When Stone gets stick

‘I saw this goddam politician on your British television last night,’ says the film director Oliver Stone. ‘He was yapping about how he can’t cut the defence budget because of blah, blah, blah.’ Was it, by any chance, Liam Fox at the Tory party conference? ‘Something like that… I thought, this is so disgusting.’

His voice is dry and cool, but the words are angry. ‘This love of national security is insane,’ he continues. ‘If you build the foundation of your society on security, you’re going to be disappointed. People talk about terrorism: but if your entire national debate becomes about fighting terrorists, you lose. They win.’

It’s the same in America, says Stone, a Vietnam veteran and Hollywood’s leading anti-imperialist. ‘We’re against government this or government that: but we always want money for the Defense Department. I have no idea how we expect to balance the budget and run a country with any kind of sense without cutting our fucking defence?’

Stone is 64, and very good at swearing. It’s idiomatic: he effs and blinds without stress or undue emphasis. He swears like Mickey Knox, the serial murdering hero of his film Natural Born Killers.

He is sitting in a high-back chair in a large room at the Dorchester Hotel. He appears cinematic, somehow: maybe it’s the light from the window pouring across him. His face is big, the jaw thick. His eyes are deep-set and dark — ‘like a Mongol nomad’s’, he has said — but kind. His long moustache wiggles when he talks.

He has come to London to promote Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to one of his best-known films, Wall Street. It is a drama set amid the credit crunch of 2008. The film has been given lots of hype, but the reviews have been damning — Deborah Ross was particularly scathing in these pages last week.