From Vietnam and headin? for Wall Street

Press, 22 December 1987, Page 38

From Vietnam and headin? for Wall Street

By

PHILIP WUNTCH

NZPA-KRD Dallas

Some directors, like James Brooks of “Terms of Endearment,” wait four years after winning an Oscar to start their next project. Oliver Stone waited four weeks.

Stone began shooting “Wall Street” 30 days after walking off with the academy award for “Platoon” — and watching the Vietnam drama win three other Oscars, including best picture. “I just didn’t want to think about the Oscar,” he said. "If I did, I’d get terrified at the thought of having won it. I’m after career longevity, and the only way to obtain longevity is to keep working, working, working.” Stone agrees that similarities exist between his two films. Both deal with an innocent (Charlie Sheen both times) who falls under the corrosive influence of a dangerous and more powerful older man (Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” Tom

Berenger in “Platoon”). And both films, Stone contends, are war stories. “The whole ‘Wall Street’ area is a battle zone, and I filmed it as such,” he explained, his nervous energy spewing out across his hotel suite. “The conversations are all filmed like physical confrontations, and even in the ensemble shots, the camera circles in a way that makes you feel you’re in a pool with sharks. And that’s what those guys are, they’re sharks.” Some of the characters in “Wall Street” are inspired by friends of the director. “Make that ex-friends,” Stone said, laughing. “None of my yuppie pals are going to speak to me after they see this movie. The scenes between Michael Douglas and his three-year-old son are all based on observations I’ve made.

“These powerful men love their kids. Sure they do. Or they think they do. But they basically think of

their children as possessions, and they polish them and make them shine.” “Wall Street” is dedicated to the director’s father, Louis Stone, who died in 1985. He was a Wall Street broker for 50 years. But he was definitely not a shark, the director maintains. “ ‘Wall Street’ has changed so much since my dad’s day. He wouldn’t recognise it now. He and I had our differences after I had grown up, but we were completely reconciled when he died. He represented the old-line, honest way of doing business. “Computers changed all that. Now, thanks to computers, they can do so much more business each day, and the pressures are enormous. So are the temptations to do insider trading. The whole thing is like a casino. “I think my dad would like the movie I’ve made. He always wanted business to be treated seriously. When I grew up I

loved ‘Executive Suite’ and movies like that. “Sometimes my father would watch an old 1930 s comedy on television, and he'd wonder why, when someone like Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert had a choice of marrying a plumber or a Wall Street broker, she’d always choose the plumber. He’d just sit in front of the television set and shake his head.” Stone’s father is represented in the film by Hal Holbrook, who plays an honourable veteran stockbroker, filled with philosophical sayings, who looks doubtfully at some of Sheen’s methods. Sheen’s character is based in part on David Brown, a broker convicted of insider trading who served as adviser on the set. “The main feeling I got from David Brown was one of extreme isolation. He was an ex-convict, and it showed in a lot of his actions. I tried to get that feeling of loneliness and isolation in Charlie’s character.

“Charlie responded very emotionally to his meetings with David, and Charlie got very emotional over playing a character who gets arrested. The idea of playing an informer was tough for him, but all those Wall Street guys made deals after they were arrested. I wanted to keep the movie as honest as possible.” With “Platoon” and "Salvador,” Stone had the advantage of being an outsider who scored a hit. “Wall Street,” by comparison, will be scrutinised as Stone’s first film following an Oscar coup. Stone suffered a negative critical reaction once before, when he wrote the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” in 1983. “I wrote a violent screenplay with lots of profanity. Brian doubled the violence and tripled the profanity, and of course my name was on the screenplay.”