'I have let Alexander down'

Oliver Stone makes no attempt to hide his dejection. But of course he will go on, he says. ‘I make movies, that is what I do’

There is no need to subject Oliver Stone to a painful precis of the more cruel comments of the American cinema critics: he can, and does, recite them verbatim. Crouched forward, coffee cup in hand, he closes his eyes as he repeats in an anguished voice: “Puerile writing ... confused plotting ... limp acting ... weak script ... shockingly off-note performances ... disjointed narrative ... acted at a laughably hysterical pitch ... it has wonderful highlights, but most of them are in Colin Farrell’s hair ...”

As he utters each phrase, his voice grows louder, his expression more anguished. There can be no denying that the tirade of vitriol from America’s all-powerful film reviewers has been relentless.

And Stone, legendary film director and author of the latest swords-and-sandals epic Alexander has been, by his own admission, “destroyed” by their derision. As he sits hunched in an easy chair in his Los Angeles office, he makes no attempt to conceal his dejection.

“Alexander was a winner ... pity the film wasn’t,” he says sadly. He grimaces. “Alexander never lost a battle in his life. And I have let him down. He was a fighter, the sort of man who would have gone after Osama Bin Laden and never given up.

“But I didn’t see this coming, this utter trashing of the movie. I should have. I got bloody battered for acknowledging Alexander’s bisexuality...”

Stone shakes his head: “I was devastated, Colin Farrell was devastated. The audiences, they didn’t know the story, and they were confused by it. I did that wrong. That was my fault.”

I open my mouth to speak but Stone throws up his hands, flashes that wide, gap-toothed smile and changes tack instantly. “Hey, you know what I would like to do?” he says, his voice now oozing enthusiasm. “I’d like to make it all over again. Right from the start, make the whole thing again.”

I open my mouth again. This time, Stone knows what I am going to ask. “Joke, joke,” he says, holding up one hand. “I don’t mean I regret how I made the film and that’s why I want to make it over again. I just mean I would love to make it all again ... for the sheer fun of it. Because it was fun, you know. Hard graft, exhausting graft. But so much fun.”

It’s hard to believe that Stone is really talking in jest. For, at 57, the acclaimed director is clearly in the throes of obsession. He may be the winner of three Oscars and a British Academy Award but today he huddles in his seat with the mien of a man who has witnessed the public disembowelment of a cherished child.

I am once again open-mouthed. Stone’s films have often been attacked. Always controversial, he was pilloried for portraying US President Richard Nixon as a foul-mouthed drunk and for glorifying serial murders in Natural Born Killers. The third film in his Vietnam trilogy, Heaven and Earth, was described by critics as “gruelling to watch” and “unbelievably fatuous”.

I am open-mouthed because Stone has always been gung-ho when it comes to defending his creations. Now, for what must be the first time, he is admitting that, in many respects, “It is my fault”. This is a much-humbled Oliver Stone.

His devastation is understandable: Alexander, the story of the warrior king who, by the age of 25, ruled an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Himalayas, was to be the pinnacle of his illustrious career, the culmination of a 15-year dream.

Though he was never defeated in battle, Alexander died just before his 33rd birthday. Many claim he was poisoned by his own soldiers, conquered, it would seem, by his arrogant intent for yet more glory. Alexander’s downfall is a lesson not lost on Stone. “Of course, I will go on,” he says, his tone pragmatic. “I make movies, that is what I do.”

The lesson, however, has been brutal. “I don’t think I will be able to pull this off again, not again,” he says, his head lowering. “It was a huge feat, a big achievement. All movie directors have one big epic in them. This was my big epic.”

Stone’s films ooze big emotion, big pumped-up action. As does the man. He is tall, with a haunted look, and his deep brown eyes blink constantly, giving him an anxious air. His voice is euphonious, not always in kilter with his words.

He is the obligatory 20 minutes late for our interview but, when he arrives, it is as though a whirlwind has blasted through the eerie calm of his outer office. He flings himself through the door all outstretched arms and swinging satchels — one over each shoulder. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, the bags falling in a muddle around his feet. “It’s like Wacky Races in the car park. Come in, come in. Where d’ya want to sit?”

We settle into deep comfy seats, side by side. We don’t stay there long, though. At least Stone doesn’t. By the time I leave, an hour-and-a-half later, he has changed seats three times; opened the blinds then closed them tight, leaving us in near-darkness; opened the French windows twice and closed them twice; turned the air-conditioning up, then down, then up again; called for coffee, opted instead for water, then switched to coffee again.

It has been 25 years since Stone’s first Best Screenplay Oscar, for Midnight Express. He had been brought up in a conservative household and, after dropping out of Yale, at a time when thousands of young Americans were dodging the draft, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He won a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, but he lost his tub-thumping jingoism en route. He became a drifter with a drug habit. He might have disappeared from view had he not enrolled at the New York University film school, where Martin Scorsese became his mentor.

Though Midnight Express won him his first accolade, it was his Vietnam films, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July — both depicting the horror and futility of war — that earned him world acclaim.

“It would have been impossible not to bring many of my own war experiences to the films,” he acknowledges. “When I enlisted, I was ready to die. It was the speech I wrote for Charlie Sheen in Platoon. I wanted to get to the bottom of the barrel. I felt I couldn’t be an honest human being until I knew what war and killing were.”

And Stone the soldier wanted to kill. “Yes, I did, if I could,” he says. He was wounded twice — the second time was enough to have him shipped home.

As Stone’s acclaim as a film director and scriptwriter grew, so, too, did his reputation as a hellraiser and womaniser. “Yip, I raised some hell,” is all he will say. Yet always, he brought his own life to the screen.

In Alexander, the young king is torn between his love and respect for King Phillip II, his warrior father, and Olympias, his adoring but manipulative mother. “A lot of the interaction among the three of them came from childhood memories,” he concedes.

His family was wealthy — his father was a stockbroker — and Stone attended boarding school. Then, one day, the young Oliver was called into the headmaster’s office to be informed that his father was virtually bankrupt and that his parents were divorcing.

“It was painful, and it hurt, to be told like that,” he tells me. “I can’t blame my parents, but I was the vulnerable child. You need to hear that from your parents. But I was a product of the era in which I was born. Then, if you were middle-class, your children were shipped off to boarding school and somehow it became a buffer. All news, good or bad, was relayed through that third party. It made everything once removed. And damned hard for a kid to understand.”

Stone himself has three children from three marriages. Did he tell his children from his first and second marriages