd get it made.
But the resistance to it at the very end with the MGM was supposed to be the distributor, and Henry Kissinger was on the board of directors along with Haig, Alexander Haig, you remember him?
Military guy, Secretary of State, very bad-tempered.
They were both on the board.
And whether they went to that board, I don't know, but that's what the story, they covered their ass by telling me, we can't make this movie.
We can't distribute this movie because the board would be against it.
Now, sometimes they tell you that without checking, but in this case, I don't know.
It started in 67, 8, but there was more and more discontent when Lyndon Johnson pulled out of the presidency in March of 68.
That was a big moment.
I think all the soldiers, everyone kind of knew that this thing was not going to work out, and who wanted to be the last guy to get killed in Vietnam?
Right.
And so I think 69, 70 were more and more fractions, more fractious, and there was more and more incidents.
At one point, there was a Pentagon document that came out.
I've seen it.
That said this situation in the Army is getting so poor, so bad, the morale is so low that Beginning to resemble the French mutinies in 1917 in the World War I. That was a big concern of the Pentagon.
They knew the thing was not going to work.
It was cracking from within.
So we gave more and more, let's say, more and more credit to the Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and saying that they were going to take our place.
We're going to put more money.
We put a fortune into the South Vietnamese Army like we're doing now with the Afghan Army.
When you really think about it, you're only talking, you're not talking about that much distance between that movie coming out and the Vietnam War ending.
I mean, in terms of how we look at the world now.
I mean, if we look at it's 2020, if we look at 2000, that doesn't seem like 2003.
That doesn't seem that long ago.
But that's kind of the timeline you're looking at.
And so, in a lot of ways, it was probably very fresh in a lot of people's eyes, particularly people in the Pentagon.
This film played everywhere and was, I guess, a shock at the time because it was more realistic than any war film that they had seen.
And of course, it was dirty.
I mean, we had drug use in it, which was, you know, the description of the division.
There was a division in the Army.
We were draftees, many of us.
So it wasn't all volunteer, you know, and it wasn't all like gung-ho at all.
It was a split.
And I just, I described, I showed the split as much as I could.
I would be in the, I joined the camp with the people who I would say were anti-authoritarian.
I wouldn't say they were anti-war because we didn't have anything like that going on.
It was just the army sucks, the man sucks.
You know, a lot of the black troops knew this.
So there was a lot of dissension with the black troops too, because when Martin Luther King got killed in April of 68, that had a negative impact over there.
So there was a lot going on in the country.
People were seeing it, feeling it.
And new troops were coming in all the time from the country draftees.
So we were, you know, you get a feeling for what's going on.
Did the movie feel different to you than anything else you've ever done in terms of your obligation?
Because I really do think that that was the most realistic, at that point, for sure, war movie ever made.
And the one that left people with the most conflicted feelings and just this feeling of as much as you can relay it in a film with notable actors, you showed the horrors of war in a way that I don't think had ever been portrayed before in a film.
I mean, when you see a dead body and you see it being lifted into a helicopter, that really looks like a dead man.
And the pain of death, I mean, you feel the danger.
It's never what you think it's going to be.
It always comes up in another way.
It's like sloppy sometimes.
And battle, and that's what I don't like about a lot of the movies.
A battle is often just confusion, breaking down.
Things don't work.
It's like Mike Tyson said, you know, your plan goes out the window and you get hit in the face.
That's the way it goes.
See, the Americans had a methodical way of doing it.
We go into the jungle, we send the little guys into the jungle, they meet resistance, pull back, bomb, artillery, do anything, take minimum casualties.
That's not what the Marines did, but that's what the Army's idea was.
And it works to a degree, but it eradicates the whole, the bombing is very sloppy.
And not only do you have friendly fire, but you have a lot of civilians killed, too.
I'd been through so much, I really, I didn't think it was good.
I thought it was a good movie.
I thought it was a good script, but I didn't expect anything.
I had just done Salvador, which was about a dirty civil war down in the Central America, in which America, again, supported some pretty bad guys, some death squads.
And I showed that.
And that picture had not done very well because it had been, America had been very little, no interest really in the Central American issues of the 1980s.
Remember the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua?
There was a lot of turmoil in Guatemala, turmoil in Honduras, where I went down there to research Salvador, and what I saw in Honduras was the beginning of another Vietnam.
