#scheer intelligence

"You get a very important view of the world [in combat]: how bad it is, how tough it is, and how ugly it can get. Ugly. Whatever they say about the bullshit - I hear many officers talk about 'the spirit of the men' and all that - no. What happens in combat is much more gruesome. People can be really ugly, and they can also be noble, too, at times. So I didn't have any illusions after I came out of that. 

I tried to put that real violence into the movies. Of course, I paid a price for it. People don't understand that I hate violence. The violence in the movies is heartfelt. The only movie I ever did that was a joke, in terms of violence, was Natural Born Killers because it was satiric. But everything else - Salvador, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth - was based on hating violence and just showing it. 

What people forget is that violence is underplayed. People don't understand in America because we have all these stupid cop shows! They would show [how] the bad guys are always getting caught, good guys are catching them, the guns go off. You know, it's ridiculous, because people get hurt when you have a gun off! The real meaning of one bullet in [Born on the Fourth of July] going into Ron Kovic's spine has a tremendous, lifelong meaning. That bullet goes from here to eternity. I wanted to drive that point home. I fought for it but it's been lost. Nobody gets it. I'd go to [places like] the National Press Club and I'd talk about it. They'd look at you blankly. They don't know what a bullet can do until it does it. 

That's what's going on with this George Floyd business, too, because Black people are much more aware of violence. They see it. They live with it. The police are on top of them. They know what they're talking about."

“When we talk about exceptionalism, through these terrible movies that are made post-9/11 about combat, it strikes me that perhaps your dedication to showing reality, to showing the brutality, is often misunderstood [by critics] as liking the violence or fetishization of violence when the reality is you hate violence so much. Perhaps you're trying to demonstrate that through a refusal to whitewash it. Has that been an aspect for you throughout [your career]?”

“As I said in the book, it's in me too,” responds Stone, reflecting on the violence he internalized while fighting in Vietnam. “There is an aspect of that ugliness in me. Charlie Sheen comes out of that war [in my film “Platoon” and] he says, ‘I'm the stepchild, the child of both [sergeants] Barnes and Elias.’ You take in the poison. You have to, to survive, I suppose. You can't be an idealist in a war. You're on site. It's a very dirty situation.

“So I came home a darker strain of myself,” he concludes. “And I saw it in myself. So when I did these movies, I said, ‘Let it out, show it, man. Show it in all its ferocity, and let them fucking realize.’ That was what was misunderstood, and thank you for saying that. That's been constant in my fucking life, just constant.”