On this episode of Behind The Screen, John Landis joined me to discuss his new book, "The Untold History of the United States: An American Hero's Journey Through Vietnam and the Vietnam War." John is a film director, screenwriter, producer, and screenwriter. He is also the author of "The Unrestrained Truth" and "The White House Next Door." John also served in the Marine Corps and was a member of the elite SEAL Team Six. John also directed and starred in a number of films, including "Platoon" and the critically-acclaimed "Lone Survivor." He is the author and director of the novel, "Beretta," and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Hollywood Reporter. John is also a frequent contributor to The Hollywood Reporter, and has been featured in the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. John and I discuss his life and career, including his time in the military, his book, and how his experiences in the entertainment industry have shaped who he is as a director, writer, and what he thinks of the movies he's making. and what he's up to now. We also discuss how he thinks about the movies and TV shows he makes, and why he thinks they should be better than the ones he makes and why they're better than they actually are. This episode is a must-listen! and you should definitely listen to this episode. of John's new book "The Undiscovered History Of the U.S. by John Landesman. Thank you, John, for joining us on Behind the Screen, and we hope you enjoy this episode and that you enjoy it. -John Landis is a wonderful human being a great human being and an even better human being. Thank you for being here! -Jon Sorrentino Jon Landis - John Haller Jack Dorsey Robert Downey Jr Tom Connemore Mark Wahlberg Kevin Spacey Jim Carver Paul Blanchard James Cameron Stephen King Ben Affleck Steven Spielberg Joe Pesci Andrew McCarthy Michael Bay Sam Esch Tim Robbins Brad Pitt Matt LaVell David Bowie Julian Wolfe Bill Paxton Amy Poehler
00:01:24.000So I didn't want to do that because I was going nuts with the rules and the regulations, and I'd gotten into some trouble with that.
00:01:31.000So I extended in combat for another three months, and that ended up in this mission to How much did your time serving impact your directing?
00:01:41.000You've had these life experiences as someone who's just a filmmaker.
00:06:20.000Pat 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.
00:06:31.000That's absolutely correct, which is the point, is that they really don't want the parents to know what's really going on.
00:06:39.000So imagine 15, maybe 20 percent are dying from that friendly fire.
00:06:48.000This is, of course, bombing and certainly artillery fire because that is often misplaced.
00:06:54.000It's not that easy to get the coordinates down in a tense situation where you can hit your...
00:07:01.000Where artillery 20 miles away, 40 miles away, has to hit the spot.
00:07:06.000When you're making a movie like Platoon, and much of it is based on your actual real-life experience, how much preparation is involved in that?
00:07:16.000How much is it different than when you're making another movie?
00:07:19.000Because this is something that's intensely personal to you, obviously.
00:09:51.000Bigger by far than World War II for this crazy war.
00:09:55.000Well, 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.
00:10:15.000We didn't even have PTSD. We didn't know what that was, but it started to prop 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.
00:10:28.000I guess so, but it was not a diagnosable disease.
00:10:34.000It 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 they would have to cover.
00:10:47.000So it was something that There was no word for it.
00:10:52.000But frankly, to get back to the issue of...
00:10:56.000The original question was the platoon was rejected for these two.
00:11:02.000It almost came to be again in 1983. It fell apart again.
00:12:51.000By this time, we got used to the difficulties of making low-budget films.
00:12:55.000And 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?
00:13:20.000But 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...
00:14:45.000It said this situation in the army is getting so poor, so bad, the morale is so low that it's beginning to resemble the French mutinies in 1917 in the World War I. That was a big concern of the Pentagon.
00:15:01.000They knew the thing was not going to work.
00:15:05.000So we gave more and more, let's say, more and more credit to the Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, in saying that they were going to take our place.
00:15:25.000He finally made it out in 86. When you really think about it, you're not talking about that much distance between that movie coming out and the Vietnam War ending.
00:15:38.000I mean, in terms of how we look at the world now.
00:15:40.000I 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.
00:15:46.000But that's kind of the timeline you're looking at.
