MILIUS on Austin Film Festival 2007

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Wrote by Future Filmmaker

10-14-2007

Quote :

At a last minute whim, my mother gave me money to go the Austin Film Festival this year. This time, I brought meine liebe, Amanda, along with me. I was unable to get pictures as it simply slipped my mind to take pictures. However, I had the pleasure of meeting two well-known directors, John Milius and Oliver Stone.

John Milius directed movies like The Wind and the Lion, Big Wednesday, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, and Fairwell to the King. He co-wrote Apocalypse Now, wrote Evel Knievel, Jeremiah Johnson, co-wrote Dirty Harry and Jaws, and Clear and Present Danger. Most recently, he created and wrote the HBO series Rome. John Goodman's character Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski is based off of him. There was a panel in which he discussed his own experiences coming up into film. I was able to ask him a question about "Rome" and he replied that he originally was going to make a movie, but things changed. He still owns rights to a film and gave a hint that he might have an idea to spin-off a movie from the show. Right now, he said he's doing a movie called "Journey of Death", a modern western on motorcycles and drugs. He claims he has not been able to do movies in a long while because he has been "Black listed" by Hollywood liberals because he is an open conservative and just like the McCarthy era, he is now considered an enemy by studio executives. Strange.

It's pretty obvious what Oliver Stone has done. Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Any Given Sunday, and regrettably Alexander and World Trade Center.

There was a panel in which both Milius and Stone sat down to discuss war films. Of course, the current war and its parallels to Vietnam were discussed too. I've learned that Oliver Stone and Milius both hate films like Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down and they repeatedly made jokes about the two. He kept calling it "black ship down" or something close to that. Milius favorite war film was Battleground and Seven Samurai, Stone praised "All quiet on the Western Front" and some other title that I didn't recognize. Oliver Stone was a very interesting speaker and always had some very meaningful things to say when he wasn't joking around. I was able to get a question in. I wasn't thinking too much about a good question so I just asked him what he thought of "Braveheart" and just war theory. He replied that he liked Braveheart and said yes to just war. Probably what I should have asked him is why he shied away from issues with 9/11 when he did World Trade Center. I really would like to have gotten an answer from him on that.

After the panels with Oliver Stone and Milius, I strolled around downtown Austin for about two hours looking for a place to eat without a bar and had no luck. But I was able to go see a series of Short films, two of which were from Britain and Australia, which were pretty interesting.