Past Imperfect:
History According to the Movies.
(interview with film director Oliver Stone)

The following is an expanded version of an interview between Mark C. Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, and writer/director Oliver Stone, which appears in the paperback edition of Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, a Society of American Historians Book recently published by Henry Holt and Company.

Mark Carnes: In this collection of essays, which covers about one hundred historical films, we see all sorts of 'enhancements' of the historical record, including complete and utter fabrications that have no basis in fact. We see in some movies that Custer was a hero to the Indians or that Hoover's FBI was pro-civil rights. The license you have taken in your films is, at worst, let's say, in the middle range of this panoply of invention, yet you have been sharply criticized - by historians, in particular - after JFK, and also after Nixon. Do you care that historians have criticized your work? And has their criticism influenced the way you go about making your films?

Oliver Stone: I think many historians come at filmmakers with an attitude and with hostility. It's as though history is their territory, and we don't belong. We just pervert the paradigm with emotion, sentimentality, and so on.

Carnes: But do you care what they say?

Stone: For some reason I do care. I went to school, I was educated, I loved history and current affairs, and I was good at them. Some part of me is still that schoolboy being graded by a professor. Of course, kids in school don't always agree with their professors. Yesterday I was visiting a college where some students told me their history professor had said there was no doubt that Lee Oswald shot the President by himself. They also said that most of the class didn't believe him.

I think there's a sort of pomposity, a solemnity, that historians carry about with them. They feel they are in possession of the facts and the truth as though they were the chief priests in ancient Egypt caring for the sacred innards. You know, the prophecies belong to them. But from what I know about history - not only from my personal experience of it in France and Russia and America, in Vietnam and Asia, but also from reading - I know that many of these subjects are ambivalent.

Movies about history, in particular, are often hotly disputed. Lawrence of Arabia, which I saw as a young boy, was torn apart by the reviewers, who called it a camel opera. People said much of it never happened, that Lawrence was never at the massacre of the Turks. But watching that film made me want to go back and read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom because the movie excited my interest. I think that's the only answer to people who say that movies brainwash young minds. Movies are just the first draft. They raise questions and inspire students to find out more.

Carnes: The brainwashing charge comes from those who say you're intentionally tricking viewers. Certainly your use of pseudo-documentary footage is sneaky. But your films nonetheless make clear the presence of an active, intervening director. You don't simply use a naturalistic style and pretend that your motionless camera is looking directly into the past.

Stone: My point is, what is the past? As we know from Mr. Kissinger's memoirs and those of other people, if you had five men in a room when an important decision was made, no two of them will agree later on what happened. They might agree on what time of day it was, or whether the blinds were drawn, but I don't think you can ever put together an objective viewpoint.

We all saw those "You Are There" films when we were young and they were very boring. They generally showed history from an awestruck viewpoint. The Winston Churchills and the Alexanders and other greats of history would stand there and speak in long sentences. They were simply not believable. I think that our leaders - the Richard Nixons, the John Kennedys - are just like us, and I've tried to humanize them in my films.

We read most everything there was on Nixon: books from the left, from the right, from the center - the so-called center. And at the end of the day, not one of the historians who wrote those books - except possibly Fawn Brodie, whom I would call a psychohistorian - none of them tried to gain a deeper understanding of what the man was thinking and feeling, what kind of human being he was. Perhaps Brodie overstepped the bounds of contemporary historians when she theorized about Nixon's relationship with his mother, his father, and the two young brothers who died.

But then you have Stephen Ambrose, who brings to his biography of Nixon a different point of view. Ambrose has criticized Nixon from his perspective. And his books show an historian who is - I would say - proper, but afraid to dwell in the darker shadows of history, the assassinations and conspiracies that loomed over his life. Ambrose gives us a very clean Nixon, and I think he misses the point. Historians today - American historians, anyway - want respectability, and they covet prizes. There is a fear that if you take a chance you will be assassinated in The New York Review of Books by another historian.

Carnes: The other side of the coin is that historians win a reputation by saying something new, by tearing down the intellectual edifice of their predecessors. We say that each generation of historians...

