Oliver Stone on how the “pessimism” of cinema will change

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Oliver Stone names his 10 favourite movies of all time

Sat 11 February 2023 20:30, UK

Oliver Stone was once described as being attracted to controversy like a “heat-seeking missile”. At the time, he might well have argued it was the other way around. Films like 1994’s Natural Born Killers were intended to satirise aspects of American culture that, during the shoot, became “real rather than surreal”. It is the director’s instinctive, double-edged style that has established him as one of the most revered and written-about directors in contemporary cinema. Here, he names his ten favourite films of all time.

Stone was born in 1946 to a French mother and an American father who had met while Louis Stone was fighting as part of the Allied forces in France during World War II. The first film on the director’s list – originally featured in Filmmaker magazine – was released the year of his birth and tells a story his parents would have recognised. The Best Years Of Our Lives is a sobering tale about the challenges three World War II veterans face reintegrating into civilian life.

The picture led to Harold Russell becoming the first disabled actor to receive an Academy Award. Russell’s portrayal of Homer undoubtedly helped to normalise the presence of disfigured servicemen in the aftermath of WW2. Picking up a single cigarette from a pack with his prosthetic hands, the character calmly strikes a match and lights his friends’ cigarettes. “Boy, you ought to see me open a bottle of beer,” he tells them.

By the time Lawrence of Arabia came out in 1962, Stone was 16 and looking for adventure. One wonders if David Lean’s sensual depiction of a British lieutenant wandering the desert to a soundtrack by Maurice Jarre might have influenced young Stone’s eventual decision to leave Yale University in 1965 and travel for six months in Saigon, where he taught high school students English. He would eventually return to Yale only to enlist in the United States Army and request combat duty in Vietnam in 1967.

As well as Golden Era classics, Stone’s list is overflowing with films by great Italina-American directors, such as Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Parts I & II. The director also gives a shoutout to Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 picture 1900, which takes place in Bertolucci’s ancestral region of Emilia-Romagna and, like Fellini’s Amarcord (also set in Emilia-Romagna), focuses on the lives of ordinary people living in fascist Italy. Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu star as two childhood friends unable to reconcile their political differences as adults.

You can check out Oliver Stone’s full selection below.