David Leon Talks About Making His Feature-Directoring Debut With 'Orthodox'

Stephen Graham as Benjamin

 As an actor, David Leon has appeared in films including Oliver Stone's Alexander and Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla. His hard-hitting new film Orthodox, starring Stephen Graham as a boxing Orthodox Jew, marks his feature-directing debut.  

Getting people to open their wallets for a first feature is never easy, says actor-turned filmmaker David Leon, whose provocative debut, Orthodox, is playing in the UK Jewish Film Festival. “You know no one is going to give you that opportunity on a silver plate. So you have to find innovative and dynamic ways of working around the system."

He started by making a short version, as “a kind of pilot”, to give potential investors an idea of what the feature-length movie would look and feel like. Also called Orthodox, it starred Stephen Graham (This is England, Broadwalk Empire) as an Orthodox Jew called Benjamin who's alienated himself from his community by becoming a boxer. The short was self-contained and existed in its own right. However, by making the material part of the longer version, Leon, who had gained experience in front of the camera in movies such as Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla and Oliver Stone's Alexander, only needed to raise funding for a 70 minute, rather than a 90 minute, feature. 

Whilst it was a clever (and ultimately successful) strategy, getting a feature off the ground was still difficult. The film's Orthodox Jewish backdrop could be regarded as somewhat niche, but Leon always saw this as a strength. 

“It was my intention that it would be niche,” he says. “I think when you make a micro-budget film like this, you have a responsibility to deal with subject matter that is niche, and probably in an unconventional way, because it is the only thing that allows your story to stand out, quite often."

 Leon was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne and is Jewish on his father's side. His religious upbringing was “moderate”, with neither parent forcing their different point of view on him. “As a consequence, it made me much more inquisitive,” he says. “And as I grew older, I became more intrigued by the conflicts that presented. And there certainly was conflict when my mother and father got together.” 

He describes himself as “half Jewish”, an identification which is “a very personal thing”, he says. He knows that to the Orthodox community he is in no senses Jewish, and this informed some of the feelings surrounding Benjamin's situation in the film. A proud and dedicated family man, he longs to be fully acccepted by his community, but the choices he has made in his life – including marrying a secular woman who converted – and his inability to meet the standards of observance demanded of him, have landed him between worlds. 

His troubles begin when he defies his father and takes up boxing, following a violent anti-Semitic attack. Leon witnessed such an assault on a Hassidic boy by “secular kids” in Stamford Hill. The fact that it happened in liberal, cosmopolitan London made it seem all the more “archaic and barbaric”, he says. 

“What was interesting was that that boy was literally wearing his beliefs on his sleeve. We all believe in various things but we don't all dress in a way that projects that for the world to see, and that's an incredibly brave thing. I wondered whether [the attack] would make him more intent on his values, or whether it could make him question them.” 

That Benjamin's father effectively cuts his son off for (reluctantly) pursuing boxing as a response to his attack, seems extreme.

Leon, though, spent 18 months in Orthodox communities in Newcastle, Gateshead, and north London doing background research for the short and feature, and says he learned that “the idea of one man inflicting pain upon another was frowned upon in the context of the Jewish faith.”

Stephen Graham (Right)

He found this fascinating. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, Jewish men used boxing as way to escape from being part of an underclass, and to assimilate and confront anti-Semitism. The sport turned them into heroes. But times change and Saul's reaction has to be seen in the wider context of the challenges now facing a community whose cultural cohesion, Leon seems to be suggesting, is under threat from modernity. 

“The intention was never to make an observation on the religion,” he explains. “It was much more about the culture. And not just about Jewish culture but about 21^st century culture and the demands that are placed on people within the Orthodox Jewish community as a consequence.”

The community is not monolithic but composed of individuals. And while they may all live under the same umbrella of shared beliefs, “some will believe in certain things more extremely than others”, says Leon. “I think what that does, in this day and age where we have access to information at the touch of a button, particularly to kids and those that have less strength of character, or those that are more inquisitive, is present a real conflict that I think the Orthodox Jewish community has never had before.” 

Benjamin represents this as a character and, in some respects, in the choice of actor playing him. Stephen Graham ties on Tefillin and wears a kippah like he's been doing it all of his life, but he's not Jewish. In fact the question of whether a Jew should play the role never came up, says Leon. 

