Ben Child 

Oliver Stone: China’s film-makers need to confront country’s past

Stone causes controversy by telling Beijing international film festival audience that Chinese directors fail to make movies about Mao Zedong's damaging legacy
  
  

Oliver Stone at the Beijing international film festival
Typically outspoken … Oliver Stone at the Beijing international film festival. Photograph: ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images Photograph: ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images

Hollywood's habit of allowing Chinese censors to cut offending material from blockbuster movies has led to accusations of artistic surrender from some critics. But at least one US film-maker has clearly not been reading the script: Oliver Stone has told an audience in Beijing that the world's most populous nation desperately needs to confront its past on the big screen if its burgeoning film industry is to be taken seriously.

Speaking at the Beijing international film festival, Stone caused huge embarrassment for organisers when he began to discuss the failure of local directors to confront the damaging legacy of the country's revered founder Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution a half century ago. The outspoken film-maker was appearing on a panel that was supposed to be discussing co-production between China and Hollywood.

"Mao Zedong has been lionised in dozens and dozens of Chinese films, but never criticised," said Stone. "It's about time. You got to make a movie about Mao, about the Cultural Revolution. You do that, you open up, you stir the waters and you allow true creativity to emerge in this country. That would be the basis of real co-production."

He added: "Three times I've made efforts to co-produce in this country and I've come up short. We've been honest about our own past in America, we've shown the flaws."

The director of Platoon and Wall Street continued with his theme despite attempts by the moderator of the panel to return the discussion to less controversial territory.

"It's all platitudes," he interrupted. "We are not talking about making tourist pictures, photo postcards about girls in villages, this is not interesting to us. We need to see the history, to talk about great figures like Mao and the Cultural Revolution. These things happened, they affect everybody in this room. You talk about protecting the people from their history. I can understand you are a new country since 1949. You have to protect the country against the separatist movements, against the Uighurs or the Tibetans, I can understand not doing that subject. But not your history for Christ's sake.

"We're talking about the essential essence of this nation of how it was built, this whole century, you've not dealt with it."

Stone's comments, which are likely to be hugely controversial in China, are entirely in line with his outspoken reputation. The film-maker last year hailed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a "hero" for exposing the US's mass surveillance programme, and he has also thrown his vocal support behind WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, visiting the activist at the Ecuadorean embassy in London and criticising the depiction of Assange in Hollywood movies.

 

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