`Deserts are where it's at," says Oliver Stone. "They're the most free places in the world. You drive forever and your boundaries are all within. It's a place in the movies and in real life where you can kind of get closer to yourself. Consciousness is at stake."
Consciousness is at stake? This is the way Stone talks a lot of the time. Sitting on the other side of the table in neat blazer and open-necked shirt, he looks like a successful pro golfer, but he still talks like the love child of Jim Morrison and Norman Mailer. Here to plug his latest movie, U- Turn, he's musing on the landscape, culture and history of Arizona and the American south-west, where the film was set and shot.
"A lot of the people who live out there in those small towns are really weird - a lot of inbreeding, you'd be surprised how much. When you talk to people and see how they react, you can definitely see that. It's not just the problems of the white trash and the inbreeding, there's the Indian culture, which has been driven into poverty and neglect. For me that landscape of south-west America evokes that conflict between white and Indian." Reading the synopsis of U-Turn, one might imagine for a moment that Stone had made a U-turn himself and decided to make a conventional thriller. Sean Penn plays a drifter who finds himself stranded in a small town, and becomes embroiled with sultry Jennifer Lopez in a conspiracy against her brutal husband (Nick Nolte). On the surface, it's a pretty familiar film noir of the 1990s variety, but in reality you are never allowed to forget this is an Oliver Stone film.
Gruesome violence, loveless sex, incest and American gothic are piled on to familiar excess. Above all, there is the country's dark foundations in rape and murder. "The Apache reservation where we filmed is fairly together, but you feel the warrior spirit has been sucked out," says Stone. "It was a genocide - maybe something like what a small village in Poland in the early 1950s might have felt like. There's no vitality there any more. On top of that you've got the cowboys, who you can see in the Nick Nolte character. So it's a film about ghosts and closets. A model would be Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest - that idea of a town that's been corrupted and of an evil spirit hanging over everything." Without giving too much of the plot away, the characters in U- Turn seem doomed from the start, I suggest. "Well, as in all film noir, these are desperate, second-rate people, and kind of stupid. I see Sean's character as this shallow man who really falls for this dame as the movie progresses. Is it fate?
What do you think? Is it destiny, or do they make choices that lead inevitably to that destiny? Sean does say twice at the start of the movie that he can't kill anybody, but he crosses the line for Jennifer, and for the money. It's amazing to me that by the end of the movie he's become this crazed-looking murderer, dripping in blood, his teeth broken. Here's the guy who started the movie as Mr Cool, who'll never get his hands dirty. A lot of people feel that he's the victim, because he gets beaten up six or seven times, and he's in a real mess by the end. But he's the one who explodes. He's the only one who kills out of pure passion. It's unconscionable savagery. And then of course he gets the punishment, and he laughs, because he finally gets the joke.
"I was told you always have to have happy endings. So this was a chance to kill everyone in the end, which was pretty good. You don't get a chance to do that very often and get away with it - maybe I didn't get away with it, because you immediately alienate 40 per cent of your audience. But who cares? The picture is unto itself, you know? I felt it should go that way." Some American critics have pointed out the strong similarities between U-Turn's plot and that of neo-noir specialist John Dahl's 1992 film Red Rock West, which also features a quiet loner (Nicolas Cage) stranded in a small town, falling in love and inveigled into murdering for a bag of cash.
"Yeah, it's a problem. Critics who don't want to like the picture will constantly say that it's a `re-make of Dahl's far-superior Red Rock West' or even of Scorsese's After Hours. Those are just terms of dismissal. Apart from that surface similarity in the opening, I couldn't think of two films that are more different. It would be fun to put them on a double bill and compare them. Nic Cage's performance is a world away from Sean Penn's performance, I'll tell you that. It's a superficial reaction from people who just don't want to like the movie." After the two presidential epics and the equally controversial Natural Born Killers, U-Turn, for all its excess and self-indulgence, seems like a pause for breath. So is this Stone's "small movie", his retreat from the Big Themes? "There are no small movies," he rejoins.
"Ultimately, you have to compete against the big movies in the same venues. I can't win, no matter which side I come down on. My detractors would say that nobody gave a shit about the movie, that my career was over and all that sort of stuff. The other side would be people asking why did you do such a familiar subject. So I was criticised for making a small film, but there is a theme to this movie, which is delusion - all the characters are trapped by their delusions - of freedom, of ownership, of love." Mention of themes causes me to bring up Quentin Tarantino's comment at the time of Natural Born Killers, that he was interested in making movies, but that Stone always wanted to make "films" - weighty, ponderous things with too many pretensions, it was implied.
"That story shows you how the press can create a myth," says Stone, returning to a favourite subject. "Quentin makes up this story about talking to me, and he says that I talk in terms of films and he talks in terms of movies. Fine - it's a good myth, but I don't think there's any difference - call them whatever you want. I think Quentin is very talented, by the way. Jackie Brown is very good, as were Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. The guy has had a good run, and he's a significant talent. Whatever he says about Natural Born Killers, I'm sure he doesn't mean it, because he hasn't understood the movie. One day he will, in about 10 or 15 years - when he gets past the ego problem of having been rewritten he'll just look at the movie as a movie and he'll finally appreciate it. That's what I think will happen, if he stays loose with himself." Say what you like about Oliver Stone (and certainly this writer doesn't particularly appreciate the feeling of being hit over the head which seems to come with his movies), but he is one of the very few directors prepared to take technical and aesthetic risks with the cinematic medium. In JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon, he employs Super-8, black-and-white and colour in ways that suggest he's one of the few mainstream film-makers trying to find a new visual language for our digitised, hyper-visual world. U-Turn's saturated colours and grungey graininess owe a lot to Stone's decision to shoot on reversal film stock, not something a lot of directors would dare to do.
"Yeah, we've experimented with some big money," he says. "I've got away with a lot. Here I am in the editing rooms being paid for by these big studios and the editing is pretty wild. JFK was how it started. The trick was that I knew we had to get it out for Christmas. We shot it in late summer, so it was a real push, an extraordinary effort. I knew that if I could put it together quickly enough then nobody would question this three-hour movie, and ask what this nutcase was doing. So no screenings were held, nothing was tested. Then, when it became an international success, the establishment came down on it." So does he get upset when his films are reviewed as if they were sermons rather than works of art (or artifice, at least)? "Upset is a big word, but I've become resigned to it. Sometimes people forget that a film was constructed - that it's a movie. It would be nice to hear sometimes that you may not agree with my point of view, but that you think it was well made and that you like those techniques. I didn't hear a lot of discussion about technique on JFK. I heard a lot of stuff about Stone being controversial, and who killed Kennedy, and about me saying that one vast conspiracy killed the president, which is not what the film is really saying. It's constructed as a search for the truth that offers alternate suggestions, kind of like Rashomon. There's not one thing stated as the conclusion of the movie, but unfortunately that was miscommunicated. A lot of people think it says that Lyndon Johnson killed Kennedy, which is never said at all." The person who he feels would have most appreciated U-Turn was the late John Huston.
"Huston was the character I would love to have seen bless it and laugh at the end. I just see his sardonic, cynical spirit hovering over the whole movie and over that final, cosmic joke. It's really pessimistic this movie, it's dramatic that way - Fritz Lang, Eric Von Stroheim . . ." Oliver, stop! Why is one never enough?