Stone: That's exactly it. One generation comes along and destroys the father figure. Then the next generation revises the revisionists. But until someone rips apart the paradigm, a general consensus prevails among the historical community. I think of my movies as a way of attacking the current consensus. I wish that historians would fight each other with spirit.

Carnes: Well, we do fight. In professional journals, with the weapon of choice a belittling adjective.

Stone: It must be very small infighting.

Carnes: It wouldn't make a very good movie. But while we're on the subject of overdramatizing reality, what about the opening scene of Nixon? It is a dark and stormy night, and the camera closes in on the White House, framing it through a spiked iron gate, with violins screaming through the thunder. This is not subtle.

Stone: A movie is supposed to be gripping, it's supposed to be exciting, it's supposed to be watchable. JFK and Nixon impart a huge amount of material, and place extraordinary demands on viewers. I had to make those movies gripping. I didn't see Nixon as a horror film, but I saw Richard Nixon as beleaguered, with the White House as a bunker and he, a prisoner inside. That's why I used the gates. And the storm was a metaphor for the turmoil in the nation, and the darkness of Nixon's own mood. I don't know whether it in fact stormed when he listened to the Watergate tapes, or whether he listened to them in the darkness, but I think the details of the scene captured a larger truth.

So, in answer to your question, we as dramatists are undertaking a deconstruction of history, questioning some of the given realities. What you call "sneaky" is, to me, an ambivalent and shifting style that makes people aware they are watching a movie and that reality itself is in question.

JFK was the beginning of a new era for me in terms of filmmaking because it's not just about a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. It's also about the way we look at our recent history. I mean that literally. That movie, and Nixon especially, calls attention to itself as a means of looking. It shifts from black and white to color, and then back again, and views people from offbeat angles. You see Nixon saying something, with a shot of a facial expression that says something else. Or we throw out five quick images. We make you aware that you are watching a movie. I don't pretend that it is reality. I don't dress people up like Tecumseh and William Harrison, have them read a script, and stick a camera in front of them and say that it was true. Rather, we call into question the very idea of reality. We play with your mind.

Carnes: But that's what so many historians find off-putting. The explicitness of your interpretation invites rebuttal. Let me offer an example. One scene shows Hannah Nixon brainwashing little Dick to always tell the truth. The shots of t heir faces are taken at crazy angles, and in a surreal black and white, as I recall. The scene is otherwise straight. But John Williams's tinkly and dissonant music sounds like something out of The Twilight Zone, and transforms what might be construed as a wholesome lesson in family values into a macabre harbinger of profound villainy, no?

Stone: You've raised a good point. We deliberately put an edge on the scene, not to make Mary Steenburgen (Hannah) seem sinister. Mary would not play it that way, because she believes the mother's motives were good, wholesome. Our point is that through her wholesomeness Nixon's mother put too much pressure on her son. She should have forgiven him, and told him that she understood that it's OK to tell a white lie. But the problem with Richard Nixon is that, perhaps traumatized by his strict mother, through the rest of his life he lies and lies and lies but is never conscious of it. So when Nixon got to the Watergate business, he thought it was OK to appear on national television and deny that he knew anything about what happened.

Carnes: Well, there are white lies and darker ones. Historians inevitably shape the materials of the past in ways that make them coherent. But they expect censure for inventing scenes and changing the record. Why lie at all? Historians argue that reality - or at least the verifiable facts are often more interesting than the fictions you could invent about them. And you provide plenty of evidence for this proposition. For example, the opening scene of Nixon is a neat dramatic device but wholly improbable: it shows the Watergate conspirators watching a training film on salesmanship. You've got to sell yourself, the character says, with a phony wink to the camera.

Stone: But...

Carnes: Or who could believe the scene of ten-year-old Richard describing himself to his mother as "her faithful dog"?

Stone: But...

Carnes: Or that Henry Kissinger and Nixon would fall down on their knees and pray?

Stone: But those things did happen. The Watergate burglars did watch that sales film - prior to one of the earlier burglaries. And the salesman sums up Richard Nixon. Nixon was a salesman, embittered about being an outsider. And young Richard Nixon wrote a note to his mom and signed it, "Your faithful dog." And we know about Kissinger and Nixon.