That's one of the reasons I really committed to Salvador heavily when I saw the troops, the American troops.
Now there were women, men and women, young, in uniform, many of them National Guard troops, reserves.
They were there building up for this.
I think it was pretty clear that Reagan was going to attack Nicaragua in some way.
But it never happened because of a fortuitous accident when the CIA got busted for flying a cargo over Nicaragua.
It was a huge scandal that led to the Iran-Contra unraveling with Reagan.
So Reagan was unable to do what he wanted to do in Nicaragua.
Although we had mined the port, we'd done everything possible supporting the Contras.
All that pissed me off.
In other words, it was like 20 years after the war, 15 years after the war, here I am back in Central America.
I'm seeing the same thing.
Young guys like me in a country, you know, just believing what they're hearing from their superiors.
So you felt like this obligation to not just release Salvador, but also release Platoon as in Platoon your experiences showing what the Vietnam War was really like and with Salvador saying, hey, this is happening again.
From the beginning, the way I cast it, I wanted young people as much as possible in the roles, people who were fresh, who didn't look like they'd done other movies.
They were based on everybody I knew in my platoons, people from the South, a lot of people from the South, people from the Midwest, a lot of inner city people, Chicago especially, St. Louis, New Orleans.
And, you know, Californians.
I tried to mix it all up.
But the whole idea from the beginning was that we're going to make this, with our little bit of money, we're going to make this as realistic as we could.
So we planned it that way.
The camp worked.
We got the full cooperation of the Philippine Army and some shitty helicopters that they had, but very dangerous ones.
The ten chapters here lead up to that because my story starts in 76.
I'm in New York.
I'm broke, depressed, written 12 screenplays, nothing's happened.
I've come close a few times, nothing's going on.
And my marriage has ended, my first marriage, and looks, I haven't accomplished my life the things that matter.
So at the age of 30, you kind of wake up.
You say, you know, what can I do?
My grandmother dies.
I talk to her.
I go and talk to her on her deathbed she's dead but in France they let them my mother was French she said they laid They lay them out, and I was talking to her.
And I think it's a very moving scene where he communicates with her because she loved him.
And his own family life was quite disturbing in many ways.
It was for him a traumatic divorce between his mother and father.
And he goes into what happened in, it's about a family too.
It's about how a family life can break apart.
You can become a child of divorce.
So his life kind of falls apart and he goes up, you know, hence he goes to Vietnam as a teacher.
He goes, joins a merchant marine.
There's all kinds of things that happen.
Comes back to school, goes back to Yale University, drops out again, writes a book, writes his first book about his experiences.
I did this before, back in 1966.
I was 19 years old.
Didn't work out.
It was rejected.
It was ultimately published about 1997.
It's called A Child's Night Dream.
So I was a writer from the beginning, I think, before I was a director.
And When that was rejected, I just said, fuck it.
I'm too full of myself.
I'm too much of a narcissist.
I can't write about myself.
So I joined the Army and volunteered for combat and for Vietnam.
He supported the war like many, many people did for several years until he got older.
And then he came around one day and he said, you know, I think it's a I think you were right.
I think it's a futile thing because the whole idea of the Cold War, he began to question it at the age of 70, about 65.
He said, you know, what difference does it make this domino bullshit?
He said, you know, the Russians have a sub off Long Island.
You know, they can nuke us from anywhere.
It doesn't make sense to play this zero-sum game of fighting for land, fighting for one country or another, intervening in other countries.
He began to question everything.
And I was too.
I didn't change.
I know you're going to go to later in my life, but basically I didn't change until I went to this trip in Honduras, which I just told you about, with my friend Richard Boyle for Salvador.
In 1985, I went down there and what I saw in Central America confirmed that we were doing it again.
We were going into these countries.
We didn't know what the fuck they were about.
And we were fighting, in most cases, the interests of most of the people, the majority of the people.
They had a revolution in Nicaragua because it was so corrupt.
Major revolution in 1979.
And we've been opposed to that new regime ever since.
The reason why I keep going back to this, it's so significant that you had that moment in your life when you were involved in Vietnam and you were in combat duty because all of your films, although there are these big commercial successes, they all have a message.
I mean, Midnight Express, even Scarface, there's a message in these films that's based on real-life scenarios that took place that a lot of people are unaware of.
