The Joe Rogan Experience - July 21, 2020


Joe Rogan Experience #1511 - Oliver Stone

Topics
combat experience and filmmaking friendly fire war on drugs directing and writing films Jeffrey Epstein story
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Oliver Stone
Mentioned
Jack Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald Jack Ruby Lyndon Johnson Jim Garrison Obama Martin Luther King Jr. Donald Trump Eisenhower Reagan Bimini Kevin Costner George W. Bush Dale Dye Lai Arafat Nixon Hillary Clinton J. Edgar Hoover Donald Sutherland and 61 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1510 - George Knapp & Jeremy Corbell Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 43 minutes

Words per minute

172.12

Word count

17,763

Sentence count

1,862

Harmful content

Misogyny

10

sentences flagged

Toxicity

114

sentences flagged

Hate speech

41

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:03.000 Alright, here we go.
00:00:04.000 Thank you very much for being here.
00:00:05.000 I'm a really big fan, so this is an honor for me.
00:00:08.000 I'm really, really excited.
00:00:09.000 I'm really excited about your book.
00:00:10.000 I'm really excited about just your films, the untold history of the United States, which I think is fantastic.
00:00:16.000 I mean, that's one of my favorite things that you've ever done, and so thorough and so interesting.
00:00:22.000 But the book, first of all, look how good you look in there, on the cover there. 0.99
00:00:26.000 You young, handsome bastard. 0.99
00:00:29.000 Looking good there. 1.00
00:00:29.000 Look at you. 1.00
00:00:31.000 What year is that from?
00:00:32.000 It was 1968, November.
00:00:34.000 I'd just come off the last mission in Vietnam.
00:00:36.000 Wow.
00:00:37.000 It was on a hilltop.
00:00:38.000 We got stuck in the rain in the Ashao Valley.
00:00:41.000 It was the first cavalry...
00:00:43.000 And we really, the helicopters couldn't get in for 11 days.
00:00:47.000 It was awful.
00:00:48.000 Wow.
00:00:48.000 We had leeches everywhere.
00:00:50.000 And the enemy, we didn't know where they were, but we felt that they were going to close in.
00:00:54.000 But it was too wet, ultimately, for them to close in.
00:00:57.000 But they knew we were there.
00:00:59.000 So we were praying.
00:01:00.000 The whole time was kind of nerve-wracking, because it was my last few days, you understand.
00:01:04.000 I was supposed to get out of there with Diros, leave the country. 1.00
00:01:08.000 I was due out.
00:01:10.000 I had volunteered.
00:01:11.000 I had volunteered for an extra three months in order to get out of the army three months sooner.
00:01:16.000 In other words, normally you had to serve, if a two-year deal, you had to serve six months stateside on the backside of it.
00:01:16.000 Wow.
00:01:24.000 So 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.
00:01:31.000 So 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?
00:01:41.000 You've had these life experiences as someone who's just a filmmaker.
00:01:46.000 They really can't draw upon.
00:01:48.000 You've had actual combat experience.
00:01:51.000 And when you're making movies about combat, that has to be a gigantic advantage.
00:01:57.000 Or at least it adds layers to it that are almost impossible to recreate for someone who's just trying to imagine what it's like.
00:02:05.000 Yeah, and that was very important when we did Platoon.
00:02:08.000 I was trying to get the exact distances and the amount of firepower is not as intense, generally speaking, as the movies make it.
00:02:20.000 And that's the problem because the movies have so much to show.
00:02:25.000 They bring the enemy much closer.
00:02:27.000 They condense things and they...
00:02:31.000 They amplify as much as possible.
00:02:33.000 Now, I did that too here and there, so I'm guilty too, but I think overall it's way overdone.
00:02:39.000 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.
00:02:49.000 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.
00:02:57.000 They're just way, way overdone.
00:03:00.000 Anyway.
00:03:00.000 In what way?
00:03:02.000 Well, what was the name of the film?
00:03:04.000 Yeah.
00:03:04.000 Lone Survivor?
00:03:05.000 Was that the name of it?
00:03:05.000 Yeah.
00:03:06.000 Yeah, they get dropped off, whatever, in ten guys, and they manage to kill how many Taliban for each guy, you know? 0.95
00:03:12.000 How much of that was based on...
00:03:14.000 I mean, it's all about Marcus Luttrell's life.
00:03:16.000 I haven't had a chance to talk to Marcus.
00:03:18.000 I'm friends with him.
00:03:19.000 But I don't know how much of it...
00:03:21.000 They monkey with everything.
00:03:23.000 Whenever they make a movie...
00:03:25.000 It was way overdone.
00:03:26.000 What I heard and what's been reported is that they got trapped right away.
00:03:31.000 It was pretty quick.
00:03:32.000 The ambush went on. 1.00
00:03:34.000 And they got the shit kicked out of themselves. 1.00
00:03:37.000 And... 0.99
00:03:39.000 I don't remember exactly the details, but he did get away.
00:03:42.000 Some people did scam.
00:03:44.000 But it doesn't look like it does in the movie, where everyone's a hero.
00:03:48.000 Right.
00:03:49.000 That is a problem, and that's one of the things that I really loved about Platoon.
00:03:52.000 Everyone wasn't a hero.
00:03:54.000 I mean, the Tom Berenger character.
00:03:58.000 Yeah, he existed.
00:03:59.000 It's in the book.
00:03:59.000 It's based on a guy called Sergeant.
00:04:01.000 Well, I called him Sergeant Barnes, but I wouldn't use his real name.
00:04:05.000 Real guy, getting shot in the face, was scarred, distorted, kind of handsome like that.
00:04:13.000 But he was a serious guy, and he knew what he was doing.
00:04:15.000 He was the leader of the platoon.
00:04:18.000 See, I made clear that the leaders of the platoon were not really the lieutenants.
00:04:22.000 They were the platoon sergeant and the squad sergeants.
00:04:26.000 And they were very important in our lives.
00:04:29.000 So I barely saw officers.
00:04:30.000 I was dealing in the jungle.
00:04:32.000 You deal with what's right in front of you.
00:04:34.000 So the sergeant was crucial.
00:04:36.000 Barnes is a crucial character.
00:04:37.000 So is the other character, Sergeant Elias, played by Willem Dafoe, was in another unit.
00:04:44.000 I had combined four different units.
00:04:47.000 I was in three combat units.
00:04:48.000 I combined them into one unit, one platoon for this movie purposes.
00:04:53.000 So the Willem Dafoe character was also based on a real person?
00:04:56.000 He was based on a guy I knew in the LERPs, Long Range Recon Patrol, who was a great guy.
00:04:56.000 Yes, he was.
00:05:01.000 He was an Apache, kind of an Apache Mexican mix.
00:05:06.000 I'm not quite sure what he was because I didn't get to know him that well.
00:05:09.000 But I admired him because he had that lithe grace of...
00:05:14.000 A guy who fought a lot, been around.
00:05:16.000 He'd been in before.
00:05:17.000 He was on a second tour.
00:05:20.000 And very much a beloved figure.
00:05:22.000 And he was killed after I left the unit.
00:05:26.000 He was killed about a month later in a friendly fire accident.
00:05:31.000 Now, friendly fire is, we talk about it in the book quite a bit, you know, because it's also underestimated.
00:05:38.000 People never, the Pentagon cuts it all out, especially in the movies that come from the Pentagon approval.
00:05:43.000 Right.
00:05:44.000 They don't like to emphasize how difficult, how often, I would say 15 to 20 percent of our casualties in that war were friendly fire.
00:05:53.000 Wow.
00:05:54.000 Now that's not just ground fire.
00:05:56.000 When you get into a jungle situation, you're close to people.
00:05:59.000 You don't really know where you're shooting sometimes.
00:06:01.000 You don't know where the incoming fire is coming from.
00:06:04.000 So it's quite a mess.
00:06:06.000 It's chaotic.
00:06:07.000 The radio, people screaming, shouting, noise, confusion, and a lot of fear.
00:06:14.000 Yeah, that was highlighted for us when the Pat Tillman incident happened.
00:06:19.000 Yeah, very important one.
00:06:20.000 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.
00:06:31.000 That's absolutely correct, which is the point, is that they really don't want the parents to know what's really going on.
00:06:39.000 So imagine 15, maybe 20 percent are dying from that friendly fire.
00:06:46.000 This is not just ground fire.
00:06:48.000 This is, of course, bombing and certainly artillery fire because that is often misplaced.
00:06:54.000 It's not that easy to get the coordinates down in a tense situation where you can hit your...
00:07:01.000 Where artillery 20 miles away, 40 miles away, has to hit the spot.
00:07:06.000 When 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?
00:07:16.000 How much is it different than when you're making another movie?
00:07:19.000 Because this is something that's intensely personal to you, obviously.
00:07:23.000 Mm-hmm.
00:07:24.000 Yeah.
00:07:26.000 How much preparation?
00:07:28.000 Well, I got a great combat advisor.
00:07:32.000 He'd been there as a Marine, Dale Dye.
00:07:35.000 He came in out of the blue and he was a real lifer type.
00:07:40.000 So he remembered all the details of uniforms and fire and the firepower.
00:07:47.000 It took a lot of details to put this together.
00:07:51.000 But the preparation was, I've been doing it for 10 years.
00:07:54.000 I started the picture in 1976. I wrote it.
00:07:58.000 It wasn't made.
00:07:59.000 It was rejected by the powers that be the first time.
00:08:05.000 And then it was considered great, great script, but too realistic, a bummer, a downer.
00:08:12.000 If you remember back in the 70s, Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter.
00:08:15.000 Those were big films and mythic, beautiful films, but they were not realistic.
00:08:20.000 Then they had Sylvester Stallone do his Rambo series where he goes back and fights the war again.
00:08:27.000 Do those drive you crazy?
00:08:29.000 Yeah.
00:08:30.000 Although the first one was pretty good.
00:08:32.000 The first one was different.
00:08:34.000 They're playing up the whole sympathy card, the pity card.
00:08:38.000 I don't buy that.
00:08:40.000 There's a lot of that veteran feeling that we had our hands tied behind our backs and we couldn't win and that kind of thing.
00:08:50.000 Believe me, it was a...
00:08:52.000 Badly-conceived war with a lot of misinformation.
00:08:56.000 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.
00:09:04.000 They were using the body counts, heavy body counts.
00:09:07.000 We'd say, well, if we're killing so many of them, there are not going to be that many left.
00:09:12.000 But on the other hand, as the years went on, more and more of them kept appearing. 0.84
00:09:17.000 So the Vietnamese were indestructible in a way. 1.00
00:09:19.000 They were like ants.
00:09:22.000 They were fighting for their independence, for their land, man.
00:09:25.000 It was their country.
00:09:26.000 And they never gave up, ever.
00:09:28.000 You could have nuked them, and that's what Curtis LeMay at one point suggested.
00:09:32.000 You could have dropped a nuclear bomb.
00:09:34.000 It wouldn't have made the difference.
00:09:36.000 Thank God they didn't.
00:09:38.000 But America went to extremes to win that war with poisoning.
00:09:44.000 The bombing of not only Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was intense.
00:09:50.000 Intense.
00:09:51.000 Bigger by far than World War II for this crazy war.
00:09:55.000 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.
00:10:14.000 Sure.
00:10:15.000 We 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.
00:10:26.000 What did they call it back then?
00:10:27.000 Shell-shocked?
00:10:28.000 I guess so, but it was not a diagnosable disease.
00:10:34.000 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 they would have to cover.
00:10:47.000 So it was something that There was no word for it.
00:10:52.000 But frankly, to get back to the issue of...
00:10:56.000 The original question was the platoon was rejected for these two.
00:11:02.000 It almost came to be again in 1983. It fell apart again.
00:11:05.000 It's a heartbreaking story.
00:11:06.000 It's in the book.
00:11:08.000 And...
00:11:11.000 It's resurrected.
00:11:13.000 I mean, I forget about it.
00:11:14.000 I just put it in the closet after those movies came out.
00:11:16.000 I said, Dad, they don't want to know about Vietnam in this country. 0.94
00:11:18.000 They really forget it.
00:11:19.000 It's not going to happen.
00:11:21.000 Fine.
00:11:21.000 I live with it.
00:11:22.000 I was moving on with my career.
00:11:24.000 I had Midnight Express.
00:11:25.000 I had Scarface.
00:11:27.000 I had other things in mind.
00:11:30.000 But Michael Cimino, who had directed The Deer Hunter, told me he wanted to produce it with me as a writer, as a director.
00:11:40.000 And that we would resurrect it because he said, Vietnam's coming back. 0.98
00:11:45.000 I said, that's nonsense.
00:11:46.000 I don't think it's going to come back.
00:11:47.000 He said, look at Stanley Kubrick's pictures.
00:11:50.000 He's going to make a picture.
00:11:51.000 It's called Full Metal Jacket.
00:11:53.000 And it took three years or two years for him to make it.
00:11:57.000 But the fact that he made it certainly gave us some impetus to make.
