10 Things We Learned From Oliver Stone On Joe Rogan Experience
4. Failed Film Ideas
Despite eventually getting Platoon over the line and helping craft other outstanding Academy Award winning features like Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Midnight Express (1978) not every idea of Stone's has made it to our screens.
When asked by Rogan if there was ever a film he wanted to make but never could, Stone revealed that there's been a couple.
He spoke about how he wanted to tell the story of the My Lai massacre, which involved a company of American soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians in a village during the Vietnam War. Stone actually got two or three weeks away from shooting the film in 2007, but the film ran into the 'fiscal crisis of 2008. However, Stone confesses this shouldn't have been an excuse and that clearly nobody wanted to make the movie.
Another film the director tried to get made was a Martin Luther King Jr story. Stone said he worked on the story for 'many years', but it's 'too tough a story to tell' as it would look at the iconic figure as a human and wouldn't shy away from his failings. He did, however, suggest that a black filmmaker should take on that project in the future.
Lastly, he spoke about trying to make Evita. However, after he wrote a screenplay for the project it was given to another director (Alan Parker) to work on.