At this past May’s Cannes Film festival, I met up with a producer who told me that Oliver Stone, 77, was shopping around a highly political feature film project, and I swore not to talk about its contents, but Stone definitely wants to make another film.
A few months later, a report came out that Stone was working on “one more ambitious narrative film” and that, to “make that dream a reality,” he had just signed on with Atlas Artists for representation in all areas.
Here’s the statement from Stone:
I’d like to, I think I have one more in me. I do have a narrative film in mind, but I can’t tell you what it is […] I know you’re going to ask that. But it is an important narrative. I’d like to have one more film if I can get it done. It’ll be done in the next year, that’s for sure.
Stone will need funding for this one, and judging by his recent appearance at the Quincy Institute, he hasn’t found the money yet. In fact, he’s saying that he’s probably been “blacklisted” from Hollywood for the 2017 documentary he did about Vladimir Putin.
I’ve been passionately driven, and you unfortunately pay a price for it. Probably right now, I’m on a blacklist, a grain list, or whatever that is, because I did interviews with Putin. You know, they’re so nuts in Hollywood, they’re so virtuous, you have to express your virtue, you have to wear your ribbon that says how conscious you are about political correctness, or you can call it wokeness, I can’t stand that stuff, that’s why I went to Vietnam, to get away from all those things.
Maybe European backers have stepped up to the plate, we’ll see, but it sure sounds like Stone is struggling to get this one going.
Stone hasn’t directed a narrative feature since 2016’s “Snowden,” which premiered at TIFF to mixed reviews. His other more recent releases included 2008’s “W,” 2010’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and 2012’s “Savages.”
Regardless, Stone, currently the Chomsky of U.S. filmmakers, is still fully engaged, plugging away and making docs — his latest one, “Lula,” premiered at Cannes in May.
From ’86 through ’97 Stone was a force to be reckoned with— “Salvador” (’86), “Platoon” (’87), “Wall Street” (’87), “Born on the Fourth of July” (’89), “JFK” (’91). You could extend that streak, I suppose, to “Natural Born Killers” (’94), which I don’t like, “Nixon” (‘95) and his underrated 1997 pulp-noir “U-Turn.”