00:12:01.000 We made it very low budget.
00:12:03.000 And by the way, it was made by the same company as made Salvador, my previous film.
00:12:08.000 I made them back-to-back in Mexico and the Philippines.
00:12:13.000 Back-to-back, financed, very low budget by Hemdale, a British company led by a gentleman named John Daly, who was my mentor.
00:12:23.000 I much credit him in the book.
00:12:28.000 We were nothing film, out of nowhere.
00:12:31.000 I mean, we were in the Philippines, making a film that nobody really knew much about.
00:12:38.000 We were struggling to get it made.
00:12:40.000 There was weather problems, there was all kinds of...
00:12:46.000 Logistical problems.
00:12:47.000 But we'd been through hell on Salvador, as I describe in the book, in Mexico.
00:12:50.000 So we were a unit.
00:12:51.000 By this time, we got used to the difficulties of making low-budget films.
00:12:55.000 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?
00:13:04.000 Sure.
00:13:05.000 No, that went on quite a bit.
00:13:07.000 Everyone read the script at one point or another.
00:13:10.000 Everyone rejected it.
00:13:11.000 So when it finally almost got made with Cimino in 1983, we thought we were in.
00:13:18.000 We thought we'd get it made now.
00:13:20.000 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...
00:13:30.000 Hague.
00:13:31.000 Alexander Hague.
00:13:32.000 You remember him?
00:13:34.000 Secretary of State.
00:13:34.000 Military guy.
00:13:36.000 Very bad tempered.
00:13:37.000 They were both on the board.
00:13:38.000 And whether they went to that board, I don't know. 0.99
00:13:40.000 But that's what the story, they cover their ass by telling me, we can't make this movie. 0.96
00:13:43.000 We can't distribute this movie because the board would be against it. 0.93
00:13:47.000 Now, sometimes they tell you that without checking.
00:13:49.000 But in this case, I don't know.
00:13:52.000 So as a result, the film fell apart again.
00:13:55.000 This was a heartbreak.
00:13:56.000 Did you ever think, like, maybe I can move it a little bit or change it a little bit?
00:14:00.000 Or would you just step fast?
00:14:01.000 The Pentagon said to me, forget it.
00:14:03.000 We're not going to help you at all.
00:14:04.000 This thing is completely distorted.
00:14:07.000 They were upset as hell about the fragging.
00:14:09.000 I mean, that's to say...
00:14:11.000 You know what fragging is?
00:14:11.000 Really?
00:14:12.000 Yeah.
00:14:12.000 Yeah, there was a lot of that towards the end.
00:14:15.000 It started in 67-8, but there was more and more discontent when...
00:14:21.000 Lyndon Johnson pulled out of the presidency in March of 68. That was a big moment.
00:14:26.000 I think everyone kind of knew that this thing was not going to work out.
00:14:30.000 And who wanted to be the last guy to get killed in Vietnam?
00:14:33.000 Right.
00:14:34.000 And so I think 69, 70 were more and more fractious.
00:14:40.000 And there was more and more incidents.
00:14:42.000 At one point, there was a Pentagon document that came out.
00:14:44.000 I've seen it.
00:14:45.000 It 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.
00:15:01.000 They knew the thing was not going to work.
00:15:04.000 It was cracking from within.
00:15:05.000 So 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.
00:15:16.000 We're going to put more money.
00:15:17.000 We put a fortune into the South Vietnamese army, like we're doing now with the Afghan army. 0.92
00:15:22.000 It's interesting when you look back.
00:15:24.000 What year did Platoon come out?
00:15:25.000 He 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.
00:15:38.000 I mean, in terms of how we look at the world now.
00:15:40.000 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.
00:15:46.000 But that's kind of the timeline you're looking at.
00:15:49.000 And so, in a lot of ways, it was probably very fresh in a lot of people's eyes, particularly people in the Pentagon.
00:15:56.000 It was quite something when it came out.
00:15:58.000 It was like a bomb went off.
00:16:01.000 It went around the world, first of all.
00:16:03.000 It wasn't just America.
00:16:04.000 This film played everywhere.
00:16:08.000 I guess it was a shock at the time because it was more realistic than any war film that they had seen.
00:16:15.000 And, of course, it was dirty.
00:16:17.000 We had drug use in it, which was a description of the division.
00:16:24.000 There was a division in the We were draftees, many of us.
00:16:28.000 So it wasn't all volunteer, you know, and it wasn't all like gung-ho at all.
00:16:35.000 It was a split.
00:16:37.000 And I showed the split as much as I could.
00:16:42.000 I joined the camp...
00:16:45.000 We're the people who I would say were anti-authoritarian.
00:16:49.000 I wouldn't say they were anti-war because we didn't have anything like that going on. 1.00
00:16:52.000 It was just the army sucks, the man sucks. 1.00
00:16:56.000 A lot of the black troops knew this. 1.00
00:16:57.000 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.
00:17:06.000 So 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.
00:17:18.000 Did the movie feel different to you than anything else you've ever done in terms of your obligation?
00:17:24.000 Because I really do think that that was the most realistic, at that point, for sure, war movie ever made.
00:17:31.000 And the one that left people with the most conflicted feelings and just this feeling of...
00:17:40.000 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.
00:17:51.000 Well, we got the details right.
00:17:52.000 I mean, when you see a dead body and you see it being lifted into a helicopter, that really looks like a dead man.
00:17:58.000 Yeah.
00:17:59.000 The pain of death.
00:18:00.000 I mean, you feel the danger.
00:18:04.000 It's never what you think it's going to be.
00:18:06.000 It always comes up in another way.
00:18:09.000 It's like sloppy sometimes.
00:18:11.000 And battle, and that's what I don't like about a lot of the movies, battle is often just confusion, breaking down.
00:18:18.000 Things don't work.
00:18:19.000 It's like Mike Tyson said, you know, your plan goes out the window and you get hit in the face.
00:18:25.000 That's the way it goes.
00:18:28.000 See, the Americans had a methodical way of doing it.
00:18:31.000 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.
00:18:42.000 That's not what the Marines did, but that's what the Army's idea was.
00:18:45.000 It works to a degree, but it eradicates the whole...
00:18:50.000 The bombing is very sloppy.
00:18:53.000 Not only do you have friendly fire, but you have a lot of civilians killed, too.
00:18:58.000 Imagine when you finish your final cut of that movie, and it had to be a very strange, almost like you're releasing a child.
00:19:08.000 It had to have been so much more personal and so much more significant.
00:19:13.000 Yeah, I'd been through so much, I really...
00:19:16.000 I didn't think it was good.
00:19:17.000 I thought it was a good movie.
00:19:18.000 I thought it was a good script, but I didn't expect anything.
00:19:21.000 I 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.
00:19:32.000 And I showed that.
00:19:34.000 And that picture had not done very well because it had been...
00:19:38.000 America had been very little...
00:19:40.000 No interest, really, in the Central American issues of the 1980s.
00:19:43.000 Remember the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua?
00:19:47.000 There was a lot of turmoil in Guatemala, turmoil in Honduras where...
00:19:52.000 I went down there to research Salvador, and what I saw in Honduras was the beginning of another Vietnam. 0.99
00:19:59.000 That's one of the reasons I really committed to Salvador heavily.
00:20:03.000 When I saw the troops, the American troops, now there are women. 0.99
00:20:07.000 Men and women, young, in uniform, many of them National Guard troops, reserves.
00:20:12.000 They were there building up for this.
00:20:14.000 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 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.
00:20:35.000 So Reagan was unable to do what he wanted to do in Nicaragua.
00:20:41.000 Although we had mined the port, we'd done everything possible supporting the Contras. 0.99
00:20:46.000 All that pissed me off.
00:20:47.000 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.
00:20:53.000 Young guys like me in a country, you know, just believing what they're hearing from their superiors.
00:21:02.000 So you felt like this obligation to not just release Salvador, but also release Platoon as...
00:21:09.000 In Platoon, your experiences showing what the Vietnam War was really like and with Salvador saying, hey, this is happening again.
00:21:17.000 Yeah, I did them simultaneously, except I didn't really believe Platoon was going to work to come out, so I didn't have much faith in it.
00:21:25.000 Well, when it did come out, how much of a surprise was it when it was a giant hit?
00:21:28.000 Well, I knew that in the moment...
00:21:30.000 Put it this way, the shooting was...
00:21:32.000 You could tell from the young people, the actors and their enthusiasm for this.
00:21:38.000 There was a hunger.
00:21:39.000 They were so...
00:21:41.000 I'm delighted to become soldiers for the purposes of the movie.
00:21:46.000 We trained them on a 24-hour basis for two weeks, and it worked.
00:21:51.000 I wanted them to get no sleep, and Dale Dye helped me with that.
00:21:56.000 We 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.
00:22:04.000 You split your duty with foxholes, three guys.
00:22:10.000 No, no.
00:22:27.000 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, and types.
00:22:39.000 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.
00:22:59.000 And, you know, Californians, I try to mix it all up.
00:23:02.000 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.
00:23:08.000 So we planned it that way.
00:23:10.000 The camp worked. 0.72
00:23:11.000 We got the full cooperation of the Philippine Army and some shitty helicopters that they had, but very dangerous ones.
00:23:18.000 But at least it was a start.
00:23:20.000 Had that ever been done before, the camp, the idea of having them live like soldiers?
00:23:24.000 I don't think so, because that had bothered me a lot.
00:23:27.000 Maybe in the old days, but I don't know one.
00:23:30.000 What made you fall on that?
00:23:32.000 Why was that?
00:23:33.000 Well, I'd lived it.
00:23:34.000 I'd lived it, so I wanted them to...
00:23:36.000 Above all, I wanted them to be tired, irritable.
00:23:40.000 It gives you a sense of what it's like.
00:23:43.000 There's bugs, there's heat, it's a jungle.
00:23:47.000 And...
00:23:49.000 How did they respond to that?
00:23:52.000 At first, they were a lot of bitching. 1.00
00:23:54.000 There was a SAG, SAG Unions, and you have to have 12-hour turnaround.
00:24:00.000 So a few of them quit.
00:24:01.000 Really?
00:24:02.000 Yeah.
00:24:03.000 Wow.
00:24:03.000 And we replaced them because I had a long waiting list of people that I'd seen over the years.
00:24:09.000 Wow.
00:24:10.000 Actually, 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,
00:24:26.000 who came of age about that time, was my age when I was over there.
00:24:28.000 Oh, wow.
00:24:29.000 So, he was 19, 20. So, you know, that's when I wanted those faces.
00:24:34.000 Once you get the faces, you can train them.
00:24:37.000 Yeah.
00:24:39.000 Berenger and Defoe were the oldest and that helped enormously.
00:24:43.000 They were the anchors of the operation.
00:24:47.000 When the film was this gigantic success, How did that feel to you?
00:24:54.000 Did that validate this idea that you had?
00:24:57.000 It shocked me.
00:24:58.000 It shocked me.
00:24:59.000 I mean, for years this had been rejected.
00:25:01.000 Ten years, you know.
00:25:02.000 I mean, I was sick of it.
00:25:04.000 I was saying, I'm not going to make this movie because it's going to go wrong.
00:25:08.000 I didn't think it was possible.
00:25:10.000 But because of this Kubrick picture and the support of the English company, John Daly, they wanted to make it.
00:25:18.000 This is news for me because all my life I'm fighting to make a movie against somebody's wishes.
00:25:22.000 All of a sudden I got some people on my side.
00:25:24.000 That's a big difference.
00:25:27.000 And the enthusiasm of the cast and Dale Dye and all these great people and my cameraman, everybody, they loved it.
00:25:35.000 We made it, and frankly, we finished it.
00:25:37.000 We did it on budget.
00:25:39.000 It was 50 days.
00:25:40.000 We went 54 days, but we had the money in that 10% contingency.
00:25:47.000 We finished it in 54 days, and it was tough.
00:25:50.000 And 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.
00:26:01.000 We edited it.
00:26:02.000 There was no...
00:26:03.000 We edited it a little bit, but, you know, we played with it, played with it.
00:26:07.000 You massage it.
00:26:08.000 But right away, I would say, from the first screening on, you could tell people were responding, saying, this is real.
00:26:14.000 This is...
00:26:15.000 I've never seen this.
00:26:16.000 This is real.
00:26:17.000 So it took care of itself in a way.
00:26:20.000 I mean, they didn't put much money in.
00:26:22.000 The distributing company was Orion Pictures.
00:26:25.000 They said, we'll give it a quality release, a few theaters at Christmas in 86. And it opened huge.
