First Oliver Stone travels to Turkey and apologises to the people for some of the overly brutal scenes in Midnight Express that showed the Turkish prison system and those who ran it in a very bad light, now he’s openly discussing what he should have done differently with Alexander.
Now, I haven’t seen it yet but the press and controversy about it has been quite strong, as we’ve shown here. Still, I can’t help but feel if I had gone so far and made such a film, and even defended it at great length in the open press, I wouldn’t now suddenly go back on that and talk about what was perceived to have been wrong with the movie and what I should have done differently. Stone has though, in an article from Variety for subscribers, copied in Rope of Silicon.
He opens with a statement which is very resigned and almost, if you’ll pardoned the expression, conquered statement:
“In some way,” Stone told Variety, “I failed to communicate his story properly to that audience. I still think it’s a beautiful movie, but Alexander deserved better than I gave him.”
Stone goes on to talk about the more controversial aspects of the story:
“They called him Alexander the Gay. That’s horribly discriminatory, but the film simply did not open in the South, in the Bible Belt. There was clear resistance to the homosexuality.
“If I could go back, I’d have put events in linear order and limited the voiceovers. I’d have gotten the film to 2√Ç¬Ω hours and taken out the homosexuality for the U.S. market and for countries sensitive to such things, like Korea or Greece. Kids weren’t comfortable with men who hugged, a king who cries and expresses tenderness,” Stone said.
That’s a lot of changes, and quite a change of direction from the previous statements of defense that have been issued before. I still don’t understand his change in direction, perhaps the humility is designed to try and raise audience figures abroad to recoup the cash invested. I find it hard to see Stone actually feeling this way considering his past movies and the criticism he’s faced before.
For me, none of this changes the fact that I will go and see it, merely for the fact it is an epic, oh okay then, and because of the controversy to date!
