Oliver Stone Partied with Real Gangsters While Researching “Scarface”

Scarface is another movie. We were saying that that is the introduction for a lot of people. A lot of people, especially outside of Miami, really just didn't understand how crazy things had gotten there. And I have a good friend of mine who was an ophthalmologist who did his residency in Miami, and he would tell me stories. Like, he was there in the 80s when all the crazy shit was happening. And just, he was like, it was a war zone. You would just, everybody was, you just, everybody coming in was shot. People were all coked up and all these overdoses. Well, that's, I think there's a lot of sensationalism in that. You know, America likes war. They like to play up the machine guns and all that. That was, 1930s Chicago Time magazine went out of its way to sensationalize it. I was there, I saw, you know, it wasn't wild that way in the sense of shooting in the streets would happen rarely, but they happened. People would be gunned down. These were killed. Drunk dealers went after families of each other. So there was a lot of that kind of interness sign warfare. Well, my friend saw it because he was in the ER, you know, so he was seeing, doing his residency there. So he was seeing it. I think in any American city, there's a lot of shootings every week. That's true, especially right now, right? But definitely there was a new element. It was the Colombian element and the Mario Letos came in, some of them, Cubans who were a gangster element out of Cuba. And it got bloody when the Colombians were not playing around. So there was a lot of cut throats. They used to, they used to, Shivatos. Colombian nectar. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. When I was there, I heard about a couple of these guys. It was interesting because I was working both sides of the case. I was trying to get to know the crime element as more than, so I knew all the lawyers and I went over to Bimini one day to get some real information about them because they couldn't. In the US, they were scared to talk. So I located through a defense lawyer, a couple of, some guys in Bimini. I went down there and I met with them. And they were talking because Bimini was another kind of world. The government was on the take there, I think. And they had a lot of speedboats going out of there every night at the hotel towards, you know, Bimini's very close to Miami. And I was doing coke at that time and I got, when my wife, she was my cover. And I, you know, Hollywood screenwriter wants to talk to you, he did Midnight Express. They liked that, you know. They want to know about the business. But then in the middle of this, we're all coked up in the hotel and, you know, the way conversation goes. And I drop a name just like that, you know, a guy I talked to. Well, he'd been a defense lawyer when I talked to him. In the past, he'd been a prosecutor because prosecutors often flipped to defense attorneys to make more money. So when I mentioned that name, two of these three guys got really uptight and they walked, they excused themselves, went in the bathroom and I said, I fucked up. I knew I'd fucked up. And I didn't know what was going to come out of that bathroom, you know, if they thought I was some kind of cop, some kind of under-informer because they hated that prosecutor that put them away, put one of them away. So a few minutes went by there and it was pretty hairy. But I think I was paranoid because they came out and they didn't have guns in their hands, but they cut the meeting off. And, you know, I went back to my room. They were staying in the same hotel. All night I was tense because I knew they could come and get me. It was their hotel. They owned the island. But it was nerve-wracking. And I got out of there first thing in the morning. The whole point is you say the wrong word sometimes and you're dead. That's the kind of tension I wanted for this movie. I put it into the scene earlier in the picture where Mr. Pacino, Al, goes in to make a pickup, make a trade. And he says, you know, he senses something's off in this meeting and he becomes that blood bath with the dismemberment, you remember? Yes. And the chainsaw. The chainsaw. Yeah, I was going to bring that scene up. Yeah, there was a chainsaw's murder at one point. There's something about the way you filmed that was so excellent because it was obviously gory and disgusting, but you didn't have to show it. I didn't direct it. I wrote it. Brian De Palma did a great job directing it. Grand opera. No, that's right. He did an amazing job. That's right. When you are talking about someone who is in that world, when you're trying to make a film about a guy who is in that world who is not a good guy, your main guy, Al Pacino, Tony Montana, is a bad guy. He's the hero. It's a very strange movie. Well, yeah, it is because he is a hero because he's free in a way. He's a free man. That's where people liked it. White people did not like that movie when it came out. I was disappointed at first. There was the blacks and the Latinos in the inner cities that went and they loved it. Also, white people who were doing some drugs, they went. That was the kind of audience we had. We were a bad boy movie. The movie didn't do as well as they'd hoped because it cost a lot of money. It went three months over budget. It was a very tedious shoot. I was there the whole time. Over time, the film garnered a reputation and made money, big money for the movie. It's become this iconic drug war movie. It's the movie for gangsters. It was just bold. In fact, wherever I go in the world, I'm pretty much people. You wrote Scarface. I got into Salvador. I got into the fascist party that way. Really? Some research. They thought I had muy cajones.