You know, a lot of people got their education about Cuba releasing prisoners to America based on Scarface.
I mean, that's how a lot of people found out about that.
So, you know, you have to realize that a lot of people at 19 are suicidal in nature.
And we know this from the facts now, now that we're talking about it, you know, in this country, in America, we have a surf fight of suicide among 1920s, 21s.
And it's sad, but that's where I was.
I was spiritually desolate.
And frankly, it got cleared up over there in the sense that I came out very grateful to be alive, having seen a lot of death, having been wounded twice, and I'd gotten the Bronze Star and done 30 or more helicopter missions.
I'd seen quite a fair share of combat, which I describe in the book.
What was it like coming back and seeing the protest, though, and seeing these people that were your age that were angry at people like you who had been over there?
There's a thing about your films, though, that I think I keep getting back to this, but because you did go over there, it's almost like in your films, like you have something you have to tell people.
But it's like you have to give them medicine, but you've got to give it to them in sugar.
One of the things that's overstated is the scope was off.
You know, people always say, well, the scope was off.
Well, fucking anything can knock a scope off.
You can drop a gun in the evidence room and the scope's off.
That's nonsense.
That's people who don't understand guns.
But the bullet hitting those two people and finding its way onto Connolly's gurney magically with very little distortion in the boat at all is straight up horseshit.
And the fact that that still gets touted as being, well, this is actually how it could have happened.
And weird things happen with bullets.
Sure, weird things happen with bullets.
But one weird thing that never happens with bullets is when they hit bone and shatter bone, they always distort.
Depending upon how much he trained for it, depending on, I mean, I've known some people that are spectacular marksmen that can do some ridiculous shit and do it so fastly.
And depending upon how much training he did between his time in the service and his time actually getting ready to shoot Kennedy, you can get a lot better.
I don't know how much training he did.
I mean, you could take someone who's three years ago a terrible shot, and then they kill someone.
Well, he couldn't have done it.
He's a terrible shot.
Look, three years ago, he was a terrible shot.
Well, if that guy was training the entire time.
Well, I don't think the rifle.
Look, it can be done.
But again, whether it's likely or not, that could be debated.
But it's the least ridiculous thing about that story.
That came about, actually, the Northwoods came about as a result of the movie because that was what they were found by the Assassination Records Review Board.
Let's call it Colespay to Spade, which had never been done.
This was a shock to the American way of government.
I mean, we come from a pro-military system, and here was Kennedy questioning it.
And then, you know, after he was killed, I mean, it was insane for Lyndon Johnson to appoint him to the Warren Commission, where he managed to control pretty much the hearings and who was heard, who wasn't heard, and what the CIA was delivering to the – it was a joke.
Arlen Specter being the guy who comes up with the magic bullet theory is another joke.
Yeah.
There's a lot of that that's just very disturbing.
It's one of those things where you go over that subject and you just leave in this state of discomfort and unease and it's very hard to relax afterwards.
Look, like I said, I love the untold history of the United States and I think you do a great service with that series where you illustrate in a way that's both entertaining and very thorough all the pieces that were moving and all the things that took place.
You were asking me about why I get attracted to these kind of subjects.
And they don't seem attractive on the surface, but when the more you get into them, the more they can be exciting.
So I am a dramatist at heart.
Really, that is what I do best, which is to dramatize situations, take something and bring it to life.
So taking the Kennedy murder was extremely challenging.
And I knew it could work.
I felt like it could work.
And it was a surprise.
Yeah, like platoon.
I mean, basically, how can you take this?
War is boring.
There's a lot of details.
I was in four different units, you know, time, not much happens, and then suddenly things happen.
It's not that easy to make it happen in a movie time, movie space.
So I took two different sergeants from two different units, and I imagined what would they be like if they were in the same unit.
They would clash.
One would be the law and order guy, a guy who believed in what he was doing and fought it viciously.
And the other guy is the guy who was an anti, who was a rebel, who was like a bit like my own character.
My father was much of a law and order guy.
My mother was very much a rebel.
And I kind of put that into this conflict because I saw it in every platoon.
There was people who were like doing marijuana, people who were doing alcohol.
There was that split kind of.
And a lot of the black guys I hung out with were doing marijuana and they were doing music.
The music was unbelievable.
But they had a different kind of music than the Oki music.
So it was all the split in these platoons.
I saw it constantly.
