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CAROL OLSEN DAY: Hello, everyone.
I'm Carol Olsen Day of The New York Times.
It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this special
Times Talks during Adweek, just for Adweek, presented by
our Times Talk sponsor, Continental Airlines.
It's truly an honor to have such an accomplished filmmaker
on our stage today.
He is a three-time Academy Award winner and the creator
of many hit movies, including the iconic Wall Street, and
now, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas
reprising his Oscar-winning role as the Machiavellian
Gordon Gekko.
And as you know from the Times coverage in the past few
weeks, in Business, the Sunday Magazine, Movies, and Deal
Book, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is the most talked
about movie of the year, rising to the top of the box
office in its first weekend.
You'll hear much more from our guest and about the film in
just a moment.
But first, I'm delighted to introduce our moderator.
for the past 25 years, he's been writing
about media and culture.
He writes a perceptive must-read for the Monday
Business section called Media Equation.
As the first carpetbagger, he covered all the news,
nonsense, and players in the seasonal Oscars race, and his
brutally honest memoir, The Night of the Gun, was named
one of last year's 100 most notable books.
So please join me in welcoming our interviewer, David Carr,
and our very special guest, Oliver Stone.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID CARR: Kind of a quiet bunch.
You think you're scared?
I'm sitting next to Oliver.
A couple years ago, I was doing a story about film
financing in Louisiana, and specifically people shooting
films in Shreveport.
And Shreveport has a lot of good locations.
A very good infrastructure supports the film industry.
Louisiana's been very aggressive.
And they said, we have five movies shooting here.
The only movie you can't go to--
it's a closed set-- is W, it's an Oliver Stone film.
Me being a reporter, it's like, that's the one I'm going
to for sure.
And so even though I was doing just this broad-based story
about production, and what Shreveport was good for, and
stuff, whenever you tell a reporter they can't do
something, that's what they're going to do.
So I fought and fought and moved into position.
Pretty soon, I was on the outer ring of the set.
And then, they were walking me around it.
Then I spotted where Oliver's trailer was.
And lo and behold, by hook and by crook, I ended up in a
trailer with Oliver Stone.
And I had not a thought in my pea brain.
I just wanted to be there.
And he started in talking about America's history of
cultural imperialism, about existentialism, about the
mixed-up legacy of the current president.
And my head just turned to red mist. I was completely
unprepared.
I've tried to do a better job today including seeing Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps.
What a great movie.
Who's seen it?
[APPLAUSE]
We'll try to keep those spoilers to a minimum,
although judging from the box office, opening at number one,
the biggest open for an Oliver Stone film ever, which is a
pretty big bump to get over.
And just before we got up here, we found out that it
opened in India as the biggest film ever for
a non-dubbed film.
So this movie has legs.
And there's a reason for that.
It's as current and as of-the-moment as your and
mine's bank account, however diminished it might be.
It's about America's obsession with leverage, with more, with
getting more than their share.
I wonder--
I left there worried as hell about America.
I went with my 13-year-old, and I just said, well, this is
the country you're going to get.
Good luck!
I wonder when you got done making it if you were
depressed about where we're headed?
OLIVER STONE: Oddly enough, not at all.
I had the opposite reaction.
That's why I put the David Byrne and Brian Eno.
They are philosophers, and they have a sense of irony,
whimsy, you could call it, that this thing is a cycle.
It's a bubble.
And we bubble imagery in the movie, as you know.
Look, you're as old as I am, or maybe a little younger.
But my father was in Wall Street, and he saw the
Depression, and he used to talk about it.
He saw World War II.
And, of course, I saw the 1960s bubble.
And I say it's a bubble.
It's just as big as this one because my life was at this
place in the '50s, and then with the Vietnam War,
everything started getting crazier--
the sense of inflation of expectations, the
high society bigness.
Everything got bigger during the '60s partly because of the
Vietnam War's inflation of body count.
So I saw that.
I said, wow, this is quite a jump.
I felt the evolutionary jump, and then quantum leap.
'70s, I don't think of as a leap.
I think of it as a time of long sideburns, and John
Travolta, and The Fonz, and stuff that wasn't particularly
exciting to me.
The '80s, we had Ronald Reagan, and I took another
unexpected leap forward with Ronald Reagan.
Whatever you thought, it was the age of greed, the age of
consumerism, possessions.
Material became a god more so than ever, although it was
always an American obsession.
We saw more CEOs on magazine covers than ever, and yachts,
and Robin Leach, I just thought of him.
The Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous became very popular
as an early reality show.
OK, that's the second bubble.
And I was never going to be the same again.
And then, in the late '90s, it occurred to me that this is
all happening again in a strange way with this hype
over the internet and this tech bubble, whatever you want
to call it.
Prices were paid-- what was it?
Warner Brothers paid, at that point, was it $2,
$3 billion for AOL?
DAVID CARR: Time Warner, yeah.
OLIVER STONE: Record setting, these numbers, a billion
dollars in the Gekko era would be like $100 million to buy
into a company.
Or even $40 million is big money.
And here, they're talking a billion dollars, two billion
dollars for a company that had not even
several quarters of profit.
