AARP Hearing Center
| Chasing the Light, Oliver Stone's newly published memoir of his first 40 years, is a ride as wild as any of his movies. But the scariest part isn't the Vietnam War, where he enlisted after dropping out of Yale (inspiring his Oscar-winning Platoon); nor his stint in a Mexican jail (which influenced his Oscar-winning Midnight Express); nor his druggy, crazy days as wunderkind director of Salvador, JFK, and Born on the Fourth of July. It turns out, as the 73-year-old director and screenwriter tells AARP, that the biggest drama was his own family life.
Your talent seems rooted in your parents’ personalities. Your dad — a conservative, unhappy Wall Street man with unproduced plays in his desk drawer — thought you were a radical bum and wished you were like your cousin, the millionaire Harvard economics teacher. And your mom?
Oliver Stone: Looking back, I can see the patterns of my father's discipline merging with my mother's indulgence. My father — that's where the writing came from. And as a director, you gotta look at my mother, who's a partygoer, a party animal.
They both took you to the movies a lot, but in a way she was making a movie in your house every night.
Yeah. Mom would be the director in me. I think I am the contradiction of those two. I'm double-minded, as Homer said of Odysseus.