“In many ways the character is as much secular as he is Jewish, because of the way he chooses to live his life. So there was something interesting, as a film-maker, in taking somebody who is not Jewish and introducing them to that world, because here is a man who to all intents and purposes is not living his life as a Jewish man; he is living his life as a kind of a halfway house.” 

Benjamin's predicament – inspired by someone Leon met – allows the film to reveal some of the different sides of the community, which is portrayed honestly, seemingly accurately, and without sentimentality. It offers people love and security, but can be tough on those who don't observe its practices.

“That was my experience,” says Leon. “The community can be a very safe environment and somewhere people feel very close, and there was a real sense of people looking after one another. But it's fair to say the demands placed on the individual are very restrictive and very unrelenting. And I think if you don't toe the line, you can be cast aside and ostracised.”

Many do meet the demands, of course. For Leon, as a film-maker, however, “those who fall through the cracks and fall by the wayside” are more interesting. 

That said, he stresses that he came away from the process of making Orthodox having encountered a “beautiful feeling of being willing to forgive. There is an unremitting attitude towards forgiveness, and I think that is something that the Jewish faith, particularly, upholds.”

An edited version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, November 13, 2015 

From The Vault: 9/11 WTC Survivor John McLoughlin

As a Port Authority Police Officer, John McLoughlin led a rescue team to find survivors of the WTC attacks on 9/11. He and team-mate William Jimeno became trapped and looked doomed to die. Their story became the subject of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Here McLoughlin recounts what happened.

What was your reaction the first time you watched World Trade Center?

"My general reaction was that it was very well done and it was very emotional. Because it was so well done, it was difficult to see."

What were your initial thoughts when the idea was proposed to you about this film being made?

"Well, it was a process that came up before they actually said they were going to be doing a movie. During that process, Will [Jimeno] and I weren't looking to have our story told. It was important for us to tell the story of the men from our team we lost that day - we were the last ones to see them alive - and the heroics of the rescue workers. That was the important part and what we wanted to let the world know happened. So with that in mind we were very much in support of it to get their stories out."

Some people have said that it is too soon for films like this and United 93. It never struck you as being too early?

"No, my observation since it's come out in the United States is that those who maybe said it was too early and have changed their minds about it. We read a lot about that in the press and once they saw it they realised it's not a 9/11 terrorist story; this is a 9/11 story about humanity. Part of what is important to us is that everybody has their own level in dealing with tragedy. Some people will never be able to watch movies about 9/11. I mean I personally witnessed some of that trauma of people that I know. But some people a year later would have been okay to see it. The important thing is that this is part of us not forgetting, that we have to remember the tragedy of that day.

"It is also a historical event and if you want to get the information on a historical event, you'd better get it while the people are still alive and the memories are fresh and the details are still there. It's a shame we had all these soldiers from World War 2 that now are in their 60s, 70s and 80s, and all of a sudden somebody said, ‘Maybe we should find out what they went through.' We should have found out what they went through when they were in their 20s, because suddenly these walking pieces of history are disappearing, and people are realising that. I think that's part of it too. It was an historical event, we were all part of it, and while the story is still fresh in our minds, tell it."

The film is also a love story, between you and your wife, Donna, and between WIll Jimeno and his wife, Allison. How did you react when they said they wanted to do something so personal? What was your reaction when you saw your relationship on screen?

"I think the emotion of the trauma of 9/11 is more difficult to deal with than telling the story of my family and my wife. The story about my family, my wife, is a happy story. It's a good story to tell. So the more difficult part was telling the details of what happened to us and our friends on 9/11. It was nice that people understand how families come together. I hope people get out of the movie how important it is to appreciate your kids, appreciate your loved ones. Life gets too involved and you start taking too many things for granted that maybe we shouldn't in our normal everyday life. People take away from the movie that they should be thankful for what they've got and hang onto it. So that's very good."

What did you draw on to survive?

"It was thinking about my family. I had to get out for my family. I had to try and survive for them."

What was your first thought when you realised what was going on?

"When the planes had hit the towers? At first I thought this was just a very tragic accident. Until I got down on the scene and realised how significant it was. Then I realised this was much more serious. But I didn't think we were facing the end of the world or anything. I thought we were facing a serious condition and a lot of people were in need up in those towers."

Was it a tough moment when you asked for volunteers to go into the towers with you, or was it just part of the job?

