Quote

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Oliver Stone

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Oliver Stone
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: September 15
Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
New York City
New York
William Oliver Stone
Dramatist
Historian
Interpretation
Dramatic
History
Doe
Trying

More quotes by Oliver Stone

Image
A lot of the good cameraman who we used are doing television work they're doing commercials for a lot of money. And the commercials look incredible. But what's it about? I made three major commercial campaigns. I enjoyed it, I experimented with it, and at the end of the day I felt no satisfaction. It was like having a fast food lunch.
Oliver Stone
Image
Franklin Roosevelt saw the world as a possible alliance, with the UN involved, of course, where we would never have these kinds of wars again. And he was equally opposed to the British Empire as he was against the Communist Russians.
Oliver Stone
Image
I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.
Oliver Stone
Image
In any film there's always a historical implication.
Oliver Stone
Image
I think our life is a series of adventures.
Oliver Stone
Image
I don't want to make a half-assed film. It's not my area of expertise.
Oliver Stone
Image
I do have a side as a citizen, and I've always expressed it, and that's where I've gotten into misunderstandings, because some people see me as a leftist nut or whatever. A conspiracy nut. All that stuff. These are definitions that don't really apply to a dramatist, because a dramatist is working from empathy.
Oliver Stone
Image
Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.
Oliver Stone
Image
I'm a dramatist. Dramatists have a right to look at history and interpret it the way they see it.
Oliver Stone
Image
After World War II the Republicans - the Wall Street crowd - were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in '46 that we'd fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation.
Oliver Stone
Image
What I've experienced, I'm trying to put in a narrative form, I suppose, to say that it does make sense in this way.
Oliver Stone
Image
I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.
Oliver Stone
Image
I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war.
Oliver Stone
Image
Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.
Oliver Stone
Image
But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
Oliver Stone
Image
I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens... it's a shame that people have to watch DVDs with the lights on in a television-type situation where people are wandering in and out of the room. Movies are different from television, and you cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.
Oliver Stone
Image
Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States' Big Brother attitude toward the world. We need countries to say no to the United States. The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities, cyber abilities. And the world is in danger with our tyranny.
Oliver Stone
Image
I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken.
Oliver Stone
Image
The second [presidential] term changes, and I think that John F. Kennedy certainly ran on that and he knew that second term would give him oxygen, and he needed it. Unfortunately, he didn't get there.
Oliver Stone
Image
Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams.
Oliver Stone