for death of the marriage act and for an all to enlist i explained that in detail it was very painful for me i had i lived a magical life for 15 years in new york and in france my mother was french my father was a soldier colonel in world war 2 in mary it was a beautiful but here they never belonged together they were i'm the product of that it's a contradictory relationship between 2 people that has haunted my whole life and by writing the book i understood myself better as being torn between these 2 and i'm the child of that divorce and i try to write about what a child of divorce is like he sees the world in a different way he sees the world as a lie i mean what people are saying about themselves is often a lie as we know from governments as well so i grew into. a young man who was very troubled and you have to admit adolescents are not in those days were not they didn't give them space we were not considered full at all so i don't think it was

attention was paid to the to the problems of adolescence they continue to this day in america we have a record suicide rate per young people of 1920. record and may countries i gather that this is a growing problem because there's a lack of spiritual life that's what took me to this place of fatalism and i said i want to go to war i want to see what it's like at the bottom i don't want any favors and if the gods my destiny. were intended for me to take me they would take me i would test myself against them and i did i didn't complain when i was there i got wounded twice and i did a lot of fighting i saw a lot of combat. but i i brought it on myself i wasn't whining about it but i felt like i was lucky i survived and if you saw platoon you remember the end of it i found a meaning to my life in that war which is to say i really go on and teach what i know to others good teach goodness and teach experience teach the good things of

life that i can garner that i can turn on and that's what i've done to the best of my ability one thing i've done which makes me very proud and it's really i documented the war before you people knew argue with me about vietnam through other sources and when it came to films and pictures it was the pain of the american saying in the in the deer hunter but you do say that he killed people in vietnam maybe stopped a rape of demi's girls but you came back knowing the lie i just want to skip a lot on a bed to midnight express because the prison industrial complex is something we talk a lot about here on going underground fact we say often that the united states imprisons per capita more people than stalin or mao why was midnight express not just about what happens in turkey if it mr and what happens to be watching to try to make their point unsuccessfully at the turn but when i wrote midnight express years

later this was in 1970. i come back from vietnam in 68 late 68 i had been thrown in jail myself for federal smuggling in san diego california and right after i came out of vietnam i was carrying no some marijuana from from vietnam because it was good and i was smoking it on a regular basis i learned about that over there. and i was busted with it and thrown it into federal slowly charged very serious but increase and i was with 5000 young people blacks spanish panic americans and a few white people mostly old drug crimes nonviolent but they were being severely dealt with at that time it was the beginning the very beginning of the war on drugs nixon had just been elected he ended cleared that war yet but he was about to so we were the 1st wave that i could see in the injustice of it these these kids

most of them were coming from rough lives they didn't want to go to vienna you know they they were boarded at the best of their ability but many of them were drafted they made it they were trying to make extra money on the side and that was the way to do it there was a system that i saw in america which and of course i was lucky because my father got me out of jail with the with with money there was there was class there because yeah you came from a relatively wealthy family man your or your speech at the golden globes which a recount here which alas i guess is not on video. some people may don't know that the amazing speech by tony montana in scarface where he talks about the corruption of society it with highly inspired by your own speech on the golden globes with share of the film people he liked said no you call her that if i can talk like that my anger change from there because i thought hollywood was hypocritical about. she at that time in the 1970 s.

there was a lot of cop shows police shows on the air they were very popular successful and they were very simplistic the drugs were bad cops were good people were going to jail and i was protesting that system and there were a lot of those producers were in the room they were making money off this american television has prospered on the idea of fun foresight years about the media about criminals and dances it resulted ultimately in the clinton white house and the crime bill that's put 2000000 people behind bars most of them not most of them but a significant amount or a black man joe joe biden of course joe biden being the leading democratic contender for president proud pasts of his mass incarceration record joe biden goes along with it with the crowd he is thinking is not original in this regard. even bill clinton did so i mean and hillary clinton they created a lot of his problems but that's another story but my anger was based on the

hypocrisy and tony montana suggested that you know drugs in america has the biggest appetite for drugs you know what because i think where there's a spiritual. spiritual shallowness about america creates that need for film i felt victim to it too and not to be hypocrites and it was. definitely i i had my problems with it my ups and downs with it including cocaine and after midnight express and winning the oscar i made the hint which i think is an interesting film to watch it's like who kane who was excellent in the film but it didn't succeed at the box office said i was i listened to be shamed by. cheryl into jail into my bed period there that's insane talk about scarface and it'll be longer because i don't know whether there's any truth in it that some prints of it that are released don't have the female castro bit at the beginning and some people try