00:26:33.000 First day in New York, there was a line of veterans, young veterans who looked young.
00:26:39.000 I mean, not World War II veterans, young veterans.
00:26:42.000 They were around the block at the Lowe's Astor.
00:26:46.000 And I wasn't there, but people told me that they went in quietly.
00:26:51.000 There 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.
00:26:58.000 And at the end of it, they were quiet, and some of them wouldn't get up out of their seats.
00:27:03.000 Quite a few of them were sitting there still in their seats, you know.
00:27:06.000 Some were crying.
00:27:07.000 It took off.
00:27:09.000 And then it took off like I can't, I've never, you know, it's a phenomenon you rarely see in the world.
00:27:14.000 It's like the top, third highest grossing film in America that year.
00:27:18.000 And it was, it was a blockbuster because no children are allowed in, you know, and you don't have much of a woman's audience at first.
00:27:27.000 So you don't figure on these things, you know.
00:27:30.000 It took off and kept going.
00:27:32.000 And then the women started to come in the third week. 1.00
00:27:34.000 As it was getting more and more talked about, there was no stopping it.
00:27:39.000 Even when you went to places like Paris or London, people cared.
00:27:43.000 It was unbelievable.
00:27:45.000 Well, it was a masterpiece.
00:27:46.000 And is that your finest moment and your proudest moment you feel like as a filmmaker?
00:27:51.000 Well, it's one of the highlights of my life.
00:27:53.000 And it's the climax of this book.
00:27:56.000 The ten chapters here lead up to that because my story starts in 76. I'm in New York.
00:28:04.000 I'm broke, depressed, written 12 screenplays.
00:28:07.000 Nothing's happened.
00:28:09.000 I've come close a few times.
00:28:10.000 Nothing's going on.
00:28:11.000 And my marriage has ended.
00:28:14.000 My first marriage.
00:28:16.000 I haven't accomplished in my life the things that matter.
00:28:19.000 So at the age of 30, you kind of wake up.
00:28:21.000 You say, you know, what can I do?
00:28:23.000 My grandmother dies.
00:28:24.000 I talk to her.
00:28:25.000 I go and talk to her on her deathbed.
00:28:27.000 She's dead, but in France, they let them. 0.96
00:28:29.000 My mother was French, you see.
00:28:31.000 They lay them out, and I was talking to her.
00:28:35.000 I think it's a very moving scene where he communicates with her because she loved him.
00:28:42.000 His own family life was quite disturbing in many ways.
00:28:46.000 It was for him a traumatic divorce between his mother and father.
00:28:51.000 And he goes into what happened.
00:28:56.000 It's about a family, too.
00:28:57.000 It's about how a family life can break apart.
00:28:59.000 You can become a child of divorce.
00:29:02.000 So his life kind of falls apart, and he goes to Vietnam as a teacher, and he joins a merchant marine.
00:29:11.000 There's all kinds of things that happen.
00:29:13.000 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.
00:29:27.000 Didn't work out.
00:29:28.000 It was rejected.
00:29:29.000 It was ultimately published about 1997. It's called A Child's Night Dream.
00:29:35.000 So I was a writer from the beginning, I think, before I was a director. 1.00
00:29:39.000 And when that was rejected, I just said, fuck it. 0.99
00:29:43.000 I'm too full of myself. 1.00
00:29:44.000 I'm too much of a narcissist.
00:29:46.000 I can't write about myself.
00:29:48.000 So I joined the Army and volunteered for combat and for Vietnam.
00:29:53.000 I didn't want to miss it.
00:29:54.000 I wanted to see it right away.
00:29:56.000 For the experience?
00:29:57.000 No, I wanted to get to the bottom of the barrel.
00:29:59.000 I wanted to see what this country was about.
00:30:03.000 I was inquisitive.
00:30:04.000 I wanted to know what life was about.
00:30:07.000 I mean, I'd grown up relatively sheltered, you know.
00:30:12.000 My father made a living on Wall Street.
00:30:14.000 He was a Republican, Eisenhower supporter.
00:30:17.000 He was a lieutenant colonel in World War II where he met my mother.
00:30:21.000 I mean, he was a strong Republican, and all his life, I grew up in that ethic.
00:30:30.000 And it really, it's something that when I went to Vietnam, he had never been in combat.
00:30:36.000 But when I saw what I saw over there, coming from a sheltered existence relatively, it was shattered.
00:30:43.000 The glass was shattered.
00:30:45.000 It was just, I wasn't like, I couldn't take my father's word for it anymore in anything.
00:30:50.000 So I had to learn for myself.
00:30:52.000 That's why.
00:30:53.000 What was different from your father's perceptions of what it was like?
00:30:56.000 Well, he supported the war like many people did for several years until he got older.
00:31:02.000 And then he came around one day and he said, you know, I think you're right.
00:31:06.000 I think it's a futile thing because...
00:31:11.000 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? 0.98
00:31:24.000 He said, you know, the Russians have a sub off Long Island. 0.99
00:31:27.000 You know, they can nuke us from anywhere.
00:31:30.000 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.
00:31:40.000 He began to question everything.
00:31:43.000 And I was too.
00:31:45.000 I didn't change.
00:31:46.000 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.
00:31:56.000 In 1985, I went down there and what I saw in Central America confirmed that we were doing it again. 1.00
00:32:04.000 We were going into these countries. 0.99
00:32:06.000 We didn't know what the fuck they were about. 0.99
00:32:08.000 And we were fighting, in most cases, the interests of most of the people, the majority of the people. 0.99
00:32:14.000 They had a revolution in Nicaragua because it was so corrupt.
00:32:18.000 Major revolution in 1979. And we've been opposed to that new regime ever since.
00:32:27.000 So when you first, when you entered into the Army, when you signed up, did you have clarity about this?
00:32:34.000 Did you just have this idea in your head that you needed to find out what it was like?
00:32:39.000 No, no, I had no clarity.
00:32:41.000 I was, I wanted to get out of New York.
00:32:44.000 I 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.
00:32:51.000 I didn't like Yale University.
00:32:54.000 I was in the class with George Bush.
00:32:56.000 You know, I come from that generation of Donald Trump, George Bush, Bill Clinton.
00:33:00.000 It's the same generation. 0.98
00:33:01.000 But I don't identify with those people because maybe they didn't have that sense of service at all.
00:33:08.000 I had a sense of patriotism.
00:33:08.000 I did.
00:33:10.000 But I think, call it, I really think it was misplaced.
00:33:14.000 But I felt that I owe my country something.
00:33:17.000 I can't work just for myself.
00:33:19.000 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.
00:33:35.000 I mean, Midnight Express, even Scarface.
00:33:38.000 There's a message in these films that's based on real live scenarios that took place that a lot of people are unaware of.
00:33:46.000 A lot of people got their education about Cuba releasing prisoners to America based on Scarface.
00:33:54.000 I mean, that's how a lot of people found out about that.
00:33:56.000 That's too bad because I wish we had more study of what's going on in the world, more contemporary studies.
00:34:03.000 Well, that's, again, what I really loved about the untold history of the United States.
00:34:07.000 It's a fantastic piece that you put together.
00:34:09.000 Want another chair?
00:34:10.000 You can slap it on that chair right there.
00:34:13.000 No worries.
00:34:13.000 Excuse me.
00:34:15.000 But that's something that's really flavored your life, is that your work is not just commercial.
00:34:23.000 You don't just put out these commercial success movies.
00:34:27.000 But they are commercially successful.
00:34:29.000 But you balance it with a message, whether it's JFK or whether it's Platoon, all of them.
00:34:37.000 There's something to them that resonates with people.
00:34:44.000 I think?
00:34:45.000 In answer to your question about whether I was clear, no, I wasn't clear.
00:34:51.000 Here's what I felt at the time.
00:34:53.000 I said, look, I wrote this book.
00:34:55.000 It didn't work.
00:34:56.000 I spent two years putting that together.
00:34:59.000 My whole life's on there.
00:35:01.000 It's not of interest to a publisher.
00:35:03.000 So therefore, I'm going to go into this army and I'm going to go to this war.
00:35:08.000 And I'm going to let, at that time I was a good Christian, I'm going to let God sort this out.
00:35:16.000 He'll decide.
00:35:18.000 That's how you felt?
00:35:19.000 Yeah.
00:35:20.000 If I'm not meant to come back, I won't.
00:35:23.000 Wow.
00:35:24.000 And I went under those conditions.
00:35:25.000 So, you know, you have to realize that a lot of people at 19 are suicidal in nature.
00:35:29.000 Yeah.
00:35:30.000 And we know this from the facts now.
00:35:31.000 Now that we're talking about it, you know, in this country, in America, we have a surfeit of suicide among 1920s, 21s.
00:35:41.000 And it's sad.
00:35:43.000 But that's where I was.
00:35:44.000 It was spiritually desolate.
00:35:45.000 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.
00:35:54.000 I had been wounded twice, and I'd gotten to Bronze Star and done 30 or more helicopter missions.
00:36:02.000 I'd seen quite a fair share of combat, which I describe in the book.
00:36:05.000 I came back Alienated and numb.
00:36:09.000 I didn't come back as a protester, but confused.
00:36:15.000 How did you feel about the protest?
00:36:16.000 Fighting with my father.
00:36:17.000 Oh, fighting with your father?
00:36:18.000 Sure, of course.
00:36:19.000 I gave him LSD one time.
00:36:20.000 On purpose?
00:36:21.000 Did he know?
00:36:22.000 Yeah.
00:36:23.000 Didn't he know you were giving it to him?
00:36:24.000 No, he didn't know I'd give it to him, but he knew that he was on something, yeah.
00:36:29.000 How did you do that?
00:36:30.000 Did you slip it in his coffee?
00:36:32.000 No, in his scotch.
00:36:33.000 Ah, even better.
00:36:36.000 How much?
00:36:37.000 Quite a bit.
00:36:39.000 He was strong, though.
00:36:41.000 He handled it?
00:36:42.000 He drank whiskey every day of his life.
00:36:45.000 So, yeah, he was a tough guy.
00:36:46.000 But he was great.
00:36:47.000 He was swaying to the music.
00:36:49.000 Oh, wow. 0.95
00:36:50.000 I mean, sex fantasy. 0.98
00:36:52.000 Wow. 0.94
00:36:53.000 Did you tell him about it afterwards?
00:36:55.000 No, actually.
00:36:56.000 But over the years, he knew after a while he figured it out, I guess.
00:37:02.000 I was a long-haired, wild kid, you know?
00:37:04.000 Right, right. 0.71
00:37:05.000 Talking black talk to him. 0.86
00:37:07.000 Did you feel like you had to do it?
00:37:09.000 Because, like, you knew what kind of an impact it would have on him to open some doors?
00:37:13.000 Oh, I was fighting with him.
00:37:14.000 No, we were fighting about the war, fighting about everything.
00:37:16.000 Like, I just didn't like his ideas and wanted to destroy his mindset.
00:37:20.000 Oh, wow.
00:37:21.000 His mindset was, okay, this Vietnam is a mess, but... 0.95
00:37:25.000 His mindset was, but we can learn from it.
00:37:28.000 We can get armaments.
00:37:29.000 We're going to build up our knowledge for the next war. 0.78
00:37:31.000 That was his thinking.
00:37:32.000 See, he came out of that generation of World War II. His father was wiped out in 29, and his first job was as a floor walker.
00:37:41.000 He didn't have anything.
00:37:43.000 He worked his way up on Wall Street, a very hard worker, research in the back offices.
00:37:50.000 So the Second World War was the highlight of his life, he says. 0.96
00:37:55.000 He comes back from the war and America faced this problem.
00:37:58.000 What are we going to do with all these men?
00:38:00.000 And now we've got the women working. 1.00
00:38:02.000 How are we going to employ all these people?
00:38:03.000 Everybody seemed to be scared of another depression.
00:38:06.000 They thought we're going back into that.
00:38:08.000 So there was this militarized economy that we had and they kept going.
00:38:12.000 It basically kept going and built up by 19...
00:38:16.000 It ended in 45. By 1950, 51, we're back in Korea where we were building up again.
00:38:22.000 So the whole concept of an enemy was important to the American economy.
00:38:29.000 The Soviet Union, of course, fit the bill, although they were our ally in World War II and did most of the fighting.
00:38:36.000 They became our biggest enemy right away.
00:38:39.000 Right away.
00:38:40.000 There was no hesitation about it.
00:38:42.000 It was often a political decision, you know, to have an enemy, to create fear, and to keep the militarized economy that we have.
00:38:52.000 Eisenhower talked about it.
00:38:53.000 He was the one who built it up the most, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
00:38:56.000 No, no, no, we're not.
00:38:57.000 I mean, it's fine.
00:38:58.000 But my father came from that generation, and he believed firmly that Russia was really invading our country, threatening it.
00:39:07.000 They were in our schools, they were in our State Department.
00:39:10.000 I mean, he wasn't Joe McCarthy, but there was a lot of that mentality.
00:39:13.000 Nixon was like that.
00:39:15.000 Hoover was pushing it.