00:15:49.000And so, in a lot of ways, it was probably very fresh in a lot of people's eyes, particularly people in the Pentagon.
00:15:56.000It was quite something when it came out.
00:16:57.000So 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.
00:17:06.000So there was a lot going on in the country, and 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.
00:17:18.000Did the movie feel different to you than anything else you've ever done in terms of your obligation?
00:17:24.000Because I really do think that that was the most realistic, at that point, for sure, war movie ever made.
00:17:31.000And the one that left people with the most conflicted feelings and just this feeling of...
00:17:40.000As 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.
00:18:28.000See, the Americans had a methodical way of doing it.
00:18:31.000We go into the jungle, we send the little guys into the jungle, they meet resistance, pull back, bomb, artillery, do anything, take minimum casualties.
00:18:42.000That's not what the Marines did, but that's what the Army's idea was.
00:18:45.000It works to a degree, but it eradicates the whole...
00:19:18.000I thought it was a good script, but I didn't expect anything.
00:19:21.000I had just done Salvador, which was about a dirty civil war down in Central America, in which America again supported some pretty bad guys, some death squads.
00:20:14.000I 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 The CIA got busted for flying a cargo over Nicaragua and it was a huge scandal that led to the Iran-Contra unraveling with Reagan.
00:20:35.000So Reagan was unable to do what he wanted to do in Nicaragua.
00:20:41.000Although we had mined the port, we'd done everything possible supporting the Contras.
00:21:41.000I'm delighted to become soldiers for the purposes of the movie.
00:21:46.000We trained them on a 24-hour basis for two weeks, and it worked.
00:21:51.000I wanted them to get no sleep, and Dale Dye helped me with that.
00:21:56.000We put them in a bivouac training situation, but a real one, I mean, where you don't sleep and you're basically pulling sentry duty all night.
00:22:04.000You split your duty with foxholes, three guys.
00:22:27.000From 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, and types.
00:22:39.000They 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.
00:22:59.000And, you know, Californians, I try to mix it all up.
00:23:02.000But 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.
00:24:10.000Actually, Charlie Sheen was the younger brother of Emilio Estevez, who was my first choice to play it in 1983. And after the movie peeled back to 86, Emilio had gotten older, and I went with Charlie,
00:24:26.000who came of age about that time, was my age when I was over there.
00:25:40.000We went 54 days, but we had the money in that 10% contingency.
00:25:47.000We finished it in 54 days, and it was tough.
00:25:50.000And we got out of there just in time because the bonsoons came, and In the editing, right away, you could feel that people were reacting to it in a different way.
00:26:20.000I mean, they didn't put much money in.
00:26:22.000The distributing company was Orion Pictures.
00:26:25.000They said, we'll give it a quality release, a few theaters at Christmas in 86. And it opened huge.
00:26:33.000First day in New York, there was a line of veterans, young veterans who looked young.
00:26:39.000I mean, not World War II veterans, young veterans.
00:26:42.000They were around the block at the Lowe's Astor.
00:26:46.000And I wasn't there, but people told me that they went in quietly.
00:26:51.000There was a mute, and they sat through the film, and there was very little talk, very little anything, not a lot of the gung-ho stuff you hear.
00:26:58.000And at the end of it, they were quiet, and some of them wouldn't get up out of their seats.
00:27:03.000Quite a few of them were sitting there still in their seats, you know.
00:29:02.000So his life kind of falls apart, and he goes to Vietnam as a teacher, and he joins a merchant marine.
00:29:11.000There's all kinds of things that happen.
00:29:13.000Comes 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.
00:30:53.000What was different from your father's perceptions of what it was like?
00:30:56.000Well, he supported the war like many people did for several years until he got older.
00:31:02.000And then he came around one day and he said, you know, I think you're right.
00:31:06.000I think it's a futile thing because...
00:31:11.000The 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?
00:31:24.000He said, you know, the Russians have a sub off Long Island.
00:31:27.000You know, they can nuke us from anywhere.
