Why famous director Oliver Stone never forgets Vietnam?

In September 1966, Oliver Stone withdrew from Yale University for the second time, never to return. His first autobiographical manuscript was rejected. Heartbroken, at the age of 21, he decided to go to Vietnam as a US infantryman.

Young Oliver Stone - Photo: Slant

"To join the war of my generation" - Oliver Stone wrote like that. But his personal reason was deeper. After dropping out of Yale, dreaming of becoming a novelist but receiving his first failure, he did not have the courage to end his life. And he went to Vietnam to let God do it for him. In April 1967, he "volunteered for the army", arriving in Vietnam on September 15, 1967. The war was not glorious but terrifying and profound. "A battle all night, with artillery shells, aircraft shells, incendiary bullets, bombs falling without stopping - not once, from midnight until dawn. And in the flash of those explosions, I saw the last bodies turned into stiff corpses, they could have been sculpted by Michelangelo". "Such power, so much death in one place at the same time. Never to be forgotten" - Stone wrote in his memoir Chasing the light.

Vietnam in the life of an American director

After just over a year, in November 1968, Oliver Stone left Vietnam. He was nearly 23 years old at the time, but he became aimless, immersed in hallucinogens and loneliness, imprisoned and then prosecuted for federal smuggling... He preferred to stay unconscious so as not to feel any pain after witnessing so many deaths that he thought "No one should have to witness so many deaths".

In his memoir Chasing the Light, director Oliver Stone devoted a large amount of space to writing about Vietnam - Photo: Jean Paul Guilloteau/Express-Rea

Stone did not believe he had “post-traumatic stress disorder”—PTSD, as the American media kept saying after the war—but he was furious whenever anyone mentioned the war and Nixon, the newly elected US president, was continuing it. Paranoid, isolated, and uncertain about the future, Stone bought a few books on screenwriting out of curiosity. Having failed at writing, he decided to try his hand at screenwriting.

That turn changed Oliver Stone's life.

Of course, with cinema, it is difficult to succeed at first. Stone's first script was called Break , but it was never made into a film. It was a symbolic and allegorical account of the Vietnam War, with a young rebel as the main character, much like James Cameron's Avatar .

Realizing he was not up to the mark, Stone went to film school, where he made his first short film , Last Year in Vietnam. The film tells the story of a young veteran living alone in New York, packing all his mementos and heavy memories of Vietnam into a small bag.

"A part of me died in Vietnam"

Page by page in his memoir Chasing the Light, Oliver Stone - a famous American film director, screenwriter and producer, now 78 years old - acknowledges the influence of Vietnam on his life and career.

Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone, published in the US since 2020 and recently translated into Vietnamese, published by The Gioi Publishing House and Phuongnambook - Photo: MI LY

The book has many pages that are really hard for the reader, when Stone tells about his experiences in Vietnam. None of these experiences are bright and give people hope to live. He is deeply troubled by the way American soldiers treated poor civilians in Vietnam: the massacres, the moments of madness when they pulled out their guns and shot indiscriminately. Stone himself once went crazy from exhaustion and threatened an old Vietnamese farmer by firing several warning shots, but he stopped at the final limit: not killing civilians. Or when he stopped three American soldiers from raping two teenage Vietnamese girls. "There were the thinnest lines that stopped me, the thinnest thread of humanity in me that could not be broken" - the director admitted. One year in the war, a lifetime to heal. Stone wrote: "A part of me was paralyzed there... died in Vietnam, was murdered". Returning to America, he did not truly awaken until he was 30 years old, in 1976. While completing the script for Platoon - which later became the 1987 film that won four Oscars - Stone relived memories of Vietnam to confront the past.

Oliver Stone (right) accepts the 1987 Oscar for Platoon from film legend Elizabeth Taylor - Photo: X by Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone was born in 1946. He is a controversial but also very successful filmmaker, having won numerous awards including the Oscar, BAFTA, Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe. Oliver Stone's most famous films are Platoon - which won him the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director; Born on the Fourth of July - won the Oscar for Best Director; Midnight Express - won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. He is also the director of Salvador, Wall Street, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, JFK, Nixon, Snowden... and the screenwriter of Scarface, Evita... Source: https://tuoitre.vn/vi-sao-dao-dien-lung-danh-oliver-stone-khong-bao-gio-quen-duoc-viet-nam-2024070310170364.htm