I first met Oliver Stone in 1986 on a junket tour of Australia to promote his film, Salvador. He was spikey, passionate, exhausting and exhausted. Having just read what I hope will be the first installment of his memoirs, CHASING THE LIGHT, I now know why.

He had made two harrowing films, back to back, SALVADOR and PLATOON, and their making takes up half of this bloody entertaining biography.

CHASING THE LIGHT concerns Stone’s first forty years of life, from child of divorce to golden boy of Hollywood, his time as foreign posted teacher, merchant sailor, and tour of Vietnam as a “grunt” weaving the fabric of his life and dreams in between.

CHASING THE LIGHT has some good, some great and some horrible moments, but indelible.

Regarding his childhood, his first fifteen years, Stone says, he had a blessed life, “I wholeheartedly adored my sexy mother, trusted and respected, sometimes feared, my hardworking and loving father.”

He had complete access to two cultures, two languages (his mother was French), able to speak and think in both.

His mother would often sneak him out of school to attend double feature bills at the movies, and he writes that he could never have surmounted the obstacles he’d face later making his own movies without the fundamental sense of optimism instilled by her.

That optimism was first truly tested when his parents divorced while he was away at boarding school, then again when his hopes of becoming a novelist were shattered. The rejection of his novel, at age twenty, made him give up on himself, where very dark thoughts propelled him to volunteer for the draft, specifically insisting on infantry in Vietnam at the lowest possible level.

Stone confesses that he has competing visions for his life- “it was a pirate’s life I romantically saw” – He’d be the Captain of a chaotic crew – Salvador, Platoon – looking for the vessel of the next story idea and then board her and plunder her, with a wary eye out for other treacherous freebooters like Dino De Laurentis, Jon Peters, and various studios, who would sell you out for a pittance if there was something in it for them.

Film financing was the bane of film making life as funds for Salvador were siphoned from a proposed Arnold Schwarzenneger project that went into turn around.

CHASING THE LIGHT is quite an eye opener on Stone’s travails as director getting up two extraordinary projects, Salvador and Platoon, both which would garner Academy Award nominations, with Platoon securing his first for directing.

It is also full of anecdotes about the ones that he wrote that never got made, wrote, got made by other directors and bastardised like Eight Million Ways to Die, or films that finally eventuated way down the track.

Case in point: As far back as 1978, Born on the Fourth of July was going to be made with Al Pacino in the lead. Stone describes the rehearsals with Pacino as a white hot modern version of Richard III in a wheel chair. He also relates the devastation felt, two weeks out from shooting, the collapse of the German tax shelter financing. Stone would, of course, go on and make the film as a Tom Cruise vehicle, collecting a second Best Director Oscar for it.

CHASING THE LIGHT is written with the natural born killer style that Stone’s screenplays have and one looks forward the novel that is promised to be published. And to the next installment of memoir.

CHASING THE LIGHT by Oliver Stone is published by Monoray