00:39:17.000 I grew up terrified.
00:39:19.000 I grew up terrified.
00:39:20.000 Dad, why do we let the Russians do that? 1.00
00:39:24.000 That kind of mentality of being besieged.
00:39:29.000 And so my father and I fought a lot, as you can imagine.
00:39:32.000 Because, you know, I got kicked out.
00:39:34.000 He'd take me to a restaurant.
00:39:36.000 I'd have an American tie.
00:39:37.000 It was made of an American flag, right?
00:39:39.000 And the restaurant owner would kick me out because, you know, he thought it was disrespectful.
00:39:43.000 He'd been an ex-Marine.
00:39:44.000 That's interesting.
00:39:45.000 You can have an American flag anything now and you're respectful.
00:39:48.000 That's weird.
00:39:49.000 Like you can have an American flag hat or a t-shirt and it's a different world.
00:39:53.000 This was still the height of the, you know, still the 70s.
00:39:56.000 The older people were offended by that.
00:40:00.000 Yeah, it's interesting how that shifted, right?
00:40:02.000 Like now, the more American flags, the better on everything.
00:40:05.000 Socks, underwear, whatever you want.
00:40:07.000 Nothing is respectable.
00:40:08.000 Yeah, it's different.
00:40:09.000 It's so, yeah, it's really weird.
00:40:10.000 It's kind of been bastardized.
00:40:12.000 What 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?
00:40:27.000 I didn't have any horror stories.
00:40:28.000 I didn't see that, you know, baby killer.
00:40:30.000 That's been exaggerated, I think, by people looking for, you know, looking for revenge.
00:40:35.000 You mean someone yelling baby killer at the soldiers, right?
00:40:38.000 Yeah, none of that.
00:40:39.000 I mean, I think there was discomfort.
00:40:42.000 I went back to New York Society, which was, I didn't have any veteran friends in New York.
00:40:48.000 My friends went back to small towns in Tennessee and Kentucky and Georgia.
00:40:54.000 And enter Chicago.
00:40:56.000 So I didn't see them until I made Platoon.
00:41:02.000 Well, I think the problem was it was indifference.
00:41:04.000 People didn't care. 1.00
00:41:05.000 They didn't give a shit. 0.99
00:41:07.000 I mean, most people were making money. 0.99
00:41:08.000 It was the 60s, man.
00:41:09.000 People were getting jobs.
00:41:11.000 There was all kinds of new liberating ideas.
00:41:14.000 The world was on fire.
00:41:16.000 And I think people were thinking about Vietnam was an afterthought unless you were directly involved with a relative.
00:41:22.000 At least in New York, very little.
00:41:25.000 Occasionally people would wonder, why did you go over there?
00:41:28.000 Like I was an outcast.
00:41:30.000 Why did you waste your time?
00:41:32.000 Make some money.
00:41:32.000 Get ahead.
00:41:34.000 Donald Trump was the Donald Trump generation.
00:41:37.000 That kind of a feeling.
00:41:39.000 Make money.
00:41:41.000 There'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.
00:41:52.000 It's like you have to give them medicine, but you've got to give it to them in sugar.
00:41:55.000 I don't think of it that way.
00:41:58.000 I take thorny subjects, but they're entertaining, too, because I want to know what happens next.
00:42:03.000 Like you, I think you have an interest in...
00:42:05.000 So even political matters can be fascinating.
00:42:08.000 Who else would do Nixon's life?
00:42:09.000 I mean, come on.
00:42:11.000 He was not the most popular guy.
00:42:13.000 No, he's an odd man.
00:42:14.000 For me, it was a challenge.
00:42:16.000 Same thing with the JFK murder.
00:42:18.000 I mean, it was so gnarly.
00:42:21.000 That one's extra complex, right?
00:42:23.000 Because you took some liberties there to try to move the plot along.
00:42:26.000 But liberty is in the spirit of the—I didn't violate the truth that I saw in this.
00:42:33.000 I mean, I had to combine characters and so forth.
00:42:35.000 That is a complex story.
00:42:37.000 The story of JFK's assassination is very complex because I can learn a lot from a person in what their opinion is.
00:42:45.000 What do you think happened?
00:42:47.000 Oh, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
00:42:48.000 You get these very specific character types where these people have these predetermined patterns that they plug into.
00:42:56.000 And the Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is one of the weirder ones.
00:43:00.000 Yeah, sure.
00:43:01.000 That is one of the weirdest arguments.
00:43:03.000 And when I talk to them about the magic bullet, they go, well, that's actually been proven that that can happen.
00:43:08.000 I mean, that drives me nuts.
00:43:10.000 Yeah, sure.
00:43:10.000 Because I'm a guy who shoots guns.
00:43:12.000 I'm a hunter.
00:43:13.000 And I know what happens when bullets hit bones.
00:43:15.000 It doesn't ever come out like that, ever.
00:43:17.000 And also, I think you know it was a hell of a shot.
00:43:20.000 Well, a hell of a shot can happen.
00:43:23.000 I don't think it's that big of a deal.
00:43:26.000 I think that's overstated.
00:43:27.000 There's many things that are overstated.
00:43:29.000 One of the things that's overstated is the scope was off.
00:43:31.000 You know, people always say, well, the scope was off. 0.99
00:43:33.000 Well, fucking anything can knock a scope off. 0.99
00:43:35.000 You can drop a gun in the evidence room and the scope's off. 1.00
00:43:39.000 That's nonsense.
00:43:40.000 That's people who don't understand guns. 0.99
00:43:41.000 But 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. 0.85
00:43:51.000 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.
00:43:59.000 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.
00:44:06.000 Always.
00:44:07.000 Yeah, I've made a documentary.
00:44:10.000 It's almost finished.
00:44:11.000 We went back to the case again, taking all the information from the Assassination Records Review Board that came out of the film.
00:44:19.000 They passed an act, the JFK Act, Congress did.
00:44:22.000 It was amazing.
00:44:23.000 And they allowed the board to exist for five years, and they went through a lot of detail.
00:44:28.000 They weren't out to prove anything, but they were...
00:44:31.000 They found a lot of little detail that we put into this documentary, which I think you'll love.
00:44:37.000 I'm sure I'll love it.
00:44:38.000 It goes into CE-399, the bullet, but it also goes into so much else on the autopsy that's screwed up.
00:44:46.000 The two autopsies, the one in Bethesda and also the one in Dallas.
00:44:49.000 There was none in Dallas.
00:44:50.000 Well, they did some examinations of what happened to him in examinations in Dallas.
00:44:58.000 Everybody saw a huge gaping wound in the rear right of Mr. Kennedy's head.
00:45:04.000 And that was covered up.
00:45:07.000 Yeah, there was also the reason why they needed to make that magic bullet work.
00:45:13.000 The guy who got hit under the underpass.
00:45:16.000 I can see your enthusiasm on this.
00:45:20.000 And also, you know, come on, if you're an infantryman, you can't fire three shots like that.
00:45:27.000 Why aren't you not firing at him when he's coming towards you, if you're serious?
00:45:32.000 It's very unlikely, but possible.
00:45:34.000 I mean, it can be done.
00:45:35.000 The shot can be done. 0.93
00:45:36.000 But that's one of the least ridiculous things about that story, is whether or not one person could have pulled off those shots. 0.91
00:45:42.000 I don't think it can be done.
00:45:42.000 I think the world's best marksman couldn't do it.
00:45:46.000 I remember reading something about that.
00:45:48.000 It's a hard shot.
00:45:49.000 It's a hard shot.
00:45:50.000 But hard shots can be made.
00:45:51.000 Hard shots can be made.
00:45:52.000 Three shots in that time period?
00:45:54.000 Depending upon how much he trained for it, depending on... 0.99
00:45:57.000 I mean, I know some people that are spectacular marksmen that can do some ridiculous shit and do it so fastly. 0.97
00:46:02.000 He wasn't. 0.98
00:46:02.000 But he wasn't. 0.98
00:46:03.000 But he was also trained.
00:46:05.000 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.
00:46:14.000 I don't know how much training he did.
00:46:16.000 I mean, you could take someone who's three years ago a terrible shot, and then they kill someone.
00:46:20.000 Well, he couldn't have done it. 0.94
00:46:21.000 He's a terrible shot.
00:46:22.000 Look, three years ago he was a terrible shot.
00:46:24.000 Well, if that guy was training the entire time...
00:46:27.000 Well, I don't think the rifle...
00:46:29.000 Look, it can be done.
00:46:31.000 But again, whether it's likely or not, that could be debated.
00:46:34.000 But it's the least ridiculous thing about that story.
00:46:37.000 Well, wait till you see the documentary.
00:46:39.000 I can't wait.
00:46:41.000 I think we pretty much proved that there's no chain of evidence on the rifle either.
00:46:46.000 No, I'm sure.
00:46:47.000 I'm sure.
00:46:47.000 Did you read David Lifton's book, Best Evidence?
00:46:50.000 Years ago, yeah.
00:46:51.000 Yeah, that's what got me into the Kennedy assassination.
00:46:54.000 Somebody 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.
00:47:06.000 And 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.
00:47:13.000 I was like, I had never considered it before.
00:47:15.000 I'm like, Jesus Christ, they killed the president and they covered it up.
00:47:18.000 Yeah, 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.
00:47:25.000 I think he did a lot of great things that people don't even know, and we put that in the documentary.
00:47:28.000 What he was actually doing in Africa, people don't know.
00:47:31.000 What he was doing around the world in Asia, in Cuba, obviously, South America, what his plans were.
00:47:37.000 People 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.
00:47:45.000 There was a big divide in thinking between Kennedy and Johnson.
00:47:49.000 Kennedy was without doubt pulling out of the war.
00:47:52.000 There was a directive, we bring it up from a SecDef conference in Hawaii from earlier that year.
00:48:00.000 He was pulling out.
00:48:01.000 He made that very clear.
00:48:03.000 Well, there was also the Northwoods document, which is really crazy.
00:48:07.000 Shocking.
00:48:08.000 When 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.
00:48:17.000 They were going to blow up a jet airliner and blame it on the Cubans. 0.90
00:48:21.000 They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay. 0.83
00:48:24.000 They're going to do all this to get us to go to war with Cuba.
00:48:27.000 And it's stunning that this...
00:48:30.000 This is an actual plan by the United States government vetoed by Kennedy.
00:48:35.000 Wasn't there a plan also to fly a plane into a building as I remember?
00:48:39.000 I don't know if there was.
00:48:40.000 There was a plan to blow up a drone jetliner.
00:48:42.000 They were going to take a jetliner, fly it and blow it up in the sky and attribute all these deaths to that.
00:48:48.000 That 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.
00:48:54.000 Really?
00:48:55.000 It's one of many documents that have come out.
00:48:55.000 Yeah.
00:48:55.000 Wow.
00:48:57.000 That's why it's important for my peace of mind to finish this thing.
00:49:03.000 It's kind of like, okay, this is the end.
00:49:05.000 I have to just put down the evidence because I couldn't do it in a film.
00:49:09.000 Right.
00:49:10.000 That's what I was going to get to.
00:49:11.000 What 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?
00:49:30.000 I'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.
00:49:42.000 And I think he needed some organized, very organized, top people to help him.
00:49:47.000 So 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.
00:49:58.000 He certainly had some ideas that didn't jive well with the people that were in power.
00:50:03.000 Dulles was fired by Kennedy.
00:50:05.000 Let's call a spade a spade, which had never been done.
00:50:08.000 This was a shock to the American way of government.
00:50:11.000 I mean, we come from a pro-military system, and here was Kennedy questioning it.
00:50:19.000 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...
00:50:32.000 It was a joke.
00:50:33.000 It was transparent, a joke.
00:50:34.000 There's a couple things that are a joke.
00:50:36.000 Arlen Spector being the guy who comes up with the magic bullet theory is another joke.
00:50:39.000 Yeah.
00:50:40.000 There's a lot of that that's just very disturbing.
00:50:43.000 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.
00:50:54.000 You're way too short, aren't you?
00:50:55.000 I can't wait!
00:50:56.000 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.
00:51:09.000 All the pieces that were moving and all the things that took place.
00:51:12.000 We really worked on it.
00:51:13.000 I had a professor of history, Peter Kuznick, work with me.
00:51:17.000 Five years we spent on that.
00:51:19.000 Wow.
00:51:19.000 We rewrote it.
00:51:20.000 It was really a non-profit kind of enterprise, but I really had to do it.
00:51:25.000 It's amazing, and I don't think it gets nearly the credit that it deserves.
00:51:28.000 No.
00:51:28.000 A lot of people like it, though.
00:51:30.000 I love it.
00:51:30.000 It's great.
00:51:31.000 It's available on Netflix, aren't you?
00:51:32.000 Yes, yes.
00:51:34.000 When you're doing...
00:51:35.000 Can I take a pee?
00:51:36.000 Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
