Frasi di Oliver Stone

“Un film come 8½, a differenza di La dolce vita, che è un film positivamente datato, nel senso che si riferisce a un particolare momento e luogo come se fosse una capsula del tempo, è un film universale perché potrebbe essere in un posto qualsiasi e in un momento qualsiasi.”

“Ormai l'America ha bisogno costante di un nemico di proporzioni hitleriane per tenere la popolazione mobilitata in favore degli interventi militari, e per fare sì che ogni perdita di libertà sia considerata un prezzo giusto da pagare per la propria sicurezza.”

“A Hollywood bisogna stare molto attenti a non esagerare con la verità. Perché la verità è tanto potente che può spaventare.”

“Dovremmo cercare di educare, liberare e ampliare la nostra mente. Ma di guardare oltre i pregiudizi. Per esempio bisognerebbe studiare i finanziamenti del partito nazista. Capire quante società americane sono state coinvolte, dalla General Motors all'Ibm. Hitler era solo un uomo che avrebbe potuto essere facilmente assassinato.”

“Hitler è un facile capro espiatorio per la storia ed è stato utilizzato troppo facilmente. Ma in realtà è il prodotto di una serie di azioni. È causa, ma è anche effetto…”

“Una delle gioie che procura il cinema è il fatto che è a buon mercato, e questo non dovremmo dimenticarlo mai.  ”

“Poi vidi 8½, il culmine della sua carriera. Sembrava a quel tempo così strano per la fine aperta, così misterioso e ambiguo. Nei film americani si ha sempre la necessità di un inizio, una parte centrale e una fine. Fellini ha realizzato una sorta di decostruttivismo della realtà. 8½ è un puzzle che induce a porsi delle domande, pratica una sorta di impressionismo, il punto di vista del protagonista e della cinepresa si fondono.”

“Dai primi anni '90 in poi, il cinema americano e la tv hanno un punto in comune, la glorificazione degli Stati Uniti e la presentazione del punto di vista americano come l'unico giusto e l'unico possibile.”

“Zero sum game implies winners and losers. If somebody wins, somebody gotta lose…. I don’t agree with that. Because all boats can rise on a rising sea. Good films help other good films. Different psychology. If you’re overly competitive, you say it is exclusionary, a zero sum game: I must win so he must lose. That’s not true. We can all win without forcing the other guy to lose.”

“My father was a Republican and he hated Roosevelt. And that's sort of been the battle of my life, I think. You have to understand I grew up a Republican conservative. I hated Castro. And I put my money where my mouth was because I went to war, but I understood pretty quickly that this was another place, another culture and we would never fit in there.”

“I’m ambivalent. I like Gekko, which is partly why Michael Douglas did so well…. Gekko is despicable but kinda fun too.”

“It’s funny to read articles about Gordon Gekko as if he exists…. If you really listen to Gekko’s speech, half of it makes sense…. But it’s the excess, losing moderation, that destroys all…. There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator, greed motivating evolution…. But there’s a huge disconnect between the classes. It is very demoralizing to work for someone who makes a billion dollars a year while you make just barely enough to make it.”

“Balzac was right…. There is tremendous jealousy about money.”

“This is about getting into a corporation, screwing it up, putting in poison pills so your competitor can’t swallow it…. Very intricate game played in the 1980’s…. Mike Milken did it with junks bonds, Drexel Burnham.”

“Greed is good. Taken from Ivan Boesky’s speech saying ‘Greed is right.’… Gekko says he wrecks it ‘because it is wreckable.’ There is an impulse in Gekko to take, to rape…. Kirk Kerkorian destroyed MGM and UA…. Buy both companies and destroy both. And that was the end of the movie business. UA and MGM were two great film companies. Suddenly they were one lousy company. Kerkorian did it for the money, like Gekko. He didn’t care about film. Never. He sold it off in pieces. He cannibalized it. Just like Gekko. These guys do what suits their short-term.”

“I wanted to explore the new Wall Street. When I was writing Scarface in Miami, there was so much coke around and so many lunatics, and I met so many kids from Wall Street who were millionaires. I thought older men were rich, but here were these kids, 25 or 28 or 35 years old, with millions of dollars playing the markets all over the world around the clock. My father would have been shocked by the new electronics that allowed it…. Dad was a stockbroker on Wall Street when there was more integrity and class.”

“I leave Bud Fox in the canyons of Wall Street, just another ant, one of millions of ants…. We’re all absorbed in this system of capitalism…. You join the collective unconscious.”

“All these Wall Street lawyers are running the system according to Buckminster Fuller. After World War II they took most of the money out of the United States, they drained the blood out of the United States and put it abroad, overseas capital…. Fuller calls it Lawyer Capitalism, the lawyers run the show. Tax laws are the key. In the postwar years, tax law allowed US capital to go abroad…. It all fled the country and stayed abroad and America changed tremendously…. We became a world power, yet a rapacious one, with capitalists really doing a major theft of our money…. Nixon took us off the Gold standard in 1972 because America went bankrupt…. All these recessions in the 70’s, 80’s…. My father got wiped out on Wall Street.”

“Money never sleeps.”

“We have an obligation to those who died ... to remember.”