The movie that set Oliver Stone’s career back years: “The attacks were pretty heavy”
Oliver Stone has been earnestly stoking controversy from the beginning of his career, often peppering his maddeningly excellent filmmaking with shameless conspiracy theories. Even when he isn’t obsessively rehashing the JFK assassination, his films have focused on shadowy government overreach and secrecy, whether it’s through the lens of an NSA whistleblower in 2016’s Snowden, or America’s involvement in foreign wars in 1986’s Salvador.
Even when he isn’t directly referencing the U.S. government, Stone has landed himself in hot water. His 1994 serial killer satire Natural Born Killers was broadly accused of glorifying violence, and even inspired a series of copycat murders.
According to the director, however, the one film that nearly put an end to his career happened early on. Speaking to The Los Angeles Times in 2016 for the release of Snowden, Stone said that his 1981 horror movie The Hand was a disastrous misfire. At the time, he had just won an Academy Award for ‘Best Screenplay’ for Midnight Express and was finally given the opportunity to direct his own film. He wrote a script about a comic book artist who loses his hand and watches helplessly as it goes on a killing spree, and according to Stone, it was a victim of the Hollywood system.
“Horror films were a way many young directors thought they could make an impression,” he said. “[The Hand] was a psychological thriller but I got a lot of pressure to make it into a horror film. That’s the nature of the business, and when you’re a young man, you sometimes bow to that pressure.”
Starring Michael Caine as the comic book artist, the film could have been a hit, but Stone took a characteristically serious approach to decidedly unserious subject matter. “It’s about paranoia, which we know is abundant in the modern world,” he explained, adding, “The attacks were pretty heavy. My career was blighted at that point. It was another setback. I was hurt. But I learned.”
He went back to screenwriting, penning the script for John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian and Brian De Palma’s Scarface before taking another crack at directing. His sophomore feature, Salvador, bore many of the political hallmarks that he would later become known for, but it was his third foray into directing that would finally allow him to break through as a filmmaker.
Released in 1986, Platoon was directly inspired by Stone’s experiences as an infantryman in the Vietnam War and brought audiences into the chaos, horror, and psychological breakdown of senseless conflict. It earned the director an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Screenplay’ and a win for ‘Best Director.’ Now the toast of Hollywood, Stone went on to even greater success with his next film, Wall Street.
Stone continued his winning streak throughout the end of ‘80s and ‘90s with Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, Any Given Sunday, and, of course, JFK, but more recently, he’s struggled to regain the magic of his early work. Perhaps the crux of the issue can be traced all the way back to The Hand, as his films in the past two decades have frequently taken themselves extremely seriously even as the subject matter grows increasingly less original.