Carnes: OK, that's my point. In Nixon especially, you have unearthed many details, based on a verifiable historical record, that are wonderful. When the known facts are so good, why bother to invent additional material?

Stone: I used the facts where I could. In fact, perhaps too much, because at three hours Nixon may have been too much for some moviegoers. The only reason we invented additional material was because these were behind-closed-doors discussions. The relationship to Pat that we invented, so to speak, is based on, first of all, several reports of the coldness of their relationship. And Bob Scheer, who was our consultant, had interviewed Pat and Richard, and had developed an opinion. The point is that you cannot string together a movie from a series of random, interesting facts. You have to have a pattern, a theme. The material we invented was not done haphazardly or whimsically, it was based on research and interpretation.

Besides, the "known facts," as you call them, are often in dispute. The Warren Commission and Watergate are still clouded in mystery. "Reality," as you call it, is wonderful, but how can you string together a movie of external 'realities' without probing into the subterranean and unknown areas that make a human life fully rounded? The truth is elusive, so we must arrive at it by examining both the conscious and unconscious lives of the individual.

We may be dead wrong on this, but we're groping for the elusive thread that brings to Nixon's life some sort of order. Dramatists look, as should historians, for patterns in the world. We've tried to relate Ellsberg to Hiss. We've tried to relate Watergate to Nixon's mother and father and the deaths of his two brothers. We've tried to relate his brothers' deaths and the survivor's guilt he felt to the deaths of the two Kennedys. I don't think that's ever been done before - I've never seen it in a history book - but these are patterns that we're looking for to bring together this three-hour movie.

What I'd like to do now, though, is circle back to JFK and try to bring all this together in some way. I'm looking for a very difficult pattern in our history. What I see from 1963, with Kennedy's murder at high noon in Dallas, to 1974, with Nixon's removal, is a pattern. Call me wrong, but we have John Kennedy suspiciously killed, we have Robert Kennedy suspiciously killed, we have Martin Luther King suspiciously killed, and we have Nixon suspiciously 'falling on his sword.' These four men came from different political perspectives, but they were pushing the envelope, trying to lead America to new levels. We posit that, in some way, they pissed off what we call "the Beast," the Beast being a force (or forces) greater than the presidency. Now you must look at the Beast as metaphor, because that's the way it's intended. In his farewell address, President Eisenhower, the most conservative President, whom Stephen Ambrose worships, said we should beware the military-industrial complex. He went out of his way to make...

Carnes: I don't think Ike meant those people would be going after presidents with a rifle.

Stone: Don't say what he meant. He said it. He said, "Beware the military-industrial complex." And he said it in a way that was stunning because he just stopped in the middle of his speech and made a big point about it. He saw something coming, he saw the power - excuse me, Mark, let me finish - of money. The power money would have over government, the power of multinational corporations. And through the years, that power has grown. We've seen a huge war in Vietnam that cost more than a hundred, perhaps two hundred, billion dollars, and now that the Cold War is over, there's no peace dividend. Instead, the military-industrial contracts just keep growing.

Carnes: OK, Oliver, but it's one thing to say that the military- industrial complex has gained power and another to say it has gone out and pointed guns at people in the White House.

Stone: I think historians such as yourself had to have been there during the 1950s and 1960s to understand the true nature of those men. Kennedy, in looking at the novel Seven Days in May, explicitly said that a military dictatorship and the removal of a president could have happened here if he had screwed up one more time on Cuba.

But the Beast to me means more than the military-industrial complex. When Nixon was quoted, referring to "those Wall Street bastards!," he meant it. I think the power of the bond market and the stock market is enormous. Today, if a Clinton/Kennedy were to change the Federal Reserve board, or the way we issue our currency, he wouldn't have to be assassinated. The bond market would simply tremble, and that tremble would be felt around the world. And the media which is ten times bigger today than it was in Kennedy's time - would echo this message of doom until the president backed down. A president today doesn't have to be assassinated. It's simply enough for the power of money and the media to prohibit him from making significant changes in the way things run. My point is that between 1963 and 1974, these four men all ran up against the Beast and were removed or killed as a consequence. In Nixon's case, it would be more accurate to say he fell on his sword to preserve the Establishment, which, as a self-proclaimed 'outsider,' he hated.