Black, white, and country, city, sensibilities.
Also, a very important point is that I found over time that the law and order guys often were the most racist in terms of coming down on the Vietnamese civilians.
Really?
We did jungle duty, but we also did a lot of civilian villages, search and destroy.
Search and whatever, search them.
We find stores, weapons, this, that.
Not necessarily they were cooperating, but sometimes they were forced to.
But a lot of guys screwed with them, you know, who didn't like the Vietnamese at all.
Which was not the black problem.
That was, you know, that was more of a, it was a white problem.
So I found there was a lot of that going on, and I couldn't, that was not my thing, and I just really didn't like what I saw.
Well, what they were trying to do is they were trying to squash the civil rights movement.
That's a big part of what they were trying to do.
They were trying to make everything incredibly illegal, Schedule I, so that they could have a reason to infiltrate these groups and start arresting people and break the groups up.
So when you put together JFK, you have this film that is about this incredibly important subject, but yet you want to make it interesting and you want to make it a great film and you succeeded in doing that.
But what is that like doing that balancing act of having so much information to tell?
Once you get a Costner in the middle of it, then you can start to move.
You've got an interesting central character.
Then you bring in all these crazies that you read about, people like Jack Lemon, Walter Matthow, all the lunatics around New Orleans, Dallas involved in the war against Cuba.
And then so I wanted, then I wanted a Lee Harvey Oswald character, which is to tell a little bit of his story.
So I had two stories, Garrison and Oswald.
I got to know Marina.
I didn't, you know, tracked a lot of the Oswald story.
Not enough of it, but there's more now.
But he seems to have been definitely in the employ of the CIA when he went to Russia the first time, and when he came back again, there's too much evidence of it.
But he was a central character in the CIA's use of LSD during the whole Operation Midnight Climax in San Francisco, and they ran a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury that's connected to Manson where they were giving people LSD and running studies on them.
He went to visit Ruby in prison.
And Ruby, who had shown no psychological trauma or distress after he left, was a mess, curled up in a fetal position on the ground and was thinking they were burning Jews in the streets and literally was in a psychotic state.
And they think they dosed him up while he was in jail.
Now, there again, there's a lot of cancer experimentation going on at this point in the 60s.
You mentioned doctors and the MLK.
Cancer too.
There was a huge, huge experiment.
There was a doctor in New Orleans.
I forgot his name, but working on it.
And David Ferry was one of these people who knew him.
Ferry had a lot of mice, and he was operating on his mice.
He was using his mice as cancer, feeding them huge doses of cancer.
The idea was that they said they were going to kill Castro with it, you know, inject Castro with a needle and kill him because they'd make it so strong.
And they're getting this cancer to play.
They're building up through these mice a cancer that was so powerful that could kill.
I mean, I heard everything on this film, but there seems to be truth to this.
And the Mariolitos came in, some of them, Cubans, who were a gangster element out of Cuba.
And it got bloody when the Colombians were not playing around, so there was a lot of cutthroats.
They used to, shivatos, Columbian necktie.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And when I was there, I heard about a couple of these guys.
It was interesting because I was working both sides of the case.
I was trying to get to know the crime element as more than – so I knew all the lawyers and And I went over to Bimini one day to get some real information about them because they couldn't, in the U.S., they were scared to talk.
So I located through a defense lawyer, a couple of some guys in Bimini.
I went down there and I met with them.
And they were talking because Bimini was another kind of world.
The government was on the take there, I think.
And they had a lot of speed boats going out of there every night at the hotel towards the, you know, Bimini's very close to Miami.
And I was doing Coke at that time.
And I got with my wife, she was my cover.
And I, you know, and I took Hollywood screenwriter, he wants to talk to you.
He did Midnight Express.
They like that, you know.
They want to know about the business.
But then in the middle of this, we're all coked up in the hotel.
And, you know, the way conversation goes, and I drop a name just like that.
You know, a guy I talked to.
Well, he'd been a defense lawyer when I talked to him.
But in the past, he'd been a prosecutor because that prosecutor's often flipped to defense attorneys to make more money.
So when I mentioned that name, two of these three guys got really uptight.
And they excused themselves, went in the bathroom, and I said, I fucked up.
I knew I'd fucked up.
And I didn't know what was going to come out of that bathroom, you know, if they thought I was some kind of cop, some kind of underground informer, because they hated that prosecutor that put one of them away.
