Oliver Stone
The American public, which has been brainwashed with that for 28 years, has never accepted it. They smell a rat.

William Oliver Stone (born 15 September 1946), usually known as Oliver Stone, is a three-time Academy Award-winning American film director and screenwriter.

Wall Street (Director’s Commentary) (2000)

  • I wanted to explore the new Wall Street. When I was writing Scarface in Miami, there was so much coke around and so many lunatics, and I met so many kids from Wall Street who were millionaires. I thought older men were rich, but here were these kids, 25 or 28 or 35 years old, with millions of dollars playing the markets all over the world around the clock. My father would have been shocked by the new electronics that allowed it…. Dad was a stockbroker on Wall Street when there was more integrity and class.
  • Wall Street was an extension of Scarface.
  • This is about getting into a corporation, screwing it up, putting in poison pills so your competitor can’t swallow it…. Very intricate game played in the 1980’s…. Mike Milken did it with junks bonds, Drexel Burnham.
  • I’m ambivalent. I like Gekko, which is partly why Michael Douglas did so well…. Gekko is despicable but kinda fun too.
  • Money never sleeps.
  • All these Wall Street lawyers are running the system according to Buckminster Fuller. After World War II they took most of the money out of the United States, they drained the blood out of the United States and put it abroad, overseas capital…. Fuller calls it Lawyer Capitalism, the lawyers run the show. Tax laws are the key. In the postwar years, tax law allowed US capital to go abroad…. It all fled the country and stayed abroad and America changed tremendously…. We became a world power, yet a rapacious one, with capitalists really doing a major theft of our money…. Nixon took us off the Gold standard in 1972 because America went bankrupt…. All these recessions in the 70’s, 80’s…. My father got wiped out on Wall Street.
  • It’s funny to read articles about Gordon Gekko as if he exists…. If you really listen to Gekko’s speech, half of it makes sense…. But it’s the excess, losing moderation, that destroys all…. There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator, greed motivating evolution…. But there’s a huge disconnect between the classes. It is very demoralizing to work for someone who makes a billion dollars a year while you make just barely enough to make it.
  • Greed is good. Taken from Ivan Boesky’s speech saying ‘Greed is right.’… Gekko says he wrecks it ‘because it is wreckable.’ There is an impulse in Gekko to take, to rape…. Kirk Kerkorian destroyed MGM and UA…. Buy both companies and destroy both. And that was the end of the movie business. UA and MGM were two great film companies. Suddenly they were one lousy company. Kerkorian did it for the money, like Gekko. He didn’t care about film. Never. He sold it off in pieces. He cannibalized it. Just like Gekko. These guys do what suits their short-term.
  • Zero sum game implies winners and losers. If somebody wins, somebody gotta lose…. I don’t agree with that. Because all boats can rise on a rising sea. Good films help other good films. Different psychology. If you’re overly competitive, you say it is exclusionary, a zero sum game: I must win so he must lose. That’s not true. We can all win without forcing the other guy to lose.
  • Balzac was right…. There is tremendous jealousy about money.
  • I leave Bud Fox in the canyons of Wall Street, just another ant, one of millions of ants…. We’re all absorbed in this system of capitalism…. You join the collective unconscious.


Quotes

G.W. Bush

  • In all my public statements, I was not at all in favor of anything he G.W.Bush did. He was a disaster for the country in his reaction to 9/11...Worst president we've ever had... To say that Trump is similar is ridiculous because it trivializes the situation.... He's got enough nutcases around him between Bolton and Pompeo that I would worry very, very much. But to say that he's George Bush is to miss the point. You've got to look back at George Bush... and understand what a mess he put us into. We have not gotten out of Iraq. We have not gotten out of Afghanistan. We have not gotten out of the War on Terror, this global war on terror, which is the greatest fiction since the Cold War back in 1945.

Fidel Castro

  • Fidel Castro was a brilliant person who predicted everything that has happened in the world since 2001... I made the film Comandante with the idea that it would be a historical profile of the man. The film can be seen on YouTube, but it could never be screened in theaters in the United States because they censored it and removed it a week before it was due for release...Then we made Looking for Fidel, which was possibly the most aggressive interview with Fidel. I asked him very difficult questions and that movie was screened on HBO. However, given the good job that Fidel did answering the questions they do not put it on enough on U.S. television. HBO instructed me to ask Fidel hard, tough questions, to put him on the spot. As you all know, that was not easily done and he was brilliant in his answers to all my questions. I think that’s why HBO has not shown the movie again.