to appropriate it you talk a bit about how well again you nearly lost your life in research for or for scarface but how in allowed you in a way to do salvador because some people saw it as a you as a person who understood violence and others especially in miami saw you as a as an apologist for female castro because it was a film about the impossibility of the american dream arguably. yes. yes scarface was a was a take a satire almost on the american materialism that was prevalent at the time tony montana comes to this country and he is a free man you know that's the way he's a gangster but he's a free man and for that reason i think he was a admired and appreciated by a certain class of people. when the film 1st came out the white or it was either you know beat or whatever you want to call it did not like that you did not

reviewing well the crowd that came in new york city where i was there were as black puerto rican latino and white drug or white druggies i'd say you know that was the initial audience for the show it only grew through time. because it's the dialogue stood out because now 2 cheaters performance stood out and that and brian de palma made a really wonderful film grander like a grand opera you were saying you know no i couldn't get off the route that i was in love with violence that i and i argued back in the book you know that i was exploiting violence in midnight express and in scarface and this and that kind of the barber conan the barbarian era the dragon i understand and i write about that i wouldn't i didn't direct the films but i really put on paper real violence in my head i mean i have seen a lot of violence in that time in get and in other merchant marine too and i was trying to and in the prison i tried to reflect the real life that i saw i just

couldn't as they were there were scenes and you mentioned i mean for those in the know tell you a assassination in washington d.c. of the high end as ambassador in washington some are smuggled in to scarface how is it that i wouldn't have any way a person voted reagan would you dead didn't know what was going on in central america and then end up creating salvador argue me one of the greatest films about u.s. intervention in the western hemisphere. when i research star thing in 1903 i did not i did not go i did not know central america because it the connection was from colombia to miami so it was not about politics for me at that point i did throw in because i had a political bone in my body the end emerge from 76 the chilean. ambassador it was a very outspoken critic of the of the regime in chile which was fascist eat was bombed and killed in

a car 3 blocks from the white house or something it was outrageous so in my mind i made i combined that with tony much and it being the it was supposed to kill him but doesn't kill him because tony has a conscience in the end about family and so it becomes an involved story the message didn't get out and it wasn't understood so what i'm saying is when i did i dropped out of the business essentially after 980 i was you know i was dead no water i was just a screenwriter living in a broader in new york so i wanted to get a make a movie out in one necessary deal with hollywood i wanted to write make this movie salvador and it was based on now i had gone to salvador with richard boyle who was a great journalist but an oddball journalist to oh it was intro to countries he'd been in lebanon and in ireland he'd been everywhere nicaragua salvador and he had a story in salvador with a woman and it was a fascinating thread for the movie he took me down there i saw enormous amount of corruption i saw

a pathetic situation in central america where all the reformers teachers the unions were being busted were being oppressed they were the ruling class was old aristocratic families owning all and you're talking about the eighty's and you know this news coming from ecuador from bolivia the whole people and the mars johnson he recognizes in venezuela. maybe they haven't seen your film that film salvador has anything changed since those days you think. i'm not up to date on but it seems not it seems that home birth is in worse shape and sent and i think what hillary clinton did the intervention was a disaster re why does america keep. you know the wrong for the wrong side in all these countries is a very good question for history will be we will be held to account but going back to the south the sounded or story we got there still may i mean i got into the fascist party headquarters arena major bob who it was responsible i believe for the

murder of orchard bishop. i go almost to meet him i was supposed to meet him but something happened but they gave me their cooperation because they love scarface in other words i was getting the car operation of the desk lights because they loved scarface for having balls and being what they thought was a fascist here upon a stone i'll stop you there after the break more from all of a stone on intellectual neoliberalism an alleged attempt by henry kissinger to stop platoon from ever being made and why his next project would turns to his j.f.k. assassination hola some more coming up in part 2 of going on the ground. a short time ago an american airplane run by hiroshima.

standing up clinging to him suck on top of. the car going on our own there and you know you. can it's. like most americans growing up after the war the bombs were a great thing they ended the war they say hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides and that's what my grandfather always said mrs reason for the decision. truman was hoping for a dual strategy one was to drop the bombs and hope that japan would surrender and number 2 the americans were trying to send a message to the soviet union there was an american power plant in october 145 and had chosen 20 targets in russia.

show seemed wrong. when old rules just told. me to get to shape out just to become educated and engagement because betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground. welcome back you're watching going underground lockdown edition i'm still here with oliver stone discussing his memoir chasing the light i mean if anyone thinks it's easy making movies this book isn't off of him because he can hear his and but how how seriously should we take the accusation that the military industrial complex interferes with the distribution of movies as you seem to allege you don't going to very much detail but you talk about kissinger there in the shadows henry kissinger xander hey i mean they actually acted to interfere with me that i think they did

