Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1511 - Oliver Stone
Uploaded: 2020-07-21T19:00:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1511 - Oliver Stone' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1511 - Oliver Stone' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-21. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1511 - Oliver Stone

all right here we go thank you very much for being here i'm a really big fan so
this is an honor for
me i'm really really excited i'm really excited about your book i'm really
excited about just your
films the untold untold history in the united states which i think is fantastic
i mean that
is that's one of my favorite things that you've ever done and and and so
thorough and so interesting
but um the book first of all look how good you look in there on the cover there
what's an old shot young handsome bastard look at you looking good there what
year is that from
it was 1968 november i'd just come off the last mission in vietnam wow it was
on a hilltop we got
stuck uh in the rain in the asha valley it was the first cavalry and uh we
really the helicopters
couldn't get in for 11 days it was awful wow we had leeches everywhere and the
enemy we didn't know
where they were but we felt that they were going to close in it was but it was
too wet ultimately for
them to close in but they knew we were there so we were praying the whole time
was kind of nerve
wracking because it was my last few days you understand i was supposed to get
out of there
what deros leave the country i was due out uh i had volunteered i had
volunteered for an extra three
months in order to get out of the army three months sooner wow in other words
they had there normally
you had to serve uh if a two-year deal you had to serve six six months stateside
on the back side of
it so uh i didn't want to do that because i was going nuts with the rules and
the regulations
and i'd gotten into some trouble with that so i extended in combat for another
three months
and that ended up in this mission how much did your time serving impact your
your directing and
like you've had these life experiences as someone who's just a filmmaker
they really can't draw upon like you you've had actual combat experience and
when you're making
movies about combat i mean that has to be a a gigantic advantage or at least it
adds layers to it
that are almost impossible to create to recreate for someone who's just trying
to imagine what it's
like yeah and that was very important when we did platoon i was trying to get
the exact
distances and what and the amount of firepower is not as usual it's not as
intense generally speaking
as the movies make it yeah and that's the problem because the movies have so
much to play you know so
much to show they bring the enemy much closer they they condense things and
they they amplify as much as
as possible now i did that too here and there so i'm i'm guilty too but i think
overall it's way overdone
and uh the newer stuff that's come out since 2001 you know with the patriotic
stuff and heavily
heavily militaristic stuff is way off way off and uh people don't die that way
like you know
in the uh type of films like mark walberg made or you know those kind of films
they just
way way overdone anyway in what way like well uh what was the name of the lone
survivor yeah
was that the name of it yeah yeah they get dropped off whatever ten guys and
they managed to kill how
many taliban for each guy you know how much of that was based on i mean it's
all about marcus latrell's
life i haven't had a chance to talk to marcus although i'm friends with him but
i don't know how much
of it they they monkey with everything whenever they're way overdone it was way
overdone they and
what i heard and what's been reported is that they you know they got trapped
right away it was pretty
quick and the ambush went on and they and they got they got the kicked out of
themselves and uh you
know i can't i can't be i don't remember exactly the details but he did get
away and yeah some people
did scam but it doesn't look like it does in the movie where everyone's a hero
right that is a problem
and that's one of the things that i really loved about platoon everyone wasn't
a hero yeah i mean
the the tom berenger character yeah he existed it's in the book yeah it's based
on a guy called
sergeant well i called him sergeant barnes but he had a i wouldn't use his real
name real guy
getting shot in the face and was uh scarred distorted kind of handsome like
that but he was a
serious guy and he knew what he was doing he was the leader of the platoon see
i i made
clear that the the leaders of the platoon were not really the lieutenants they
were the the platoon
sergeant in this and the squad sergeants and uh they were very important in our
lives so i barely saw
officers i was dealing in the jungle you deal with what's right in front of you
so the sergeant was
crucial barnes is a crucial character so is the other character sergeant elias
played by willem defoe
was the in another unit that i had combined four different units i was in three
combat units i combined
them into one one unit one platoon for this movie purposes so the willem defoe
character was also
based on a real person yes he was he was based on a guy i'm doing the lerps
long range recon patrol
who was a great guy he was an apache kind of an apache mexican
mix i'm not quite sure what he was because i didn't get to know him that well
but i admired him
because he had that lithe grace of a guy who fought a lot had been around he'd
been he'd been in before
he was on a second tour and uh very much a love a beloved figure and he was
killed
after i left the the unit uh he was killed about a month later in a friendly
fire accident now friendly
fire is meant we talk about it in the book quite a bit you know because it's
also underestimated
people never the pentagon cuts it all out especially in the movies that come
from the pentagon approval
right they they they don't like to emphasize how difficult how often i would
say 15 to 20 of our
casualties in that war were friendly fire wow now that's not just ground fire
from when you get into
