Disinformation author Ed Rampell (Progressive Hollywood) has an exclusive interview with Oliver Stone about his new movie Savages.
The Oscar winning director of Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street discussed film technique, his actors, Mexico’s narco-politics, torture, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, at Festival of Films Blog:
FOF: What do you think of the way the Drug War is going in Mexico now?
OS: Aside from the movie business [laughs], it was a tragedy under [President Felipe] Calderon; he militarized it more. I don’t think that militarization works. I think that decriminalization works better, overall. As well as tolerance. But these are very hard qualities to achieve in a modern era.
FOF: Do you think that the [apparent] election of the PRI’s [Institutional Revolutionary Party] candidate [Enrique Peña Prieto] will have any effect at all on the Drug War in Mexico?
OS: I think that’s a spooky question. Frankly, uh, the PRI is, you know, what it is. It’s the way Mexico’s been governed since 1910. And you can reach accommodations in that Mexico that were apparently better than the accommodations that could be made in present-day Mexico, with Calderon and [Vicente] Fox [both members of the PAN, or National Action Party]. So, it’s kind of like the old guard is being readmitted, because you could do business better. That means that cartels will finally be tolerated, because by cutting off the cartels and chasing them, you created a Murder Inc. environment, and also, you added more cartels, like an octopus head. So, it became more of a problem, rather than less. So, anybody who’s smart about this knows to keep it cool and under the table and don’t talk about it like in your press announcements all the time…
[More at at Festival of Films Blog]