00:51:37.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:51:37.000 We can break it.
00:51:38.000 No worries.
00:51:38.000 Go ahead.
00:51:40.000 Thank you.
00:51:41.000 We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
00:51:46.000 So we're back.
00:51:47.000 You were asking me about why I get attracted to these kinds of subjects.
00:51:56.000 And they don't seem attractive on the surface, but the more you get into them, the more they can be exciting.
00:52:03.000 So I am a dramatist at heart.
00:52:05.000 Really, that is what I do best.
00:52:08.000 Which is to dramatize situations.
00:52:10.000 Take something and bring it to life.
00:52:12.000 So taking the Kennedy murder was extremely challenging.
00:52:18.000 And I knew it could work.
00:52:20.000 I felt like it could work.
00:52:21.000 And it was a surprise.
00:52:22.000 Yeah, like Platoon.
00:52:23.000 I mean, basically, how can you take this...
00:52:25.000 War is boring.
00:52:26.000 There's a lot of details.
00:52:27.000 I was in four different units, you know.
00:52:29.000 Time, not much happens and then suddenly things happen.
00:52:33.000 It's not that easy to make it happen in a movie time, movie space.
00:52:37.000 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.
00:52:45.000 They would clash.
00:52:46.000 One would be...
00:52:48.000 The law and order guy.
00:52:51.000 A guy who believed in what he was doing and fought viciously.
00:52:55.000 And the other guy is the guy who was a rebel.
00:53:00.000 A bit like my own character.
00:53:02.000 My father was much of a law and order guy.
00:53:04.000 My mother was very much a rebel. 0.88
00:53:06.000 And I kind of put that into this conflict because I saw it in every platoon.
00:53:12.000 There was people who were like...
00:53:15.000 Doing marijuana, people who are doing alcohol.
00:53:18.000 You know, there was that split kind of.
00:53:20.000 And a lot of the black guys I hung out with were doing marijuana and they were doing music.
00:53:26.000 The music was unbelievable.
00:53:28.000 But they had a different kind of music than the Okie music.
00:53:31.000 So it was all this split in these platoons.
00:53:33.000 I saw it constantly.
00:53:35.000 Black, white and Country, city, sensibilities.
00:53:40.000 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.
00:53:50.000 Really?
00:53:51.000 We did jungle duty, but we also did a lot of civilian villages.
00:53:55.000 Search and destroy, search and whatever, search them.
00:53:59.000 We'd find stores of weapons, this, that.
00:54:02.000 Not necessarily they were cooperating, but sometimes they were forced to.
00:54:05.000 But a lot of guys screwed with them, you know. 0.84
00:54:07.000 Didn't like the Vietnamese at all. 1.00
00:54:10.000 Which was not the black problem. 0.98
00:54:11.000 That was, you know, that was more of a, it was a white problem. 0.98
00:54:15.000 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.
00:54:24.000 It's a lot of cowardice too.
00:54:26.000 I can only imagine.
00:54:27.000 And that's a shock education.
00:54:30.000 I 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.
00:54:40.000 Yeah, and then when I got out, I got thrown into jail.
00:54:42.000 It's in the book, too.
00:54:44.000 What for?
00:54:44.000 For federal smuggling, marijuana, coming back from Mexico.
00:54:49.000 How much did you have on you?
00:54:51.000 Just an ounce or two.
00:54:52.000 Really?
00:54:53.000 Federal smuggling for an ounce or two?
00:54:53.000 That's it?
00:54:55.000 I'd taken some Vietnamese grass home.
00:54:57.000 Oh, yeah?
00:54:58.000 But I never went home.
00:54:58.000 I just went right to Mexico.
00:55:00.000 Oh.
00:55:00.000 So it was a few days later, I was in the jail.
00:55:03.000 Called my father and said, Hey, Dad, you know, I'm in trouble.
00:55:03.000 Wow.
00:55:07.000 He said, Why haven't you called me?
00:55:08.000 Where have you been?
00:55:09.000 We knew you got out two weeks ago at Fort Lewis.
00:55:13.000 I said, Dad, you want to hear where I'm at?
00:55:16.000 You know, blah, blah, blah.
00:55:17.000 And he got me out.
00:55:18.000 He got me out with some money.
00:55:20.000 Without it, I would have been sunk into that prison.
00:55:22.000 It was awful. 1.00
00:55:24.000 Prison was filled with blacks and Latinos. 0.97
00:55:26.000 I mean, there were 5,000 people in there for 2,000 beds. 0.95
00:55:29.000 That was the beginning of the drug war.
00:55:32.000 Nixon had been elected but had not yet declared the war on drugs, but it was filled.
00:55:37.000 Most of them were non-violent crimes, you see.
00:55:40.000 And I saw that side of America coming out.
00:55:44.000 So we have a lot of law and order types here.
00:55:47.000 Yes.
00:55:48.000 Well, that law and order stuff was instituted when they passed that sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970. Oh, God.
00:55:55.000 Yeah.
00:55:55.000 What they were trying to do is they were trying to squash the civil rights movement.
00:55:59.000 That's a big part of what they were trying to do.
00:56:01.000 They 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.
00:56:12.000 That's absolutely correct.
00:56:13.000 Yeah.
00:56:14.000 And J. Edgar Hoover was still around, unfortunately.
00:56:17.000 He had a lot of influence on this.
00:56:19.000 Marijuana had been the devil drug.
00:56:21.000 What a fascinating character he was.
00:56:25.000 Yeah.
00:56:25.000 They never got him yet on movies.
00:56:28.000 No, no.
00:56:28.000 God.
00:56:29.000 Almost impossible to really get... 0.99
00:56:31.000 I really wish there was more, I mean, real personal footage of all the crazy shit that he was actually into. 0.95
00:56:38.000 We can get an understanding of how nuts it was that this guy was in charge of spying on people. 0.99
00:56:43.000 And Lyndon Johnson, you have to ask, you know, did Lyndon Johnson really believe the bullshit he was talking about? 0.99
00:56:48.000 The black civil rights movement had a communist basis? 0.99
00:56:53.000 That communism was supporting it?
00:56:55.000 I mean, that was very much Hoover's thesis.
00:56:57.000 Yeah.
00:56:58.000 Well, that was a great way to get people motivated to see your side of things back then, you know?
00:57:04.000 Yeah.
00:57:05.000 During the whole Cold War scare and the Red Scare, it's like communism being a motivating factor for any group.
00:57:12.000 Yeah.
00:57:14.000 Yeah.
00:57:15.000 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.
00:57:27.000 But what is that like doing that balancing act of having so much information to tell?
00:57:34.000 Like that story is so complex.
00:57:36.000 It was three hours and ten, twelve minutes, and I got it through the system, which is unbelievable.
00:57:41.000 I'll tell you how later, but at the time, I needed the protagonist, and the protagonist, and who was the guy?
00:57:50.000 The only person who ever brought any kind of charges publicly was Jim Garrison in New Orleans.
00:57:56.000 He was a district attorney, and I read his book.
00:58:00.000 He 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.
00:58:10.000 And that's the book I bought.
00:58:12.000 In other words, he was devoted to this subject, like you are.
00:58:15.000 He believed...
00:58:16.000 A lot more than me.
00:58:17.000 He'd been a patriot in World War II, and he'd served in Korea.
00:58:21.000 He'd been...
00:58:22.000 I mean, he'd been called every name in the book.
00:58:27.000 But as a patriot, he firmly believed that Mr. Kennedy was killed...
00:58:32.000 By these intelligence forces and he went after it and in those days you just couldn't do it.
00:58:39.000 You couldn't prove a covert operation.
00:58:41.000 He got killed by the press.
00:58:44.000 Killed and now we've found out a lot more about why, what was going on. 0.99
00:58:48.000 We 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. 0.98
00:58:57.000 Well, Kevin Costner did an amazing job of playing him in your movie, too. 0.98
00:59:01.000 Well, he was the basis of that.
00:59:02.000 Once you get a Costner in the middle of it, then you can start to move.
00:59:05.000 You've got an interesting central character.
00:59:08.000 Then 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.
00:59:19.000 Then I wanted a Lee Harvey Oswald character.
00:59:23.000 Which is to tell a little bit of his story.
00:59:25.000 So I had two stories, Garrison and Oswald.
00:59:28.000 I got to know Marina.
00:59:29.000 I didn't, you know, track a lot of the Oswald story.
00:59:33.000 Not enough of it, but there's more now.
00:59:35.000 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.
00:59:44.000 There's too much evidence of it.
00:59:46.000 Yeah.
00:59:46.000 We want to bring that out too, but...
00:59:49.000 That story becomes...
00:59:50.000 And then the third story would be the Dealey Plaza, the actual assassination.
00:59:54.000 So Garrison's not there.
00:59:56.000 He has to go back into the past to find this out, right?
00:59:59.000 So he has that thread.
01:00:01.000 That whole Dallas section is part of the structure.
01:00:05.000 It starts the movie, but it also...
01:00:08.000 We go back to it at the right time, and at the climax, we go back to it for the final time, the way it probably happened.
01:00:14.000 See?
01:00:15.000 So then that's three stories.
01:00:17.000 And the fourth story, if you want to know the truth in my thinking at that time, was a Donald Sutherland business.
01:00:22.000 He 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.
01:00:31.000 He thinks he's dealing with something that's in New Orleans.
01:00:34.000 He's not sure what beyond it.
01:00:37.000 And now Cohn says it's a much bigger story, which sends Costner to the last act, going to Dallas.
01:00:45.000 It's too much for the Costner character.
01:00:48.000 He's blown away by it.
01:00:50.000 He knows he's up against forces much larger than he ever thought.
01:00:54.000 What was the motivation for the Donald Sutherland character?
01:01:00.000 Fletcher Prouty, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.
01:01:02.000 He was the focal officer between the CIA and the Pentagon.
01:01:07.000 An old-timer, World War II, did a lot of service.
01:01:10.000 And he was in charge of basically providing the CIA with military equipment for covert operations.
01:01:18.000 He worked in Tibet.
01:01:20.000 He worked on a lot of the operations in the 50s and the late 40s.
01:01:25.000 We had operations going on in Ukraine, China, Tibet.
01:01:33.000 He trained Tibetans in the Colorado mountains and many stories.
01:01:38.000 He's written several books.
01:01:41.000 He was a keen observer of the differences that were going on.
01:01:45.000 He knew Dulles, used to brief him.
01:01:48.000 And told me stories about then.
01:01:51.000 Everything changed after Kennedy was killed.
01:01:53.000 So you got to meet him?
01:01:54.000 Oh yeah.
01:01:55.000 Oh yeah, I hung out with him.
01:01:57.000 Garrison too.
01:01:58.000 I mean, both of these were authentic men.
01:02:02.000 Fletcher described, you know, the difference after November 63. He felt it right away.
01:02:07.000 He left the Pentagon a year later.
01:02:09.000 It was over.
01:02:11.000 There was something that changed in the country.
01:02:13.000 And sure enough, we were in Vietnam faster than you can imagine with combat troops.
01:02:18.000 Yeah, another crazy character in that whole historical record is Jack Ruby.
01:02:25.000 Oh, yeah.
01:02:26.000 He's a very strange one, and I just read a book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill.
01:02:31.000 It's about the CIA and Manson in the 60s.
01:02:35.000 Oh, yeah, I know the book, yeah.
01:02:36.000 Yeah, 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.
01:02:45.000 Jolly Black.
01:02:46.000 What's his name?
01:02:47.000 Jolly West.
01:02:47.000 Jolly West, thank you.
01:02:49.000 Who was the central character in MKUltra, who they believe was involved in these various...
01:02:58.000 Yeah, that's a plastic cell.
01:03:00.000 No, it comes off.
01:03:02.000 Don't worry about it.
01:03:03.000 I'm listening.
01:03:04.000 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...
01:03:15.000 A free clinic in Haight-Ashbury that's connected to Manson where they were giving people LSD and running studies on him.
01:03:22.000 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.
01:03:43.000 Yeah, he seems to be the mob connection to this thing.
01:03:45.000 Yes, yeah.
01:03:47.000 You can put your arm back?
01:03:48.000 I'll fix it back, yeah.
01:03:50.000 No, Ruby's, his contacts alone, he goes back many years, the 40s.
01:03:57.000 He was mobbed up completely and didn't want to do it.
01:04:00.000 He was forced into doing it.
01:04:01.000 Why do you think he was forced?
01:04:02.000 What do you think it was?
01:04:04.000 I think he was scared.
01:04:06.000 About what?
01:04:08.000 Well, I have never followed that in depth because, you know, people say that organized crime killed them.
01:04:14.000 I don't believe that because they didn't have the power to pull this thing off.
01:04:17.000 I think that they're an element to it.
01:04:19.000 Yeah, you wanted somebody to rub out Oswald.
01:04:21.000 Probably Oswald was intended to die there on that day, you see.
01:04:26.000 Mm-hmm.
01:04:27.000 There's a lot of things that point in that direction, but he didn't, and he couldn't be allowed to go.
01:04:32.000 It's just crazy that they got Jack Ruby to do it.
01:04:34.000 I mean, they killed off.
