The two movies Oliver Stone deems failures: “I’m not a natural born sadist”
By the end of the 1980s, Oliver Stone had already outlined his credentials as one of his generation’s most exciting creative talents as both a writer and a director, with success and accolades swiftly becoming second nature.
He scripted sword-and-sorcery classic Conan the Barbarian, penned gangster favourite Scarface, secured an Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ category for Salvador and won trophies for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ the very same year after the seminal war drama Platoon was released just nine months later.
Stone additionally directed Michael Douglas to a ‘Best Actor’ win in Wall Street, and maintains that Tom Cruise was robbed of the same distinction for Born of the Fourth of July, which nonetheless won him his second ‘Best Director’ gong. Suffice to say, he was on top of the cinematic world before the calendar had even reached 1990.
Of course, Stone was already an Oscar winner long before that having scooped ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ for 1978’s Midnight Express, which was only his third feature film credit. He debuted as an associate producer on Sugar Cookies five years previously before following it up with his directorial debut Seizure the following year, but it would be another seven years before he directed again.
When he did, there was another five-year gap between his sophomore effort The Hand and Salvador. Even though he soon went on to become one of Hollywood’s most distinctive auteurs, Stone began rather inauspiciously by taking the reins on just three movies in a 12-year span.
He had his reasons for that, and as he explained to The Guardian, it was because he didn’t think the first pair were very good. Seizure finds a horror author experiencing a living nightmare when three of his literary creations come to life with murderous intentions, while The Hand stars Michael Caine as a comic book artist who suffers an accidental amputation, only for the disembodied hand to gain a life of its own.
Stone dabbling in back-to-back horror doesn’t sound as if it would be up his street given what he went on to accomplish after, and he’d be the first to admit it, describing his early directorial career as “two failures” that saw him take a vow to “never do a horror film again.”
“It would be a disaster for me to do a horror film. I’m not a natural born sadist, actually, and I think you have to be to do a good horror film,” he said. “You have to scare the shit out of the audience, you have to really want to. I don’t know if I could.” Just like that, he drew a line under his association with the genre and made good on his promise to never return.
