According to Oliver Stone, Hollywood censors films that are critical of U.S. foreign policy, a rather strange charge, considering that the director made a name for himself with movies such as “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “JFK,” “Nixon,” and “W.”
Speaking with Jesse Watters on “Watters’ World” in an exclusive interview that will air on Saturday, Stone said that he had a difficult time getting his movies made and believed the censorship was economic.
“In my own personal experience, I would say Hollywood tends to economically censor subjects that are critical of America’s foreign policy, and critical of the military adventures abroad that we’ve been engaged in for so many years,” Stone said, as reported by Fox News. “I know also that I had a hell of a hard time getting ‘Platoon’ made, as well as several other films.”
Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1986 and solidified the director as a force to be reckoned with. The movie was based on his experiences fighting in the Vietnam War.
During the same interview, Stone alleged that the U.S. intelligence complex essentially misleads the American people into armed conflict.
“The intelligence agencies mislead us in many affairs, going back—in wars, especially—to Vietnam, to Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Syria,” he said. “It’s years of misinformation, particularly in Vietnam where I experienced, where—I was a small fry there, but certainly at the bottom of the chain, we felt the devastating effect of the continual lying about the fact that we were winning the war, winning the war. It was never true.”
Stone then addressed the new Oscars diversity initiatives, which dictates that movies must meet a diversity threshold, employing specific minority individuals in front of or behind the camera, in order to qualify for Best Picture. According to Stone, the new rules will make historical movies much harder to produce.
“We have to deal with the fact that people do historical pieces,” he said. “History fascinates me and if you’re doing another era, you have to pay attention to the mores of that era … I don’t know how that will apply and I don’t know how they’re going to make that work.”
This past month, Oliver Stone emphatically denounced cancel culture, arguing that his career would never have been allowed to begin if it were in place back in the 1980s.
“I mean, it’s just impossible. I would have had to step on so many sensitivities. You have to have some freedom to make a movie, unfortunately,” said Stone.
“You have to be rude, and you can be bad, and you [can] have to do these things like step on toes,” he continued. “Holy cow. Do you think I could have made any one of those films? I can tell you that if I made any of my films, I don’t think I’d last. I’d be vilified. I’d be attacked, shamed, whatever you want to call that, culture, cancel f***ing culture.”
RELATED: Oliver Stone: My Career Would Not Survive ‘Cancel F***ing Culture’