On the night of November 7, 2000, Oliver Stone sat down to watch the results of the presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

As the results started coming in, and it looked like Bush might win, Stone told me he was feeling worried.

It was very scary to me that I thought something was fucked up, frankly.

He'd actually met Bush a year before the election, during an event for graduates of Yale

University.

He was a very cheery man and gentlemanly, but certainly there was a hint that there

was something behind him.

Stone got the feeling that Bush was being controlled by others, that they dictated the way he talked and the way he thought.

There was a sense of a brainwashed president, I'd say.

Everything was very programmed, like a Manchurian candidate.

In early 2001, after Bush had been sworn in, Stone tried to remain optimistic.

I didn't know where the country was going, and I was kind of hoping that, you know, you always wish a new president well, no matter what, even if you don't like them.

But after the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Stone's

goodwill toward the new president disappeared. He believed that the Bush administration had rushed

into battle without thinking.

They declared the enemy before they even knew who they were, and they started to impose

all kinds of emergency nature. They created a state of emergency in the country.

Like this was the worst thing that had ever happened in the United States.

From the 1980s through the 2000s, Stone was one of the most influential writer-directors in the world.

A filmmaker whose big ideas about American history, some of which were very controversial, shifted how many Americans felt about the world. A filmmaker whose big ideas about American history, some of which were very

controversial, shifted how many Americans felt about the country's darker moments. As a Vietnam

war vet, he looked at the violence of that conflict and its aftermath in movies like Platoon and born

...