There was no sense of definition.
There was the old concept of P&E, price and earnings share,
and there was just nothing there.
And people were paying big money.
So I knew we were in something different here.
It was like another Vietnam type experience, or a Reagan.
And we went shooting for it.
That collapsed.
But the economy, instead of readjusting, in a strange way
after 2001, kept going.
It snuck up on us, true, unless you followed the
businesses.
So by the 2008 period, it was insane, theoretically insane,
to put $800 billion into a bailout of all of these
central banks that were now behaving like lunatics in a
casino, like bookies.
I
And I'm still not down from it.
But essentially, there's four bubbles in my lifetime.
And I don't know how can we assume that there's not going
to be a fifth or a sixth if we live that long?
So the world that we're in has always been this constant rise
to another level.
In other words, the longer you live, everything you don't
expect to happen probably will happen if, to
paraphrase David Burton.
DAVID CARR: At the heart of the first Wall Street was--
I thought of it at the time as the last word on the pathology
of American business.
And no more movies need be made about the things that
greed will make men and women do.
And yet, here we are, back, still a very ripe topic.
Back to a place where it's the same forces, only it's all
metastasised with more zeroes behind it.
OLIVER STONE: I would not have done a movie about the wealth
because I thought it was boring to celebrate wealth
until 2008, when there was some definition, some crime
and punishment aspect to it, a sense of karma coming home to
roost. And there was.
The trust between us and the banks, and the trust that
should exist in society has been diminished.
The whole issue of a credit bubble, the idea that the
Federal Reserve board in the movie.
I know that those of you who've seen it know there's
two very important Federal Reserve board scenes.
In one of them, they let Bear Stearns go, or the equivalent
of Bear Stearns.
In the other one, they bailout the banks.
And that's a big deal.
It's too big to fail.
So that bubble involves the concept of
overnight money market.
At one point, Josh Brolin says, if you let us go, all
the banks in this room will be out of business by the end of
the week, which was what I heard about that.
Specifically about Goldman and Morgan would be the last two
banks to go, investment banks to fall.
And this is all because of the overnight money markets and
the money market itself.
The concept of [INAUDIBLE].
The concept that your credit--
at this point, you have to realize that Goldman Sachs had
almost $10 billion in equity and probably-- no, $100
billion in equity more than $1 trillion in assets.
$100 billion in equity, $1 trillion in assets, and they
were liable to fold at any point that week.
So you understand the immensity of the credit
[INAUDIBLE]
the concept of trust. If you don't have the trust of the
person in the street who somehow, at midnights, decides
that your money's no good, you're in trouble.
DAVID CARR: Yeah, but if you were in that room that second
meeting, where they get their finger poised over the bubble.
And it's going to say say, it's
going to be like dominoes.
They're all going to fail.
To you, not as a director, I mean you, as a human being
with fairly progressive political values, one part of
you want to say screw 'em?
Let them tumble?
Absent consequence, the moral hazard going forward will be
too significant.
And unless there's consequence to these economic decisions,
these guys will never learn.
So let's just put on the nut cup and let them fail.
OLIVER STONE: That's certainly the big question that will
come and haunt us historically because I think a lot of the
traders at that time said let it go.
Let it go.
Let it sink.
There will be some--
what would happen?
What would happen?
I'm not enough of an economist. But I think there's
been some--
they would have been replaced.
These banks would have been replaced by smaller versions
of some banks.
And they would have come on by now.
Two years later, I'm sure that they would've
been working capital.
The government still had the money.
The Federal Reserve board had the money.
The question was, were these banks?
And I think they scared us.
They scared us very effectively.
And everyone, even in Congress, which balked at
first, went along with it because you had to.
There was a consensus in the air that you have to do this.
DAVID CARR: The issue of too big to fail comes up.
But there's also a broader message in your film that this
financial services, which is this activity of taking the
same dollars, the same trillion dollars, and passing
them around back and forth and giving off the illusion that
that's an economic activity.
That we as a country--
one of the themes I came away with is 40% of what we do is
just passing money around.
That we don't make stuff.
OLIVER STONE: The 40% of the corporate profit in the United
States in 2008, more than 40%, was
actually corporate finance--
was shadow banking and financial services.
Up until 1986, as I remember it, from 1973 to 1986, it
never veered above 16%.
So from '86, you jump from 16% to 40-some percent.
That shows you that the productivity in this country
is now become about financial services, not about
productivity.
My father, who was a stockbroker, used to say,
there should not really be profit without production.
That was the emphasis that was mentioned in the first Wall
Street, and it's also obviously an issue in this
Wall Street.
But what does our country make?
We do make things.
We're still a big manufacturing base.
But that has been diminished.
The worker role in our so-called--
let's say, the employment of our workers has been
diminished significantly.
And the wages of our union workers have
been flat since 1973.
Since 1973, they have not, per capita, earned more.
Keeping up with inflation has been about it.
DAVID CARR: Right.
OLIVER STONE: So it's a very difficult situation we're in.
DAVID CARR: It's a little hard to watch Germany, which still
has an industrial base, China which has--
OLIVER STONE: We do, too, but it's diminished considerably.
