Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Oliver Stone, Hachette Australia, $35.00.
Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Oliver Stone is well placed to elaborate on what is it like to make movies ‘on the edge’.
In this commanding and redolent memoir, the 73-year-old elucidates about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering for combat and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Salvador, Platoon, Midnight Express and Scarface.
As Oliver puts says: it’s about “the successes, the failures, making a dream at all costs, even without money. It’s about cutting corners, improvising, hustling, cobbling together workarounds to get movies made and into theaters, not knowing where the next payday is coming from – or the next monsoon or scorpion bite. It’s about not taking no for an answer”.
Stone commands attention: he begins by describing a complex, dangerous scene he was filming in Mexico for his “epic-scale” Salvador (1986). “It’s everything that made the movies so exciting to me as a child—battles, passionate actions, momentous outcomes,” he writes. This book covers Stone’s first 40 years.
We also relive the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction following the failure of his first feature, The Hand (starring Michael Caine); experience his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface; and see his stormy relationship with The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino.
Along with some momentous photographs and vibrant details of the high and low moments, we also learn of the breathless hustles to finance the acclaimed and divisive Salvador; and witness tensions behind the scenes of his first Academy Award-winning film, Midnight Express.
Written fearlessly with intense detail and colour, Stone does justice to Chasing the Light by giving an insider’s story of Hollywood’s years of upheaval in the 1970s and ’80s.
The pinnacle of the book is the extraordinarily vivid recreation of filming the Oscar-winning Platoon (1986) in the depths of the Philippine jungle pushing himself, the crew and the cast almost beyond breaking point. The film’s opening was like a “runaway train”.
Finally, Stone had fought his way into Hollywood. He had “managed to crest into the light. Money, fame, glory, and honor, it was all there at the same time and space”.
In the ostentatious world of movie commentary, Stone’s Chasing the Light will stand out for its hard-earned acumen, veracity and poise.
