CraveOnline: You don't see Lost and Heroes forcing people to take more of a film attitude?
Oliver Stone: Well, they have. Television has usurped everybody from film. So has commercials by the way. In a sense, we've democratized the image. We've taken the techniques. If you look at the techniques, for example, of Natural Born Killers or JFK, they're all over commercials now, all over TV, all over the place. I've seen it so constantly that I feel like it's a degeneration. There's no point or purpose for it. To the contrary, stylistically, I would go the other way like a World Trade Center where you really concentrate on the acting and the lighting, the story. This is what we are. We're storytellers. I can't say that because there is reason for stylization but let's do it better than television. For some reason television bores me, even the best shows. I'm not a Sopranos fan.
CraveOnline: And movie theaters seem to be becoming more like TV.
Oliver Stone: Oh God. It's very difficult. I can tell you, when I go to the movies and I have to sit through 10 previews of films that tell the whole story and they look alike, you know that we've reached an age of consensus. Consensus is the worst thing for us, the worst. We've reached consensus. We all agree to agree. That's where we lose it as a culture. We have to move away from that and I think that's part of what I keep doing. That's why I'm still trying, I hope he's trying for. I would like to see originality. It's so difficult.
CraveOnline: What's your relationship with Tarantino these days?
Oliver Stone: I've talked to him many times since then. We do get along. We're very civil. He was upset at the time. He was a young filmmaker and he was upset that we'd changed his story completely. Not his story, we changed his screenplay quite a bit. We put more emphasis on other things and he was upset. He came out publicly.
CraveOnline: How do you look back on Scarface, another classic?
Oliver Stone: I always thought it was a satire. I never saw it as threatening to be reality. It never sought to be The Godfather. I think Brian was the right director for it because he has the necessary sarcasm. There is a lot of humor in the film. It was lost at the time because the bloodbath, the violence, the viciousness of the gangsters. My model frankly was twofold. One was Bertold Brecht's Arturo Uli and the other one was Richard III as I remember. This was 1982. So those were the models. They were not exactly reality models but the film was attacked for its literal, as Natural Born Killers was attacked for being literal and it wasn't. As you know Wall Street also, they took the Michael Douglas character and made him into a role model which was not intended that way. You can never judge how the film will be taken. You can only make your best effort and put out what you feel. How it's read you never can tell, how it's perceived or remembered for that matter.
Best edge of your ... 