00:31:30.000It doesn't make sense to play this zero-sum game of fighting for land, fighting for one country or another, intervening in other countries.
00:31:46.000I 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.
00:31:56.000In 1985, I went down there and what I saw in Central America confirmed that we were doing it again.
00:32:41.000I was, I wanted to get out of New York.
00:32:44.000I wanted to get away from my, the whole, my parents were divorced, my father, I wanted to get away from my father, I wanted to get away from everything I knew.
00:33:19.000The 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.
00:33:35.000I mean, Midnight Express, even Scarface.
00:33:38.000There's a message in these films that's based on real live scenarios that took place that a lot of people are unaware of.
00:33:46.000A lot of people got their education about Cuba releasing prisoners to America based on Scarface.
00:33:54.000I mean, that's how a lot of people found out about that.
00:33:56.000That's too bad because I wish we had more study of what's going on in the world, more contemporary studies.
00:34:03.000Well, that's, again, what I really loved about the untold history of the United States.
00:34:07.000It's a fantastic piece that you put together.
00:40:12.000What was it like coming back and seeing the protests, though, and seeing these people that were your age that were, you know, angry at people like you who had been over there?
00:41:41.000There's a thing about your films, though, that I think, like, 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.
00:41:52.000It's like you have to give them medicine, but you've got to give it to them in sugar.
00:43:40.000That's people who don't understand guns.
00:43:41.000But the bullet hitting those two people and finding its way onto Connelly's gurney, magically, with very little distortion in the bullet at all, is straight up horseshit.
00:43:51.000And the fact that that still gets touted as being, well, this is actually how it could have happened, and weird things happen with bullets.
00:43:59.000Sure, 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.
00:46:05.000And 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.
00:46:14.000I don't know how much training he did.
00:46:16.000I mean, you could take someone who's three years ago a terrible shot, and then they kill someone.
00:46:51.000Yeah, that's what got me into the Kennedy assassination.
00:46:54.000Somebody gave it to me, a friend of mine, a musician friend of mine, when I was on the road, and I read it, unfortunately, all day, right before my stand-up comedy shows that night, and I was so depressed, I didn't think anything was funny.
00:47:06.000And I went on stage, I had a terrible show, and then I had to shake myself out of it for the second show, because I was bummed out.
00:47:13.000I was like, I had never considered it before.
00:47:15.000I'm like, Jesus Christ, they killed the president and they covered it up.
00:47:18.000Yeah, and we're paying for it to this day because I think Mr. Kennedy was one of the really on the road to being a great president.
00:47:25.000I think he did a lot of great things that people don't even know, and we put that in the documentary.
00:47:28.000What he was actually doing in Africa, people don't know.
00:47:31.000What he was doing around the world in Asia, in Cuba, obviously, South America, what his plans were.
00:47:37.000People don't understand there was a big divide between Lyndon Johnson, who he was about to get rid of him as vice president for the next election.
00:47:45.000There was a big divide in thinking between Kennedy and Johnson.
00:47:49.000Kennedy was without doubt pulling out of the war.
00:47:52.000There was a directive, we bring it up from a SecDef conference in Hawaii from earlier that year.
00:48:08.000When you actually, because this is not speculation or any kind of conspiracy theory, this is all from the Freedom of Information Act, signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:48:17.000They were going to blow up a jet airliner and blame it on the Cubans.
00:48:21.000They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay.
00:48:24.000They're going to do all this to get us to go to war with Cuba.
00:48:40.000There was a plan to blow up a drone jetliner.
00:48:42.000They were going to take a jetliner, fly it and blow it up in the sky and attribute all these deaths to that.
00:48:48.000That came about actually, the Northwoods came about as a result of the movie because that was what they was found by the Assassination Records Review Board.
00:49:11.000What is it like when you have this passion for this story, and this is a critical story in the history of the United States, and a clear historical record of an assassination of a president, and most likely, who do you think was behind it?
00:49:30.000I'm not going to get sued because they're all dead, but I think that Alan Dulles has to be looked at a lot closer, and I think He was no longer in the CIA, but he had a tremendous amount of influence.