01:04:36.000 Everything that Oswald said in that station, police station, is gone.
01:04:39.000 Yeah.
01:04:40.000 It's hearsay.
01:04:41.000 But what he said in the corridor outside, it's very interesting, and we know that Ruby was there.
01:04:48.000 So Ruby, I think, was pushed into this thing because they had to make it.
01:04:52.000 It was a quick operation.
01:04:52.000 We got to get to him, you know?
01:04:54.000 And it's really crazy.
01:04:55.000 The 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.
01:05:05.000 Yeah.
01:05:05.000 And then they get the chance to see Kennedy's head going back into the left.
01:05:08.000 Yeah.
01:05:08.000 And everybody's like, what?
01:05:10.000 Yeah.
01:05:11.000 That's a disgusting story.
01:05:12.000 But, you know, on the Ruby affair, don't forget that he was also, he was urgently asking the Warren Commission to get me to Washington.
01:05:21.000 I want to talk.
01:05:22.000 Jesus.
01:05:23.000 What he knew.
01:05:24.000 He didn't know everything.
01:05:25.000 I don't think anyone knew everything.
01:05:26.000 He knew his part of it.
01:05:28.000 So the whole idea was, how can you get cancer out of the blue like that so suddenly?
01:05:33.000 Yeah.
01:05:33.000 So suddenly and die so quickly.
01:05:34.000 Yeah.
01:05:35.000 Now, there again, there's a lot of cancer experimentation going on at this point in the 60s.
01:05:40.000 You mentioned doctors in the MLK. Cancer, too.
01:05:44.000 There was a huge, huge experiment.
01:05:47.000 There was a doctor in New Orleans, I forgot his name, but working on it.
01:05:51.000 And David Ferry was one of these people who knew him.
01:05:54.000 Ferry had a lot of mice and he was operating on his mice.
01:05:57.000 He was using his mice as cancer, feeding them huge doses of cancer.
01:06:04.000 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.
01:06:15.000 They're building up through these mice a cancer that was so powerful that it could kill.
01:06:21.000 I mean, I heard everything on this film, but there seems to be truth to this.
01:06:25.000 Do you feel like you're going to put it to bed with this documentary in your mind?
01:06:29.000 It's the best we can do.
01:06:31.000 I mean, I have Jim DiEugenio working with me.
01:06:33.000 He's followed this thing like he's a fifth-generation researcher, and he's very, very up-to-date.
01:06:39.000 When is this coming out?
01:06:40.000 I don't know yet.
01:06:41.000 I don't know if we can get it out.
01:06:43.000 We're going to try.
01:06:46.000 Now, Scarface is another movie.
01:06:47.000 We were saying that that is the introduction for a lot of people.
01:06:51.000 A lot of people, especially outside of Miami, really just didn't understand how crazy things had gotten there.
01:06:57.000 I have a good friend of mine who's an ophthalmologist who did his residency in Miami, and he would tell me stories. 0.64
01:07:05.000 He was there in the 80s when all the crazy shit was happening. 0.86
01:07:09.000 And he was like, it was a war zone. 0.98
01:07:12.000 Everybody coming in was shot.
01:07:16.000 People were all coked up and all these overdoses.
01:07:20.000 Well, I think there's a lot of sensationalism in that.
01:07:22.000 You know, America likes war.
01:07:24.000 They like to play up the machine guns and all that.
01:07:28.000 That was 1930 Chicago.
01:07:30.000 Time magazine went out of its way to sensationalize it.
01:07:33.000 I was there.
01:07:34.000 I saw, you know, it wasn't wild that way in the sense of shooting in the streets would happen rarely, but they happened.
01:07:39.000 People would be gunned down.
01:07:41.000 Families were killed.
01:07:42.000 Drunk dealers went after families of each other.
01:07:45.000 So there was a lot of that kind of internecine warfare.
01:07:49.000 Well, my friend saw it because he was in the ER. Oh, I see.
01:07:52.000 He was doing his residency there, so he was seeing it.
01:07:55.000 I think in any American city, there's a lot of shootings every week.
01:07:58.000 That's true.
01:07:58.000 Especially right now, right?
01:08:00.000 But definitely, there was a new element.
01:08:02.000 It was the Colombian element.
01:08:04.000 And the Marialitos came in, some of them. 0.99
01:08:07.000 Cubans who were... 0.81
01:08:09.000 A gangster element out of Cuba.
01:08:11.000 Yeah. 0.95
01:08:12.000 And it got bloody when the Colombians were not playing around, so there was a lot of cutthroats. 1.00
01:08:18.000 They used to... 0.93
01:08:18.000 They used to shivato's... 0.93
01:08:21.000 Colombian necktie?
01:08:22.000 Yeah, that's right.
01:08:23.000 That's right.
01:08:24.000 Yeah.
01:08:24.000 And when I was there, I heard about a couple of these guys.
01:08:29.000 It was interesting because I was working both sides of the case.
01:08:32.000 I was trying to get to know the crime element as more than...
01:08:35.000 So I knew all the lawyers and I went over to Bimini one day to get some real information about them because they couldn't...
01:08:45.000 In the U.S. they were scared to talk.
01:08:47.000 So I located through a defense lawyer a couple of...
01:08:51.000 some guys in Bimini.
01:08:53.000 I went down there and I met with them.
01:08:56.000 And they were talking, because Bimini was another kind of world. 0.79
01:08:59.000 The government was on the take there, I think.
01:09:02.000 And they had a lot of speedboats going out of there every night at the hotel.
01:09:07.000 Bimini is very close to Miami.
01:09:09.000 And I was doing coke at that time, and I got with my wife.
01:09:13.000 She was my cover.
01:09:15.000 And a Hollywood screenwriter, he wants to talk to you.
01:09:19.000 He did Midnight Express.
01:09:20.000 They liked that.
01:09:21.000 They wanted to know about the business.
01:09:22.000 But then in the middle of this, we were all coked up in the hotel.
01:09:26.000 You know, the way conversation goes, and I drop a name, just like that, you know, a guy I talked to.
01:09:32.000 Well, 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.
01:09:41.000 So when I mentioned that name, two of these three guys got really uptight. 0.99
01:09:45.000 And they walked, they excused themselves, went in the bathroom, and I said I fucked up. 0.99
01:09:50.000 I knew I fucked up. 0.99
01:09:52.000 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 under-informer. 0.99
01:09:59.000 Because they hated that prosecutor that put one of them away.
01:10:04.000 So a few minutes went by there, and it was pretty hairy.
01:10:08.000 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.
01:10:17.000 I went back to my room.
01:10:18.000 They were staying in the same hotel.
01:10:20.000 Whew! 0.99
01:10:20.000 All night I was tense because I knew they could come and get me. 0.99
01:10:23.000 It was their hotel.
01:10:24.000 They owned the island.
01:10:26.000 But it was nerve-wracking.
01:10:28.000 And I got out of there first thing in the morning.
01:10:31.000 The whole point is you say the wrong word sometimes and you're dead.
01:10:35.000 That's the kind of tension I wanted for this movie.
01:10:38.000 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,
01:10:53.000 remember?
01:10:54.000 Yes.
01:10:54.000 And the chainsaw.
01:10:56.000 The chainsaw.
01:10:57.000 Yeah, I was going to bring that scene up.
01:10:58.000 Yeah, there was a chainsaw murder at one point there.
01:11:01.000 There'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.
01:11:09.000 I didn't direct it.
01:11:09.000 I wrote it.
01:11:10.000 Brian De Palma did a great job directing it.
01:11:13.000 Grand Opera.
01:11:14.000 No, that's right.
01:11:15.000 He did an amazing job.
01:11:16.000 That's right.
01:11:17.000 When you are talking about someone who is in that world, when you're trying to...
01:11:24.000 Make a film about a guy who is in that world who is not a good guy.
01:11:30.000 Your main guy, Al Pacino, Tony Montana, is a bad guy.
01:11:36.000 He's the hero.
01:11:37.000 It's a very strange movie.
01:11:39.000 Well, yeah, it is because he is a hero because he's free in a way.
01:11:43.000 He's a free man.
01:11:44.000 That's where people liked it.
01:11:46.000 White people did not like that movie when it came out.
01:11:48.000 I was disappointed at first.
01:11:52.000 There was the blacks and the Latinos in the inner cities that went, and they loved it.
01:11:57.000 And also people, white people who were doing some drugs, they went.
01:12:01.000 That was the kind of audience we had.
01:12:03.000 We were a bad boy movie.
01:12:05.000 So the movie didn't do as well as they'd hoped because it cost a lot of money.
01:12:09.000 It went three months over budget.
01:12:11.000 It was a very tedious shoot.
01:12:13.000 I was there the whole time.
01:12:15.000 But over time, the film garnered a reputation and made money.
01:12:22.000 Well, it's become this iconic drug war movie.
01:12:26.000 I mean, it's the movie for gangsters, right?
01:12:29.000 It was bold, yeah.
01:12:30.000 In 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.
01:12:39.000 Really? 0.98
01:12:40.000 Yeah, they thought I had muy cojones. 0.87
01:12:43.000 When 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. 0.95
01:13:00.000 Well, he's not a hypocrite, you see.
01:13:01.000 He tells the truth, as he says, even when I lie. 0.53
01:13:05.000 He's a man who's free unto himself and I think that's what worked because the people around him are so corrupt. 0.61
01:13:12.000 I mean, the cops are corrupt in Miami.
01:13:15.000 The system, the bureaucracy that pressed down on...
01:13:19.000 By the way, I mean, let's be honest.
01:13:22.000 Let's talk about the drug war.
01:13:23.000 I mean, this is an invention that's come about that's a disaster.
01:13:27.000 It's a bureaucracy of enormous billions of dollars are being wasted.
01:13:31.000 On fighting drugs with this super DEA and now they ice and all that, whatever they want.
01:13:37.000 We always create wars.
01:13:39.000 We call it war on drugs, war on poverty, war on this, war on that.
01:13:43.000 That's the problem.
01:13:43.000 We make too much of a bureaucracy.
01:13:45.000 I noticed this in Vietnam.
01:13:47.000 It bothered the shit out of me because we were sending five people, non-combat people over there for one every combat person.
01:13:54.000 We had an infrastructure.
01:13:57.000 Las Vegas of material.
01:14:00.000 We had PX's.
01:14:01.000 We had everything we wanted.
01:14:03.000 They sent cars over there.
01:14:04.000 A lot of this stuff was, you know, sold on the black market in the end by master sergeants making a buck on the side. 0.98
01:14:12.000 You know, there was a lot of shit going on, crime stuff. 0.99
01:14:15.000 And the Vietnamese were benefiting from it. 1.00
01:14:18.000 They loved the Americans, of course.
01:14:20.000 They loved us.
01:14:21.000 It's the same thing Afghanistan and Iran. 0.73
01:14:23.000 It goes on and on and on.
01:14:25.000 It's like we create these super bureaucracies around events.
01:14:30.000 So what happened in the war on drugs is the same thing.
01:14:34.000 I think that Pacino's a hero because in a way he sees it all. 0.99
01:14:39.000 He sees it's all bullshit and he calls it out. 0.98
01:14:44.000 I think a lot of people just picked up on it. 1.00
01:14:47.000 They knew the war on drugs was a lie.
01:14:50.000 Yeah, well, most people today at least have a sense that it's not going well.
01:14:58.000 Back then they thought, I think in the East...
01:15:00.000 How many countries have we pissed off?
01:15:02.000 How many countries have we told, hey, you've got to do it this way.
01:15:04.000 We're coming down there. 0.50
01:15:06.000 We're going to bust you.
01:15:07.000 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?
01:15:15.000 Yeah, sure.
01:15:16.000 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.
01:15:29.000 So we've got American soldiers.
01:15:31.000 It's a crazy story.
01:15:32.000 Well, then you find out that spectacular growth of heroin, like heroin, just heroin sales and heroin use worldwide went up in an amazing manner.
01:15:43.000 Yeah.
01:15:44.000 This was going on, by the way, in the 1980s when we were supporting the Mujahideen against the Russians.
01:15:52.000 That's when it started.
01:15:54.000 They were fighting for the poppy fields.
01:15:56.000 We're talking about billions of dollars here.
01:15:58.000 Billions.
01:15:59.000 Some of these drug dealers, we don't even know their names, but they're well known in the Pakistani-Afghani world.
01:16:05.000 Some of them are unbelievably rich.
01:16:09.000 But it's so transparent.
01:16:10.000 The 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. 0.92
01:16:24.000 It's one of the weirdest parts of the war.
01:16:26.000 Yeah, as was Dan Rather doing his stand-up at the beginning of the war about how we're fighting the awful Russians. 0.94
01:16:35.000 They got us going on that.
01:16:37.000 You didn't see that clip.
01:16:38.000 When was that?
01:16:39.000 Early in the war.
01:16:40.000 Yeah?
01:16:40.000 He brought the flag to Afghanistan, you know, making heroes out of them.
01:16:48.000 Actually, the guys we supported that we gave the most money was Hector, who was a drug dealer.
01:16:55.000 We gave him the most amount of aid. 0.94
01:16:58.000 Hector, he's like the killer warlord.
01:17:02.000 It's so strange. 0.68
01:17:03.000 It's so strange how history repeats itself in different forms, just over and over and over again.
01:17:09.000 In Vietnam, there was a whole, in Laos, there was a whole poppy growth.