Carnes: You've discussed Nixon as a character, an absorbing subject, surely. But most historians I've spoken with find much good to say about Nixon as a character study, but question your sense of historical causation. You've spoken about the metaphor of 'the Beast' in Nixon, and many of your films refer to a 'beast' that has shadowed recent American history, but the nature of the beast seems to change from one movie to another, or even within the same movie. In Wall Street, the beast is the giant corporation. In JFK the beast is the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In Natural Born Killers the beast is the mass media that deplores violence while glorifying it. Born on the Fourth of July criticizes the repressiveness and clueless insularity of small-town America, a theme that is echoed in the scenes of the Nixon family in Whittier. Yet in Wall Street the villain is the megacorporation that effaces small-town life. In JFK, the beast is the agencies of the government; yet in Nixon, the beast seems to be largely internal, the demons within Nixon himself. If we say that every force is causal, then we have really said that none are.

Stone: An excellent question. Certainly Nixon emphasizes personal causation. To clarify, however, I see the Beast in its essence as a System, with a capital S, which grinds the individual down to meaninglessness - Camus's insignificance. It's a System of checks and balances that drives itself off: 1) the power of money and markets; 2) State power, Government power; 3) corporate power, which is probably greater even than state power; 4) the political process, or election through money, which is therefore in tow to the System; and 5) the media, which mostly protects the status que and their ownership's interests like Doberman pinschers. That would cover, I believe, all the beasts you've mentioned in the individual films.

Actually, I've never done a film about the political process, but you felt a bit of it in Nixon, because the pragmatism of continuing the Vietnam War is measured against the political realities of winning an election. The Beast for Nixon is, in a sense, the political process because he has to get reelected at any cost and wipe out the 'liberal' McGovern, so he continues for four years a war in Vietnam for political reasons. He doesn't believe in the war personally, but he continues it because he does not want to offend the right wing, just as Clinton doesn't.

In the case of Nixon, I would like to go just a little further, because, of all these films, it is perhaps the most complex. It is perhaps true that personal causation is what it's about, but in his mind he saw the Beast as the Establishment, which he hated. Remember that he referred to the Establishment throughout his life with derision, because he saw himself as the outsider, the little man, while the Kennedys represented the Establishment. And yet, bear in mind that Richard Nixon metaphorically fell on his own sword, like a good Roman, for the Establishment. Whatever its secrets were, he took them to the grave with him rather than destroy the Government he despised.

He was in this strange paradox of hating the Government - as the outside boy - but embodying that Government as its leader; yet falling on his sword, committing his own political suicide, to save the government from whatever disruption he knew about. In the film we suggested that one of those secrets certainly would have to have involved the Bay of Pigs because of the connection of the Watergate burglars to the Bay of Pigs, as reflected in the Helms discussion, the Pat Gray discussion, and the transcript of what he actually said.

Carnes: This is a question that Arthur Schlesinger gave me. He wrote, "JFK seemed to me preposterous in its contention that LBJ, the FBI, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff got together to murder Kennedy because he wanted to get out of Vietnam. Ask Oliver whether he really believes it happened this way, and if he has doubts, does he not feel some responsibility not to mislead the young?"

Stone: JFK is such a misunderstood movie. You should watch it again and pay attention to what is actually being said. Kevin Costner describes possibilities. He talks about the people and the organizations that hated change - and hated Kennedy, specifically, for making changes. In 1963, Kennedy changed enormously, and afterwards he was not the same man. I think Schlesinger would agree with me on that. Nineteen sixty-three was a watershed year, and the changes it brought in relations with the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba threatened groups of powerful people. What we say in the movie is that these groups were pissed off, these people were upset, because change threatened them. Nowhere do we say that they all sat down together in some conference room and plotted to knock off the President. I think that's ludicrous, because it's just too large a conspiracy. It wouldn't work.