DAVID CARR: Your movie gets at that in that there's the dark
side that's going after each other for payback, for
advantage, very well played by Josh Brolin.
That guy in leather is just unbelievable.
You know what?
We should look at this movie a little bit.
Let's run the trailer to start with just so those of you who
haven't seen it can see what it looks like.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Someone reminded me I once said greed is good.
Now, it seems it's legal because everybody is drinking
the same Kool-Aid.
Now, I've been considered a pretty smart guy.
And maybe I was in prison too long.
-One watch, and one mobile phone.
-Because sometimes, it's the only place to stay sane and
look out through those bars and say, is everybody out
there nuts?
[APPLAUSE]
-Gordon Gekko was one of the biggest names on Wall Street
before he went to prison for insider trading.
-That name doesn't mean anything anymore.
-If it weren't for people who took risks, where would we be
in this world?
-You might want to wipe some of that drool off your face.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-Mr. Gekko.
My name Jacob Moore.
I'm going to marry your daughter.
-My daughter hasn't spoken to me in years, and you know it.
-I never knew my dad was a peaceful person.
That always scared me.
-I know it sounds crazy, but people change.
-He's not who you think he is, Jake!
He'll hurt us.
-Why don't you start calling me Gordon?
You're going to be part of the family business.
-You have my attention.
But when you don't know what you're doing,
it's fatal, Mr. Moore.
-So much you don't know, Jacob.
-They took my life.
And when I got out, who's waiting for me?
Nobody.
-This is not about the money.
This is about you and me.
-It's about doing the right thing.
-It's about the game.
-I did tell you, Jake.
I did warn you.
-It's easy to get in.
It's hard to get out.
-Is that a threat?
-Absolutely.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID CARR: OK, so you don't have to--
we'll leave the geopolitics behind and talk about all the
cool people in this movie.
You don't have to watch much of that trailer to see Michael
Douglas really at the height of his powers.
It's hard to imagine--
you probably would have never stepped back to this movie if
he wasn't around and interested, right?
OLIVER STONE: He was at Pressman, and he had asked me
to come on.
Yeah, they wanted to do it again.
I was skeptical because in 2006, nothing had happened.
It was the continuation of that period.
I didn't want to go back.
After 2008, it had a reason for me.
And Gekko was the hook because time had passed and had he
learned a lesson?
Had he changed?
And I think the key to the movie is that he's on the
outside looking in at the beginning.
DAVID CARR: And the key to the movie is you think he's
learned a lesson, but maybe he hasn't, but maybe he has?
You know what I mean?
You're really trying to spot him morally
throughout this film.
And there's a scene with Shia on the subway where you can
see him spider to the fly, set in the hut.
Let's run the clip and you can see what I'm talking about.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-What are you, some kind of energy freedom fighter?
-No, Mr. Gekko.
I'm in this game to make money like anybody else.
-So what about money, Jake?
You like her?
-Do I like her?
I've never--
I've never thought about money as a she.
-Oh.
She lies there in bed at night with you, looking at
you, one eye open.
Money never sleeps.
And she's jealous.
And if you don't pay close, close attention, you'll wake
up in the morning, she might be gone forever.
I think you want in to the family business.
-Which is what?
-Payback.
Except I'm not in that business anymore.
Because one thing I learned in jail is that
money is not the problem.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE] money.
Time is, and your time is just about up.
You know there's fortunes to be made.
Hundreds of millions of dollars betting
against this bubble.
I just wish I had a million.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID CARR: Nobody is perfectly good in this movie.
Everybody is complicated and conflicted.
Shia's character, in a way, he embodies a lot of American
Yankee ingenuity.
He's ambitious.
He's young.
And his big dream is to fund a big fusion reactor which will
produce green energy, which he impressed by, and green money,
which he is into.
Let's talk a little bit about him as a character, how you
thought of him?
OLIVER STONE: Well, I think he's an idealistic young
trader, completely different than Charlie Sheen, who was--
frankly, Charlie wanted to make money.
And he didn't care how he made it.
He was willing to sellout the labor union and his father in
the original.
Here, I think Shia has a different set of-- a
generational idealism, and so does Carey Mulligan.
But he comes into conflict with the power of money.
And we all get tested.
At one point, he does pass false rumors against Josh
Brolin, which is illegal, malicious rumors.
But a lot of people are doing it on Wall Street.
And, of course, he uses the power of rumors.
A sub-theme to the movie is there's two huge montages
where we show what a rumor can destroy companies, as they did
with Bear Stearns and, to a certain
degree, with Lehman Brothers.
Rumor.
And the other thing he does is, as you know, I don't want
to give away too much, but he betray his
girlfriend, his fiancee.
DAVID CARR: Right.
OLIVER STONE: And I think he does it for what he thinks are
legitimate reasons.
But that's what money makes you do.
It makes you do things you don't want to do.
Everyone in the movie, at one point, betrays another person.
It's the nature of the Wall Street game.
DAVID CARR: Well, you have worked in Hollywood on and off
for so long, I'm surprised that you would take such a dim
view of human nature.