00:49:42.000And I think he needed some organized, very organized, top people to help him.
00:49:47.000So I think it could have been a group of people that were involved, maybe involving certain people in the Pentagon, too, because there was an awful lot of strange things that happened.
00:49:58.000He certainly had some ideas that didn't jive well with the people that were in power.
00:50:05.000Let's call a spade a spade, which had never been done.
00:50:08.000This was a shock to the American way of government.
00:50:11.000I mean, we come from a pro-military system, and here was Kennedy questioning it.
00:50:19.000You 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...
00:50:40.000There's a lot of that that's just very disturbing.
00:50:43.000It'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.
00:50:56.000Like 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.
00:51:09.000All the pieces that were moving and all the things that took place.
00:53:35.000Black, white and Country, city, sensibilities.
00:53:40.000Also, 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.
00:54:30.000I mean, you talk about like a no escape, just thrust into this completely volatile, chaotic world, and then introduced to a bunch of different people that you weren't around.
00:54:40.000Yeah, and then when I got out, I got thrown into jail.
00:55:55.000What they were trying to do is they were trying to squash the civil rights movement.
00:55:59.000That's a big part of what they were trying to do.
00:56:01.000They were trying to make everything incredibly illegal, schedule one, so that they could have a reason to infiltrate these groups and start arresting people and break the groups up.
00:57:15.000So 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.
00:57:27.000But what is that like doing that balancing act of having so much information to tell?
00:57:36.000It was three hours and ten, twelve minutes, and I got it through the system, which is unbelievable.
00:57:41.000I'll tell you how later, but at the time, I needed the protagonist, and the protagonist, and who was the guy?
00:57:50.000The only person who ever brought any kind of charges publicly was Jim Garrison in New Orleans.
00:57:56.000He was a district attorney, and I read his book.
00:58:00.000He wrote two books, and I actually got to know him, and He was a man who, like 20 years after he did this and went through hell, came back to it and wrote another book.
00:58:44.000Killed and now we've found out a lot more about why, what was going on.
00:58:48.000We know a lot more facts about how the media went after him with bullshit, a lot of bullshit accusations and made him look as bad as possible.
00:58:57.000Well, Kevin Costner did an amazing job of playing him in your movie, too.
00:59:02.000Once you get a Costner in the middle of it, then you can start to move.
00:59:05.000You've got an interesting central character.
00:59:08.000Then you bring in all these crazies that you read about people like Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, all the lunatics around New Orleans, Dallas, involved in the war against Cuba.
00:59:19.000Then I wanted a Lee Harvey Oswald character.
00:59:23.000Which is to tell a little bit of his story.
00:59:25.000So I had two stories, Garrison and Oswald.
01:00:17.000And the fourth story, if you want to know the truth in my thinking at that time, was a Donald Sutherland business.
01:00:22.000He comes into the movie at the halfway point and he gives Garrison a lot of new information because Garrison thinks he's dealing on a local level.
01:00:31.000He thinks he's dealing with something that's in New Orleans.
01:02:36.000Yeah, it's very interesting, but Ruby is in that book as well, because Ruby was actually visited by, I forget his name, Jolly, something Jolly.
01:03:04.000But he was a central character in the CIA's use of LSD during the whole Operation Midnight Climax in San Francisco, and they ran...
01:03:15.000A free clinic in Haight-Ashbury that's connected to Manson where they were giving people LSD and running studies on him.
01:03:22.000He 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.
01:03:43.000Yeah, he seems to be the mob connection to this thing.
01:04:55.000The story plays out 12 years later when on the Geraldo Rivera show, Dick Gregory brings a Zapruder film and introduces it to the American public.
01:05:47.000There was a doctor in New Orleans, I forgot his name, but working on it.
01:05:51.000And David Ferry was one of these people who knew him.
01:05:54.000Ferry had a lot of mice and he was operating on his mice.
01:05:57.000He was using his mice as cancer, feeding them huge doses of cancer.