"I took it as part of the job. I knew what we had to do. I worked Emergency Services, which is a specialised unit within a police department to deal with these kinds of events, and I worked at the World Trade Centre for 12 years setting up equipment and training and preparing for a major event. Nothing to that significance, though. So as a supervisor it basically was my job. I had to get people in. I didn't order people in because I knew the significance of it. I asked for people that were comfortable with the equipment we were going to need to get up into those towers, and those men stepped forward that were comfortable with it. Then there was no hesitation. I didn't feel bad or I was doing something unusual asking people to come with me up into the tower."

When you were trapped, did you experience any kind of guilt with regards to the people you had led into the building?

"At that time, that day, no, I had no guilt feelings. I knew these officers, I worked with them, I was comfortable and confident that these were the type of men that with direction were going to do the job right. So I was comfortable with the men I was going in with and that we would be able to handle whatever we came across. It was just circumstances turned out beyond any of our control and tragic things ended up happening."

You helped put emergency plans in place after the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993. Could any preparations for something like this have been put in place, because we have heard subsequently that the government was being warned by the CIA security services that terrorists were planning to hijack planes, and there have been suggestions that they may have had concerns that thy might be used as weapons?

"It wasn't handed down to my level, to street level, that that was a possibility. We had trained and set up contingencies, different types of training scenarios for problems, and that wasn't one of our training scenarios. Let's put it this way: we could have dealt with an accidental accident in a better manner than in the manner it was done, which was a terrorist event with such a large airliner. That was beyond our training and there was nothing in our training scenarios that we had set up."

Were you being kept in the dark to some extent and are you angry?

"[Sighs] Can you be angry over it? No. Sometimes people think this is such a simple process that they assimilate this information, it's black and white, cut and dried, this was going to happen, let's put everybody in fear of going into high-rises and tell them planes may crash into your buildings any day now. I've been in a position on a lower level, I would never want to be second guessed - you know, what we call Monday morning quarterback - on what happened the day before, the day after. I am comfortable that people did what they felt . . . Could I live with people actually knowing what was going to happen and consciously made the decision not to supply it? I don't think that occurred. You'd have to be some kind of horrific human being to consciously allow something like that to happen. I don't think that happened."

How did you feel about being played by Nicolas Cage?

"I was honoured that Nicolas wanted to take this role on. He truly went into it with a very dedicated attitude to get this as close as he could."

Can you tell us about how you worked together with the actors, Nicolas and Maria Bello, who plays your wife, Donna?

 "Well they both came to our home and we sat and talked. Nicolas came to the house, we went out, we had hours of discussions. We went to lunch together, just a couple of guys going out talking. We went out to a couple of places, we were on the set, and I think he understood. He went on patrol with one of our sergeants; all the main characters that play police officers went to the bus terminal [in midtown Manhattan], went on patrols, were assigned to a police officer and went out on patrol with them. Nicolas went out on patrol with one of our sergeants so they could see what it's like to be a street police officer in New York City as opposed to a Hollywood police officer. One of the aspects of the movie that I liked was you saw real cops. You didn't see the Hollywood cop. You saw fear. You saw how they handle themselves in public. They got the feel of the mannerisms of police officers because they went out with them, and they portrayed how a normal police officer goes out in a day in New York City with the Port Authority Police."

How involved were you? Were you on set during the shoot?

"No. We went into the details extensively prior to even the first piece of film being shot. All the details were already down and discussed over and over and over again. Then as they progressed with the film, we were on the set. I was only on the set once in New York. I was out there 10 days in California when they were doing the rescue scenes, and in between that if they had any questions they would call me up at home and asked me what was I wearing, what was I doing, how did I feel, and I'd fill them in. But I wasn't on the set extensively."

How much did you help them with the physical details of the locations?

"The debris-field set, I couldn't even help them with. I never saw the debris field. I was in the inside. There were two separate sets. The one where you see Nicolas and Michael [Pena, playing Will Jimeno] where they were buried, that was inside and they had this set inside for the hole. Then there was an outside set where there was a debris field. So the only thing I could help them with was the hole. They had to talk to all the Port Authority Police officers, New York City Police officers, and New York firemen to help them on the set with what they saw. Mainly the rescue workers on the set came out with us so they helped them out with what they saw and what they did on the debris field. And all those officers and firemen, it was very emotional for them. That's how realistic the set was when they saw that debris field."