Everybody's just--
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER].
OLIVER STONE: Some people would say that this is love
story because actually there are some things matter.
The values that really matter, Gekko sees in the end.
Gekko is not--
he changes, but he's not changed.
He's very much a deal maker.
Giving 10% of what you've made back to get something you want
is not a bad deal for Gekko.
Some people have said that he's soft.
I don't think that he's soft.
But Gekko is older.
And he's wracked with experience and, as he says,
he's lost a son.
When he comes out of prison in that very first scene that you
saw, the key to the movie is that no one's waiting for him.
He has nobody there.
His daughter will not talk to him.
She will not give him any satisfaction.
He has nobody ahead of him except mortality.
Nothing in heaven.
DAVID CARR: Part of what I thought made this an Oliver
Stone film-- and I'm a fanboy.
I'll admit it.
I love your movies, always have. Early on, I thought, who
is a guy that would pick up both a gun and a camera and go
off and make all these wonderful films?
So you pretty much had me at Platoon, had me at Salvador.
The thing about this movie is everybody's got an arc.
A lot of movies, you just have one person, and everybody
pivots around.
Even Shia's mom, who's a middle class stand-in, the
Long Island Realtor, right?
OLIVER STONE: Yeah.
DAVID CARR: And she catches the virus.
She just wants--
she keeps her [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
kid up for money because she's addicted to what everybody
else is in this film, which is leverage.
OLIVER STONE: She was a good nurse, and she
makes more as a Realtor.
She's flipping houses for money like a
lot people were doing.
And she gets in way over her head.
She, as you said earlier, she becomes addicted,
addicted to the deal.
Which is a problem.
What happened, I think-- it's interesting.
This movie, there's no labor union.
DAVID CARR: Right.
OLIVER STONE: In the 1980s [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
The labor unions still mattered to some degree,
although Reagan had broken the back of them.
But in France or Germany, labor unions still have power,
even in England.
But in America, you don't hear about labor unions.
They don't factor into the equation.
The way labor unions got hurt in 2008 was that
they were the receivers.
They were *** over because the banks and the insurance
companies sold them--
labor union pension funds-- they sold them sub-prime
securities, which were junk.
So they got hurt.
So the labor union's dead as a social factor in American
history right now.
DAVID CARR: One of the things that I thought while I was
watching this is always the tendency of human prerogative
to [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
of what someone gets.
Josh Brolin--
when Shia LaBeouf asks him, what number will
make you sit still?
And he just--
you give him like three full beats, and then he just says,
"More." Everybody--
OLIVER STONE: I think envy has a lot--
DAVID CARR: Everybody wants just a little bit more than
they have, which is what leverage is about.
OLIVER STONE: It's a game.
At that level, it's a games.
It's a cruel game, but it really doesn't matter how much
you have. It's if you're winning or losing.
DAVID CARR: One of the things that I was struck by in these
Federal Reserve scenes are--
they're amazing cinematic set pieces.
And you have allegedly the smartest guys--
it's mostly guys--
in American finance gathered round the room when, in fact,
if you pull back a little bit, they've sold instruments they
had no understanding of and got clobbered and tipped the
company over.
As you worked your way into the narrative of the film and
the heart of it, were you stunned not by how start these
guys were but by how dumb they were?
OLIVER STONE: I think the shock waves are
still setting in.
I think you find out as you go.
But you don't realize the implications, the size of it.
In a sense, what happened was that the Gordon Gekko of the
1980s, who was a crook, insider trading, became the
banks of the 2000s.
Inside information became acceptable.
It became a norm.
Counter-parties, the concept of
everyone knows your business.
Everyone knows your debt.
Everyone's trading with everybody else.
The concept of a securities business has lost its meaning
if the rating system is incompetent, which it was.
DAVID CARR: Or complicit.
OLIVER STONE: Or complicit.
And, of course, the regulations were diminished
over 30 years by three different administrations,
which is a shame unto itself.
So the whole thing came to this place where I realized
there were trillions of dollars--
trillions and trillions of dollars, far more money than
we ever dreamed is on the line.
And at one point, Brolin says, we don't have any concept of
how many trillions of dollars are out there.
No one knew in 2008 how dangerous it was.
They didn't know where the bottom was.
And the idea was to let the mortgage market go and to see
where the bottom was.
And they still haven't resolved it, by the way,
because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the
government.
And that's still a mess from everything I hear.
And no one has really gotten to the bottom of
this mortgage problem.
Eliot Spitzer, who was very helpful to us because he
investigated Wall Street, suggested the other day to me
that if the government had given that same money towards
the mortgage market and controlled the mortgage market
instead of to the banks, it would have made a huge
difference.
We'd be out of the hole we're in, which is uncertainty.
DAVID CARR: Right.
OLIVER STONE: We're a patient still on
medication in a hospital.
We've had a triple heart attack, and we're still taking
medication.
We're alive, but one in Congress called it the
illusion of normalcy, which I think is a great
terminology for it.
DAVID CARR: Do you think that--
I don't want to boil it down too much.
