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Oliver Stone’s ground zero

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IT’S hard to imagine there will ever be a better example of the folly of judging a filmmaker by his politics instead of his work than “World Trade Center,” a movie opening Wednesday about a team of Port Authority police officers who become trapped in the twisted wreckage of the twin towers. The film celebrates self-sacrifice, personal heroism, the sanctity of family and essentially all that is good about America, with no unsettling pangs of troubling doubt, guilt or dark conspiracy.

So how is it that an uplifting, unabashedly sentimental drama -- our first look at the selflessness that followed in the hours after the terrorist attacks -- was made by Oliver Stone? This is, after all, Hollywood’s prince of darkness, the man who not only brought us such wild-eyed fare as “JFK” and “Natural Born Killers,” but who also, soon after the attacks, referred to the catastrophe as “the revolt on Sept. 11,” linking it to a rebellion against six media companies who “run the world”?

“I wanted to do what I did in ‘Platoon,’ to use realism to honor the people who were there at ground zero that day,” explains Stone, who appeared restless during our 90-minute interview, moving around his office and once asking an assistant for a new chair (“I can’t think in this one”). The policemen “stay alive because of their hearts and their connection with their families. They stop taking their lives for granted, which I think is a pretty important message to get across.”

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When Stone was announced as the director of the project last year, a wide variety of editorialists and bloggers went into spasms of outrage. As one conservative blogger put it: “To allow [Stone’s] poisoned and deranged mind to pollute the memory of 9/11 by re-creating it in the likeness of his vile fantasies is beyond obscene.”

Paramount Pictures, which bankrolled the $63-million film, was so worried about Stone’s bomb-thrower reputation that the studio hired a media firm that played a prominent role in various conservative causes, notably the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group that attacked Sen. John F. Kerry’s Vietnam record during the 2004 presidential campaign, to do outreach in the conservative community. Paramount also tried to avert a backlash in Washington by having screenings of the film and its trailer for members of Congress, something I suspect the studio won’t be doing when it releases “Jackass 2” next month.

Now that many of Stone’s critics have seen the movie, written by Andrea Berloff, they’ve changed their tune. Cal Thomas, a leading conservative columnist, called it “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”

Oliver Stone and God Bless America. When have you ever seen those two phrases in the same sentence?

So when I sat down with Stone the other day at the film’s West Los Angeles production office, I couldn’t resist teasing him, asking if he’d ever imagined right-wingers like Thomas hailing one of his films. Was there some secret plot afoot?

Stone, who is just as prone to conspiracy theories as ever -- he thinks the New Yorker has been out to get him, based on what he believes are negative pieces on him that have run in the magazine -- offers a pained smile. “I’m not embarrassed,” he says, sitting at his desk, a big map of Manhattan behind him. “Maybe Cal was my brother in another life. I guess they responded to the heart of the movie, which is the best part -- it’s what makes us feel redeemable.”

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Still, “World Trade Center” is strikingly different from Stone’s signature work -- somber rather than flamboyant, understated instead of indulgent, elegiac instead of inflammatory. In his other historical films, Stone has always focused on his character’s contradictions and self-destructive zealotry, always keenly aware of his heroes’ failings. “WTC” is so austere and quietly observant that if you didn’t see the credits, you’d think it was directed by Clint Eastwood, not the man who made “Platoon” and “The Doors.”

The one aspect of the film that feels most like Stone’s earlier work is its innate sympathy for men under fire, whether they are first responders reeling from a terrorist attack or bleary-eyed Marines in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Having earned two Purple Hearts in Vietnam in the 1960s, Stone sees pretty much everything through the prism of that war, which shaped his anti-establishment politics as well as his identification with blue-collar heroes, be they police officers, firefighters or Army grunts.

“Oliver is interested in how men handle pressure,” says Stacey Sher, one of the film’s producers. “It’s why we wanted him as our director. He’s done two tours of duty in Vietnam -- he’s had a real life. And he’s certainly not the kind of guy who’d ever make a movie for a paycheck.”

Sher says she never had any worries about Stone inserting crackpot theories into the tale. “He wanted to get everything right. If anyone said, ‘That’s not how we did it,’ Oliver would say, ‘OK, show me how you did it.’ You always felt he was on this obsessive quest for the truth.”

In an era when studios are notoriously risk-averse, you have to give Paramount a lot of credit for hiring Stone, who was coming off of “Alexander,” a costly dud. Other studios had been leery of hiring the director, citing his erratic behavior and much-publicized fondness for drugs and drink. During the making of “The Doors,” Stone commandeered the Warners corporate jet so he could spend a weekend doing peyote with some Indians in South Dakota. More recently, he lost out on a possible job at Universal Pictures after showing up late and behaving oddly at a meeting with studio executives.

“Universal is a hundred miles from hell, and I had a late thing going for a while,” he explains. “I couldn’t get out of the house. Call it my own case of agoraphobia.” Stone says reports of his drug use are exaggerated, though he says, “I’ve always had a thing for marijuana since Vietnam.” In 1999, he pleaded guilty to drug possession and no contest to driving under the influence. Last year he was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and drug possession. Of the 1999 arrest, he says, “I was under tremendous stress, and so, for a period of time in the late 1990s and 2000, I was under medication for a pre-diabetic condition, but being the madman I was, I didn’t give up alcohol, and they didn’t mix.”

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He also acknowledges using psychedelics, which, he says, “liberated my mind and gave me a heart, and whatever success I’ve had is because my movies are from the heart.” For all his excesses, Stone remains one of the most gifted filmmakers of his generation, in the same pantheon as Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann. And in fairness, Stone’s indulgences have always come on his time -- every producer I spoke with said he was well prepared on set, though I’m not sure I’d want him driving carpool at my kid’s school.

Stone’s political views are as outspoken as ever. “I’ve traveled the world and seen it everywhere -- we lost the trust of the world,” he says. “So now we have more death from terror, not less. Not to mention a constitutional breakdown.”

Startled, I asked, “Who had a constitutional breakdown?” Stone’s eyes widened. “America, that’s who!” he says. “You know, there’s a great line from ‘Alexander’: ‘Conquer your fear and you will conquer death.’ That’s what the heroes of our film and the rescuers did on 9/11. But since then, we haven’t fought smartly. We’ve fought stupidly. We’ve overreached.”

Stone rattles off a list of countries that have successfully fought terrorism in recent history. “We had something to learn from them, but we ignored them. We didn’t have to go to war in Iraq when the enemy was really 4,000 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. If we had successfully hunted down Bin Laden, we could’ve finished him off and most people would’ve still been with us.”

He’s on a roll now. “It was hard for us Vietnam vets to see Iraq creep up on us, just the way Vietnam did. I really believe if Bush or Cheney had fought in a war they wouldn’t have put us through all the pain and suffering. I have three kids, including a 21-year-old son. Are they going to be Stealth jet pilots, like those guys in ‘Why We Fight,’ smiling after they’ve dropped the first bombs in Iraq?”

Stone doesn’t buy the argument that filmmakers should keep their politics to themselves. “I served my time in Vietnam. I pay my taxes. So why am I being muffled and censored as a celebrity? Why can’t I speak out as a human being?”

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Which brings us back to the folly of judging an artist by his politics, not his work. I often get mail from conservatives saying they won’t see a movie starring Sean Penn because they don’t like his politics, which to me is just as narrow-minded as my saying I wouldn’t see a movie directed by Mel Gibson because he hates Jews.

Artists are not necessarily nice people, but it’s their work that matters, not their politics or prejudices. As Stone says, the best movies are from the deepest, most mysterious place of all, from the heart.

“The Big Picture” appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

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