Tonight was freakin' awesome. I went to the JCC again to see Oliver Stone in discussion with Ruthe Stein, the Sr. Film columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was just mindblowing. This guy is SO intense, but SO laid back and relaxed at the same time. It was amazing to see and hear such a legend of filmmaking so "up close and personal." All in all in was an amazing talk, but a few silly leading questions like "So who do you support in the upcoming election?" Kindof a silly question to ask someone who obviously has clear views and is not here to discuss politics and his opinion of the candidates. I thought that went a bit too far, but otherwise the rest of the questions and answers and general discussion was just amazing.
Oliver Stone has done some amazingly powerful films, "Platoon", "Born on the Fourth of July", "Nixon", "JFK", "Natural Born Killers", "World Trade Center" and a bunch more. He seems like an incredibly serious guy when it comes to filmmaking and he seems like he pours all of himself into his films. When asked why he didn't follow through with Mission Impossible 2 (which he had an early role on), he said that filmmaking these days, especially action films like Mission Impossible 2 are so so so much work to do, and there are a lot of professionals you have to work with to design the movie, keep people's attention, make the action scenes believable... and so on. He was implying that all of this work is not worth it if your heart isn't in it. He said that he only does things he really cares about. Pretty awesome.
Then the best quote of the night, which really sums up his philosophy on life... Ruthe Stein said,
"So, with all these Hollywood Blockbuster movies out there, you know, big exciting action summer popcorn flicks, do you think you'd ever want to do one of those?"
His answer...
"No."
... and the crowd laughed and cheered.
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