a jungle situation you're close to people you don't really know where you're
shooting sometimes you
don't know where where the incoming fire is is coming from so it's quite a mess
it's chaotic the radio
people screaming shouting noise confusion and a lot of fear yeah that was
highlighted for us
when the pat tillman uh incident yeah very important one pat tillman who is
this uh spectacular athlete
decided to postpone his nfl career and and go over and serve and was killed in
friendly fire and it
wasn't really reported that way for a while that's absolutely correct which is
the point is that they
don't they really don't want the parents to know what's really going on so if
imagine if imagine 15
maybe 20 percent are dying from that friendly fire that this is not just ground
fire this is of course
bombing and certainly artillery fire because that is often misplaced it's not
that easy to get the
coordinates down in a tense situation where you you can hit your where
artillery 20 miles away 40 miles
away has to hit uh you has to hit the spot when you're making a movie like platoon
and this is in
many much much of it is based on your actual real life experience how much
preparation is involved then how
much how much is it different than when you're making another movie because
this is something that's
intensely personal to you obviously yeah uh how much preparation well i got i
got a great combat advisor
he'd been there as a marine dale die i he came in out of the blue and uh he he
was a real uh lifer type
so he remembered all the details in of uniforms and uh fire and the and uh the
firepower i mean it's it's
it took a lot of details to put this together uh but the preparation was i've
been doing it for 10
years i started the picture in 1976 i wrote it i wrote it it wasn't made it was
rejected
by the by the powers that be the first time and then it was uh it was
considered great great script but
too real you know too realistic a bummer a downer if you remember back in the
70s and apocalypse now and
deer hunter yeah those were big films and mythic beautiful films but they were
not realistic then
they had uh sylvester stallone do his uh rambo series where he goes back and
fights the war again
do those drive you crazy yeah although the first one was pretty good uh but the
first one was different
they're playing up the you know yeah the whole sympathy card the pity card yeah
i don't buy that you
you know that there's a lot of that veteran feeling that you know it's we were
we were we were beaten we
had our hands tied behind our backs and we couldn't win and that kind of thing
believe me uh it was a
badly conceived war with a lot of misinformation i go on in the book and talk
about the lies that were
spread by the military the propaganda that were winning the whole time the they
were using the body counts
heavy body counts and we'd say well if we're killing so much so many of them
they're not going to be that
many left and but on the other hand as the years went on more and more of them
kept appearing so they
the vietnamese were indestructible in a way they were like ants they were they
were fighting for their
independence they're for their land man it was their country and uh they never
gave up ever and you
could've nuked them and that's what curtis lemay at one point suggested you
could have dropped a nuclear
bomb it wouldn't have done it wouldn't have made the difference thank god they
didn't but uh america
went to extremes to win that war with poisoning the the bombing the bombing of
not only vietnam laos
and cambodia was intense intense bigger bigger than by far than world war ii
for this crazy war
well it also it set a precedent for our lack of trust in the military a lack of
trust in the government
that guides the military particularly in how they deal with the veterans that
are dealing with things
like agent orange or you know people that have come back that were sick where
they denied that this was
part of the problem sure we didn't even have ptsd we didn't know what that was
but it started to prop up
when i got back and i talk about it here a bit about ptsd which i'd never heard
of but i think we all had
it what did they call it back then shell shocked or i guess so but it wasn't it
was not a diagnosis
diagnosable it was not an ailment that you could officially uh catalog because
if you did the army
would be admitting to a huge amount of insurance problems and all kinds of
medical problems that they
would have to cover so it was you know it was something that there was no word
for it but
frankly uh to get back to the issue of the original question was the platoon
was rejected on for these
two it almost came to be again in 1983 fell apart again and it's a
heartbreaking story it's in the book
and uh uh uh it's resurrected i mean i forget about it i just put it in the
closet after those movies
came out i said they don't want to know about vietnam in this country they
really forget it it's
not going to happen fine i live with it i was moving on with my career i had
midnight express i
had scarface i was uh i had other things in mind i but uh michael cimino who
had directed the
deer hunter told me he wanted to produce it with me as the writer as a director
and that uh we would
it would we would resurrect it because he said vietnam's coming back i i said
that's nonsense i
don't think it's kind of come back he said look at stanley kubrick's pictures
he's going to make a
picture it's called uh full metal jacket and uh it did it took three years or
two years for him to make it
but the fact that he made it certainly gave us some impetus to make we made it
very low budget
and uh by the way it was made by the same company as made salvador my previous
film they made him i made
him back to back in mexico and the philippines uh back to back financed very
low budget by hemdale
a british company led by a gentleman named john daly who i might who is my
mentor i much credit him in the book
so uh we were nothing film out of nowhere i mean we were the bottom i mean we're
in the philippines and
making a film that nobody really knew much about and at the bottom you know we
were struggling 