But part of what happened is bankers were looking at hedge
fund guys and saying, I'm dealing with a $5 million
bonus, and this schmuck down the street, he's not
smarter than me.
He's getting a $50 million, an $80 million bonus.
And the banks more or less just changed their businesses,
not on a dime, but organically over time.
OLIVER STONE: Well, they were allowed to, too.
The whole concept of commercial banks becoming
investment banks.
The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed with the help of
Robert Rubin, who was our Secretary of the Treasury at
the time, and who then went on to enrich himself as perhaps
the richest ex-Treasury secretary ever.
DAVID CARR: Right.
He gets credit for good market timing in terms of what he
pulled off.
OLIVER STONE: Well, I remember when he was a hero.
He was on the cover of Time magazine, Rubin and Greenspan
and Larry Summers.
Those were the three heroes.
DAVID CARR: All the geniuses that built this world that we
currently live in.
OLIVER STONE: They deregulated it.
And they had their reasons, but those reasons were never
really valid.
So there's people like Paul Volcker and [? Joseph ?]
Stiglitz--
there's people who were calling the shot.
And the regulations were thrown out the window.
That's Reagan's idea.
Clinton continued it, and Bush, Jr., never even had any
interest in running government.
So it was all across the board.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
OLIVER STONE: Now, it's a different place.
I might go back to my four bubbles.
I really don't know what's going to happen.
I think these are most interesting
times, but it's scary.
And I don't know.
And I think it's uncertainty principle will rule.
I frankly don't know-- when you open the newspaper in the
morning, I think many of you share the idea, you don't know
what's going to happen in the markets.
You don't know if they're going to announce it's going
to slide, and they say it's disappearing over the edge.
Next week is the end of the banking system.
I think we're ready for anything.
And I think be ready for the fifth bubble.
For me, it'd be the fifth bubble.
For you, I don't know how many you've had.
DAVID CARR: Well, I just want you to give me a phone call
when the next bubble comes so I can go short it and make
some money.
OLIVER STONE: If money is still viable.
DAVID CARR: Oh, no.
I'm going to show up with two stick and a rock?
OLIVER STONE: The US dollar might not be--
you might be into--
Iraqi dinars might be worth more.
DAVID CARR: One of the things that I think we forget about
when the bubble burst is no one knew really what
was going to happen.
There were those three, four days about, are my toes
touching bottom?
OLIVER STONE: Two weeks, yeah.
DAVID CARR: Do I really need to go to the bank and put my
money in a mattress right now?
I think the scene you had where they're walking in the
park and Shia's talking to the great, great
Frank Langella about--
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
DAVID CARR: Boy, if you like this guy's work--
let's just run this clip.
I don't need to tell you how good he is.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-How's your day going, huh?
-I told you, good day.
I'm OK.
Bad day, I'm OK.
Stop bugging me on my feelings.
They're irrelevant.
-I wanted to come see you face to face to talk about these
rules, you know?
Because it's getting crazy.
It's out of control now.
I'm hearing it from all ends.
-So much you don't know, Jacob.
-What?
What about the bonus thing?
Why now?
-Because I know you.
You're holding out for something better.
Well, don't.
Spend it.
Use the money because one day, you're going to wake up and
you're going to be dead.
-Louis, you gotta get yourself together, all right?
We're going to be fine.
No matter how bad this thing gets, we have real equity in
this company.
-You know that dream you got about that little energy
company in California?
-Yes.
-You may not get there, but you hold onto that because
everything else is just noise.
-It's not just noise.
There's 15,000 jobs on the line.
15,000 people here, that's not noise.
Are we going under?
-You know, I never liked this damn--
-Louis, are we going under?
-You're asking the wrong question, Jacob.
-What's the right question?
-Who isn't?
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
DAVID CARR: Pretty big kick in the stomach there when you're
sitting there in the moving theater and watching that.
I'm going to be cutting to questions here
in about two minutes.
So do we have microphones out there?
Or what are we doing?
Yes, we do.
Because Oliver her very much wanted to spend time answering
your questions in addition to my silly ones.
One of the things I noticed about all--
you've made very important New York films including this one,
about the World Trade Center.
New York was a character in this film, but it was a New
York I had never see.
It was up high.
There was very little of the street.
And the city had this gossamer sculptural quality.
It's just remarkable to look at, number one, how did you
get those shots?
Is that just a helicopter flying around?
Or number two, what were you thinking about in terms of was
it supposed to look like Oz?
Was it supposed to look like a hell that was all dressed up?
OLIVER STONE: Well, having grown up in New York in the
'40s, '50s, '60s, I wanted to pay homage to this.
It's really become an architecturally stunning city.
And it looks quite different than it ever looked to me.
And money is impersonal.
And there's an abstract quality, a cold, as you say,
God-like quality to it.
And I think the buildings, the gleam, the night and the day.
But above all, the most important thing when you shoot
that is frankly to have good weather.
You can't do much with a cloudy sky.
So we did have a series of great blue days last October.
We had a horrible September last year.
It was a back and forth.
But October really bloomed into a wonderful blue sky.
I had the same problem.
Incidentally, on 9/11, the World Trade Center because
that was all in one day.
