Tonight in Manhattan, Oliver Stone premiered South of the Border, his new documentary and love song to the Latin American Left, before a small audience of friends. The film lionizes leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Raul Castro, among others. Before the screening, National Review Online spoke with Stone about his politics.
“The American economy has been geared to the concept of the military-industrial complex,” Stone says. He believes the U.S. gives the CIA, national security, and the military “way too much emphasis” and thinks “we’ve suffered as a result.” An “empire that rules by force or by fear will not last,” he says. Huh? I followed up. I asked Stone why he considers the U.S. to be an “empire.” His response: “Why? Because it is. We have bases all over the world. We have military in half the countries of the world. We tell people what to do.”
After Stone wraps an interview with NY-1, a New York City network, the NY-1 anchor comments that in the U.S., we “don’t hear either side” of the Latin American debate. Stone laughs that on Fox News one can get the “cartoon” side of things, “a dictator, a thug, all that stuff, it’s just not true.” I scratch my head. Is Stone saying that Fox News is cartoonish and that Hugo Chávez’s media efforts are not? Stone jumps to Chávez’s defense, saying the Venezuelan media is “against him, and they are cartoonish.”
I then ask Stone whether he ever feels that his film could “be a tool for the propagandists — that [the Latin American leaders] are trying to spin you.” He tells me to check the facts. “None of them are dictators,” he says. “What are you talking about?” Tariq Ali, the film’s co-writer, chimes in, telling me that the film is a “corrective.”
NRO sat through the film, which besides being boring has an odd obsession with Fox News. Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol, and the whole cast of Fox & Friends are mocked, Michael Moore–style. In fact the whole film is like a Michael Moore documentary, just narrated by Stone, with the lens turned south. To (I guess) emphasize the point, Stone edits in some clips of Moore himself yelling at CNN and how they’re biased and worthless with regards to a different subject, Iraq.
Stone also throws out some juicy quotes in the film. He detests the “triumphalism” that permeated Washington after the fall of the Soviet Union. He calls human rights a “buzzword.” He beams when he looks at Chávez, saying he’s “never seen such energy.” He says Fidel Castro was once “noble.” Interestingly, Stone’s interviews with Latin American leaders, those men of the people, are mostly conducted on private jets and in presidential palaces, with a lot of aides present.
Numerous members of the Hollywood elite attended the NYC screening. I asked actor Mickey Rourke what he thought of the film’s politics, and he said he had “no opinion.” Really, I asked? “Yeah,” he joked. “The only thing I know about Latin America is that they have good baseball players.”