Do you and your family talk about 9/11 much today?

"At this point we don't have a lot of discussions about 9/11, especially with family. We've talked about it. Everybody knows and everybody in the family knows what's going on. We don't want that to be a constant part of our life so we go on with life. Sometimes strangers are curious and ask questions. Our friends know most of the details and they don't bring it up."

Often people who have suffered a trauma cannot speak about it for some time. Did you go through a period like that?

"No, I don't think there was any period of time I couldn't talk about it. But there was definitely a period of when I couldn't deal with you as calmly as now. It was extremely emotional to deal with, whereas certain aspects of it now it's a lot easier for me to deal with than years ago. But aspects of it are still very emotional and raw and probably always will be."

Tell me about the moment you were pulled out.

"When I came out on the stretcher I didn't know the towers were down. I thought it was car bombs that went off. When I got trapped I was in my own little world. So not only didn't I know the towers had come down, I had no idea of the magnitude of the event at that time. I only found that out months later. It obviously upset me because it was very personal to me. This wasn't an event where nearly 3000 people died but it had over 30 of my personal friends die. So this wasn't an event or tragedy that I was separated from, plus I lost three men that I had personally brought into that building, so it was very personal."

Copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2014

Hollywood Maverick Oliver Stone Goes South Of The Border

Early in his new documentary South Of The Border, Oliver Stone tells the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez that after spending three days with him, he realises he must have had to grow a thick skin. It is one of several moments in this entertaining survey of the new Latin America, and the popular movement that is changing its relationship with the United States, where Stone's identification with his subject becomes apparent, and lends the film an extra layer of fascination.

Like his interviewees - Chavez, Bolivia's coca-chewing president Evo Morales, Cuba's Raul Castro, Argentina's Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Ecuador's Rafael Correa - Stone has been demonised and caricatured by large sections of the US media, often because, like Michael Moore, he goes against the grain.

When he challenged the lone gunman theory in the assassination of John F Kennedy in JFK, the attacks reached hysterical proportions. Stone, a Vietnam veteran who was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster, was not just wrong, according to some, he was un-American.

With South Of The Border he has again come under fire, notably from the New York Times' Larry Rohter. His claims of errors and misrepresentations began a written war of words with the film-makers, who retaliated with their own accusations of inaccurate reporting and bias.

Sitting across a boardroom table from me in a London office, jet-lagged but voluble, Stone says that these days he views such onslaughts as a "missile shield". "That was the Reagan Star Wars idea that he'd shoot out of the sky any incoming missiles," he laughs. "I think there's a similar feeling in the United States media, even if they like the movie, of 'This must be a trick. I can't accept this as a fact because it's Stone, and at best it's going to be rose-coloured agitprop. Which is fine, as long as I know that it's agitprop,' as if I was secretly manipulating the gears."

He wasn't, he insists. But then neither was he firing the kind of tough questions at Chavez that the BBC's Stephen Sackur did recently on HARDtalk. A film-maker who believes in the classic Hollywood tradition of giving audiences characters they can care about, Stone says: "I go and I say, 'I'm not interviewing you as a journalist. I'm not a prosecuting attorney. Tell me what you're thinking about and what's going on about this. If you lie that's fine. People may see it on camera or not.' If it's a clear thing where there's a tremendous dislocation I will (come back at them], and I have."

Stone has inevitably been accused of being too pally with Chavez - a man as bad as Bin Laden or Hitler, according to Fox News - as he was when he spent time with Fidel Castro for his documentary Commandante (he recently interviewed him for a third time). However, the aim of South Of The Border, he explains, was to let people who haven't got a voice in the Western media speak for themselves. As for the charge that, in Chavez, he is giving a platform to a dictator, he says: "I have been in dictatorships. This is bullshit. It's really a Right Wing/Left Wing battle in Venezuela where the Right Wing has used Chavez as this egomaniac character they can attack much easier than they can the concept of reform."

But his approach is unobjective, say his critics; he is a patsy. Stone sighs. "I could never be fair or balanced enough to suit their needs unless I turned against Chavez. I don't know where the line is. I don't know where true objectivity lies. I just think that you have to take it as you can do it."