because well it's a 2 term story i'm in the i'm in a bad moment the end of my career so to speak i want to be can you ward so what i'm 30 in my thirty's at 3839 they take everything i had all my resources and i plunge them into south to make this movie for no money now this is very difficult because there are 93 speaking parts i mean to country cus it sounded oh i have tanks or starches murders assassinations civil riots i'm sure to include everything that 3000000 dollar budget and i keep it in started that started a $300000.00 budget it would have been a disaster for me it would wiped out thank god it was an englishman who came in it was john daly with him do you read salvador and put 2 and he asked me literally which film do you want to do 1st of all or he was even a boxing promoter at the alley fight in the congo no american studio would touch

the show either as a script to produce or as a distribution company of john put up all the money nobody would do it this is disgusting to see is all the studios to which all the studios would say well we were an interest in the film an artistic merit had you know i've never tell you what not just it's a past but this you know if you think about it politically this is a film with revolutionary sympathies which was totally against i guess the american grit real red. lucian except it's where the west wing were the heroes of the film. nobody would touch it was a crane to experience painful i can't tell you it turned off the projector in the middle of the film it was too violent too sexy too everything the film only got out because john stuck with john's company distributed and not not to great success or anything but he also at the same time said all of it go to the philippines make it to he had that amount of confidence in me i went to the philippines on the back of salvador and i made this low budget movie little bit more money with the best of my

ability to get it for $56000000.00 as opposed to 3. nobody expected anything i mean it was i didn't i was happy to make it but you know there's something very disturbing in this book when you talk about salvatore's reception when you say salvador didn't make it to care this side of the born and i think what disturbing is you say a creeping intellectual neo liberalism in the in the 1980 s. a sort of sense or as identity politics drew an idea of what what constitutes politics just explain that a little because of course that debate is here about council culture and all the rest of it and that it isn't the car culture of george orwell that didn't inspire you but there's something else going on that the violence and so on get confused and somehow you mean we saw jonathan racist even though what you're saying is actually anti imperialist. well it's as franklin roosevelt said i and i was

a traitor to my class. the idea here is this is a speculation i was making in the book about europe changing because the old europe that i knew from charles de gaulle time grew up a lot of the time in france it was much more independent they were separate countries they were not into a common market de gaulle was very independent and tough with america he through he exited nato as you remember so when 'd he came along and neither all was a socialist but you could feel i felt that there was. when reagan came into office in america that was a breakpoint that was a beginning of a reaction to the liberalism so-called of jimmy carter etc and john kennedy and reagan took it back to a worship of the market in any cost get rid of the unions get rid of regulation same as trump kind of thing and free up the whole thing it would do better business everybody be happy well it's a nice idea and to some degree my father of course believe that too but not to the

point of reagan my father you mentioned him earlier did believe in a regulated capitalism and he would not have approved of this breakout that happened with reagan in fact he called reagan a dope and my father started the changes and as a result even and i said our man and now he thought reagan was miss and was green back the cold war when there is no need to bring back the cold war it once said you know what difference does it make who does who how many arms you have when you're in a soviet when a soviet nuclear sub can be off long island with one you know and do so much damage to our country it just doesn't make sense to build keep building up his arms surplus to tune was also had many problems on its way to be made daily said my ass but it almost been made by another producer $983.00 and it was with there at that point the producer was putting up his own money $3000000.00 to make the movie and all that's that's not a lot for platoon and the distributor his deal was with m.g.m.

and on the board of m.g.m. was enrique center and alexander haig i do i believe that because either they were consulted or not but whatever happened the distributor said no to the film and this was outrageous because he was making films like blue velvet with which is very risky all kinds of other films were being made that time with the video revolution . my film was thrown out so i had only you have to realize rambo was being made chuck norris missing in action we were refighting the vietnam war going back to save our p.o.w.'s that was a big issue back which is i think totally misplaced and that the american people did not really get a true picture of you and it was like the idea was we could have won the war if we really wanted we had our hand side behind my back our back like like hitler said about the germans in world war one was the same. way i was living in a benighted benighted society communication was not possible they were even

released by film that's how desperate i was that's why john daly is dedicated the book to john down that it he's he's an english lower class guy who says for all you know we're going to do what we do and i think we need that spirit really need it especially now when no one's going to do anything with any guts because they don't want to see. the media in this country which is doing the government's work for them. well because tame he helped to put on a better lucina for marcus on lost to emperor the list so many different ties between you i would say and they have and the left wing european filmmaking one he didn't really understand you perhaps when it came to top gun he wanted you to direct top gun is a true no no yes not directed to write to write it in 1903 you know that you want to be 2 i couldn't do it. i wrote for the 4th of july and put to it accordingly i was in run topix corner i had made

a film but it was no way i was going to do top gun i was heartbroken because it was a lot of money i see in the book you worked also with robert bolt famous for lawrence of arabia the vision of aagot and he tells you in this book how terrorism can be used by the state to change the minds of people within within a fate i don't know whether that's premonition of snowden later on what impact did that bolt have on your thinking when it came to me i spent it was sold to his company or a company was partner to eat brought me to it they brought me to los angeles and i met with robert robert love my treatment my treatment was based on a story i heard back in 7374 the patty hearst kidnapping that the people which is the person who led the gang that kidnapped many years donald. to freeze i believe was the name was a black man but it i've heard the story that he'd been into f.b.i.

