Few characters in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” leave as indelible an impression than Donald Sutherland’s mysterious Capitol Hill informant. In just one short scene, Sutherland masterfully provides Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison with intel about the assassination that makes Garrison realize exactly what he’s up against. Sutherland is just about perfect in the small but pivotal role, but IndieWire reports that Stone almost cast another legendary actor in the part. And if Stone had gone with his original choice, the epic “JFK” scene would have been a lot different (and probably for the worse).
At a live edition of IndieWire’s “Filmmaker Toolkit” podcast in Los Angeles, Stone unveiled his initial choice for Sutherland’s role. “I had been dumb enough to go to Marlon Brando,” Stone told the audience at the American Cinematheque. “We all love him, of course. But if he’d said yes I would have been fucked. That scene would have gone on for twice the length.” By 1991, when “JFK” was first released in theaters, everyone in Hollywood knew about Brando’s reputation as a on-set cancer due to his method acting. He hadn’t yet reached the extremes of 1996’s “The Island Of Dr. Moreau,” but the actor was notoriously difficult to work with, and had been for nearly a decade and a half.
So, despite wanting Brando in his picture, Stone went in a different direction with Sutherland, and never regretted it. In fact, Stone loved Sutherland’s succinct delivery of all of the info his character supplies Garrison that he moved the scene up in the film’s narrative. “The pictures rises to another level, because Costner realizes what he’s up against and it’s much bigger than he ever thought,” explained Stone. The scene sets up the final hour of “JFK,” which shows Garrison take on the Warren Commission’s claims about the 1963 assassination in a riveting courtroom sequence.
And Stone had other people in mind other than Costner for Garrison, too, including Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson. “Harrison Ford was terrified of it,” Stone recalled. “There’s a risk once you play that role. But Kevin has guts.” At the time of filming “JFK,” Costner was coming off of career-best hits like “Field Of Dreams” and “Dances With Wolves.” Stone’s film was a much different part for Costner, but the director managed to get Warner Bros. to greenlight the film, cast the actor, and snag a $40 million budget by pitching “JFK” as a murder mystery. “I sold it to some very sympathetic executives, Terry Semel and Bob Daly, as a thriller. They liked the idea because there was a big question: who committed the murder and how does it get resolved?”
But “JFK” proved a tough film for Stone to both make and market, especially when, upon the film’s release, the director had to defend himself against media outlets who wanted to discredit the film. “The press never did their job, they never did any work,” Stone explained. “They just accepted the Warren Commission.” Stone told the LA audience that backlash against the film hurt his career in the industry afterward. “It’s been a battle for me and has hurt me in the business,” Stone continued. “When people consider you a troublemaker and a conspiracy theorist, you can’t ever recover the trust with certain people who will back the government no matter what. I guess I have to laugh, but I do have some anger about how impossible it is to get the truth out in this country, and how much the government continues to lie about current events.”
But none of that stopped Stone from returning to his 1991 film in documentary “JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass.” The 2021 doc updates Stone’s original film with research about the JFK assassination in the three decades since the movie’s release. Despite being in a different stage in his career, Stone couldn’t miss an opportunity to return to the assassination and its surrounding conspiracies. “I know more,” he explained. “I have all this information on the military-industrial complex, and I felt it was necessary to do an updated version so people might better understand what happened. It annoyed me that all this information was coming out of the assassination records review board and had been ignored by the media.”
And Stone finds the documentary format more appropriate for exploring the information he has. “I did 20 feature films and I’m proud of them,” said the director, “but it’s a lot of work. At a certain point you only have so much time and you want to get to the point. It’s very important to me to get it right because we don’t seem to have a good sense of our own history. I’ve been trying to get to the big stuff. It’s not a simple world, but you have to wonder why the problems in “JFK” are still around and all around us and keep the military budgets high in this country. Who are the people that are benefiting? They shouldn’t be there. This is a disgusting criminal enterprise that’s been going on for a long, long time, and it’s getting worse.” Stone’s most recent doc, 2022’s “Nuclear Now,” explores the nuclear industry in the US, France, and Russia and its emergence in the mid-20th century.
As for what Stone has in store for audiences next? Stay tuned on that.
