Photo:Tasos Katopodis/Getty
Tasos Katopodis/Getty
Oliver Stoneis weighing in on the state of cinema today — and he isn’t mincing his words.
The 76-year-oldPlatoonwriter-director recently toldVarietyhe had seen the Keanu Reeves movieJohn Wick 4on a plane. “Talk about volume,” he said. “I think the film is disgusting beyond belief. Disgusting."
“I don’t know what people are thinking,” Stone continued, referencing Hollywood producers and filmmakers.
“Maybe I was watchingG.I. Joewhen I was a kid. But [Reeves] kills, what, three, four hundred people in the f—ing movie. And as a combat veteran, I gotta tell you, not one of them is believable. I realize it’s a movie, but it’s become a video game more than a movie," he said.
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Fast X(2023).Universal Studios
“How many cars can crash? How many stunts can you do? What’s the difference betweenFast and Furiousand some other film?" said Stone. “It’s just one thing after another. Whether it’s a super-human Marvel character or just a human being like John Wick, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not believable.”
According toVariety, while receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Transilvania Film Festival in Romania earlier this month, the Oscar winner said, “People in showbiz are idiots. They just go with the trend, they just go with the fashion — it’s a fashion business.”
This isn’t the first time Stone has made his views clear on how the moviemaking industry has evolved since the late ’70s, when he got his start withMidnight ExpressandScarface.
“If I made any of my films [today], I don’t think I’d last,” Stone toldSiriusXM’sJim Norton & Sam Robertsin 2020. “I’d be vilified. I’d be attacked. Shamed.”
“I would have had to step on so many sensitivities. You have to have some freedom to make a movie, unfortunately," he said. “You have to be rude. You can be bad. And you’re going to have to do these things like step on toes. Holy cow. Do you think I could have made any one of those films?”
Oliver Stone at the 79th Venice International Film Festival.Andreas Rentz/Getty
Andreas Rentz/Getty
Martin Scorsesehas aired his frustrations with comic book movies repeatedly, tellingEmpirein 2019 that he has tried and failed to watch Marvel movies.
“That’s not cinema,” theGoodfellasdirector said at the time. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
In 2021,The Power of the Dogdirector Jane Campion joined in the debate, tellingVariety, “I actually hate [superhero movies] … They’re so noisy and ridiculous. Sometimes you get a good giggle, but I don’t know what the thing is with the capes, a grown man in tights. I feel like it must come from pantomime.”
Stone also recently toldVarietythat when Hollywood gatekeepers produce films now, “they want to think about how do we market it, who’s going to watch it? Of course, that’s a consideration. But it becomes the sole consideration.”
Of his own trajectory throughout the industry, he added, “As I got older, I became more angry, not less.”
Stone has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won three: for penningMidnight Express, directingPlatoonand directingBorn on the Fourth of July. His newest film, the documentaryNuclear Now, premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
source: people.com
