How Oliver Stone's Experiences in Vietnam Influenced Platoon

breakthrough And the enemy we didn't know where they were but we felt that they were gonna 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 D-ros leave the country I was due out 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's normally you had to serve if a two-year deal you had to serve six six months state side on the backside of it So 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 you like you've had these life experiences as someone who's just a filmmaker They really can't draw upon like you've had actual combat experience and when you're making movies about combat I mean that has to be 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, you know, 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 put you know, so much to show they bring the enemy much closer they they condense things and they They amplify as much as possible now. I did that too here and there so I'm guilty too, but I think overall it's way overdone and The newer stuff that's come out since 2001, you know with the patriotic stuff and heavily heavily militaristic stuff it's way off way off and people don't die that way like, you know in the Type of films like Mark Wahlberg made or you know those kind of films. They just way way overdone Anyway, it went in what way like well, what was the name of the film? Lone Survivor? Yeah Yeah, yeah, they get dropped off whatever in 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 may over done It was way overdone. They and what I heard and what's been reported is that they you know, they got trapped right away they was pretty quick the ambush went on and they got they got the shit kicked out of them so and 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 skin, 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 I mean the the Tom Berenger character The I existed it's in the book. Yeah based on a guy called sergeant Well, I called him sergeant Barnes, but he had it wouldn't use his real name real guy getting shot in the face and was 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 leaders of the platoon were not really the lieutenants they were the platoon sergeant and the squad sergeants and 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 Dafoe Was he 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 Dafoe character was also based on a real person. Yes, he was He was based on a guy. I'm you in the lerps long-range recon patrol who was a great guy He was an Apache kind of an Apache of 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 life 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 Very much a love a beloved figure and he was killed After I left the unit He was killed about a month later in a friendly fire accident Now friendly fire is met we talk about it. Yeah 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 don't like to emphasize how difficult how often I would say 15 to 20 percent of our casualties in that war were friendly fire 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 incident, yeah, very important one Pat Tillman who is this 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 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 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 in 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 How much preparation Well, I got I got a great combat advisor. He'd been there as a marine Dale Dye he came in out of the blue and He was a real lifer type. So he remembered all the details in of uniforms and Fire and the and the firepower and it's it took a lot of details to put this together But the preparation was I've been doing it for ten 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 at B The first time and then it was it was considered great great script But to real you know to 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 Sylvester Stallone to his Rambo series where he goes back and fights the war again. Do those drive you crazy? Yeah, although the first one was pretty good 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 know that there's a lot of that veteran Feeling that you know, it's we were we were beaten We had our hands hide behind our backs and we couldn't win and that kind of thing Believe me. 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 Propaganda that were winning the whole time. They were using the body counts heavy body counts They'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 there for their land man. It was their country and they never gave up ever You could have nuked them and I 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 America went to extremes to win that war with poisoning the bombing the bombing of Not only Vietnam Laos and Cambodia was intense Intense bigger bigger than by far than World War two for this crazy war. Well, it also it set a precedent for 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 talked 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? I guess so, but I wasn't it was not a diagnosome diagnosable it was not an ailment that you could officially 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 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 It's resurrected I mean I forget about I just put in the closet after those movies came out I said dad they don't want to know about Vietnam in this country. They really forget it. It's not gonna happen fine I live with it. I was moving on with my career. I had Midnight Express. I had Scarface I was I had other things in my night, but 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 We would it would we would resurrect it because he said Vietnam's coming back. I said that nonsense I don't think it's kind of come back. He said look at Stanley Kubrick's pictures. He's gonna make a picture It's called full metal jacket and 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 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 back to back financed very low budget by Hemdale a British company led by a Gentleman named John Daly who I might who was my mentor. I much credit him in the book so 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 to get it made and there was a weather problems. There was all kinds of Logistical problems, but we'd been through hell on Salvador as I described in the book in Mexico So we were a unit by this time we got used to the difficulties of making low budget films in between the time you wrote it And the time it actually got done Was there ever any effort by the studios to try to water it down or to try to doctor it up and? Sure. No that went on quite a bit Everyone read the script at one point or another Rejected it so and when it finally almost got made with Chamino in 1983 We thought we were in we thought