"The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror."

Undoubtedly one of the most controversial directors in Hollywood, Oliver Stone's remarkable films often raise some debate over the subject matter portrayed. Although he has served as a producer, screenwriter, and actor on a variety of films, Stone often gets consistently identified with his more political works, from 1986's Platoon, the first of his so-called Vietnam trilogy, to Nixon. Despite this association, Stone has stated that he considers himself to be primarily a dramatist, and his films "first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles".

Without doubt, Oliver Stone is a master film craftsman and an exceptional man. But the truly fascinating things about him are not just the magnificent images he projects on screen and etches into the collective mind, but the trials and tribulations of his personal life -- a life which reads like an epic novel, plays like a thriller, and serves as a trigger for his work.

Born in New York City on September 15, 1946, Stone grew up nurturing his love of films. Luis Buñuel particularly inspired him, as did Jean-Luc Godard, whose film Breathless inspired the nascent filmmaker with its speed and energy. After a year at Yale, Stone dropped out and moved to Vietnam, where he taught English for a year. A year in Mexico followed, during which he wrote an unpublished novel.

To escape his disciplinarian father, socialite mother, and the Ivy League world, in April 1967 Oliver Stone enlisted in the U.S. Army and requested to be assigned to the infantry. "It was a way of announcing to my father that I was a man," he says. He took basic and advanced infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and on September 14, 1967, the day before his twenty-first birthday, he flew out of Oakland in a transport bound for Vietnam: "They put me in an airplane on the night of the fourteenth in Oakland, California, going west. On the plane, I smoked a cigarette for the first time in my life. We hit a dateline and lost a day. The day we lost was my twenty-first birthday. We landed in Vietnam on September 16, 1967."

Faced with the horrors of battle, Oliver Stone became convinced of the need for sensitivity in his life. He began to notice the beauty of Vietnam, and bought a 35-millimetre Pentax to film it. Having always wanted to become a writer, he switched to telling stories through images.

Oliver Stone completed two tours of duty and was discharged in November 1968 after fifteen months. He was wounded twice, but awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for combat gallantry. Unfortunately, he also left Vietnam with a head full of painful memories that would haunt him to this day.

On his return from Vietnam, Stone enrolled at New York University, where he studied filmmaking under Martin Scorsese. As a student of Scorsese's, he participated in his first film project as the cinematographer of Street Scenes, a collection of student films.

Four years later, he wrote, directed, and edited his first feature, Seizure. The film's overriding theme of psychological trauma proved to be good preparation for Stone's next project, the 1978 film Midnight Express.

Stone attempted to make Platoon, for his next film, but while everyone loved it, no one wanted to put any money into it. However, it caught the attention of Columbia, who hired Stone to adapt the story of the young American Billy Hayes' life experience in a Turkish prison for smuggling hashish. This became the film Midnight Express, and won Stone his first Academy Award, for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Stone's own experiences helped him write the story as he himself was arrested upon his return from Vietnam for posession of pot. He remembers painfully how thousands of Vietnam vets slummed in the jails of San Diego while America forgot about them.

As strange as this seems today, Oliver Stone was not invited to the set, and Alan Parker, the film's director, is reported to have been cold to him. He also was not invited to the Cannes premiere. The buzz around Hollywood labelled Stone a wild man: he drank, snorted coke, and chased anything in a skirt.

But instead of letting his first professional experience wear him out, Oliver Stone was already hard at work on another project.

After making his directorial debut for a major studio (Orion) with 1981's The Hand (a production for which he also served as screenwriter and had a minor acting role), Stone wrote a number of films. Again on the strength of the Platoon spec script, Edward R. Pressman hired Stone to write a script based on the comic book hero Conan the Barbarian. This film led to nothing but trouble as Stone butted heads with one perspective director after another, and the weakest parts of his script were the ones kept and filmed.

But then Midnight Express was released and his life would never be the same again.

Still unable to get funding for Platoon, especially after the release of a similar Vietnam story Coming Home, Oliver Stone moved onto his next directorial effort: Salvador. This film fully embraced the political tilt that Platoon had hinted at with its exploration of the various politics at play during the early-'80s war in Central America. It is a passionate protest against the savagery unleashed by fascist thugs in El Salvador 1980s with the complicity of the U.S. government. Woods gives a brilliantly incendiary seriocomic performance in this wild, lacerating, and bitterly observant film.

Finally, in 1986, Stone had his directorial breakthrough with internationally acclaimed Platoon. The film won him his first Best Director Oscar (as well as a slew of other awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. And Stone effectively opened the way for a new -- albeit controversial -- approach to looking at the war, and in so doing, his name became almost irretrievably associated with films of a more political, revisionist nature.