And it was a blue day, 9/11.
So we had this problem with weather and we would have to
shoot only on the blue days to go down towards the World
Trade Center.
Once they get in there, it doesn't matter.
But I remember we had to go back several times to shoot
the blue days.
So getting a blue sky in New York is a big deal.
And we had quite a few of them in October.
So that made that possible.
And it was clear, clean.
They've also cleaned up the pollution New York.
I think you know that from the old days.
DAVID CARR: Right.
OLIVER STONE: So there's less haze.
Helicopters, yes.
And also, we did a wonderful wire shot up the side of a
building with one camera.
That's not digital.
Early in the movie when the credits are introduced, we're
going all the way up to the top of a skyscraper from the
street level.
It's quite a shot by Rodrigo Prieto and his crew.
One thing I always thought about was I grew up on the
East River, looking at the East River.
And the movie, it tends now towards the
West River, the Hudson.
DAVID CARR: Yeah, you're on the west side most of it.
OLIVER STONE: Yeah, if you look at Wall Street and you go
around, it leans more now towards Jersey.
DAVID CARR: Right.
OLIVER STONE: And when I was a kid, Jersey was a place you
never went to.
It was the wilderness.
The Indians were out there.
But now, we ended up shooting in Jersey.
It was a lovely experience in Jersey City.
We shot the trading floor, the big trading floor there.
DAVID CARR: And you even gave Jersey City some love shooting
across the river.
OLIVER STONE: Yeah, the city leans west. Whereas the East
was a more Europe, I think now it's going
more towards Jersey.
So I particularly like the Hudson River.
I've fallen in love with the Hudson River, in fact.
I think it's a locus for me in the world.
And I can see myself starting my life on the East River and
ending on the West River.
DAVID CARR: The first movie was like a little bit of
Pilgrim's Progress in terms of thematically.
Can you think of either historical or literary
allegories for what you thought of when you were
making this movie, or what you read, or what you--
or did you just conjure it?
OLIVER STONE: I think it's a little different.
Because Pilgrim's Progress, it was a story of Charlie Sheen.
He started out--
he's cutting corners at the beginning of the movie.
His ethics are in question.
And then he finds, once he screwed his father, he screwed
the labor union, he understands what he's done.
And he comes to an assessment of himself which is harsh, and
he's willing to take the sentences for it.
So it's a relatively simpler movie.
This one, we're dealing with six people, including Susan
Sarandon, and they do-- they're swimming
around in this tank.
And I say it's a systematic failure of the system that
brings them down.
Everybody is hurt.
Everyone adjust their own way.
Who gets out?
Who doesn't?
I'm not going to give away the ending.
One of the characters goes off.
He's going to be indicted.
Another one gets into a mortal injury, you could say.
And where Shia and Carey end up, because they're the
younger generation, to me is very helpful.
They stay.
And I think that's the future.
And whether Gordon Gekko is what he is, you have to decide
for yourself.
As I said earlier, it's a 10% deal.
And as to Susan Sarandon, she does go back to nursing.
I'll give that way.
DAVID CARR: Right.
And there is a [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
to this movie.
It's just with a lot of mayhem around it and uncertainty.
Go ahead, sir.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Gordon Gekko in the first movie, obviously one of the
great character ever, and we're all thrilled to have two
more hours with him.
He was obviously the villain, but he was also so
charismatic, and he made greed look sexy as well good.
So concerning where the world went afterwards, did you ever
feel any sense of responsibility for making
greed look so damn good, so much fun?
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
OLIVER STONE: Well, it's all in the eye of the beholder.
If you think it's sexy, and I think it is.
Certainly it is sexy.
Money is sexy.
There's something about it.
But how many yachts can you water ski behind is
a line in the movie.
AUDIENCE: I'd like one.
OLIVER STONE: You only need one yacht, right?
And you can't even water ski behind a yacht.
So think about that.
It did get crazy, and it got ugly when you'd
found people making--
the union worker, his salary is flat.
And the CEOs are making 1,000 times what the
union workers make.
It does get crazy.
And I think it speaks for itself what happened.
I don't feel responsible, no.
Because Gekko went to jail at the end of the movie.
He was a bad guy.
But I think people were attracted to the glamour of
the markets.
In the new movie, it's not the same
satisfaction for some people.
They want to go see Gekko be bad.
Unfortunately, the movie has to start on another
premise, you see.
He's out looking in.
So to me, it's more humanistic because he's an older man and
he's suffered.
The original Gekko is a one-note character.
Whatever you think, he's one note, and he's superficial,
and he's great at it.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Thanks.
DAVID CARR: Young lady.
AUDIENCE: Yes, young lady.
Thank you.
First of all, I'd like to thank you so much for
respecting the audiences.
OLIVER STONE: A little louder please.
AUDIENCE: I'd like to thank you so much for respecting
movie audiences and giving us intelligent films.
OLIVER STONE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: They're beautifully shot, brilliant.
But it's just such intelligence
that goes into it.
My question is what drives your passion
in making your films?
Is it a need to tell stories?
Is it to answer questions?