01:17:12.000 Yeah.
01:17:13.000 And the shipping, there was CIA shipping out, Air America, remember that movie?
01:17:18.000 Mm-hmm, yeah.
01:17:20.000 Yeah, 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.
01:17:33.000 I'm like, this is a plane that had been to Guantanamo Bay multiple times.
01:17:36.000 Like, this is still going on. 0.99
01:17:37.000 All that shit that happened with... 1.00
01:17:40.000 Barry Seals and... 1.00
01:17:42.000 You're talking about Iran Contra.
01:17:43.000 Yeah.
01:17:44.000 I mean, that stuff's still going on.
01:17:45.000 That's an ugly story.
01:17:47.000 Yes.
01:17:47.000 Very ugly.
01:17:48.000 Yeah, the Barry Seals movie was okay.
01:17:50.000 Other Tom Cruise.
01:17:51.000 They got a piece of it.
01:17:52.000 But it was uglier than that.
01:17:52.000 Yeah.
01:17:54.000 Yeah.
01:17:54.000 We were basically...
01:17:56.000 Reagan was selling arms to Iran, taking the cash and splitting it with the Contras. 0.79
01:18:02.000 Yeah.
01:18:03.000 The Contras were one of the most brutal groups, terrorist groups in Nicaragua.
01:18:09.000 They were killing civilians, blowing up farms, scaring people.
01:18:15.000 And we supported them.
01:18:16.000 We supported a lot of bad guys everywhere in the world.
01:18:19.000 You have a very comprehensive knowledge of history.
01:18:23.000 And is this one of the reasons why you decided to make that documentary series, The Untold History of the United States?
01:18:30.000 Because you obviously get some of it out in your films, but did you just feel like...
01:18:35.000 Well, yeah, I've done a lot of films about subjects around it.
01:18:40.000 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.
01:18:45.000 And I think I went to school, kind of back to school.
01:18:49.000 I never studied.
01:18:50.000 I never got a college degree in normal subject matter like history or mathematics.
01:18:55.000 I got a film school degree, so I had to...
01:18:58.000 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.
01:19:07.000 And I made that film with just five years it took.
01:19:13.000 We had to rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it.
01:19:15.000 It was complicated.
01:19:16.000 We started with the Philippines because that was the beginning of overseas imperialism. 0.74
01:19:21.000 And we worked our way up through the Obama administration from 1898 to 2013. It's an amazing series.
01:19:30.000 It goes too fast, if anything.
01:19:32.000 But I think people could watch it two times and learn.
01:19:37.000 Each chapter is revealing stuff people don't know about how this country really got off...
01:19:44.000 I don't know.
01:19:45.000 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.
01:20:04.000 Trevor Burrus Yeah, that's the way we excuse it, right?
01:20:10.000 We're the number one superpower.
01:20:11.000 We do awful things, but better us than them.
01:20:13.000 There's no excuse for that.
01:20:14.000 No excuse, and it doesn't hold up to history, and it won't hold up to God either.
01:20:20.000 When you're making a series like that, is it difficult to edit it down to a palatable sort of version?
01:20:26.000 I feel like it moves fast.
01:20:29.000 You can't accuse that series of boredom.
01:20:31.000 If anything, it just has to because there's decades to cover.
01:20:36.000 But I'm so proud of that.
01:20:37.000 I'm glad you mentioned it.
01:20:39.000 Frankly, it's one of my achievements in my life.
01:20:42.000 It stands up there with JFK for me and Platoon.
01:20:45.000 Now, 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.
01:20:54.000 What motivates you now?
01:20:55.000 Like, what gets you going when you're trying to make a new project?
01:20:59.000 Well, this book is a lot of work.
01:21:02.000 Memoir is a chance to rediscover.
01:21:05.000 It was going so fast at times between films that I didn't have that leisure time to think about what I'd done.
01:21:13.000 And I think by reliving it, each film for me is important.
01:21:19.000 By reliving it, I'd rediscover a lot.
01:21:23.000 I 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.
01:21:35.000 Also, I realized that I'm a fundamentally flawed character.
01:21:40.000 I mean, I understand this, really understand the contradiction in myself between my parents, my fundamental nature, which is...
01:21:48.000 You have to do that with yourself.
01:21:49.000 You have to look at who you are.
01:21:50.000 My mom being who she was, my dad being...
01:21:53.000 I mentioned earlier the writer-director side.
01:21:56.000 They're two different people.
01:21:57.000 You can't be the same person when you do it.
01:22:00.000 Writing is very much an inner loneliness, solitude.
01:22:04.000 My father was like that.
01:22:06.000 And directing is very much being external, being...
01:22:14.000 Warm, inviting, working with people, collaborating.
01:22:17.000 It's a totally different exercise in your mind.
01:22:21.000 And those two, I think I'm double-minded, I say in the book, and I think that's a good thing.
01:22:28.000 Do you prefer to do both?
01:22:30.000 Do you prefer to write the film and direct it?
01:22:34.000 How much satisfaction do you get out of just writing a film like Scarface or writing a film like Platoon and directing it?
01:22:42.000 I think for me it was the both.
01:22:45.000 I mean that's why I wanted to direct.
01:22:46.000 I went to film school for that.
01:22:48.000 So the writing I'd always been doing naturally and directing is what I wanted to do.
01:22:53.000 Then don't forget editing.
01:22:55.000 There's an editing process.
01:22:56.000 I worked very closely with my editors.
01:22:59.000 And then there's the whole process of selling the film which is another category completely.
01:23:05.000 It's called marketing. 1.00
01:23:06.000 It's a crazy fucking business. 1.00
01:23:08.000 It's hard. 1.00
01:23:08.000 You know, I've done 20 of them and they're killers. 1.00
01:23:11.000 20 films and 8 documentaries, 9 documentaries.
01:23:16.000 And what am I going to do now?
01:23:17.000 I don't know.
01:23:18.000 I think there's another book in me.
01:23:20.000 That's for sure.
01:23:20.000 Oh, absolutely.
01:23:21.000 Because this ends in 1986. The story is not over.
01:23:25.000 It takes another turn.
01:23:28.000 As to films, documentaries satisfy me.
01:23:32.000 Do I need to make another film only if I really needed to?
01:23:35.000 What was the last film you did?
01:23:36.000 Snowden.
01:23:37.000 Ah.
01:23:38.000 2016. Oh, you interviewed him.
01:23:40.000 Yes.
01:23:41.000 Yeah, we talked about that briefly.
01:23:42.000 Yeah.
01:23:42.000 You understood his...
01:23:47.000 It's a crazy story for our times that that That this man is persecuted, this guy who I think is a hero.
01:23:57.000 He's exposed things that are unconstitutional, things that no one signed off on.
01:24:03.000 He exposed that there's this widespread surveillance of law-abiding citizens who've done absolutely nothing wrong, and this data collection.
01:24:12.000 And the fact that this man is hiding in Russia is, to me, crazy.
01:24:17.000 And, I mean, I don't know, I don't even know if at this point in time anybody could pardon him.
01:24:24.000 But it's stunning to me that no one has.
01:24:27.000 It's stunning to me that Obama didn't.
01:24:29.000 It's stunning to me.
01:24:30.000 I mean he pardoned Chelsea Manning. 1.00
01:24:33.000 Goddamn. 0.99
01:24:34.000 Pardon Snowden. 0.98
01:24:36.000 Yeah, but Obama, he went after the whistleblowers with a ferocity that was... 0.81
01:24:43.000 Crazy.
01:24:44.000 ...using the Espionage Act from 1917. I mean, it was really ugly. 0.90
01:24:49.000 He was zealous.
01:24:50.000 I mean, he was actually like, he did more damage than Bush in many ways overseas.
01:24:55.000 Well, it's very counter to his image.
01:24:57.000 I mean, if you look at the Hope and Change website, do you remember that?
01:25:00.000 They had a whole thing about empowering whistleblowers to come out and tell their story.
01:25:04.000 Oh, Jesus.
01:25:05.000 They had to delete that.
01:25:06.000 I supported him at the beginning.
01:25:09.000 Boy, he seemed perfect.
01:25:10.000 I mean, he's a statesman.
01:25:11.000 He's a brilliant speaker.
01:25:13.000 He seems like an amazing guy. 0.99
01:25:14.000 But whatever the fuck happens when you get in that office... 0.98
01:25:17.000 You can't change things, you know? 0.99
01:25:20.000 I mean, it seems to be every president since Jack Kennedy.
01:25:24.000 You see, Kennedy tried on a fundamental level.
01:25:26.000 He wanted to change the CIA. He wanted to change the Cold War.
01:25:30.000 It seems like you can't get off that path in this country.
01:25:33.000 I can't.
01:25:34.000 It seems very hard.
01:25:35.000 No one's been able to do it so far.
01:25:37.000 When you see a story like the Jeffrey Epstein story, which is playing out right now, right?
01:25:44.000 Oh, boy.
01:25:45.000 You should talk to my son. 1.00
01:25:47.000 That is one of the craziest fucking stories of our time because it's a conspiracy theorist wet dream. 0.99
01:25:53.000 No one would have ever believed there's an island where a guy... 1.00
01:25:57.000 It brings prominent scientists, celebrities, and politicians to fuck underage girls. 1.00
01:26:03.000 They film them all and use it to somehow or another blackmail them. 1.00
01:26:08.000 Did they film?
01:26:09.000 They filmed them, apparently.
01:26:11.000 According to Ghislaine Maxwell, there's tapes.
01:26:14.000 I mean, there's so much to this story that's so crazy.
01:26:18.000 Oh, so she knows something.
01:26:19.000 Oh, for sure.
01:26:20.000 So that's going to be the next mystery.
01:26:24.000 Well, the next mystery is how they're going to kill her.
01:26:27.000 That's the next mystery.
01:26:29.000 I mean, how long is it going to last?
01:26:31.000 The whole trial doesn't take place for a year.
01:26:35.000 That's a lot of time.
01:26:36.000 And that tomb, you feel it was a murder from outside?
01:26:39.000 Yeah.
01:26:40.000 For Epstein?
01:26:41.000 Yes, 100%.
01:26:42.000 The guy's on suicide watch.
01:26:44.000 The film doesn't work.
01:26:46.000 The surveillance cameras don't work.
01:26:49.000 And Michael Badden, the forensic scientist, reviews the autopsy and he's like, this man was strangled.
01:26:56.000 Look at the break in the bone of the neck that's consistent with strangulation.
01:27:00.000 Look at the position in which he was choked, which part of the neck that's not consistent with hanging.
01:27:08.000 All the factors point to the fact that the guy was killed.
01:27:11.000 And then the fact that, I mean, the guy's on suicide watch.
01:27:16.000 And, 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?
01:27:31.000 Whoops.
01:27:31.000 No worries.
01:27:32.000 Sorry.
01:27:33.000 Well, I'm staying away from that, frankly.
01:27:37.000 It's such a mess.
01:27:38.000 It's a mess.
01:27:39.000 It's a mess.
01:27:39.000 But that's one that I would think would intrigue you.
01:27:43.000 I 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?
01:27:51.000 Well, if I had to write it, I had to get very interested in the subject matter.
01:27:55.000 It seems it doesn't, you know, I mean, I don't know what it's about.
01:28:01.000 I 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.
01:28:09.000 It doesn't make sense.
01:28:10.000 I mean, the world is a much more important place.
01:28:15.000 A sense of world peace, and this is the most important issue, peace in our time.
01:28:20.000 And we are building up nuclear weapons at an incredible rate under this guy, Trump.
01:28:26.000 And it's a return to the worst of the Cold War, and that scares me.
01:28:31.000 That'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.
01:28:39.000 About the accumulation of arms and the building up towards...
01:28:43.000 And the madness of our leaders, Democrat and Republican, constantly pushing for more sanctions, more pressure on our perceived enemies, China, Russia, North Korea,
01:28:59.000 Iran, and Venezuela.
01:29:03.000 I mean, it's just, why?
01:29:05.000 Why are we doing this?
01:29:06.000 We don't have to.
01:29:07.000 The world could be a much more peaceful place if we take our foot off the pedal.
01:29:12.000 Is there anybody that has stood out in recent memory as a politician that gave you some hope?
01:29:17.000 Kennedy.
01:29:18.000 Oh boy, we've got to go back to 63. Obama.
01:29:21.000 Well, I was there.
01:29:22.000 I mean, Obama gave me hope.
01:29:24.000 And I was hoping for Clinton, too.
01:29:28.000 It just doesn't seem to be in the cards.
01:29:31.000 In other words, the office is not as important as you make it out to be.
01:29:35.000 I think there's a system in place.
01:29:37.000 It's a system that Eisenhower quite well described as the military-industrial.
01:29:42.000 It's a corporate complex that drives money, profit, greed. 0.69
01:29:47.000 That speech is so amazing.
01:29:49.000 That speech that he gave upon leaving office.
01:29:52.000 It was a warning. 0.99
01:29:53.000 He knew that he'd fucked up. 0.99
01:29:56.000 He said, I leave my successor a legacy of ashes. 0.99
01:30:00.000 This is a famous quote.
01:30:02.000 Eisenhower did not – horrible things, Eisenhower.
01:30:05.000 He started intervening much more in other countries than ever.
01:30:08.000 He appointed John Foster Dulles, who was a psycho, in my opinion, as his Secretary of State.
01:30:13.000 He's like Pompeo now. 0.66
01:30:16.000 Mike Pompeo.