Doomsday

  • In January 2018, the experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight, where it had stood during the darkest days of the Cold War, from 1953 to 1960. The latest move of the hands was precipitated by the recklessness in Trump’s nuclear thinking and the deepening crisis over Korea. Trump wondered aloud about the point of having nuclear weapons if he couldn’t use them. His answer was to make them more usable, which he did with his new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the first since Obama’s 2010 NPR, which had reduced the role of nuclear weapons in the US defense posture. The 2018 NPR significantly elevated their role, permitting use in response to vaguely defined “extreme circumstances,” such as cyberattacks or attacks on the infrastructure of both the United States and its “allies and partners.” The review doubled down on Obama’s unconscionable 30-year trillion-dollar modernization of all parts of the nuclear arsenal. The actual cost looks to be closer to $1.7 trillion and climbing. To make matters worse, all eight other nuclear powers are undertaking their own modernizations, though on a far more modest scale. Russia, it should be noted, actually cut its defense spending this past year.


John F. Kennedy

Civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office (1963)
  • There was a civil war in this country... Kennedy provoked such hostility and hatred. His death was cheered in the South because of his support for Martin Luther King. He was moving to change things on all fronts. He was starting to end the Cold War. He made a deal with Khruschev and Russia in 1962 to end the missile crisis, and he furthered the deal when he signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. He installed the Hot Line. He... described the Soviets for the first time in American history as mortals, like us, who care about their children. He seemed to have an expanding vision of the world, much like Gorbachev did in Russia in the '80s.
    People in power are afraid to ask the obvious questions. From Day 1, they accepted the cover story that Oswald did it [assassinated JFK] alone. Oswald said he was the patsy. A lot of people believed him, but not the establishment. Since that day, the media has chanted the mantra that Oswald did it alone. But the American public, which has been brainwashed with that for 28 years, has never accepted it. They smell a rat.
  • The most shocking part [about the assassination of JFK] is...the sequence of the shooting, the timing,... the wounds and the autopsy. It’s all quite shocking when you...think seriously about it. It doesn’t make any sense the way they described it. That’s the most shocking part of the case. When you start to investigate Oswald, of course there are a thousand interesting things that come up. The files on Oswald were much more closely supervised by the CIA then we knew at the time and were omitted by the Warren Commission. They treated it like a routine investigation, but it was hardly so.
    We draw a line between the cover-up and the assassination. The cover-up is filled with another cast of characters. That is to say, the Warren Commission itself, who is in charge of the investigation; and the main man, Alan Dulles, the ex-chief of the CIA and one of the most powerful figures in government. He was fired by Kennedy, as were all his top officials, two years earlier. He was put in charge of the investigation and buried certain information. That’s part of the cover-up.

Vladimir Putin

  • Putin is the most mature statesmen in the whole world right now. He's been there for four American presidents, since Clinton...He's been everywhere, met everybody. And he sees the world as needing balance. It's not a uni-polar world, dominated by the United States... He's been very clear that we need balances of regional power. Unfortunately, the United States just doesn't want to believe that...it's our military side that scares the sh-- out of me,.. as we tend to be arrogant, that's when you become very dangerous. Somehow we have to learn that we don't have to be number one. We can be partners with the world.
  • Acting like a hegemon, the United States, starting in 1999, took advantage of Russian weakness and broke its promise not to expand NATO, eventually adding 13 countries, the last of which was Montenegro, in 2017. When Bush announced plans to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine, Putin drew the line. Following the US-backed Ukrainian coup, he took back Crimea and made clear that there are limits to his toleration of NATO expansion.
    In his March 1, 2018, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, he went further, throwing down the gauntlet to the United States. Russia, he acknowledged, had been on the defensive since the Soviet Union collapsed, having lost substantial amounts of its territory, population, GDP, industrial potential, and military capability. It depended on the IMF and World Bank for survival. The United States ignored its appeals not to abrogate the ABM Treaty in 2002 and expanded its global missile-defense system, leaving Russia vulnerable to a US attack. A 2006 article in Foreign Affairs contending that neither Russia or China could even retaliate against a US first strike “sent heads spinning” in Russia, The Washington Post reported, “with visions of Dr. Strangelove.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • My father was a Republican and he hated Roosevelt. And that's sort of been the battle of my life, I think. You have to understand I grew up a Republican conservative. I hated Castro. And I put my money where my mouth was because I went to war, but I understood pretty quickly that this was another place, another culture and we would never fit in there.

See also

  • Category:Oliver Stone films
This article is issued from Wikiquote. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.