Oliver Stone Shares His Theories About Jack Ruby and JFK

So when you put together JFK, you have this film that is about this incredibly important subject, but yet you want to make it interesting and you want to make it a great film and you succeeded in doing that. But what is that like doing that balancing act of having so much information to tell? That story is so complex. It was three hours in 10, 12 minutes and I got it through the system, which is unbelievable. I'll tell you how later. But at the time I needed the protagonist and the protagonist and who was the guy, you know? Yeah. The only person who ever brought any kind of charges publicly was Jim Garris. Yes. In New Orleans, he was a district attorney and I read his book. He wrote two books and I actually got to know him and he was a man who like 20 years after he did this and went through hell, came back to it and wrote another book. And that's the book I bought. In other words, he was devoted to this subject like you are. He believed a lot more than me. He'd been a patriot in World War II and he served in Korea. He'd been called every name in the book, but as a patriot, he firmly believed that Mr. Kennedy was killed by these intelligence forces and he went after it and in those days, you just couldn't do it. You couldn't prove a covert operation. He got killed by the press. Killed and now we've found out a lot more about what was going on. We know a lot more facts about how the media went after him with bullshit, a lot of bullshit accusations and made him look as bad as possible. Well, Kevin Costner did an amazing job of playing him in your movie too. Well, he was the basis of that. Once you get a Costner in the middle of it, then you can start to move. You've got an interesting central character. Then you bring in all these crazies that you read about, people like Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, all the lunatics around New Orleans, Dallas involved in the war against Cuba. Then I wanted a Lee Harvey Oswald character, which was to tell a little bit of his story. I had two stories, Garrison and Oswald. I got to know Marina. I didn't know the attractive, a lot of the Oswald story. Not enough of it, but there's more now. He seems to have been definitely in the employ of the CIA when he went to Russia the first time and when he came back again. There's too much evidence of it. We want to bring that out too. That story becomes ... Then the third story would be the Dealey Plaza, the actual assassination. Garrison's not there. He has to go back into the past to find this out. So he has that thread. That whole Dallas section is part of the structure. It starts the movie, but we go back to it at the right time and at the climax, we go back to it for the final time the way it probably happened. That's three stories. The fourth story, if you want, to know the truth, and my thinking at that time was a Donald Sutherland business. He comes into the movie at the halfway point and he gives Garrison a lot of new information because Garrison thinks he was dealing on a local level. He thinks he's dealing with something that's in New Orleans. He's not sure beyond it. Now, the phone says it's a much bigger story, which sends Costner into the last act going to Dallas. It's too much for the Costner character. He's blown away by it. He knows he's up against forces much larger than he ever thought. What was the motivation for the Donald Sutherland character? Fletcher Prouty, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. He was the focal officer between the CIA and the Pentagon. An old-timer, World War II, did a lot of service and he was in charge of basically providing the CIA with military equipment for covert operations. He worked in Tibet. He worked on a lot of the operations in the 50s and the late 40s. We had operations going on in Ukraine, Ukraine, at China, Tibet. He trained Tibetans in the Colorado Mountains and many stories. He's written several books. He was a keen observer of the differences that were going on. He knew Dulles, used to brief him, and told me stories about then. Everything changed after Kennedy was killed. You got to meet him. Oh yeah? I hung out with him. Garrison too. Both of these were authentic men. Fletcher described the difference after November 1963. He left the Pentagon a year later. It was over. There was something that changed in the country. Sure enough, we were in Vietnam faster than you can imagine in the combat troops. What a crazy character in that whole historical record is Jack Ruby. He's a very strange one. I just read a book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill. It's about the CIA and Manson in the 60s. Oh yeah, I know the book. It's very interesting, but Ruby is in that book as well because Ruby was actually visited by I forget his name, Jolly, something Jolly. Jolly West. What's his name? Jolly West. Who was the central character in MKUltra who they believe was involved in these various ... yeah, that's a plastic cell. No, it comes off. Don't worry about it. I'm listening. But he was a central character in the CIA's use of LSD during the whole Operation Midnight Climax in San Francisco. They ran a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury that's connected to Manson where they were giving people LSD and running studies on him. Yeah, and he went to visit Ruby in prison. And Ruby, who had shown no psychological trauma or distress after he left, was a mess curled up in the fetal position on the ground and was thinking they were burning Jews in the streets and literally was in a psychotic state. And they think they dosed him up while he was in jail. Yeah, he seems to be the mob connection to this thing. Yes. You can put your arm back. I'll fix it back, yeah. It's a ... No, Ruby's, his contacts alone, he goes back many years to the 40s. He was quite a ... he was mobbed up completely and didn't want to do it. He was forced into doing it. Why do you think he was forced? What do you think it was? I think he was scared. About what? Well, I have never followed that in depth because the, you know, people say that organized crime killed him. I don't believe that because they didn't have the power to pull this thing off. I think that they're an element to it. You know, you wanted somebody to rub out Oswald. Right. Probably Oswald was intended to die there on that day, you see. There's a lot of things that pointed that direction, but he didn't and he couldn't be allowed to go to ... It's just crazy that they got Jack Ruby to do it. They killed off everything that Oswald said in that station. Police station is gone. Yeah. It's hearsay. But what he said in the corridor outside, it's very interesting. We know that Ruby was there. So Ruby, I think, was pushed into this thing because they had to make it ... It was a quick operation where you got to get to him, you know? It's really crazy. The story plays out 12 years later when on the Geraldo Rivera show, Dick Gregory brings a Zapruder film and introduces it to the American public. Then they get the chance to see Kennedy's head going back into the left and everybody's like, what? Yeah. That's a disgusting story. But on the Ruby affair, don't forget that he also ... He was urgently asking the Warren Commission to get me to Washington. I want to talk. Jesus. What he knew. He didn't know everything. I don't think anyone knew everything. He knew his part of it. So the whole idea was, how can you get cancer out of the blue like that so suddenly? So suddenly and die so quickly. Now there again, there's a lot of cancer experimentation going on at this point in the 60s. He mentioned doctors and the MLK. Cancer too. There was a huge ... There was a doctor in New Orleans, I forgot his name, but working on it. David Ferry was one of these people who knew him. Ferry had a lot of mice and he was operating on his ... He was using his mice's cancer, feeding them huge doses of cancer. The idea was that they said they were going to kill Castro with it, inject Castro with a needle and kill him because they'd make it so strong and they're getting this cancer to play ... They're building up through these mice a cancer that was so powerful that could kill. I mean, I heard everything on this film, but there seems to be truth to this. Do you feel like you're going to put it to bed with this documentary in your mind? It's the best we can do. I mean, I have Jim Diugenia working with me. He's followed this thing like he's a fifth generation researcher and he's very, very up to date. When is this coming out? I don't know yet. I don't know if we can get it out. I'm going to try.