What fuels your passion?
OLIVER STONE: For me, the passion of--
AUDIENCE: Yes.
OLIVER STONE: --making this movie?
AUDIENCE: All of your films.
OLIVER STONE: Oh, well each one is different.
AUDIENCE: OK.
OLIVER STONE: For example, W. You interviewed me.
I could not stand George Bush's policies.
I made that clear in my personal comments.
But really, it was not my role to do a documentary.
I was in there to understand who he was and
how he became president.
And I think I answered it for myself, a sense of how you can
be an American and come up to be the President like that.
And in this movie, it was really curiosity because after
2008, obviously Wall Street had entered a new dimension,
as I said, a bubble, a new bubble.
And as the son of a stockbroker, I was curious as
to what had happened.
Also curious as to what's going on in New York.
And for me, it was a great chance, after World Trade
Center, to come back and stay here.
DAVID CARR: What about the Huge Chavez move you made?
What did you make of the election the other day when
Hugo got away just by the hair of his chinny chin chin?
OLIVER STONE: That's a half a glass of water one way
or the other way.
It depends how you look at it.
If you look at it as a person who admires Chavez, you'd say
this is a very good sign, very healthy.
The opposition had never been part of the opposition.
They'd never taken--
they boycotted the last elections.
So it was only inevitable that they have now assumed a shape.
And I'm glad they're there because the other way, they
were very dangerous.
They were plotting with The New York Times for coups to
get rid of him.
DAVID CARR: Yeah, I'm getting incoming reports on my head
set just as--
"Let the coup begin!"
OLIVER STONE: There was so much--
there was a coup.
I don't want to go back into that.
But there were such negative reports on Chavez.
I think this was a healthy election.
It shows you, once again, that it's a transparent process
that he's gone through.
And I think if they don't want him, he will go like Obama.
He's got-- his approval rating is down.
It's very hard to be a leader for 10 years, very hard.
People get tired of it.
It's natural.
This man is a Democrat.
He will step out.
DAVID CARR: You're confident of that?
OLIVER STONE: I'm confident of it, and he's behaved
impeccably.
There's no money in his bank account.
His father was a public official.
He's got a strong sense of public service.
And the economic figures say that he has helped the poor
enormously in this country, much more so than any previous
administration in the history of colonials Venezuela.
DAVID CARR: It's sort of like being the
tallest leprechaun, actually.
OLIVER STONE: Oh, come on, David.
That's not--
DAVID CARR: I had to get one cheap shot in.
I didn't use "tin pot dictator." I
didn't say those words.
OLIVER STONE: It's easy to dislike him if everyone in the
United States is calling him names.
DAVID CARR: No, I think he's a remarkable figure.
And if nothing else, South and Central America has been a
persistent interest of your film-making.
And I think he's been a clarion call to the world that
we are not your tchotchke.
We are not your play thing.
We have our own dreams, our own objectives, which may or
may not coincide with yours.
And to that extent, I think he's been a great wake up call
to America and places beyond.
Go ahead, sir, before I get in a lot of trouble.
AUDIENCE: Needless to say, Oliver, I love your movies.
Do you have any feeling on the finance reform bill that was
just passed?
Do you think these things will be prevented?
OLIVER STONE: It's several thousand pages long.
I don't think many people have read it except for the lawyers
who are looking for loopholes.
But Barney Frank promises this, and I would like to
believe him.
It will be in the execution.
Some of the rules on the surface make a lot of sense.
But how they interpret them if, for example, the 3% hedge
fund thing becomes tier one capital.
Under that definition, they can stash billions of dollars
in that hedge fund.
So banks could continue to be hedge funds.
But there's no question that Goldman and those type of
things, why are they holding banks?
They should not be holding banks.
They don't take any deposits.
I don't get that.
And I don't understand why--
I don't know what a bank is anymore.
I don't know about you, but all I know is we're in a lot
of trouble when I can only get 1% at the bank, or 1 and 1/2
if I'm lucky.
I don't know how you feel about that.
But this is the first time in the history of this country
where there's no money to be had with money.
You can't make money.
So we're at really a stagnation.
And the banks are not there for us.
So the system is not really good to older people, or to
people who want stability rather than have to be forced
to gamble with their money.
DAVID CARR: I've watch your career for a long time.
And every single movie you make, you become an absolute
expert on what you're talking.
Your ability to absorb, process, make this stuff
cinematic, and then come behind and talk about it,
regardless of what it is.
I don't know, as a journalist, I find it breathtaking.
Miss, go ahead, please.
AUDIENCE: A lot of people have compared you to a good book,
like a J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, or Dostoyevsky.
How do you see yourself as a book?
OLIVER STONE: I'm sorry, compare me--
DAVID CARR: As a book.
AUDIENCE: As a book.
OLIVER STONE: As a book?
DAVID CARR: As a book.
AUDIENCE: As a book.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: How would you see yourself?
Because a lot of people, like he just said, whatever it is
that you're going after, whatever it is that you're
filming, you become an expert at it.
and you can back up whatever it is that you filmed.
So put yourself in as a book.
How would you see yourself?