What happened, I think, is that somewhere from one of these possibilities came the directive, the order, the need to kill Kennedy, and it was probably held to a very small group, ten or twenty people, a Julius Caesar-style murder. Now LBJ didn't say, "Yes, go kill Kennedy." We never say that in the movie. We say that LBJ had to know something more than he said he did, and we think he was involved in the process of covering up by appointing the Warren Commission and approving its report. Back channel, LBJ himself didn't believe the report, so why should we believe these fairy tales?

Anyone who reads history has to acknowledge the power of conspiracy. Alexander the Great's father, Philip of Macedon, was killed by a conspiracy that haunted Alexander throughout his life. Julius Caesar, Lincoln, popes left and right, kings - they have all been removed as the result of conspiracies. Why should American history be any different? Even Franklin Roosevelt was almost removed by a coup d'etat. Historians seem to believe in this fairy-tale simplicity about America, that we are somehow free of conspiracy. I grew up under the bigggest conspiracy of them all. My father convinced me, and Richard Nixon convinced me, that there was a monolithic Communist conspiracy out there involving Moscow and Beijing, that the Communists were going to invade America, and that they were already in the schools, perverting our minds.

Carnes: Of course, our history has been filled with conspiracies, and historians have ferreted out many of them. But there's also an American fascination with conspiracies. Writing about the Red scares of the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter speculated that conspiracy theories are part and parcel of American life, that they have to do with the anxieties Americans feel in this society where status is uncertain and instability common. These little fits of conspiratorial fear that infect the body politic...

Stone: I find that so condescending. Hofstadter is trotted out every time. It's condescending because we've had so many conspiracies in America - Watergate and more recently Irangate, which has significant implications regarding the military-industrial complex. Our reporters are backing off stories because editors and the power of conservative media money are telling them to. But the American people, I hope, will stay turbulent and agitated enough to question their leaders, to question authority. That is not to deny, by the way, the role of accident in history. Kings do fall off horses and break their necks. Floods, storms, bad harvests are causations, too. Random accidents, individual acts, and conspiracies have existed side by side for centuries.

Carnes: I don't think there's much of a dispute that there has been a concentration of power, certainly during the 1980s and probably during the 1990s as well, a concentration of wealth and certainly a great expansion of the power of global corporations, but the explicit underlying issue in JFK and Nixon is that somehow these forces were harnessed to particular assassins. If these forces are as powerful as you say they are, why have they left you alone? I don't mean this purely facetiously. If you are blowing the whistle on them...

Stone: Assassination and coup d'etat were methods used during the 1950s and 1960s in Cuba, the Congo, Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, Vietnam, and elsewhere - much of this when Nixon was Vice President. Now, in the 1980s and 1990s, people are assassinated metaphorically, in the media. There has been a significant onslaught in the political press against me and the things I have tried to say, implying that I'm making them up as I go along or that I have no credibility. That's the way you assassinate somebody's character. It happened very viciously to Martin Luther King, too, before he was killed.

Carnes: Certainly J. Edgar Hoover's conspiracy to assassinate King's character has been well documented, but that's not...

Stone: But at the time, if you had said that there was an FBI conspiracy against Martin Luther King, people would have thought you were crazy. Wasn't it Juvenal who said, "Who shall guard the guardians? Who shall guard the guardians?"

But there's one more thing I want to say about historians like Stephen Ambrose...

Carnes: Ambrose again?

Stone: He attacked us quite a lot when Nixon came out. He said that we had no right to put dialogue into a real person's mouth. Well, I don't think he understands that there's a genre called historical drama. It existed, in fact, before Alcibiades and Plutarch. Homer was the first 'historian'/dramatist of the Greek world. Then Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and so on. The Elizabethans were great dramatists as well.

The films we're making are interpretive dramas. We don't know what Nixon actually said to Pat and what Nixon actually said to Kissinger. We know what Kissinger reported, but he's fighting for his place in history. We had no choice but to try to guess what was said, and that's what filmmakers do. Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List received universal praise. Yet I gather the original screenplay writer, who quit after researching the project, had become convinced that the real Schindler was a Nazi, yet the movie is much more empathetic. To do that Spielberg and the writer invented dialogue, too, dialogue that went on behind closed doors and was never witnessed or reported. Dramatists do that.

Carnes: Right. So why are critics - historians, especially - so rough on you?

