al20/20 hindsight alert!

Oliver Stone is making all kinds of excuses for the lackluster performance of his bloated flop of a film, Alexander. The auteur is incredibly frank in his discussion of the film he directed and co-wrote, and in some ways seems defeated and beat down. My only problem with some of his comments stems from the fact that he seems to want to blame the audience (particularly the American audience) for the film's resounding failure. I am personally of the opinion that the film failed because it was a disjointed mess, and word of mouth on the thing was poison.

That said, I do find it very interesting when a man of such obvious talent openly discusses his failures. I’ll simply let the man’s words do the talking by way of Variety:

"In some way," Stone says, "I failed to communicate his story properly to that audience. I still think it's a beautiful movie, but Alexander deserved better than I gave him. Who could have imagined that the election would turn on the issue of homosexuality? But it also became the headline of this movie. They called him Alexander the Gay. That's horribly discriminatory, but the film simply did not open in the South, in the Bible Belt. There was clear resistance to the homosexuality.

"On JFK, I gambled on the audience's intelligence and won. Here, I lost, the way I did with Nixon. If I could go back, I'd have put events in linear order and limited the voiceovers. I'd have gotten the film to 2½ hours and taken out the homosexuality for the U.S. market and for countries sensitive to such things, like Korea or Greece. Kids weren't comfortable with men who hugged, a king who cries and expresses tenderness."

Stone also mentions how he had plans to adapt Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” but now fears studios are going to be less apt to hand over a large amount of cash to him after Alexander’s impressive flop. The film cost $150 million to make and so far has only brought in around $35 million stateside.

I have an idea for you, Oliver: Every one of your films does not have to be an epic. Why don’t you tone it down a little for the next one and simply tell a good story?