we get it made note, but the Resistance to it at the very end with the MGM was supposed to be the distributor and Henry Kissinger was on the board of directors along with Haig Alexander Haig you remember him? Mm-hmm military guy who was Secretary of State very bad tempered though They were both on the board and whether they went to that board I don't know but that's what the story they cover their ass by telling me we can't make this movie We can't distribute this movie because the board would be against it now Sometimes they say they tell you that without checking but in this case, I don't know Hmm. So as a result the film fell apart again. This was a heartbreak Did you ever think like maybe I can move it a little bit or change it a little bit or would you just? Pentagon said to me forget it. We're not gonna help you at all. This thing is completely distorted Mmm, they were upset as hell about the fragging. I mean, that's to say really, you know what fragging is Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of that towards the end I mean it started in 67 8 but there was more and more discontent when Lyndon Johnson pulled out of the presidency in March of 68. That was a big moment I think all the soul everyone kind of knew that this thing was not gonna work out And who wanted to be the last guy to get killed in Vietnam, right? And so I think 69 70 were more and more fractions more fraction fractions and There was more and more incidents at one point there was a Pentagon document that came out I've seen it that said this situation in in the army is getting so poor so bad The morale is so low that it's it resemble is beginning to resemble the French mutinies in 1917 in the World War one That was a big concern of the Pentagon. They knew the thing was not gonna work. It was cracking from within So we gave more and more Let's say more and more Credit to the Vietnamese South Vietnamese and saying that they were gonna take our place. We're gonna put more money We put a fortune into them South Vietnamese army like we're doing now with the Afghan army It's interesting when you look back what year did platoon come out? Finally made it out in 86 86 When when you really think about it, you're only talking you're not talking about that much distance distance between That movie coming out and the Vietnam War ending. I mean in terms of how we look at the world now I mean if we look at it's 2020 if we look at 2000 that doesn't seem like 2003 that doesn't seem that long ago, but that's kind of the timeline you're looking at Mm-hmm, and so, you know in a lot of ways It was probably very fresh in a lot of people's eyes particularly people in the Pentagon It was quite something when it came out. It was you know, it was it was like a bomb went off I mean went around the world. First of all, it wasn't just America this film played everywhere and Was I guess there's a shock at the time because it was more realistic than any war feel that they had seen And of course it was dirty. It got you know, I mean it was that we had drug use in it Or which was you know description of the division there was a division in the army We were we were draftees many of us. So it wasn't all Volunteer, you know and it wasn't all like Gung-ho at all. It was a split and I just I described I showed the split as much as I could I Would be in the I joined the camp where the people who I would say were anti Authoritarian I wouldn't say they were anti-war because we didn't have anything like that going on You know, it's just the army sucks the man sucks, you know A lot of the black troops knew this so there was a lot of dissension with the black troops too Because when Martin Luther King got killed in April of 68 That had that had a negative impact over there. So there was a lot going on in the country and people were seeing it feeling it and And New troops were coming in all the time from the country draftees. So we were you know, you get a feeling for what's going on Did the movie feel different to you than anything else you've ever done in terms of your obligation? because I really do think that that was the most realistic at that point for sure war movie ever made and the one that left people with the most conflicted feelings and just this this feeling of as Much as you can relay it in a film with notable actors that you you you showed The horrors of war in a way that I don't think it ever been portrayed before in a film Well, we got the details, right? I mean when you see a dead body and you see it being lifted into a helicopter That's really looks like a dead man Yeah, the pain of death. I mean you feel the danger It's it's never what you think it's going to be it's always comes up in another way it's like sloppy sometimes and battle and That's why I don't like about a lot of the movies a battle is often just confusion Breaking down things don't work. It's like Mike Tyson said, you know Your plan goes out the window and you get hit in the face. It's that's the way it goes. It never play See the Americans had a methodical way of doing it. We go to the jungle. We send the Little guys into the jungle they meet resistance pull back bomb artillery do anything Take minimum casualties. That's not what the Marines did But that's what the army's idea was and that it works to a degree but it eradicates the whole the bombing is Is very sloppy? Mmm, not only you have friendly fire, but you have a lot of civilians killed, too Imagine when you finish your final cut of that movie and it got really that had to be a very strange almost like you're releasing a child You're you I mean it was it had to have been so much more personal and so much so much more Yeah, I'd been through so much. I really I didn't I I didn't think it was good. I thought was a good movie I thought I was a good scriptman. I didn't think I didn't expect anything I had just done Salvador which was about a dirty Civil War down in the in the Central America In which America again supported some pretty bad guys Yeah, that squads and I showed that and that picture had not done very well because it had been America had been very little in no interest really in the Central American issues of the 1980s Remember they sent an Easter Revolution in Nicaragua. There was a lot of turmoil in Guatemala turmoil in Honduras where I Went down there to research Salvador When I saw in Honduras was the beginning of another Vietnam. That's one of the reasons I really committed to Salvador's heavily when I saw the troops the American troops now, there were women men and women Young in uniform many of them National Guard troops reserves They were there building up for this I think it was pretty clear that Reagan was going to attack Nicaragua in some way but it never happened because of a fortuitous