Stone: You're from that tribe, perhaps you can tell me. Maybe it's because I look at some of the deeper, darker areas of contemporary American life. It's not Schindler's List, safely criticizing a distant Nazi Germany, or John Wayne waving the flag at the Alamo. America in recent decades - in my opinion - has been corrupted. For a larger part of my life, my passion has been to reveal that corruption. When I put out JFK, the Doberman pinschers of the Establishment came after me. I had never experienced that amount of hatred, particularly from political opinion makers and so forth. I was shocked, because the material for JFK had been around for some time, from a strong body of books, films, witnesses, and people who had talked about it through the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. But it was the style of the movie that was original.

Carnes: Yes, but maddeningly explicit, too. Instead of a relaxed pace that invites contemplation and sober reflection, your movies are visceral. You once described them as shards to the brain.

Stone: Why not? One critic called it "Wakeup Cinema."

Carnes: But this is at the root of the historian's complaint. The dramatic message is too sharp, too clear. Life is a churning sea of confusion, of grey ambiguities, of personal quirks. Good historians try to take that ambiguity and complexity and build something out of it that still has meaning. Yet movies, because they are so clean in their dramatic flow, necessarily do violence to the complexity that is the real world.

Stone: That is a valid criticism. Life is of course more complex than any movie. Life is chaos - you're right about that. And in all ten of my films the main character goes through a crisis of integrity in his own soul. It's threatened, and he finds it again. What's different about Nixon is that at the end of the movie, he starts to acknowledge the darkness that is inside himself. He seems to break down that shell of strength, that warrior shell that he had, and acknowledge that he's lost the way.

I don't think the real Richard Nixon went as far as Tony Hopkins did in the movie. I think Nixon had some slight consciousness of things going awry, but the man that I saw at the end of Watergate was shell-hocked, that's why I cut to the shot of the real Nixon.

To get back to Ambrose, however, I would say that there's something inherently wrong with Ambrose's approach to history, because when you read his books, which we did and absorbed quite a lot from them, by the way, but you find an avoidance of the shadow areas in history. Ambrose particularly took us to task for suggesting that Nixon could have been involved in any way with the Kennedy assassination. I think if you are a serious historian you must ask yourself a few questions. Nixon mentions the Bay of Pigs and "the Cuban thing" about a dozen times on several of the Watergate tapes that have been released. On the June 20, 1972 tape, which has the famous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, "the Cuban thing" is mentioned again and again. Now why is that gap there? Ambrose doesn't even intuit an explanation. He's safely on the side of 'fact.' But there is an erasure, a multiple erasure. That's also a 'fact.'

Isn't it the historian's duty to speculate about who might have made this erasure, and why, and what may have been on the tape? We did that in our movie, and we went back to the Bay of Pigs because five or six of the Watergate burglars were at the Bay of Pigs. That may just be coincidence, but if you go back into the past you find that Nixon was very involved with Cuba throughout his professional life, especially as Vice President. He detested Castro and helped supervise operations against him from the White House. This is documented. He knew about the invasion, and so on. The only area of speculation is whether Nixon knew about the assassination attempts against Castro. If he did not, then it means the CIA was operating off the shelf during the 1950s, which is what Ambrose implies, trying to protect Eisenhower. He says that Eisenhower didn't really know about this stuff. Fine. But how does Ambrose know that? We don't know how he gets to that conclusion, which I think, by the way, is fantasy.

And if the CIA is, in fact, practicing 'black ops' in Guatemala and Iran and the Congo and trying to bump off Castro without the permission of the White House, that seems to me a far more dangerous situation than one in which the President knows and approves. If the President knew, if you grant us that, then obviously the Vice President, who was the hawk of the group, also knew. And if Nixon knew that Castro was a target of American paramilitary operations, then he must correspondingly have known, or had some intuition, that some element of this operation may have blown back and shot Kennedy.

When we suggested this in Nixon, we were treated by Ambrose as though we were totally raving mad and making up stuff. But I'm just as shocked that responsible historians aren't asking these questions. Why are historians avoiding these dark areas of American history?

Mark C. Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, is a general editor of Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt) and his most recent book is Mapping America's Past (Henry Holt).