So a few minutes went by there, and it was pretty hairy.
But I think I was paranoid because they came out and they didn't have guns in their hands, but they cut the meeting off.
I went back to my room.
They were staying in the same hotel.
All night I was tense because I knew they could come and get me.
It was their hotel.
They owned the island.
But it was nerve-wracking.
And I got out of there first thing in the morning.
The whole point is you say the wrong word sometimes and you're dead.
That's the kind of tension I wanted for this movie.
I put it into the scene early in the picture where Mr. Pacino, Al goes in to make a pickup, make a trade, and he says, you know, he senses something's off in this meeting and it becomes that bloodbath with the dismemberment, you remember?
When you are talking about someone who is in that world, when you're trying to make a film about a guy who is in that world who is not a good guy, your main guy, Al Pacino, Tony Montana, is a bad guy.
In fact, wherever I go in the world, I mean, I pretty much, people, oh, you wrote Scarface, you know, I got into Salvador, I got into the fascist party that way.
When you're writing about a movie, or you're writing about a guy like Tony Montana, how do you, you did, you walk this fine line of telling the story accurately, but actually making him likable in some strange way.
He's a man who's free unto himself, and I think that's what worked because the people around him are so corrupt.
I mean, the cops are corrupt in Miami.
The system, the bureaucracy that pressed down on – by the way, I mean, let's be honest.
Let's talk about the drug war.
I mean, this is an invention that's come about that's a disaster.
It's a bureaucracy of enormous billions of dollars are being wasted on fighting drugs with this super DEA, and now they ICE and all that, whatever they want.
We always create wars.
We call it war on drugs, war on poverty, war on this, war on that.
That's the problem.
We make too much of a bureaucracy.
I noticed this in Vietnam.
It bothered the shit out of me because we were sending five people, non-combat people over there for one, every combat person.
We had an infrastructure.
Las Vegas of material.
We had PXs.
We had everything we wanted.
They sent cars over there.
A lot of this stuff was sold on the black market in the end by master sergeants making a buck on the side.
There was a lot of shit going on, crime stuff.
And the Vietnamese were benefiting from it.
They loved the Americans, of course.
They loved us.
It's the same thing, Afghanistan, Iran.
It goes on and on and on.
It's like we create these super bureaucracies around events.
So what happened in the war on drugs is the same thing.
And that I think that Pacino is a hero because in a way he sees it all.
He sees it's all bullshit.
And he calls it out.
And I think people, I think a lot of people just picked up on it.
Speaking of Geraldo, did you ever see the footage where Geraldo was in Afghanistan and he's walking through the poppy fields that are being protected by U.S. troops?
And it's on Fox News, so he's trying to do this weird propaganda job of explaining why, in order to get these poppy farmers to give us information about the Taliban, we have to somehow or another protect their crops.
There was a, I was at a guy who was in denial of this, and I showed him the CIA drug plane that crashed in Mexico with several tons of cocaine in it just a few years ago.
I'm like, this is a plane that had been to Guantanamo Bay multiple times.
Like, this is still going on.
All that shit that happened with Barry Seals and you're talking about Iran controversy.
The Contras were one of the most brutal, brutal groups, terrorist groups in Nicaragua, trying to just, they were killing civilians, blowing up farms, scaring people.
And we supported them.
We supported a lot of bad guys everywhere in the world.
Well, yeah, I've done a lot of films about subjects around it.
So at a certain point in my life, I said, I'd really like to know more about American history because something's weird here.
And I think I went to school, kind of back to school.
I never studied.
I never got a college degree in normal subject matter like history or mathematics.
I got a film school degree.
So I had to.
I thought I knew things, but I learned a lot with going back and learning with historians who were throwing out all the myths for me about American history.
And I made that film with just five years it took.
We had to rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it.
It was complicated.
We started with the Philippines because that was the beginning of overseas imperialism.
And we worked our way up through the Obama administration from 1898 to 2013.
It's an amazing series.
It goes too fast, if anything.
But I think people could watch it two times and learn.
Each chapter is revealing stuff people don't know about how this country really got off.
I don't know.
I mean, it got off.
Maybe it got off on the wrong start earlier, but it really got off the bent in its purposes.
And assuming we're the good guy, assuming this exceptionalism that we have, that we're somehow motivated in a different way than other countries.