OLIVER STONE: I try to.
I'm sure I make mistakes everywhere.
I believe.
I'm passionate.
I care.
I think it's like hitting the fastball.
You want to do it?
So that's part of the fun is you refine yourself.
Now, the key is not to become a wonk.
You can't make a wonky movie.
You've got to figure out a way to make it a dramatist. You
have to tell a story.
No matter what, it's Wall Street.
It's still a background.
It's not a documentary.
And I have six characters in the foreground.
And I want to concentrate on those and get you involved in
those six people.
That's my job.
W, my God.
W himself, it becomes Josh Brolin, the way he plays him.
If you follow the movie, you can follow his steps.
And Nixon, too, by the way.
Anthony Hopkins.
For me, Nixon was, again, the devil in many ways.
But Anthony Hopkins humanized him for me.
DAVID CARR: I think we're going to have--
this is going to have to be the last question.
I want to point out that we've made it through
the whole 45 minutes.
There's been no gaffes.
There's been no--
which is really actually a public speaker speaking our
unvarnished truth.
That's what a gaffe is.
You made it through the whole 45 minutes without ending up
with something that's going to be on a blog somewhere.
But you still have one more shot, Oliver.
And I'm dependent on you.
So make it a spicy one.
AUDIENCE: OK, I will.
OLIVER STONE: Oh, no.
AUDIENCE: So this is advertising week.
And you're speaking at an advertising event, advertising
week event.
Have you or do you have any relationships with advertisers
when it comes to your films, whether those are marketing
partnerships or product placement?
OLIVER STONE: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Can you be a little bit more specific?
OLIVER STONE: I'm sorry?
AUDIENCE: Can you be more specific please?
OLIVER STONE: I've always had relationships in every movie
through the years.
But this one, specifically because New York is one of the
centers of the universe and also because we were
approached by a lot of advertisers.
We didn't take them all.
Sometimes it didn't fit.
It didn't work.
But for example, Starbucks would have been--
I don't know.
Some trader's telling a story.
He would have been drinking Starbucks
instead of Dunkin' Donuts.
But we had Dunkin' Donuts.
So I don't care.
AUDIENCE: Can I have a follow-up question to that?
OLIVER STONE: I don't think that disqualifies the movie.
But on the other hand, we did need product placement.
It did help us enormously.
I'll tell you--
DAVID CARR: Were the energy drinks product placement?
OLIVER STONE: I believe so.
I believe so.
We did need it because we had a tight budget.
It was New York.
And we had a $60 million budget from Fox.
And Fox is know as a tight studio.
So we had tax credit.
We got the tax credit from New York.
But we needed every dollar because we're shooting here.
And I have to say, we shot fast. We shot in 58 days,
which is the same amount of time we shot the
original in in 1987.
So we kept to the old schedule.
And as you see, the movie is fairly large.
But we needed help.
And we took it where we could without, I think,
prostituting the movie.
AUDIENCE: So these for cash for placement and
partnerships, too, in terms of marketing the film?
OLIVER STONE: Yeah, it took various forms. Sometimes, it
would just be a placement, like the motorcycles.
I would imagine the motorcycles were very
high-level prototypes.
One was a $1 million bike, apparently.
So that's a prototype.
Ducati was the other one.
I'm sure there was a deal with them.
There were deals all along the line.
But as I said, I don't think that there's
anything that struck me.
Certainly maybe the terminals, the computers.
Light Stream was there.
Light Stream, if you remember correctly.
SkyBridge, SkyBridge hedge fund.
And also the party, Tom Joyce.
I don't think he put any advertising in.
Night let us shoot there.
I don't know.
Every deal is a little bit different.
But no big, big cash.
No Gillette shaving cream, anything like that.
There was no scene that we did out of the way specifically to
accommodate.
DAVID CARR: Somewhere in the movie, who says, "Life makes
you humble?"
OLIVER STONE: I'm not going to gaffe.
That's not in it.
DAVID CARR: Maybe you said it.
OLIVER STONE: Maybe I did.
In Gekko's character, life makes you
humble as you can see.
The thing about Gekko I like is that he convinces his
daughter that he's really back and he wants to be her dad.
And I think I love that.
What he's really thinking, we're going to find out.
DAVID CARR: But if you got the number one movie in America,
and everybody's talking about your film, and when you leave
here everybody's going to be licking your face and telling
you what a genius you are, how do you stay humble?
OLIVER STONE: I don't see it that way.
I think people who know me know
that this is all temporary.
One weekend number one, great.
Let's try to hang in there for this weekend and next weekend.
This is a tough business.
I'm glad the world opening is good, too.
We're doing well internationally.
And it's not an easy movies.
There's no guns, and it's hard to keep the suspense when it's
financial matters.
We're tracking older, 65% over 30.
So clearly, it's not a young person's movie.
I do think young people are seeing it, some people, but
not in the quantities we'd like.
So I'm modest about it.
I think if it does modestly well, I'd be very happy.
Really, no expectations anymore, no expectations.
DAVID CARR: I very much appreciate you taking the time
to spend time with us.
OLIVER STONE: Thank you, David.
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]