Stone followed it up with a similarly acclaimed effort, Wall Street (1987). A tale of greed, corruption, and power, the film reflected the American state of mind in the 1980s. It went on to win a Best Actor Oscar for star Michael Douglas, who supplied a chilling portrayal of the film's central source of sleaze, Gordon Gekko.

1988's Talk Radio might have been a better stage play than a movie (adapted from its star Eric Bogosian's stage production), but it worth mention among Stone's work as a startling portrait of its era. It makes a strong political statement, critical not only of sarcastic talk-show hosts who ridicule their callers and the world at large, but also of the people who have made such shows popular and the evils of society that breeds them.

Born on the Fourth of July (1989), the second installment in Stone's Vietnam trilogy, earned him yet another Best Director Oscar. Yet it also marked the beginning of the criticism that was aimed at the director for certain aspects of his historic portrayals, including his tendency to make his protagonists into Christ-like figures (with Platoon's Chris Taylor being an earlier example of this).

Deciding to fend off criticism by moving away from overtly political films, but still remaining within the sixties/seventies nostalgic mind frame, Stone made The Doors, a drug-saturated biopic of singer Jim Morrison. The film is as much a tribute to the enduring power of the Doors' music as it is a cautionary tale about the perils of both celebrity and substance abuse. Oliver Stone was apparently planning a cinematic collaboration with Jim Morrison, star of the newly defunct rock group, at the time of the singer's death. By 27, Morrison had silently passed away in a Paris bathtub of apparent heart failure brought on by a supernatural consumption of alcohol and drugs. Though he may not perceive it, the truly great director Stone perhaps dodged one Morrison bullet in order to be struck down by a second: the lure of doing a film about him.

An early scene in The Doors shows what Stone might have had to contend with. The late adolescent Morrison unveils his film school project, which his professor and classmates denounce as openly pretentious and worthless. Morrison's commentary, when called upon to provide his own explaination: "I quit." With that, he gets up and weaves his way out of college for good. One has to admire that degree of intolerance and ballsy preciousness in an Angry Young Man, and Stone certainly does.

And an angry young man Oliver Stone still was as he continued to make a slew of political and controversial films, including JFK, Heaven and Earth (the third in his Vietnam trilogy), Natural Born Killers, and Nixon.

In JFK, Stone deploys video, different film stocks shot at varying speeds, and a dizzying style of montage while harnessing the talents of a large and extraordinary cast to create a film of undeniable power and excitement. Stone's conspiracy-theory approach to the assassination of John F. Kennedy incurred a lion's share of controversy for its heated subject matter, but it nevertheless secured eight Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Stone.

Unlike the trilogy's previous instalments, Heaven and Earth looked at the Vietnam war through the eyes of a Vietnamese woman, Le Ly Hayslip (from whose autobiographical writings the film was adapted). Oliver Stone turns his cameras away from the experience of the American combatants to focus on the devastating effect of the war on the Vietnamese people.

Stone's next directorial effort, 1994's Natural Born Killers, is the story of serial killers (played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis). It was celebrated by those who saw it as a condemnation of the media's glorification of violence, and those who decried it claimed it did little more than glorify the very violence it purported to condemn. Oliver Stone, angry at the bad press he had gathered over the years, used this film as a way of hitting back. "Like an angry kid, I threw paint on the wall."

The following year, Stone managed to regain some favour with Nixon , an epic take on the title character's presidency. As in many of his films, Stone's reason for making Nixon has to do with trying to understand certain elements of his own character. Nixon was a man who, though he attained great power and wealth, never really attained inner peace.

Stone remains a fascinating director, with his large body of work revealing his personality and life in a way uncommon among directors today. Although he is most often referred to as a 'political director, a closer look at his work shows what he himself claims: he is primary a dramatist, and each of his films follows an individual's struggle through life.

FILMOGRAPHY:

1. Halloween: Blood Line (2006) (in production)
2. Alexander (2004)
3. Looking for Fidel (2004) (TV)
4. Persona Non Grata (2003)
5. Comandante (2003)
6. Any Given Sunday (1999)
7. U Turn (1997) ... aka U Turn - Ici commence l'enfer (France)
8. Nixon (1995)
9. Natural Born Killers (1994)
10. Heaven & Earth (1993) ... aka Entre ciel et terre (France)
11. "America Undercover" (1993) TV Series (episode "Looking for Fidel") (episode "Persona Non Grata")
12. JFK (1991)
13. The Doors (1991)
14. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
15. Talk Radio (1988)
16. Wall Street (1987)
17. Platoon (1986)
18. Salvador (1986)
19. The Hand (1981)
20. Mad Man of Martinique (1979)
21. Seizure (1974) ... aka Queen of Evil ... aka Tango macabre (Canada: French title)
22. Last Year in Viet Nam (1971)