Oliver Stone: Castro complex

Oliver Stone is obsessed with powerful men, and in his new documentary gets up close and personal with Fidel Castro. He tells Leslie Felperin why he felt at home with the Cuban leader

With Oliver Stone, the term "alpha male" seems so apt one expects to find antler stubs under his thatch of suspiciously too-black hair. As he sits down next to me in Berlin's Four Seasons hotel, where he's come to do interviews for his new film Comandante, I can practically smell the testosterone seeping from his sweat glands. He's a man's man, through and through: swaggeringly macho and faintly ridiculous, but rather heroic in his way.

Earlier, the Vietnam vet-turned-director of Platoon, JFK, Nixon and Natural Born Killers braved a barrage of questions at the film festival's press conference about Comandante and his attitude to the upcoming war with Iraq. (He's against it.) Ever since he premiered the film, a documentary about his three-day encounter with Fidel Castro, at Sundance, he's been fielding hostile fire about why he didn't give Fidel a tougher time. "You know, the American attitude to Castro is so caricatured," Stone says witheringly. "He's the guy with the beard, he's a commie, he's the guy you have to attack right away with 'How many people are in prison? When will you hold elections?' These very negative and hostile questions that set the wrong tonality. The wrong questions are being asked."

Stone was invited to direct the documentary by a Spanish production company that had already set wheels in motion with approaches to the Cuban authorities. He insists he was never interested in playing Jeremy Paxman or, god forbid, Barbara Walters, to Castro's politician. Although he asks the right tough questions (about human rights in Cuba, elections and allegations of torture), he doesn't push too much when Castro is evasive. Ultimately, the film is less about Cuba or even Castro himself than about the encounter between two men over three days and nights of interviewing, an unprecedented level of access. "My attitude with Fidel was we're equals," explains Stone. "I don't want to waste your time and you don't want to waste mine."

His lack of modesty may be breathtaking, but you have to hand it to him, the result is much more revealing and cinematically interesting than anything a head-on political journalist would ever get out of Fidel Castro. Stone uses the same fractured, hyper-edited technique that make his features so distinctive. With three cameras filming all the time, Stone got enough footage to zoom in on telling details, such as the way Castro holds his hands, cuts through his meat while eating or shuffles his feet when embarrassed.

The terms of their agreement were that either Stone or Castro could call cut at any time, and in this safety zone of shared power, Castro relaxes and blooms, opening up in a way he's never done before for Western cameras. He holds forth, for example, about the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ("a wily peasant") and dismisses the cult of America's First Ladies as "ridiculous". He also hints that the South African authorities hid their country's neutron bomb when Nelson Mandela came to power.

Like a more bullish version of Nick Broomfield with a better subject to explore, Stone unashamedly makes himself a character in the film; and the rapport between him and Castro is rather sweet. Castro comes across as a mischievous Marxist grandpa, which is just what he is in one way (he sired seven children). We see Stone offering to get him Viagra, in exchange for some Cuban medicine he's impressed with ("PPD10 – great stuff, very good for cholestrol" Stone explains). Castro jokes that he can just see the headlines: "Oliver Stone smuggles Viagra to Castro."

Stone also gets Castro talking about which movie stars he likes (Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, while he counts Gérard Depardieu as a friend). He asks him about his ex-wife Mirta Diaz-Balart (who now lives in Spain), and the 76-year-old's feet go into shuffle overdrive. Questions about his former comrade and lover Celia Sanchez, who died in 1980, cause even more consternation. "He was great about sex, wasn't he?" Stone asks me. "I loved the way he talked about women. It was so old fashioned, so chivalric. You could see here was this great womaniser, so pictured, and here is a guy saying, 'I only married one time.' It was clear [he didn't want to talk any more about it]. He didn't talk much but it was in the body language."

It's at that point in the movie that Stone mentions that Castro reminds him of his father's generation. Did he remind him of his father in other ways? "Exactly," he nods, although he's not going to give too much away about himself either on this point. "Especially the way he looked at his interpreter Julianna when I asked him: 'You love her [Julianna], don't you?' His reaction was exactly like the way my father would react, like 'I don't really love your mother and why do you raise that?' So shy!"

