Oliver Stone Experience

Stone himself serves as guide to this no-holds-barred retrospective-an extremely candid and comprehensive monograph of the renowned and controversial writer, director, and cinematic historian in interview form.Over the course of five years, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone (Midnight Express, Scarface, Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Snowden) and New York Times bestselling author Matt Zoller Seitz (The Wes Anderson Collection) discussed, debated, and deconstructed the arc of Stone's outspoken, controversial life and career with extraordinary candor. This book collects those conversations for the first time, including anecdotes about Stone's childhood, Vietnam, his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his continual struggle to reinvent himself as an artist. Their dialogue is illustrated by hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and documents from Stone's personal archive, dating back to Stone's birth: personal snapshots, private correspondence, annotated script pages and storyboards, behind-the-scenes photography, and production files from all of his films to date-through 2016's Snowden, and including Stone's epic Showtime mini-series Untold HIstory of the United States. Critical commentary from Seitz on each of Stone's films is joined by original essays from filmmaker Ramin Bahrani; writer, editor, and educator Kiese Laymon; writer and actor Jim Beaver; and film critics Walter Chaw, Michael Guarnieri, Kim Morgan, and Alissa Wilkinson.