That’s one thing I got reading the script and even more so in the movie, that he was really trying to do the right thing but was just too dumb to do it.
SW: That’s what we were trying to go for and would separate us from “Saturday Night Live”, YouTube and everything everyone knows about Bush. You have a guy that everyone can relate to, everybody has their own failures in life. I couldn’t stand Bush, I couldn’t even listen to him on TV, but after reading 20 books I see he believes all this stuff. He believes in good, but unfortunately his version of good is the only version he will accept and he makes the wrong decision over and over.
Can you imagine what Bush’s memoirs will read like?
SW: He’s already written a book, “A Charge to Keep,” which I got a lot of the religious stuff out of, but it will be a complete white wash. An absolute white wash.
Did you see what we were trying to do with this movie though?
Speaking of funny, that’s exactly what the trailers were selling.
SW: Well the trailers were misleading. They were trying to lure young moviegoers in and it didn’t work because the majority of the audience is over 40. Fifty percent, which is good!
I really don’t think you could win either way.
SW: No matter what you do, shit is going to come down. We wanted people to come out at the end and say we were fair to him but the end result.
This is my logline for the film: “He could have fucked up baseball, but instead he fucked up the world.”
To do a political movie, that social comment, you have to be subversive and you can’t take one heavy-handed side because everyone will come down and say, “This is dogma.” If I was to put my true feelings of Bush into a movie it would be so one-sided. I could pile on, pile on, pile on, but I am trying to give the audience the benefit of the doubt and also to see it from Bush’s point of view. To see the world from his point of view.
I don’t think anyone could come out and say, “Oh, I really like Bush now and I think he was right.”
I would think only hardcore evangelicals could come out and wholly agree with his policies.
SW: One woman told one of my assistants she felt really good for George Bush because he found God and straightened his life out. I think there are very few people who would say something like that and she was an evangelical, just like you said.
Evangelicals will back him to the Rapture. They’ll be in Alaska when they are 90-years-old with Sarah Palin and they’ll wait for the Rapture to start.
And watch Russian planes flying overhead…
SW: [laughing] Yeah!
SW: There are no more words to describe this woman. It makes me mad, the media, they make jokes about her, but the jokes aren’t enough. It’s much scarier than Bush. They made fun of Bush before he was president and then he became president and they realized it wasn’t funny anymore. The joke was on us.
She’s like a PTA mother on a reality TV show called “Who Wants to be Vice President?” After eight years of Bush it is amazing people can’t see that she is a female version of Bush. It’s shocking. If aliens came down from another planet and listened to her debate Joe Biden they would think it was like a sixth grader debating a professor.
Or one of the third graders she is giving shout outs to.
SW: Right? How the press can be talking about how she did well [in that debate] just shows you how chicken shit the mainstream media are.
It’s funny we say this even though the Republicans are hitting the media for being too left.
SW: Absolutely! Okay, there’s that line in the movie where David Kay blames Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, did not get all the material about the WMDs. Frontline did a piece with David Kay said that, David Kay said Condoleezza Rice was the worst National Security Advisor in history. Frontline could have put that in the documentary on Bush, but they didn’t. They left it on the web.
There are a ton of characters needed to tell this story and they are only touched up on in this film. Is this story too big to tell in one feature length film?
SW: It would have had to be a four hour miniseries to really do justice on that level.
Do you see this as the end of Bush biopics or just the beginning?
SW: I don’t think there will ever be another Bush movie. It’s too expensive, they won’t make political movies anymore for television or features. Oliver had to go and get a lot of money from foreign hedge funds, half the money came from China. People say this is just one story about Bush, but there won’t be another one. Studios don’t want to make political films anymore. Only on rare exceptions, if you’re Steven Spielberg or George Clooney or Oliver and even Oliver could not get this made with the studios. He had to scrape together money.
What do you think of the bailout plan that passed?