In the movie, Castro asks Stone about his combat experience in Vietnam and for once its Stone who's shy with him. Maybe it was his experience as a soldier that won Castro over. Plus, "he knew my work," he says. "I think Platoon might have been the one he liked most, because he still considers himself very much a soldier and prides himself on the guerrilla warfare, but in terms of the interview I think the key was that I wrote him a four-page letter precisely detailing what I wanted to do. Perhaps timing was an issue. Perhaps he liked me and trusted me not to distort his words. You know," he says, mock-threatenly, "that happens a lot, the distortion."

In the film, Castro flatly denies torture happens in Cuba. Perhaps he believes it, the way he seems to believe they have hardly any prostitutes either. (At one point, boasting of the triumphs of the country's education system, Castro asserts that "even our prostitutes are university graduates.") Did Stone always believe him?

"You know that's not ultimately relevant," he asserts. "What's important is to look for yourself and judge. Evasion is in the eye of the beholder. You know frankly I've done too many movies, and U-Turn comes to mind, about people who are deluded. We're all deluded. We all think we're better than ourselves. What I love about Fidel is his morality, his sense of determination and will. The media distortion of Fidel Castro in America would be enough to drive any movie director nuts. It's almost like he's a paedophile or something...."

He sighs. "Contrary to the American caricature of Fidel, he's the opposite of egotism. At his age, he fiercely believes in the concept that he is irrelevant, that when he goes, the youngest people especially are trained now to withstand the onslaught of propaganda that's going to come at them."

What didn't he like about Castro and Cuba? "Well, frankly, I told him I could never stand to be on a block where everybody was telling me and the government what I'm doing. I believe in free enterprise. I believe in capitalism within a certain ceiling. I believe in the ability to make a living freely, perhaps because I'm accustomed to it as an American. But you know Fidel's arguments are not necessarily in opposition to mine. I do believe he became indebted to the Soviet Union mostly because of American intransigence to him from the beginning, most specifically via Richard Nixon who was the biggest liar of American history, so why we believe Richard Nixon and not Fidel Castro, I don't know."

Stone agrees that one of his reasons for making the film was to capture a glimpse of the culture in case all passes away after Castro "goes". (Out of love, he can't seem to bring himself to say "dies".)

Does he wish he'd started making documentaries earlier? "It helped at this time," Stone concedes. "I was tired of movies at that time because they're so big, expensive and artificial. And also the digital aspect was so important. It was great to take up the camera and feel it out and feel the freedom, and I'm confident I could even make a feature that way now."

Indeed, Stone has already made another documentary, called Persona Non Grata, on another demonised world leader, Yasser Arafat. Friends who saw a print still with timecodes on it in the market at Berlin report that it's very good, shot in the same style as Comandante although it's more like In Search of Arafat, since Stone only gets to meet him very briefly. "But we made something of that that makes it more interesting," Stone insists. "We had very good access to both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. And since you mention it, that film has been vilified in the States much more than Comandante. When they finally saw Comandante at Sundance, they couldn't attack me for being a nutcase, but they did attack me at the time for Arafat, saying it was a love letter to Arafat which is absolute horseshit. People who have seen the movie, including the top Jewish leaders in America, have said it's very balanced."

Not having seen the film, I can hardly argue with him on this point, so leave it at that. What's more interesting is why is he so drawn to making these portraits, either as documentaries or fiction films, of world leaders. "Isn't that perhaps the biggest challenge we have, the human game?" he asks rhetorically. "You either drop out and become a spiritual man or you become a philosopher king in the Platonic sense. Philosopher kings are the highest form of the species because they can lead other people. If anything what we need now are great leaders. Not people who cheat and steal and buy their way into office. God, what a way to live a life."

It seems like a natural progression that Stone's next feature film will be about the first and arguably greatest leader in world history, Alexander the Great. He starts shooting the film, staring Minority Report's Colin Farrell in the lead, this summer. It's a project he's been gearing up to for years. "I don't think I understand him completely, but I do think I understand him a lot better than I would have 10 years ago," says Stone. "You have to be a combination of young and old [to understand Alexander the Great], and I think that he's a great character, a great example for kids, for youth to believe again in the power of man. The power of men to do things, the power of individuality and being who you are." And on that Nietzschean note, time is being called on the interview and Oliver Stone manfully strides off, ready for the next battle.

'Comandante' will be released later this year