Oliver Stone names the most “difficult” person he has ever worked with: “I went about ten rounds”
Pairing up two mavericks and titans of their respective professions is guaranteed to lead to fireworks in one way or another, with the famously bullish Oliver Stone finding himself at loggerheads with a fellow icon when they worked together for the first – and ultimately final – time.
Of course, Stone didn’t get to where he was by playing nice, and it can’t be said that his approach didn’t reap huge dividends when he became one of the most celebrated and outspoken auteurs of his era, racking up Academy Award wins like it was nobody’s business while churning out hit after hit.
The filmmaker has four Oscars to his name split across three different categories after contributing to a number of classics as either a writer, director, or producer, and sometimes all three. Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, Platoon, Wall Street, and Born on the Fourth of July are just some of the many success to emerge from the hottest streak of his career, and he was never one for bowing down to studio demands.
Even when he recruited a legendary composer to craft the score for a neo-noir crime thriller, it was Stone’s way or the highway. 1997’s U Turn starred Sean Penn as a drifter who makes a stop in the wrong town, where he ends up getting drawn into the middle of a deadly game instigated by Jennifer Lopez’s femme fatale, which places both Penn’s outsider and Nick Nolte’s husband in the crosshairs.
To capture exactly the musical atmosphere he was after, Stone plucked his composer right from the top of the tree after drafting in Ennio Morricone, the mastermind behind Sergio Leone’s entire filmography from A Fistful of Dollars onwards, The Thing, Days of Heaven, The Untouchables, and many more besides.
As Stone explained to Film Comment, though, it wasn’t the easiest professional partnership of his career. In fact, it was quite the opposite. “I went about ten rounds on U Turn with Ennio Morricone,” he admitted. “It was the only time I worked with him, and I never worked with someone so difficult in my life.”
Even though Stone was “the only American director who made him return to America a second time,” tensions boiled over in post-production. “At one point in our collaboration, I actually showed him a Road Runner cartoon and I said, ‘This is the type of music I want you to write.'” Needless to say, Morricone was not impressed.
In response, he eyed Stone with what he called “a cold stare” and issued the incredulous response of, “You want me to write cartoon music?” The director did get his way in the end, after referring to the soundtrack of U Turn as containing “lot of boings and bings and bangs,” which may or may not have been the instructions he relayed to Morricone.