SW: The Swedish bailout was the best. In Sweden they had a similar situation in the ’90s and the Swedish government took over the banks and they punished the company owners and the owners of the bankrupt banks and they took money away from them. I think we needed the bailout, but the owners of these companies should have been punished, they should have given back money, they should have lost their salaries…
I just don’t know how someone running a company that would have gone bankrupt can be given the chance to continue drawing a salary from the same company and then take $400,000 corporate retreats to San Francisco.
SW: Did you read Maureen Dowd? AIG had a second retreat, a pheasant hunting retreat in England last week. This happened last week. After everything, after all they did, they went pheasant hunting. This people are the lowest in the world.
SW: Here’s what happened. I was working on the script and the latter part was set in China and dealing with Chinese money and policing the Chinese. Gekko gets out of jail. It actually opened with Gekko getting out of jail and he’s standing by a curb and a limo pulls up and he’s next to a black kid, who’s a prisoner, and the black kid gets in the limo. The black kid is a rapper and the limo is for the rapper. So he is left standing there on the street alone and no one knows who he is anymore.
When was the film set take place?
SW: In the present. Basically, he had gone to Europe, like this world trader Marc Rich. He had been making deals in Europe and then he decided he wanted to go back to New York and get back in the action. So he does his jail time.
To make a long story short. I wrote the screenplay and Fox put it in turnaround because it was dated. Everything has changed and they’re starting with a page one rewrite that deals with the current situation in the markets. So it won’t be ready for a year and by that time the economy will have changed again so I wouldn’t be too hopeful.
So you are no longer involved?
SW: No, because Oliver turned it down and Oliver won’t direct it. I had already worked on a treatment and they didn’t go back to me.
You aren’t a churn and burn screenwriter. So what’s next?
SW: I’m going to take off a year or half a year. I’m not that ambitious. I’ll just wait for something to come along that I want to write. But yeah, I don’t take assignments. I just wait for the right project to come along. I was working on this Iraqi-Palestinian project but it didn’t get made. It’s a tough business that’s all I can say. It’s the sickest non-criminal enterprise… Maybe Wall Street is sicker.
You have had a pretty good deal working with Stone though. You also helped him with Ni—
SW: Nixon. I had a great fortune to be able to work with him. He’s a very tough task master.
How would you compare Nixon to Bush?
SW: Nixon was much more devious than Bush, but Bush caused much greater damage to America and the world than Nixon ever did. Nixon was committing all sorts of misdemeanors, Bush committed an unwitting felony.
What happens if Barack Obama doesn’t win the 2008 election?
SW: I think America goes down the tubes. It would be such a nightmare. I would say we have been saved by the market crash. That’s going to put Obama over the top. Because the market crashed when it did and there was no terrorist attack, I think he’s going to win because of that. Unless you have the Bradley Effect and have white voters claiming they’ll vote for Obama and then don’t. Nine percent say they won’t vote for a black man that means 18% won’t. Because people won’t tell the truth.
Is that the official figure they’re using?
SW: The original was 9% like three months ago, but if 9% say that then you know that it’s more than that because people will not tell the truth. Then you’ve got 10% of the public that are against everything no matter what.
And they’ll vote for Nader.
SW: Ha, oh my god! That’s what I mean, the 10% against everything. The ones that will drive slow in the fastlane.
Lou Dobbs…
SW: Yeah.
Scariest movie of all-time.
SW: The Haunting, it’s not the scariest of all-time, but it’s my favorite. Open Water is pretty damn scary.
Ha, I thought you would give me a politically charged one.
SW: Political? Well, Network, it’s the most prophetic of where our country was headed. It was scary in a political sense and now we’re there. It’s like Sarah Palin, people will accept anything if the package is right.
W. is already in theaters everywhere, you can get more information on the film and watch the trailer right here.
FURTHER READING:
An article talking about Rove’s perception of W. can be found here and there is a great article written by Stanley about Wall Street and the misconception of what Gordon Gekko stands for click here.
