Oliver Stone Quotes (47 Quotes)

You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It's hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that's great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we'll see.

I found them both to be courageous, deeply wounded people. They're both still suffering from the injuries. Will said this is a testament not to the evil, but to the good that we as human beings are capable of. That's important. That's healing.

Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

Bin Laden was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who told President Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the Saudis.

One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.

In any film there's always a historical implication.

If anything, if you can get somebody interested in something and get them excited, that's great. You should be praised for having opened the debate and having asked the right questions.

You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

I have the right to interpretation as a dramatist. I research. It's my responsibility to find the research. It's my responsibility to digest it and do the best that I can with it. But at a certain point that responsibility will become an interpretation.

There's something about movies that always amazes me, their transcendence of time. You can in one second, in one frame, see something that will spark you as divine or genius.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations.

Film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing. Montage can create a three-dimensional space, a three-dimensional aura, great sensuality. There's an electrical thing about movies.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.

The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.

Lunch is for wimps.

The Persians could not move without central approval. It was all governed by Darius in the center. Alexander went for the head. He knew that if he killed Darius he would kill the snake.

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

It's interesting that when economic times were the hardest, that's when many people embraced liberalism.

Forget the grand plan. Forget the master scheme. Forget control. That is the bleak but true basis of independent cinema. Inch by motherfuking inch we must, because we have no other choice.

I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.

There's an electrical thing about movies.

I'm terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Fear may very well be a caveman fear of the predator, of the giant lizard chasing them - maybe that's what Steven Spielberg connects with so well in Lost World.

I am here to interview Fidel for Spanish television,

When I was a child, I'd see a movie, I took it for what it was, I enjoyed it. And if I believed it I would tend to be more interested in knowing more about it.

I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it.

Natural Born Killers.

We know that there was significant rehearsal and planning, ... They even had markers, they drew marbles of the enemy, they drew carved statues and they made battle plans like they do at West Point today.

Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.

Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.

One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

They make prostitutes of us all.

It's a work of collective passion, a serious meditation on what happened, and carries within a compassion that heals.

Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.