Oliver Stone and Spike Lee recently sat down together in a video chat for Variety‘s insightful Directors on Directors, where the two got to interview each other and shoot the breeze. It’s certainly an interesting pairing as Stone had once attempted to make a version of Lee’s fantastic post-Vietnam drama “Da 5 Bloods” himself.
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Oliver recalls what interested him in the project originally. “As you know, I worked on the project before you came into it. The producer Lloyd Leven had this crazy idea; I forgot if it was a script or a treatment. But I liked the idea very much of going back to Vietnam as an older man and taking on this ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre‘ kind of feeling, going for these old guys who never had success in life back in the world. And they get together, and they bond, and they go back to find the treasure. But things go wrong, as in ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ greed emerges all kinds of problems emerge.”
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Stone, a Vietnam War veteran, famously made the film “Platoon,” and several other war-related films, which echoed some of the filmmaker’s own experiences navigating the complicated/unpopular war as a young naive soldier. Returning to the subject matter seemed like a good idea, but Oliver admittedly couldn’t crack it, which allowed Lee to solve the issues that he was having with the project. “I never was able to solve it in a way that was satisfactory to me, with those characters that we had. You solved it,” Stone tells Spike Lee. “You solved it in a strange way because you went entirely Black. The movie is a love poem to Black Vietnam soldiers. That’s what you’re doing when I see the movie, to me.”
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The director continued to praise Spike Lee’s final version of the film. “I sat through that movie; I didn’t know what the f*ck was gonna happen next. I did not know. And that is, that’s amazing. Because you really keep everybody up, you keep me off balance. Nothing cliched. Nothing predictable. Some things don’t get resolved, but that’s okay. You’re taking enormous chances with this movie. And you don’t give a f*ck. I mean, you really fly. You’re flying very fast.”
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Oliver Stone also mentioned during his Directors on Directors chat his upcoming “JFK” documentary is heading to Cannes 2021. However, the film has been having a hard time finding a distributor as both Netflix, and National Geographic turned it down because it didn’t get vetted through their fact-checking process.
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“It’s not for the American side of it,” Stone said. “Cannes invited us for July, or June, of this year. That’s a big step for us because, at least, if it can’t be recognized in America as a document, it will be recognized in the end by international people. And that’s important.”
“Where are you going to find this information except in this film,” Stone questioned. “If they do a fact check, according to conventional sources, of course, it’ll come out like that is not true.”
Speaking of Cannes 2021, earlier this month, director Paul Verhoeven mentioned during a Dutch radio interview that the film festival planned for July might have to fallback to sometime in October, possibly due to the pandemic.