Oliver Stone plans 'secret history of America'

Oliver Stone is a man's man. Of this I have no doubt before meeting him. Not just because of his status as a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam, and then an Oscar for reproducing his experiences on celluloid. But because the most compelling sequences from his latest film, a documentary called South of the Border, show him hanging out with Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, chewing the cud about politics and war, talking very much mano a mano.

It's an impression that's reinforced moments before I meet him in his Los Angeles office when the photographer appears and shows me some of the portraits he's taken. They're slightly startling because Stone has a new moustache, a big, bristling, Zapata number, and in the tiny digital frame on the back of the camera, he looks like it's him who really ought to be dressed in military fatigues and running his own small South American regime.

Then he ambles in, distractedly. "Suzie!" he calls to his assistant. "Where are my glasses? I think I've lost my glasses."

We both look at him. He has one pair of glasses on the top of his head. And another pair on a piece of cord around his neck.

"They're on your head," says Suzie.

"Do you think you could go and look for them? They're very valuable to me."

Suzie hesitates and then, having seemingly witnessed this sort of situation before, says: "OK!" and disappears out the room. Two minutes later, Stone puts his hand to his head. "Suzie! I've found them! They were on my head!"

Suzie reappears at the door. "I know," she says. "I told you."

"Did you? Jesus! What, now I can't even hear?"

It's a rather nice surprise, this. The bumbling, the self-accusation, the absentmindedness. On paper, he's so much the alpha male that, as one interviewer put it: "One expects to find antler stubs under his thatch of suspiciously too-black hair." As well as his war record, there are his various arrests for possession of drugs, as well as his well-rehearsed views on monogamy ("unnatural"). But, mostly, there's the work.

There seems an almost hyper-masculinity to Stone's oeuvre. He's the director of Platoon, one of the most highly rated Vietnam films of all time, a film that was based on his experience. The war spawned a further two films, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth. He made one of the most violent and controversial films of the 90s, Natural Born Killers. And he's had a fascination with some of the most powerful men on earth, having made films about no fewer than three American presidents: the Oscar-winning JFK, Nixon and, most recently, W, about George W Bush.

In the flesh, however, he's more like an amiable professor. There's a sort of otherworldly air of distraction and he reminds me of one of those old-fashioned Marxist academics who have now all but disappeared. Although he's not a Marxist, he has a strictly Stoneist view of the world and to this end he has facts, figures, theses, arguments, names, dates, an entire view not just of contemporary politics but also history.

Read more in The Guardian...