01:06:04.000The 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.
01:06:15.000They're building up through these mice a cancer that was so powerful that it could kill.
01:06:21.000I mean, I heard everything on this film, but there seems to be truth to this.
01:06:25.000Do you feel like you're going to put it to bed with this documentary in your mind?
01:09:21.000They wanted to know about the business.
01:09:22.000But then in the middle of this, we were all coked up in the hotel.
01:09:26.000You know, the way conversation goes, and I drop a name, just like that, you know, a guy I talked to.
01:09:32.000Well, he'd been a defense lawyer when I talked to him, but in the past, he'd been a prosecutor, because prosecutors often flip to defense attorneys to make more money.
01:09:41.000So when I mentioned that name, two of these three guys got really uptight.
01:09:45.000And they walked, they excused themselves, went in the bathroom, and I said I fucked up.
01:09:52.000And 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 under-informer.
01:09:59.000Because they hated that prosecutor that put one of them away.
01:10:04.000So a few minutes went by there, and it was pretty hairy.
01:10:08.000But I think I was paranoid, because they came out, and they didn't have guns in their hands, but they cut the meeting off.
01:10:28.000And I got out of there first thing in the morning.
01:10:31.000The whole point is you say the wrong word sometimes and you're dead.
01:10:35.000That's the kind of tension I wanted for this movie.
01:10:38.000I 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,
01:10:57.000Yeah, I was going to bring that scene up.
01:10:58.000Yeah, there was a chainsaw murder at one point there.
01:11:01.000There's something about the way you filmed that was so excellent, because it was obviously gory and disgusting, but you didn't have to show it.
01:12:30.000In fact, wherever I go in the world, I mean, I pretty much, people, you wrote Scarface, you know, I got into Salvador, I got into the fascist party that way.
01:12:43.000When you're writing about a movie, or you're writing about a guy like Tony Montana, you walk this fine line of telling the story accurately, but actually making him likable in some strange way.
01:15:07.000Speaking 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?
01:15:16.000And 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.
01:15:32.000Well, then you find out that spectacular growth of heroin, like heroin, just heroin sales and heroin use worldwide went up in an amazing manner.
01:16:10.000The poppy fields being guarded by U.S. troops and them talking about it openly on Fox News and saying, well, don't worry, folks, this is why they have to do this.
01:16:24.000It's one of the weirdest parts of the war.
01:16:26.000Yeah, as was Dan Rather doing his stand-up at the beginning of the war about how we're fighting the awful Russians.
01:17:20.000Yeah, I had a guy on 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.
01:17:33.000I'm like, this is a plane that had been to Guantanamo Bay multiple times.
01:18:50.000I never got a college degree in normal subject matter like history or mathematics.
01:18:55.000I got a film school degree, so I had to...
01:18:58.000I 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.
01:19:07.000And I made that film with just five years it took.
01:19:13.000We had to rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it.
01:19:45.000I 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.
01:20:04.000Trevor Burrus Yeah, that's the way we excuse it, right?
01:20:39.000Frankly, it's one of my achievements in my life.
01:20:42.000It stands up there with JFK for me and Platoon.
01:20:45.000Now, when you've done so much, I mean, you've had this amazing career between writing and directing and putting together all these incredible films.
01:21:23.000I thought a lot about the Vietnam War, for example, and came to a lot of the conclusions that I put here that I wouldn't have been so cogent before.
01:21:35.000Also, I realized that I'm a fundamentally flawed character.
01:21:40.000I mean, I understand this, really understand the contradiction in myself between my parents, my fundamental nature, which is...
01:23:47.000It's a crazy story for our times that that That this man is persecuted, this guy who I think is a hero.
01:23:57.000He's exposed things that are unconstitutional, things that no one signed off on.
01:24:03.000He exposed that there's this widespread surveillance of law-abiding citizens who've done absolutely nothing wrong, and this data collection.
01:24:12.000And the fact that this man is hiding in Russia is, to me, crazy.
01:24:17.000And, I mean, I don't know, I don't even know if at this point in time anybody could pardon him.
