Oliver Stone, renowned and strident director, is rushing a movie about Still-President Bush starring Josh Brolin through production so it might come out in time for the next presidential election. There has been much debate about the accuracy of W, as well as whether or not it's even supposed to be a drama, a satire, an attack piece or a legitimate biopic. Here's what Stone himself has said about it.
"I love Michael Moore, but I didn't want to make that kind of movie," Stone said of "Fahrenheit 9/11." "W.," he said, "isn't an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it."
"He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people," the director said. "We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it's never meant to demean him. We are playing with our own opinions and our own preconceptions of him," Stone said. "This is his diary -- his attempt to explain himself."
Brolin has his take on things as well.
"When Oliver asked me, I said, 'Are you crazy? Why would I want to do this with my little moment in my career?' " Brolin recalled. Then, early one morning during a family ski trip, Brolin read Weiser's original screenplay, which covers Bush from 1967 to 2004. "It was very different than what I thought it would be," Brolin said, "which was a far-left hammering of the president."
"Republicans can look at it and say, 'This is why I like this guy,' " Brolin said. "It's not a political movie. It's a biography. People will remember that this guy is human, when we are always [outside of the movie] dehumanizing him, calling him an idiot, a puppet, a failed president. We want to know in the movie: How does a guy grow up and become the person that he did?"
It remains to be seen just what it'll turn out to be in the long run, or if anyone will want to see a movie about George W. Bush once they finally get to kick him out of office. Perhaps his administration will be a nightmare best left forgotten.
