Cover Stories: My Brilliant Career

Three phones were constantly ringing, two dogs were underfoot, and one two- year-old son was scooting around the toy-strewn rooms of Oliver Stone's French country-style Santa Monica house. The writer-director, who seems capable of doing several things at once, was able to talk to TIME Correspondent Denise Worrell about his pre-Platoon movies and that peculiar state of mind called Hollywood. His comments:

My script for Midnight Express in 1978 developed into a real dark-horse success. It got me an Oscar ((in 1979)), which stunned me. I was 32. All of a sudden I went from being nobody for ten years -- total reject -- to being wanted by everybody. I wasn't quite ready for it. I was very much an artist in my mind, and I didn't understand that the movie business is a collaboration between art and money. I wasn't a vet. The same thing that had happened to me in Viet Nam happened to me in Hollywood: I got wounded, blown up right away. I tried to get my script for Born on the Fourth of July made. That was the Ron Kovic story, about a paralyzed vet. Al Pacino was to star, but at the last minute, the money wasn't there. I felt very bitter that making serious films was impossible in Hollywood. So I did The Hand.

That was a psychological horror story with special effects. But there was a lot of studio pressure. I wanted the picture to succeed, so I bowed. The trouble was that the studio wanted more hand. We spent close to a million dollars on this series of hands -- 40 or 50 of them. It was as if you had to be a mechanic to make this movie. It's better to work with a shark or a gorilla, because you have more space. But a hand?

The studio made me shoot more and more horror. The picture was released in 1981, and the audience never went. I'd been hot, and all of a sudden I was cold. People who had wanted me a year before didn't want to talk. I felt like a pariah.

From 1976 until then I had had a ball. I partied hard and did the Hollywood scene. I got into a lot of cocaine and mushrooms -- wild mushrooms were heavy in those days. I'd try everything. Before I met my wife, I was sexually wild too. But I always kept a sober side. No matter how hard the night was, I would always write in the day. I felt Hemingway was right: the true test of a man is to be able to work with a hangover. But I think the drugs were hurting my writing. I was going stale. If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying. The Hand kind of buried me, so my wife Elizabeth and I -- we had got married in 1981 -- decided it would be healthy for both of us to get out of town. So we moved to Paris in December 1981. We stopped drugs cold turkey. We had good food, good friends. It was cold; there was no heat in our apartment. It felt great.

I wrote Scarface basically as an adieu to cocaine. It had beaten the hell out of me, but I got my revenge by writing about it. I conceived the picture in terms of a comic opera. Some of my friends called it Scarfucci. I modeled it on Richard III. Brian De Palma, who directed it, has a slower camera than I do, so some of the script had to be cut. But I was very pleased with the movie. It's got me a lot of free champagne all over the world from gangsters who ask me how I know all those things.

Dino De Laurentiis promised that if I wrote the script for Year of the Dragon, he would produce Platoon. But he backed out because he couldn't get an American distribution deal, and I was in despair. Nothing was coming to me from the studios, and I decided to make a break from Hollywood. Richard Boyle, the guy a lot of the film is based on, was a friend. On the way to the airport one day, he gave me some notes. "Here, you might like this," he said. I read the sketches of his trips to El Salvador, and my mind clicked. "This is it," I said. "I am going to make Salvador. It's cheap. It's close."