Looking dapper in a blue blazer, Oliver Stone is chit-chatting with the press inside a glass box on the terrace of an antiquated hotel on the Venice Lido. He’s been posing for a few photos and doing rounds of interviews during this afternoon of rain that has somewhat dampened the festival glamor. Still, his presence has been felt on the terrace. He’s a stately figure. A big name is in town.
When the doors are closed to the glass box, no sound comes from the commotion outside on the terrace where Berlusconi babes and tired-looking journalists mill about. And vice versa, no sound gets out. But Stone’s message, with his latest documentary film, “Nuclear,” is something that the American director of titles like “Platoon” and “Natural Born Killers” wants the whole world to hear.
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Oliver Stone’s response to the global hazard of climate change has been two years in the making and is playing in an out-of-competition slot at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. It’s a film he’s said in other interviews was his most challenging to make. The documentary was inspired by the book “A Bright Future” by Joshua Goldstein, who co-wrote the film and kept Stone on track. Its subject is what Stone calls the “greatest story of our time.”
How can we use nuclear energy to lift the world from poverty to prosperity while reducing global warming and reliance upon other, more damaging fuels? How can we use science to solve the problem? It’s a subject, he says, he didn’t know enough about until he read the book. He’s since done his homework to make the film, even showing up in Russia. He talks about Germany, France, Finland, and the EU – an institution he’s not yet convinced about.
When he speaks, Stone is practical and sometimes poetic. He’s well-behaved but slightly provocative, in a fun way, like poking at Jane Fonda when he gets a chance. “In the 1970s, you could say Jane Fonda, I love Jane Fonda, was right about the Vietnam War,” he says. “I agree with her. But Jane missed the boat on this one.”
He’s got a firm grip on the failings of politics, and the subsequent impact on the climate crisis, not to mention some of the confusion surrounding the term nuclear.
“The word ‘nuclear’ was deliberately used by me because I wanted to challenge this confusion, to say there is a difference between nuclear power and nuclear bombs,” he says. “That and radiation get confused all the time. Radiation is an enemy [of the people] because they have been told that it is, and those are the two biggest issues dividing people and keeping them from knowing the truth.”
Choice and beliefs around nuclear energy appear a few times in the conversation.
“There’s so much conventional illusion. It’s the nature of life,” he adds. “You have to accept it. Most people are deluded. Most people believe in Gods and all sorts of superstitious crap. Science is the best way to deal with life. Not to say it’s the only answer, but to me it’s the spiritual answer.”
This project began when Stone read Goldstein’s book based on a New York Times review.
“I read the review, and I bought the book,” he says. “This was after I had been made aware of how dangerous climate change is through the years from the Al Gore film [“An Inconvenient Truth”) in 2006, until now.”
Nuclear could have become a bad Alfred Hitchcock horror instead of a documentary.
Stone recalls: “Right away, I called him (Goldstein) up and said can I option the book? I asked him to write a dramatic film, but it was a mistake because it’s not possible to dramatize nuclear power. It’s not possible. He wrote a conventional Hitchcock, or bad Alfred Hitchcock thriller, where the female scientist is being chased by bad guys. They are trying to kill her. It didn’t work out. So he said let’s go to documentary. My first draft was pretty wild.”
He contemplates the nature of filmmaking and how it deals with big subjects.
“Every time you do those types of movies, you have to make it negative. In ‘Pandora,’ they made Fukushima look like Hiroshima. It worked. The Korean population closed down. What about ‘The China Syndrome’ in America? It was a disaster,” he says.
He adds: “I think the only way you can go about it directly is through facts.”
By contrast, he refers to some of the fear being stirred up around Ukraine’s captured nuclear facility, Zaporizhzhia, as “fake news.” “Now the whole world is talking about this Ukrainian reactor. They are ignoring all of the people dying there and being killed. It’s the war that’s important,” he says.
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He also asks about the number of apocalyptic movies we’ve seen in the last 30 years. “So many. So much has gone wrong. They say everything is going wrong. The world is fucked. We are very pessimistic now. There’s no possibility to have hope in movies. It’s seen as corny. If Frank Capra came along and made movies with a happy ending. I love that. We love that, but it’s not possible anymore. It doesn’t seem possible. There’s a deliberate type of self-imprisonment. Movies have always been made for horror and fear. It makes money.”
Stone, of course, asks questions in the film. For example, where does the confusion surrounding nuclear bombs and nuclear power come from?
“There was the 1956 Rockefeller campaign, there was fake science saying any amount of radioactivity was dangerous to the body which started this fear of radiation,” he says. “Remember the horror movies of the 1950s with the radiated monsters in America? It worked. But think of the Hulk. It made him stronger. There’s a difference between nuclear power and war.”
Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear” just screened at the Venice Film Festival last week.
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