Oliver Stone is rolling deep. The veteran film-maker shows up for an interview with the Guardian with a support team of two: Joshua S Goldstein, a professor who will serve as a real-time factchecker-cum-footnote-provider, as well as a therapist, a twinkly eyed woman who happens to be Goldstein’s wife. “People can get very emotional when they’re reacting to the topic of their film,” she explains of her role. “I’m here in case anyone needs my help.”
Her de-escalation services will not end up being required, but it is admittedly comforting to have an emotional support professional on hand for an interview with the legendary firebrand that is Oliver Stone. As it turns out, the director isn’t looking for a sparring match or a conspiracy theory soapbox. Dressed in a beautifully tailored dark blazer, red pocket square and crisp white shirt, the Natural Born Killers and Wall Street director, who has been giving promotional interviews since dawn, is a gracious if not entirely relaxed interview subject, scribbling mysterious notes onto the margins of a printout while he fields questions.
Nuclear Now, based on a book that Goldstein co-wrote, makes an impassioned case for nuclear energy. Forget wind and solar power being enough, the film tells us. Nuclear is the answer to a world on the verge of losing the race against the climate crisis. Stone reckons it’s his 30th film and 10th documentary, but he thinks of them all as interconnected parts; his life’s work is making movies about the “undiscovered lies that people wouldn’t admit”. Since serving in Vietnam, and briefly driving a taxi, he has been devoted to making movies that prod at our prevailing narratives, be it that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F Kennedy or that nuclear is a dirty word.
Stone brings up his 12-hour docuseries The Untold History of the United States. “Chapters [of the docuseries] attacked American history they keep teaching at school and I wish they were teaching my version of it, because I think it’s a lot more accurate than the bullshit you’re getting,” he says gruffly. Nuclear Now stands apart from anything else Stone has made because it’s his first work “about an object, not a person”. And therein lay the challenge. “There’s no sexy chick in the movie,” he says with a note of chagrin. “It’s not like highly original film-making. It’s about assembly, editing, writing.”
A deep conviction that set in after reading the book that Goldstein co-wrote with Staffan A Qvist, a Swedish nuclear engineer, impelled Stone to bring the message to the masses. He started by asking Goldstein to write a fictional treatment of the subject matter. Goldstein’s face lights up at the memory and he goes into Hollywood pitch mode – something to do with a female nuclear dynamo, the American president, a villainous Texan senator, an activist daughter. It was all over the place – from the US to Korea and Russia, ending with a chase scene in Saudi Arabia. Stone called the climax “a made for TV bullshit ending”, Goldstein recalls. “It wasn’t good,” Stone grumbles. They worked on several drafts of a documentary script, a series of versions zig-zagging between their sensibilities until they landed on one that they agreed was suitably informative and entertaining (you can guess who was yanking it in either direction). Stone appears on screen, the reliably blazer-clad student who travels the world to meet with scientists and engineers and a nuclear power influencer who is the project’s closest thing to a Julia Roberts.
“We’re getting it all wrong, and in the face of climate change, nuclear isn’t only an option – it’s the only option,” intones Stone, who says he considers Marie Curie, the Polish physicist known for her work on radioactivity, worthy of sainthood. “The truth is, we had solutions, and we fucked it up.” It all went wrong in the mid-20th century, when nuclear power and nuclear war were conflated and Hollywood started churning out sci-fi movies with phosphorescent freaks and nuclear bomb-wielding villains. By the early 1970s, environmentalists were warning of the hazards of nuclear anything, and sounding alarms about nuclear waste that had the American public in a tailspin.
“There’s not an issue [with nuclear waste], it’s completely handleable, especially compared to the waste of gas, oil and coal, my God,” Stone says. “It gets safer over time because of radioactive decay,” his right-hand man chimes in. “Which you can’t say about the arsenic, lead mercury that are in solar panels or any number of other things.” The film points out that there have been far fewer casualties related to nuclear disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima than the fatal levels of air pollution produced around the world by coal and other fossil fuels.
Stone still leaves the science to Goldstein, but becomes animated when talk turns to fear-mongering. “Politicians could get votes by making people afraid. And then it’s hard to reverse yourself after many years and say: ‘Well, actually, we’ve changed our mind now. And we see that climate change is the bigger threat and that actually what we told you about this is sort of overhyped.’” Of course he read all the scholarly articles making the case against nuclear. “When you read them, it’s so concentrated. It’s like taking a dose of acid,” the director says. Thankfully Goldstein was on speed-dial, at the ready to review the science and put Stone’s doubts to rest. Goldstein points across the office at a red Exit sign and brings up that it contains small traces of tritium, the same compound in the tanks at the Fukushima power plant. “They have a short half life and they don’t accumulate in your body,” he says. “It’s like the most innocuous thing.”
Stone lives in Los Angeles and has three Oscars, but does not consider himself part of the Hollywood firmament. His feeling of alienation appears to have intensified with this project. “The movie business has not been kind to nuclear at all from Silkwood, The China Syndrome, and all the horror movies of the 50s,” he says, going on to weigh in on the way mainstream cinema has veered off course. “I like the glamour of the old movies. You know, I want to see Elizabeth Taylor and I want to see Brigitte Bardot. Marilyn Monroe. I want to see stars!” Such movie-making has become harder to pull off in a culture that is heavy on the show-all social media and light on the mystique. “I respect reality, but I don’t want to see it necessarily. I like to see heightened reality.”
Stone’s media diet is as idiosyncratic as you might expect. He follows Rumble, the Peter Thiel-backed right-leaning video platform; RT, the Russian state-owned news service; and Al Jazeera. He cops to reading the Guardian every once in a while, “although I don’t like their rightward tilt of recently”. A copy of the New York Times is sticking out of his bag, on a day when the paper published a glowing review of Stone’s new film. He reads the paper with “skepticism”, he says. “I’m reading to see what they think.” And what does he think? “I would say extreme middle,” is how he identifies his position on the American political spectrum. It’s a rather catchy but meaningless term, no? “The truth matters to me and we’re digging for the truth,” he says elliptically. “I think I happened upon a very important subject, which is climate change. And I’m grateful for that. It could be my last film, you know, because I’m at that age where I can keel over tomorrow.” (Stone’s forthcoming documentary about Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is “almost ready”.)
At 76, Stone is four years younger than Joe Biden, who many say is too old to run for a second term. Stone doesn’t want to weigh in on the president’s age and his fitness for re-election. But he will share what he thinks of the guy. “My favorite president was John Kennedy, so if you look at the two Irishmen sideways, you’ll find that John Kennedy is a peace lover. And you find that Joe Biden is a cold warrior in the worst sense of the word.”
The last time the Guardian US profiled Stone, he had just completed a strangely sympathetic 4 hour-long documentary about Vladimir Putin (at the time he said “the Russian people have never been better off”). Have his feelings about the Russian leader changed in the especially troubling years since? “I think Russia is doing a great job with nuclear energy,” he says after a moment’s thought. “China is also a leader in that field, although I never was able to penetrate into China, which was a shame for the movie I wish we had. But Putin is a great leader for his country and the people love him.” And that is as far as he is willing to go. He’s gone far enough already.
Nuclear Now is out now in US cinemas, with an Australian release date to be confirmed