South Of The Border draws parallels between the way much of the US media fell in step with the Bush administration's foreign policy in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and the way it demonised Chavez in advance of a coup - backed, it appears, by America - to topple him in 2002. Stone knows from personal experience how dangerous this can be. As a young man he dropped out of Yale and enlisted for combat duty in Vietnam. Then, the American media was behind the war.

"I feel like I was a gullible, stupid kid, brainwashed by that education system that made the ethno-American point of view dominant," he says now. "I really had not a clue as to what was going on. The media really marched to war and it took me a long time to de-educate myself."

Indeed, he didn't "wake up overnight" in Vietnam. Caught in the thick of it, "I did my duty, but I kept my moral lights, and I did in any situation what I thought I should do. Which is to say not kill civilians, and find the enemy and kill them before they kill you. What I saw with my own eyes woke me up to a degree of pain and suffering I had never experienced in my life. I saw the racism and maltreatment, the regard of the Vietnamese as a lesser people. But I really only became aware of the historical causes after the war. It took me a few years to recover."

Studying film-making in New York helped, he says, by providing an outlet that "curbed my illegal mentality". What does he mean? "Coming back from a war you're not exactly a member of society," Stone reflects. "You're living in the bush and you're living by a different set of rules. The violence doesn't end with the country, it crosses the border, and we bring the violence home. Violence begets violence is an old cliché but it's true. Unless you stop."

Violence can take many forms, of course, and right now we're dealing with the economic violence of the financial meltdown in 2008. It has given Stone the perfect opportunity to bring back Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas's slick insider trader who, in Wall Street in 1987, notoriously declared that "Greed is good". In the long-delayed follow-up, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Gekko emerges from jail broke, into a world where the hedge funders have become what he was. Greed's not just good now, it's legal.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of banks refused to collaborate with Stone on the project. He talked to "dissidents and people who had made independent money", but the banks, including Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, "were very arrogant. They closed their doors. They were scared of us. Only the Royal Bank of Canada said welcome."

Coming out so close together, South Of The Border and Wall Street 2 make an interesting pairing. Does Stone see them as complementing each other in any way? "Only in the sense that Wall Street's responsible for a lot of the misery in South America, which it is." On the other hand, "it can also be an instrument for good," he says, pointing to Shia LaBeouf's character, who is part of "an idealistic new generation". That said, being able to talk to some bankers gave Stone an insight into the "new class" and its "evident immorality". Compared to the 1980s, it's "sharper, meaner, tougher", he claims. A lot of them saw the original Wall Street and were, contrary to the film-maker's intentions, inspired to become traders because of Gekko. "It shows you the immorality of the broker, no?" he says, although he adds quickly: "Some of them are good. My father was a good one."

What the impact of the new film will be is anyone's guess. Like the first film, Wall Street 2 is meant to be a morality tale. Its message? "Enough. Enough of this bullshit. It's crazy what's going on. The system is whacko."

If people misunderstand, it won't entirely surprise Stone. It happened not only with Wall Street but also Natural Born Killers, which instead of being viewed as a satire on the media's fascination with and exploitation of violence, was taken by some as a celebration of violence.

"I don't think I could make a film that would not be misinterpreted," he says. "It seems to be my destiny." This doesn't bother Stone any more. He has come to accept it. He tells me that he sometimes feels like the character of an "old drunk" in A Chinese Ghost Story, who dances and repels spirits. "I guess it's my destiny to be perceived as a fool and a drunk," he says, "but underneath that, the Chinaman is very effective in exorcising the demons."

Originally published in The Scotsman

Oliver Stone: "I didn't want to be the bad guy again."

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: cop out or honest response to 9/11?

A month after the 11 September attacks, Oliver Stone gave a talk in New York. He said that if he ever tackled 9/11, his movie would be a realistic, politically balanced examination of terrorism from the American and Arab perspectives. He offered The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s unbiased account of the Algerian revolution, as a touchstone.

Five years later, Stone’s World Trade Center is being hailed as a masterpiece by American conservatives – a first for the director who attacked US foreign policy in Salvador, portrayed a disabled Vietnam veteran's transformation into an anti-war protestor in Born on the Fourth of July, and explored numerous conspiracy theories with JFK. He has made it easy for them: there is no mention of terrorism or Arabs or George Bush's failure to respond swiftly to events.

