The U.S. ultimately decides what the national security threat is. They put Russia one, Iran two, China three - the terrorists are down the list. But it's amazing to me that we can still consider Russia a threat. On the contrary, they've been very helpful in the Middle East, trying to calm the situation and respect the rights of sovereign countries to exist. It's the U.S. that hasn't - whether in Serbia, the old Yugoslavia, in Africa, and now, Iraq.
Oliver StoneI wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war.
Oliver StoneIf you make the movie from your heart and it stands over time, that's what matters to me.
Oliver StoneI love the act of writing. I like the quiet, internal aspect of it. If I lost track of that, I couldn't direct the same way. I couldn't be a director for-hire; it's just not my nature.
Oliver StoneIf we [Americans] are a strong people, a united people, why do we always have to hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? It got worse, because after the war we thought we'd won it. That's the first myth. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war. Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets, not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on.
Oliver StoneKennedy was significantly different than Eisenhower before him, and different from Johnson after him. So those three years were the beginning of a dรฉtente with the Soviet Union, a new feeling for peace, a seeking out of a new ally with the Soviet Union - the end of the Cold War, as Kennedy called it in his American University speech.
Oliver Stone