informant and i went with the idea that he was a provocateur one of those people and that's this is common in america where you find an under cover agent working to create. still chaos for example like kent state there was always this rumor it's been strongly supported that there was the 1st shots were fired by an undercover f.b.i. guy who worked with him he may not have been an f.b.i. agent but he was certainly associated with these stories about so that's when you have to be careful when you have these chaos situations is it's very much in the interest of the state to start chaos to start fires to start this concept of destruction because it brings the wrath of the public on the demonstrators and before you know it the government can do what they want with the damage it is going on and to some degree in america right and so you understand the robert will pick up on it right away he was a dedicated much more socialist than i was and the cover of never actually came out

as i for as far as i understand it i should just say by the way if any one thing in portland is full of national provocative though here we're having an inquiry into just what he went talking about by going to how you know he has so decide who haven't had twice and you see it in the book a sudden leatham comes up and some money and then here already whoa and then stopped at the last minute a couple of times it broke my heart i mean each time i can't tell you you know you've got to have a strong resolution to stay in this business you have to suffer or you take the pain because it hurts and even if you succeed and you make a film and then it gets burned at the box office you you're going to have a heart fashions change all the time this is popular as the popular it's in the long run what matters i love watching movies i watch old movies a lot because they last i like movies and last i love the long range the long picture but that's not economically a viewpoint the. most producers have because they're going to make money in the short run so it's a tough business i've run into a lot more heartbreaks but i was steeled for it i was disciplined by the early

years and that's why i ended book at 40 i said this dream was real honest and i appreciated it very much because i knew this i knew the last side of it the rest is a hell of a story as you know it's a lot of other things happen i know nearly a threesome between gore and allen make jagger and you you the fan are about all 3 lisa documentary on j.f.k. most people new generations and they as confirmed i'm not sure but it is it is your contention that based on evidence the cia willing to the assassination of john f. kennedy. pretty a lot of evidence when we get into it it's a 4 hour documentary it's a legacy piece i don't care if the young generation doesn't care they should care because it was the beginning of a period in american history when the intelligence agencies essentially grown brag grasp the reins of government and if you look behind the scenes ever since the intelligence agencies have a lot to do with what happened in

a look at their role 'd in the in vietnam only i mean all the misinformation all allies on a vietnam come from them and also in iraq twice afghanistan there's no end to what they're going to mess is they get us into syria certainly and libya doris goes on and on and you know it's getting worse when i 1st talked to you years ago i thought it would get better and i can't believe it's getting worse or as in cause why has it got better because obviously dollars jumper the elected on a so-called and hand to mention effect if he's pulling troops out of germany or not but he did exactly that war in france and anything like that or any recent like it was for that but i was dead wrong he can't do anything about it because it's a system as mr putin says documentary said the american president they come they go we've seen eating 5 of them now or for them 5 he said. it doesn't make

a difference we have to pollinate russia has a policy what we have in america is a changing spectrum of personalities and we demonize our enemies which is not a policy of is horrible castro is horrible horrible we who every now and cheeping is the next bill and you know whoever the villain of the days is pure or well what's important is the military industrial complex must go on must be budgeted and anything besides that is an important including the welfare of the american people all the time thanks so much for coming back on going on the ground will want you for that death new documentary on j.f.k. and your next book and whatever new films you doing this book i highly recommend that all of us john thank you so much rick you are she. had that thing for the show will be back on saturday with cornell west facing.

all across the board trying to sit down in the polls and not just by full interview traditionally incumbency alone is enough to me feel like shit but this time around it is a race trumped me and let's be clear this has little to do with joe biden how did he get. you cannot be both with the yeah you want. my.

how can you explain love i've been to 82 countries i didn't 12 but i came here and on those 3 days i just filled with hope. and. say show. i made my decision to come here because 'd i felt i knew i could build a new life you. know if you could put his name. god decided that this money is no good to be free what. did you hear i was aware my one dream is that all my children 'd find the same kind of happiness i do . i love my home i love cold weather i like the culture like the history i like everything about it. so i was i know that. i am. russian fama.

lebanon is in mourning after some 100 people are killed and thousands injured and a massive explosion that rocked the country's capital on tuesday a huge shockwave ripped through beirut destroying buildings in the port district and leaving many residents without electricity the exact cause of the disaster is a clear though it's believed to be linked to the improper storage of explosive materials in a warehouse. we found everything turned over our hands i was moving and it felt like an earthquake suddenly this sort of frozen us something explodes and everything falls with this.