01:24:24.000But it's stunning to me that no one has.
01:24:27.000It's stunning to me that Obama didn't.
01:26:49.000And Michael Badden, the forensic scientist, reviews the autopsy and he's like, this man was strangled.
01:26:56.000Look at the break in the bone of the neck that's consistent with strangulation.
01:27:00.000Look at the position in which he was choked, which part of the neck that's not consistent with hanging.
01:27:08.000All the factors point to the fact that the guy was killed.
01:27:11.000And then the fact that, I mean, the guy's on suicide watch.
01:27:16.000And, you know, how is it possible that this guy who's one of the most important witnesses in a case against a gigantic number of very powerful people just winds up committing suicide?
01:27:39.000But that's one that I would think would intrigue you.
01:27:43.000I mean, at the end of all this, when the pieces all fall into place, is that something you would think about covering for a film?
01:27:51.000Well, if I had to write it, I had to get very interested in the subject matter.
01:27:55.000It seems it doesn't, you know, I mean, I don't know what it's about.
01:28:01.000I mean, if it's really what they say and there's all these world leaders and blah, blah, blah, I mean, it just doesn't really lead anywhere.
01:28:10.000I mean, the world is a much more important place.
01:28:15.000A sense of world peace, and this is the most important issue, peace in our time.
01:28:20.000And we are building up nuclear weapons at an incredible rate under this guy, Trump.
01:28:26.000And it's a return to the worst of the Cold War, and that scares me.
01:28:31.000That's an issue I would like to, I think, if I were to get involved again in another movie, if not a documentary, it would be that one.
01:28:39.000About the accumulation of arms and the building up towards...
01:28:43.000And the madness of our leaders, Democrat and Republican, constantly pushing for more sanctions, more pressure on our perceived enemies, China, Russia, North Korea,
01:31:07.000Well, that's where you have to have courage, and that's where Obama really failed.
01:31:10.000I mean, when he appointed Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State, you knew it was over.
01:31:14.000You have to make decisions and you have to go in a new way if you're going to be there.
01:31:23.000It's 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.
01:31:35.000But as a guy who's a storyteller, this is one of the great stories of our time, is how impossible it is to be a president.
01:32:48.000And the way we did it was soft power, subtle.
01:32:51.000What happened in Brazil a couple of years ago, typical.
01:32:55.000You 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.
01:33:07.000They're still working at it in Venezuela.
01:36:31.000We can bomb other countries to death and call ourselves the good guys, but we kill a lot of civilians around the world with our bombing.
01:36:44.000That's true, 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.
01:36:59.000Do those two get in the way of each other sometimes?
01:37:40.000Snowden, we couldn't get support for it.
01:37:42.000It was financed ultimately from France and Germany and Italy, and we got some small money at the end from the U.S. with a small distributor.
01:37:52.000I mean, this is the biggest story, one of the biggest stories of our time, and we couldn't get support from any of the studios.
01:38:42.000Well, it's very clear when you listen to all of the interviews with him, and then when I got a chance to talk to him myself, he is who he says he is.
01:38:55.000I mean, he has a story, and it's a spectacular one.
01:38:58.000And 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.
01:40:09.000And we've heard all the obfuscations of that.
01:40:12.000The whole thing was, you know, 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.
01:41:09.000Martin Luther King's a great story, but it's too tough a story to tell.
01:41:13.000I mean, I think there's a lot 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.
01:41:27.000But, you know, his relationship with women is fascinating.
01:41:30.000And we were into that whole aspect of it.
01:42:16.000I mean, he's such an incredible and important character.
01:42:20.000Boy, does the world need a Martin Luther King Jr. right now.
01:42:25.000Well, things are changing all the time.
01:42:29.000But listen, Oliver, I've taken up a lot of your time, and I really, really appreciate you being here.
01:42:33.000Your book is called Chasing the Light.
01:42:35.000It's your memoir up until 1986. I really hope you make another one, because you have had one of the most interesting and spectacular lives in show business.