01:30:18.000 And Alan Dulles at the CIA. They were brothers.
01:30:21.000 But anyway, Eisenhower...
01:30:24.000 I think he felt bad about what he'd seen happen over those eight years.
01:30:30.000 I do.
01:30:31.000 And I think Kennedy was a great hope because he was a new man, new generation.
01:30:35.000 He changed too, Kennedy, in office.
01:30:38.000 How so?
01:30:38.000 He moved more and more to the left as he stayed in office.
01:30:42.000 He saw the problems.
01:30:45.000 He couldn't believe what he saw.
01:30:48.000 He saw the lies.
01:30:49.000 He was lied to a lot.
01:30:50.000 The Bay of Pigs was the first one. 0.97
01:30:52.000 But he was lied to about a lot of other things we get into.
01:30:57.000 It's the great mystery, right?
01:30:58.000 Like, what happens to a candidate once they win the presidency and once they're in office?
01:31:04.000 Like, what is the process?
01:31:07.000 Well, that's where you have to have courage, and that's where Obama really failed.
01:31:10.000 I mean, when he appointed Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State, you knew it was over.
01:31:14.000 You have to make decisions and you have to go in a new way if you're going to be there.
01:31:23.000 It'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.
01:31:35.000 But 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.
01:31:43.000 I think it's very hard.
01:31:45.000 Very hard.
01:31:46.000 But you need guts.
01:31:48.000 You need guts.
01:31:48.000 And if you have guts, it makes a difference.
01:31:50.000 Remember, Kennedy had been in war.
01:31:52.000 He saved people.
01:31:53.000 He was a hero in the Pacific.
01:31:57.000 Yes.
01:31:58.000 Those are the kind of guts you need.
01:32:00.000 Right.
01:32:01.000 When you put together the Snowden movie, what was your aim?
01:32:06.000 What were you trying to get out of that film?
01:32:09.000 Well, I knew it was an important story because I'd never imagined surveillance at this level.
01:32:14.000 I realized that with this new technology we had, that it could be everywhere.
01:32:19.000 I mean, beyond my imagination, beyond anybody's imagination.
01:32:23.000 And when I did the movie, it was to reveal what he revealed, which was shocking in its implications.
01:32:29.000 We went even further and we showed how the control of information, the use of information, can destabilize many regimes.
01:32:38.000 And they went after regime change became the new modus operandi for the United States.
01:32:44.000 It was okay to change regimes.
01:32:46.000 We were good at it.
01:32:48.000 And the way we did it was soft power, subtle.
01:32:51.000 What happened in Brazil a couple of years ago, typical. 1.00
01:32:55.000 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.
01:33:07.000 They're still working at it in Venezuela.
01:33:09.000 They worked in Bolivia.
01:33:11.000 They got rid of the guy illegally.
01:33:15.000 Honduras.
01:33:16.000 Libya.
01:33:17.000 Libya.
01:33:18.000 That's the most spectacular failure, right?
01:33:20.000 Well, that was one of.
01:33:22.000 Yeah, it's a failed state now.
01:33:24.000 Yeah, but that comes down to our policy in the Middle East, too.
01:33:28.000 Yeah.
01:33:30.000 When you make a film like that, how hard is it to put together?
01:33:35.000 I mean, the Stoughton film is so disturbing because it's current, right?
01:33:38.000 We're dealing with things that are happening right now.
01:33:40.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:33:41.000 How hard is it to put it down and make it this dramatic piece that's going to be enjoyable?
01:33:47.000 It was hard.
01:33:47.000 It was hard.
01:33:48.000 You have to judge that for yourself.
01:33:49.000 I like the movie.
01:33:50.000 I think it's tense and keeps the tension throughout the movie.
01:33:58.000 Of course, I got to know Stone very well.
01:34:01.000 I went to Moscow several times and met with him.
01:34:04.000 Oh, really?
01:34:04.000 Yeah.
01:34:05.000 How does that get arranged?
01:34:07.000 Yeah.
01:34:08.000 Do you have the bandana over your eyes?
01:34:11.000 No.
01:34:12.000 I've done that too.
01:34:13.000 Have you?
01:34:14.000 Yeah, that was the terrorist groups in the Middle East.
01:34:16.000 What was that for?
01:34:18.000 That was for Persona Non Grata.
01:34:20.000 It was a documentary I did in 2003-04 about the leader of the PLO. Whoa.
01:34:29.000 Arafat.
01:34:31.000 Really?
01:34:31.000 Yeah, I did an interview with him.
01:34:34.000 Wow, what was that like?
01:34:37.000 I was more, I didn't, because of my connections, I had more contact with the Israeli side.
01:34:42.000 I was in Ramallah.
01:34:43.000 So, I mean, I was talking to Netanyahu before he was prime minister.
01:34:46.000 I was talking to the leader, the ex-prime minister at the prime minister, all that.
01:34:50.000 And then I went to Ramallah, which was the capital of the PLO there in Ramallah.
01:34:57.000 Actually, I was there the day the Israelis, the day before the Israelis came in and knocked out the lights and everything. 1.00
01:35:05.000 They isolated Arafat and the Ramallah power.
01:35:10.000 We got out at the last second, actually.
01:35:13.000 But we were seeing Arafat and showing his side of the equation, showing what he was thinking.
01:35:19.000 So part of that, I went to see a terrorist group.
01:35:23.000 They became quite famous later.
01:35:26.000 They're well known.
01:35:27.000 They were young guys and they had their masks.
01:35:29.000 And I went at midnight.
01:35:31.000 I was more scared of the Israelis than them. 1.00
01:35:34.000 Because the Israelis could be tracking them. 0.99
01:35:37.000 They have all this equipment, you know, blow the shit out of us when we're in there. 0.98
01:35:41.000 That's what I'm scared of. 1.00
01:35:43.000 The Israelis were dangerous. 1.00
01:35:44.000 You thought the Israelis would do that knowing that you were a filmmaker?
01:35:48.000 I don't know what they're thinking.
01:35:50.000 I'm not sure they knew what we were doing.
01:35:53.000 They saw people going into an underground bunker with people with masks.
01:35:59.000 Who knows what they're thinking.
01:36:01.000 They have great reconnaissance, though.
01:36:03.000 You have to be careful when you fight them.
01:36:05.000 And so they requested that you wear a mask when they transported you?
01:36:10.000 Not the Israelis, but I mean the terrorists. 1.00
01:36:12.000 Yeah, when they transported me, yes.
01:36:13.000 But when I got there, I took it off.
01:36:14.000 But that decision, was that a tough decision to make to let them drive you around with a mask on?
01:36:19.000 No, not for me.
01:36:20.000 No, I was very anxious to meet them.
01:36:22.000 They were, they were, they call them terrorists, but you know, who's a terrorist these days?
01:36:28.000 Right.
01:36:31.000 We 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.
01:36:44.000 That'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.
01:36:59.000 Do those two get in the way of each other sometimes?
01:37:02.000 Of course.
01:37:02.000 Yeah?
01:37:02.000 Of course, yeah.
01:37:03.000 There was people that think sometimes my outspokenness overshadows my work.
01:37:09.000 It might be true for them, but...
01:37:11.000 Well, they try to label you both ways, too, which is very fascinating to me.
01:37:15.000 The world is complicated.
01:37:18.000 And I did speak out, and some people think that's...
01:37:22.000 They say I'm a filmmaker, stick to being that.
01:37:25.000 But, you know, it's very hard if you care.
01:37:27.000 You know this.
01:37:29.000 Well, it's very important that you don't, and I'm glad that you have the courage to not stick to that.
01:37:35.000 Yeah.
01:37:36.000 I mean, I think it's when someone...
01:37:38.000 Oh, sorry.
01:37:39.000 Please go ahead, Snowden.
01:37:40.000 Snowden, we couldn't get support for it.
01:37:42.000 It 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.
01:37:52.000 I 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.
01:37:57.000 We went to all of them.
01:37:58.000 Well, people are terrified of it.
01:38:00.000 That tells you a lot about what a mess we're in.
01:38:03.000 We don't even have the guts to talk about stuff.
01:38:07.000 We shut up.
01:38:08.000 We censor ourselves. 0.93
01:38:09.000 We self-censor.
01:38:11.000 Yeah.
01:38:12.000 In the 1980s or 90s, I probably could have gotten it financed, but not now.
01:38:17.000 Well, it's such a tense time, and that issue is so polarizing, and I don't understand how it isn't.
01:38:23.000 I don't understand how it doesn't have universal support by American citizens that this story needs to be told.
01:38:30.000 I mean, even when he was discussed as a podcast guest, a lot of people were saying, you should really stay away from that.
01:38:37.000 They don't understand.
01:38:37.000 They think he's some kind of Russian agent.
01:38:39.000 It's crazy.
01:38:40.000 He's been very clear about it.
01:38:42.000 Well, 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.
01:38:54.000 Exactly.
01:38:54.000 A Boy Scout.
01:38:55.000 Yeah.
01:38:55.000 I mean, he has a story, and it's a spectacular one.
01:38:58.000 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.
01:39:13.000 And cyber warfare too.
01:39:14.000 It raises the whole issue of who's doing what to who.
01:39:17.000 We were very quick to say, they're doing that to us, China, Russia, this, that, they're doing this, steal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:39:24.000 What are we doing?
01:39:26.000 You know, you've had difficulties in making films, but is there ever a film that you wanted to make that you never could?
01:39:31.000 Yeah, sure.
01:39:32.000 What is that?
01:39:33.000 Several.
01:39:34.000 My Lai.
01:39:36.000 My Lai, I got very close.
01:39:38.000 We were about two, three weeks away from shooting it in 2007 in Thailand and some of it in Vietnam.
01:39:44.000 I'd been to My Lai in Vietnam.
01:39:47.000 Great story because the massacre is unknown.
01:39:50.000 People don't know the real story.
01:39:52.000 It was investigated, the massacre.
01:39:54.000 You've heard of it, right?
01:39:55.000 I've heard of it.
01:39:56.000 500 civilians were shot down in cold blood.
01:40:00.000 Babies, mothers, everybody, old people shot. 0.99
01:40:05.000 And not one enemy bullet was fired.
01:40:07.000 Not one.
01:40:09.000 And we've heard all the obfuscations of that.
01:40:12.000 The 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.
01:40:27.000 It happens all the time, right?
01:40:28.000 Torture works, right?
01:40:31.000 Torture doesn't work.
01:40:33.000 And as a result, they were told that there was NVA in that village.
01:40:37.000 They were not there. 0.93
01:40:39.000 So the guys went in thinking they should kill.
01:40:42.000 Did you write a screenplay for this?
01:40:45.000 No, someone else did and I was about to direct it.
01:40:48.000 And it almost happened.
01:40:51.000 It just ran into the fiscal crisis of 2008. Oh, okay.
01:40:56.000 But that's not an excuse.
01:40:58.000 Nobody wanted to make it.
01:40:59.000 Have you thought about trying again?
01:41:00.000 I did.
01:41:01.000 Yeah.
01:41:02.000 No, no go.
01:41:03.000 I also tried to make the Martin Luther King story years ago.
01:41:07.000 Many years I worked on it.
01:41:09.000 Martin Luther King's a great story, but it's too tough a story to tell.
01:41:13.000 I 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.
01:41:27.000 But, you know, his relationship with women is fascinating.
01:41:30.000 And we were into that whole aspect of it.
01:41:33.000 And what happened with that?
01:41:35.000 It just never got together.
01:41:37.000 Man, it might be a good time to revisit that now.
01:41:40.000 No, I think a black filmmaker could revisit it, but it's definitely moved into that direction.
01:41:44.000 I've also tried for many years to do Evita, and I wrote a script for that, but another director made it.
01:41:53.000 How far down the road had you gotten with the Martin Luther King story?
01:41:56.000 Twice I went.
01:41:59.000 Me and someone else wrote a whole script.
01:42:01.000 I think it's very good.
01:42:04.000 But gone.
01:42:07.000 So many films get planned and not made.
01:42:09.000 For every film you do this, like five abortions. 1.00
01:42:12.000 Damn. 0.99
01:42:13.000 That seems like a great one, though. 0.99
01:42:15.000 Yeah.
01:42:16.000 I mean, he's such an incredible and important character.
01:42:20.000 Boy, does the world need a Martin Luther King Jr. right now.
01:42:25.000 Well, things are changing all the time.
01:42:29.000 But listen, Oliver, I've taken up a lot of your time, and I really, really appreciate you being here.
01:42:33.000 Your book is called Chasing the Light.
01:42:35.000 It'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.
01:42:46.000 You're a bad motherfucker. 0.99
01:42:47.000 I appreciate you. 1.00
01:42:49.000 Thank you, Joe.
01:42:49.000 I really enjoyed today.
01:42:56.000 What are you looking for?
01:42:57.000 If this is a clean copy, I can give it to you, I guess.
01:43:00.000 Okay.
01:43:00.000 You mean writing as far as you wrote it?
01:43:03.000 No, that's my copy.
01:43:04.000 It says Oliver copy.
01:43:04.000 I have to send you one.
01:43:05.000 I have one.
01:43:06.000 I have one at home that you sent me.
01:43:07.000 I'm good.
01:43:08.000 But thank you.
01:43:09.000 Thanks for everything.
01:43:10.000 Appreciate you, man.
01:43:11.000 Thank you.
01:43:12.000 Bye, everybody.