It was going so fast at times between films that I didn't have that leisure time to think about what I'd done.
And I think by reliving it, each film, each film for me is important.
By reliving it, I'd rediscover a lot.
I thought a lot about the Vietnam War, for example, and came to a lot of the conclusions that I put here that, and I wouldn't have been so cogent before.
Also, I realized that I'm a fundamentally flawed character.
I mean, I understand this, really understand the contradiction in myself between my parents, my fundamental nature, which is you have to do that with yourself.
You have to look at who you are.
My mom being who she was, my dad being, I mentioned earlier the writer-director side.
They're two different people.
You can't be the same person when you do it.
Writing is very much an inner loneliness, solitude.
My father was like that.
And directing is very much being external, being warm, being inviting, working with people, collaborating.
It's a totally different exercise in your mind.
And those two, I think I'm double-minded, I say, in the book.
And Michael Badden, the forensic scientist, reviews the autopsy and he's like, this man was strangled.
Look at the break in the bone of the neck that's consistent with strangulation.
Look at the position in which he was choked.
Like, which part of the neck that's not consistent with hanging.
All the factors point to the fact that the guy was killed.
And then the fact that, I mean, the guy's on Suicide Watch.
And, you know, how is it possible that this guy was one of the most important witnesses in a case against a gigantic number of very powerful people just winds up committing suicide?
And the madness of our leaders, Democrat and Republican, constantly pushing for more sanctions, more pressure on our perceived enemies, China, Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela.
I mean, it's just why?
Why are we doing this?
We don't have to.
The world could be a much more peaceful place if we Take our foot off the pedal.
Well, that's where you have to have courage, and that's where Obama really failed.
I mean, when he appointed Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State, you knew it was over.
You have to make decisions, and you have to go in a new way if you're going to be there.
It's just so become such a bureaucratized office that it's almost impossible to appoint a thousand people when you come in to work with you that are going to be on your side.
Well, I knew it was an important story because surveillance had, I'd never imagined surveillance at this level.
I realized that it could be every with this new technology we had, that it could be everywhere.
I mean, beyond my imagination, beyond anybody's imagination.
And when I did the movie, it was to reveal what he revealed, which was shocking in its implications.
We went even further and we showed how the control of information, the use of information can destabilize many regimes.
And they went after regime change, became the new modus operandi for the United States.
It was okay to change regimes.
We were good at it.
And the way we did it with soft power, subtle.
What happened in Brazil a couple of years ago, typical.
You know, the whole forcing out the president of Lula, getting rid of the Dilma, bringing in this, well, this other guy came in from the right, but essentially Brazil was completely changed, completely changed.
I was more, I didn't, because of my connections, I had more contact with the Israelis.
I was in Ramallah, so I mean, I was talking to Netanyahu before he was prime minister.
I was talking to the leader, the ex-prime minister, the prime minister, all that.
And then I went to Ramallah, which was the capital of the PLO there.
And actually, I was there the day the Israelis, the day before the Israelis came in and knocked out that, knocked out the lights and their isolated Arafat and the Ramallah Palace.
We got out at the last second, actually.
But we were seeing Arafat and showing his side of the equation, showing what he was thinking.
So as part of that, part of that, I went to see a terrorist group.
They became quite famous later.
They're well known.
They were young guys, and they had their masks, and I went at midnight.
But this message that you have, that you're not just a guy who makes movies, but you're a guy who makes movies and also a guy who's very outspoken about all of these issues in the world.
Do those two get in the way of each other sometimes?
Yeah, I mean, he has a story, and it's a spectacular one.
And It's one of the most important historical moments of our time that we recognize that this overwhelming surveillance state has existed without us even knowing it.
The whole thing was basically a misplanned operation because of basically CIA was guiding the war and they were torturing to death some, no, torturing some poor soul who gave them information that was faulty.
Happens all the time, right?
Torture works, right?
Torture doesn't work.
And as a result, the operation, they were told that there was NVA in that village.
I also tried to make the Martin Luther King story years ago.
Many years I worked on it.
Martin Luther King's a great story, but it's too tough a story to tell.
I mean, I think there's a lot of portion of the black community that's really kind of treats him like a saint, a martyr, whereas this is more of a human man and his failings and this and that.
But he's a hero in this.
But, you know, his relationship with women is fascinating.