Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 3, 1994 TAG: 9409070067
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DOUGLAS J. ROWE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
But he doesn't think he's guilty of that.
He intends his latest film, ``Natural Born Killers,'' to serve as a satire on violence, media glorification of it and Americans reveling in it. And if you present him with the notion that the movie simply offers up what it purports to criticize, he disagrees.
``The violence in the film, first of all, is not overly graphic. I think it moves fast. It's not like the violence I did in `Platoon,''' says Stone, who won the best-direction Academy Award for that film and ``Born on the Fourth of July.'' He cites ``Scarface'' and ``Midnight Express'' (movies he wrote) as more graphic, too.
``The film was intended as satire in the sense that you're exaggerating. You kill 52 people and you have a massive [jail] breakout, and everything is large and bigger than life; ultimately it's meant as satire to make you think about the violence and Americans' schizophrenic attraction to it. We condemn it, we moralize about it, yet at the same time we sort of are sleazily fascinated by it and watch more and more of it.''
The 47-year-old Stone, who's turned out consistently controversial movies such as ``JFK,'' ``Wall Street'' and ``Salvador,'' stirred concern with this movie as early as the editing stage. In response to Warner Bros. and the rating board of the Motion Picture Association of America, he cut several scenes so the film could get an R rather than an NC-17.
Even at that, ``Natural Born Killers'' goes over the top as it follows a young couple who are very much in love with each other and with the bloodsport of murdering people.
The movie mixes its modes - color, black-and-white, videotape, super 8, animation, along with sitcom laugh tracks, garish rear projections and dizzying angles. It's not the first time, of course, that the recurrently unsubtle filmmaker has opted for a missile launcher when a flyswatter would suffice.
Hallucinogenic style aside, Stone says, the movie's substance is talking about the roles of society and the killer.
``Is the aggression beast in all of us? What is the role of love? Is love the engine of survival? These are some of the questions, I think, it hopefully raises,'' Stone said.
Indeed, during an interview while he chomps on a room-service hamburger for lunch, Stone makes clear that he's much more into raising questions and firing cautionary flares into the air than supplying solutions for any societal ills.
As the discussion gets under way, Stone says he's tired from the series of interviews about ``Natural Born Killers.'' Fatigue doesn't stop him, however, from postulating about Asian society's lack of violence (possibly because of Buddhism and stronger family bonds); Charles Manson as the most demonized man in America; and how abortion and homosexuality are private matters that shouldn't be issues of public discourse.
As the interview goes on, he begins pacing around the hotel suite, and his answers can make you think about a rainbow since he runs through an ideological gamut of colors.
He expresses his belief in the possibility of redemption, then adds: ``I have no regrets about seeing John Wayne Gacy get it, or Jeffrey Dahmer. I don't think these people are redeemable. I think that they're sick and disturbed and depraved. ... For the state to feed them at our expense, that bothers me. Might as well get it over with, cut their heads off.''
Stone thinks former Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush politicized crime, selling law-and-order planks or vilifying the Willie Hortons to get votes.
``It plays to the public,'' he said. ``And the media has kicked into that with the cop shows and the constant attention to crime on the TV news: Body bag at 7 ... victim's family at 8 - stay tuned!''
So what we have is people taking pleasure in the suffering of others, Stone says. ``I think the whole climate has created this madness in our society - more prisons, more fear, more bad cops ... more media.''
His hybrid road-prison movie inveighs against a news industry that goes for high ratings and big circulation by focusing on soap-opera news - Tonya Harding, the Menendez brothers, the Bobbitts and O.J. Simpson - and by reducing them to morality tales with no shades of gray.
Stone wishes the media would cover more good things. While acknowledging that the journalistic guideline that offbeat, nasty people and events make news because they're the aberrations, he says: ``But it seems every time you're bombarding the country with more and more death and more and more crime, you see, what's happening is people's perspective is shifted and they believe that the bad is outweighing the good.
``And then the pessimism sets in, and doubt, disorder and chaos, and civil war. That's not good. That destroys society.''
Stone hopes people see his new movie and that it has impact, and he realizes it's ``a love-it-or-hate-it film.'' (Critics were mixed, while preliminary box-office receipts were No. 1 for the opening weekend.)
It certainly seems calculated to create controversy - like positing ``JFK'' as a ``countermyth'' - even though Stone denies craving it.
``I cared about John Kennedy a lot,'' he said. ``I thought that was a crime. I thought it was covered up. And I have a passion about it. I have a right to make that statement in a film. To be attacked was no fun ... I went through a lot ... . I can't say I enjoyed it or craved it.''
And does ``Natural Born Killers'' also stand as a ``countermyth''?
``Yeah, because you don't have all the facts. You decide.''
by CNB