Oliver Stone on the Martin Luther King Jr Film He Tried to Make

You've had difficulties in making films, but is there ever a film that you wanted to make that you never could? Yeah, sure. What is that? Several. Mie Lai. Mie Lai, I got very close. We were about two, three weeks away from shooting it in 2007 in Thailand and some of it in Vietnam. I've been to Mie Lai in Vietnam. Great story. Because the massacre is unknown. They don't know. People don't know the real story. It was investigated. The massacre, you've heard of it, right? I've heard of it. 500 civilians were shot down in cold blood. Babies, mother, everybody, old people, shot. And not one enemy bullet was fired. Not one. And we've heard all the obfuscations of that. The whole thing was, you know, basically a misplanned operation because of basically CIA was guiding the war, and they were torturing to death some, no, torturing some poor soul who gave them information that was faulty. Happens all the time, right? Torture works, right? Torture doesn't work. And as a result, that operation, they were told that there was NVA in that village. They were not there. So the guys went in thinking they should kill. Did you write a screenplay for this? No, someone else did, and I was about to direct it. And it almost happened. It just ran into the fiscal crisis of 2008. Oh, okay. But that's not an excuse. Nobody wanted to make it. Have you thought about trying again? I did. No, no go. I also tried to make the Martin Luther King story years ago. Many years I worked on it. Martin Luther King's a great story, but it's a too tough a story to tell. I mean, I think there's a lot portion of the black community that's really kind of treats him like a saint, a martyr. Whereas this is more of a human man and his failings in this and that, but he's a hero in this. But his relationship with women is fascinating, and we were into that whole aspect of it. And what happened with that? It just never got together. It might be a good time to revisit that now. I think a black filmmaker could revisit it, and it's definitely moved into that direction. I've also tried, I tried for many years to do Evita, and I wrote a script for that, but another director made it. How far down the road had you gotten with the Martin Luther King story? Twice, I went. Yeah. I wrote a, me and someone else wrote a whole script. I think it's very good. But gone. You know, you can't, so many films get planned and not made. For every film you do this, like Five Five Abortion. Damn. That seems like a great one, though. Yeah. I mean, he's such an incredible and important character. Boy, does the world need a Martin Luther King Jr. right now. Yeah. Well, things are changing all the time. Thanks for watching.