accident when the CIA got busted for flying a cargo cargo over Nicaragua And it was a huge scandal that led to the Iran Contra unraveling with Reagan. So Reagan was Unable to do what he wanted to do in in Nicaragua, although we had mined the port we'd done everything possible Supporting the Contras all that pissed me off. In other words. It was like 20 years after the war 15 years after war here I am back in Central America. I'm seeing the same thing young guys like me in a country yet You know just believing what they're hearing from their superiors so you felt like this obligation to not just release Salvador but also release platoon as in platoon Your experiences showing what the Vietnam War was really like and with Salvador saying hey, this is happening again Yeah, I did them simultaneously except I didn't really believe I didn't believe platoon was gonna work Yeah, come out so I didn't have much faith in it Well when it did come out how much of a surprise was it when it was a giant hit? Well, I knew that in the moment Put it this way the shooting was you could tell from the young people the actors and the their enthusiasm for this They there was a hunger to me they were so Delight delighted to become so Soldiers for the purposes of the movie. We trained them on a 24-hour basis for two weeks and it was it worked I wanted them to get no sleep and Dale Dye helped me with that We we put them in a bibbawak training situation But a real one I mean where you don't sleep and you you basically pulling century duty all night kind of you have you split your duty with Fox holes three guys and Dale would stage attacks and stuff in the middle of the night Really so they were nervous and they were they were tired beyond belief, which is good. That's where you want them So how did how did you plan this out? So when you were when you were about to start filming you had it in your head We have to make this more realistic. What's the best way to do it? And then you know from the beginning we from the beginning the way I cast it I wanted I wanted young people as much as possible in the in the roles people who were fresh Who didn't look like they'd done other movies right and types? They were based on everybody. I knew in my plutines people from the south a Lot of people from the south of people from the Midwest a lot of inner-city people Chicago especially St. Louis, New Orleans And I you know Californians and I try to mix it all up But the whole idea from the beginning was that we're gonna make this with our little bit of money We're gonna make this as realistic as we could so we planned it that way and we the camp worked we got the full cooperation of the Philippine Army and Some shitty helicopters that they had but very dangerous ones But at least that was it was a start had that ever been done before the camp the idea of having them live I don't think so cuz that had bothered me a lot in film maybe in the old days, but I don't I don't know one No, what made you fall on that? Like what why was that? Well, I'd lived it I'd lived it so I wanted them to above all I wanted them to be tired Irritable it gives you a sense of what it's like, you know, there's bugs. There's heat. It's it's a jungle and How did they respond to that At first they were a lot of bitching there was a sag SAG these yeah, you say unions and you you have to have 12-hour turnaround. So a few of them quit really? Yeah Wow And we replaced them because I had a long list waiting list of people that I'd seen over the years Wow, actually Charlie Sheen was the younger brother of Emil Emilio Estes who was my first choice to play it in 1983 and After the movie went peeled back to 86 Emilio had gotten older and I went with Charlie who came of age about that time was my age when I was over there Oh, wow, so he was 19 20 So, you know, that's what I wanted those faces once you get the faces you can train them and Barringer and Defoe were the oldest and they that helped enormously they were this, you know anchors of the operation When the film was this gigantic success Did that? How did that feel to you? Did that validate this idea that you had and it shocked me shocked me? It shocked me. I mean for years has it been rejected ten years, you know, I mean I was sick of it I was saying I'm not gonna make this movie because it's gonna go wrong, you know I didn't think was possible but because of this, you know Kubrick picture and the support of the English company John Daly they they wanted to make it This is news for me because I hold my life I'm fighting to make a movie against somebody's wishes all of a sudden. I got some people on my side that's a big that's a big difference and the enthusiasm of the cast and Dale Dye and all these great people and my cameraman everybody they loved it and We made it and frankly we finished it. We did it on budget and 50 was 50 days We weren't 54 days, but that was in we had the money in the in the in the that 10% contingency We finished it in 54 days and it was tough And we got out of there just in time because the pungsoons came and In the editing right away. You could feel that people were reacting to it in a different way We edited it. There was no We we edited a little bit, but you know, we played with it playing with it you massage it But right away I would say from the first screening on you could tell people were responding saying this is real This is I've never seen this this is real. So it It took care of itself in a way I mean they didn't put much money in the distributing company was Orion pictures where existed that They put a they said we'll give it a quality release a few theaters at Christmas in 86 And it opened huge first day in New York. There was a line of veterans young me Veterans were look young. I Mean not World War two veterans young veterans. They were around the block at the Lowe's Astor and I Wasn't there but people who told me that they were they went in quietly There was a mute mute and they sat through the film and a very little talk very little anything not a lot of the gung-ho stuff you hear and At the end of it They were quiet and they some of them wouldn't get up out of their seats quite a few of them were sitting there still in their seats, you know Some were crying it took off and then it took off like I can't I've never you know It's a phenomenon you rarely see in the world this is like the top third highest grossing film in America that year and it was It was a blockbuster because no children are allowed in you know And you don't have much of a woman's audience at first so you don't figure on these things, you know It it took off and kept going and then the women started to come in the third week This as it was getting more and more talked about there was no stopping it You