Instead, Stone focuses his narrative on the true story of two Port Authority police officers, Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) and Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), who survived beneath the rubble of the Twin Towers, and the tense uncertainty experienced by their families. It is powerful cinema, just not in the way you expect from Stone.

What happened to that other film, I ask him, when we meet at the Venice Film Festival? He sighs and recalls another comment he made in New York.

“I said that 9/11 was a rebellion against what Arabs considered an oppressive system of capitalism and military troops in the Middle East. I got killed for that.” He claims it was a misunderstanding. “In the English language, the concept of rebellion or revolution is considered to be a good thing, but I didn’t mean it that way. To those Arabs who felt that way it was a good thing, is what I was saying.”

The attacks hit Stone hard. He concedes that while it would have been impossible to finance the kind of film he was advocating in America at that time, he could have tried to make it abroad. “Suffice it to say that after the criticism I got I kind of shied away," he says candidly. "I didn’t want to be the bad guy again.”

Some have now accused Stone of going soft, or doing World Trade Center to atone for the (perceived) failure of his historical epic, Alexander. That film actually did very well outside America, he insists. “We did $170m. It’s no joke. It was one of the top 20 films of the year. It’s not a turkey like the British-language press would say.” Nixon and Heaven and Earth were by far his “worst financial disasters”.

Stone, who unusually was a hired hand on WTC, says he did the film because he liked the script and because he understood the camaraderie between its uniformed protagonists, having served as an infantryman in Vietnam. Wounded twice, he also knew what it was like to survive by a hair’s breadth.

“I got a bullet wound right here,” he says, pulling up the hair on the back of his neck. “The bullet went right through. I guess this much more and I would be dead.”

The director argues that he is not avoiding politics in the film because there were none that day, just shock and anger. Even so, a “stupid comment” made at the end of the film by a marine calling for revenge means he now finds himself accused of making a pro Bush film by some liberals.

Stone is eager to defend his record. While he believes they were right to “take vengeance" in Afghanistan - "We went after the right people” - he was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning. “I was castigated in America for my positions against Bush and the Iraq war,” he says. “Many of the liberals in America, don’t forget, were for the war. Hilary Clinton voted for that war. John Kerry voted for that war. The New Yorker voted for that war. I didn’t. I did Alexander instead because I wanted to get out of America.”

He dismisses suggestions that World Trade Center could help the Republicans in the forthcoming mid-term election because it would reinforce the fear of terror. “I don’t see it that way. It’s demystifies part of the 9/11 phenomena. It puts you right in the middle and says, ‘Okay, how bad can this be?’ Yeah, it’s as rough as it gets, but those two guys got out. In other words: you can conquer your fear.” At a time when governments are using fear as a weapon, this is arguably a political statement in itself.

“This movie was not to be politicised,” Stone protests. “To politicise it is to indicate that the Left is as fucked up as the Right, frankly. Some of these people on the Left have lost sight of humanity. They’re so anti Bush that they have lost sight of the possibility of change, and change comes out of the heart. We’ve got to talk to the centre again. We’ve got to be at the centre. The movie is very much about peace at the centre.”

In this respect, World Trade Center is, arguably, as much a reaction against trends in Hollywood filmmaking as anything else. Stone appears to suggest that US cinema, consciously or otherwise, helped prepare the American public for the invasion of Iraq. ”The war iconography changed again,” he says, “and it went back to shock and awe at the American military machine.”

Films like Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbour (“I hated that film because it basically said we won Pearl Harbour”), even Saving Private Ryan (“If I had been in that group, if I had been in the infantry, we would have killed that sergeant long ago”), he believes, “had a big influence on people about how powerful and technically superior we were”. Meanwhile, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, which showed the cost of war, were ignored, he claims.

“I got very depressed in that period,” he says sadly. “I mean it was my life’s work. I was a forgotten figure. Nobody even mentioned those films, or very rarely. I got my first taste of how history filters out what it doesn’t want to remember.”

Conversely, World Trade Center put Stone on the cover of Newsweek. He is the hero of the hour. However, his conservative supporters could be in for a shock. Speaking in Moscow recently, Stone reinforced his maverick reputation by hinting that he was considering doing a film about “a conspiracy by a group of people in the American administration who have an agenda and who used 9/11 to further that agenda”.

Has Stone gone soft or is he playing a long game? Time will tell.

The original version of this article appeared in The Big Issue.

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006