Stone smiled and opened his hands helplessly. "Yes and no. I don't necessarily go into a subject just because America is upset about it, because America changes every six weeks. We live in a society where issues are thrown up by the media and then they go away and there's another issue, so by the time you make a movie, the issue is gone.
"Something like Vietnam doesn't go away. Vietnam has haunted America. It's been its bastard stepchild since the '60s, and the people that try to deny it or ignore it are covering up America's soul. They're repressing the things that we did there, and as a result, we're going to make the same mistakes over and over again, whether it's in Panama or Iraq or any Third World intervention. People are going to get killed, mothers are going to lose their sons, unless we can come to terms with what we did there."
Stone leaned forward, speaking more quickly. "Between a million and 2 million Vietnamese died," he said. "Their suffering in comparison to 60,000 Americans who were killed is enormous. We have never, ever, given them the credit of that suffering. Mr. Clinton has renewed the sanctions against Vietnam; we continue to hate them, even though we rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II, and those countries committed atrocities on an enormous scale. America has, somewhere in this Vietnamese conflict, lost its compassion. It's lost its ability to make up, to forgive, to reach across this gulf and shake the hand of an enemy and say, 'Let's be friends again.' If we could do that, it would be great for America's soul. This would be a better country." A society's concerns
Stone has been over this ground before. In a sense, what he's saying is like a political speech. In another sense, of course, there is truth in it. He has put his movies where his mouth is, avoiding the obvious commercial formula plots to work on the demons that haunt him and, he believes, his country.
"There's a great line in 'Wall Street,' " he said. "You look in the abyss and that's where you find your character. I think that a lot of my character has come from defiance and rebellion, from the get-go, as a kid, in school. Whatever formed me was coming out of that. I did my homework, but I was a quiet rebel and I blew up and went to Vietnam twice and I became another person. So defiance has worked for me. That's my character.
"But to be misunderstood constantly is hurtful to me. I've been characterized as an angry Vietnam veteran. I've been characterized as a conspiracy nut, a buff, which is insulting. I've been characterized constantly as a man who can't get his head out of the '60s. These are simplifications, and they hurt me because it's not me. I live in 3-D and I'm passionate about so much. I hate to be simplified."
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