Oliver Stone

It's hard not to think that Carey Mulligan is having a "Queen for a Day" moment. Done up in purple satin, with gold kick-me stilettos, the fresh-faced 24-year-old is dolled up for pictures and perched on an antique table in the presidential suite of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a $4,200-a-night, multi-room perch atop the storied hotel. The room isn't hers, even for the night, and neither are the clothes. Practically everything touching her skin is borrowed -- except for the air of giddy excitement.

In his new documentary "South of the Border," Oliver Stone is shown warmly embracing Hugo Chávez, nibbling coca leaves with Evo Morales and gently teasing Cristina Elizabeth Fernández de Kirchner about how many pairs of shoes she owns. These amiable, off-the-cuff snapshots of the presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, respectively, contrast with the way these left-leaning leaders often are depicted in U.S. political and mass media circles. That's especially true of Chávez, the former military officer turned democratically elected socialist leader, who has become the ideological heir apparent to Fidel Castro and the bête noire of Bush administration foreign policy officials.

It's A conversation any father and son might have -- a quick chat about baseball, families and world affairs. But when the speakers are President George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, even a seemingly innocuous conversation can suddenly carry great weight, especially when Oliver Stone is at the controls.

Oscar-winning director and Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone will direct a TV commercial as part of a campaign to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. Stone will direct a 30-second spot that will air in about three weeks on national TV. It will feature a U.S. veteran of the Iraq war or the family of a veteran discussing the war's effect. The commercial is part of a campaign by MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has chronicled the lives of Richard Nixon and Alexander the Great, has requested permission to make a documentary about controversial Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an Iranian news agency reported Friday. Iranian filmmaker Ali Reza Sajjadpour, who also serves as an official at Iran's Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization, told the semi-official Iranian Student News Agency that the president received the request to make the film several months ago.

Taking on the greedy barons of Wall Street wasn't enough. Neither was filmmaker Oliver Stone's probe of John F. Kennedy's assassination or his depictions of America's traumatic involvement in Vietnam. In the end, the director's reputation as a critic of his nation's policies wasn't enough to get him official permission to make a movie about Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an official said.

Rebuffed in his quest to make a documentary film about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, director Oliver Stone shot back with his own criticism, likening the Iranian head of state to his arch-nemesis, George W. Bush. Hollywood maverick Stone had requested access to Ahmadinejad to make a movie about the controversial leader. But an advisor to the president told media in recent days that despite Stone's reputation as a critic of U.S.

No one polarizes moviegoers quite like Oliver Stone. But he may have found a true kindred spirit in Mikko Alanne, the 34-year-old screenwriter of Stone's next war drama, "Pinkville," about the investigation into one of the darkest moments in the Vietnam War: the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai by American soldiers in 1968. As a teenager in Finland, Alanne was already a history junkie when he had his filmmaking fires stoked in a Helsinki theater by Stone's controversial "JFK."

The first plane is seen only as a shadow zooming across a skyscraper. The second we hear about only because a policeman learns of it on the phone from his wife. Instead of showing the now familiar sight of two planes slamming into the twin towers on Sept. 11, this is the way director Oliver Stone announces the attacks in his yet-to-be-released film, "World Trade Center."

Chris Moukarbel was intrigued by director Oliver Stone's latest project, a $60-million movie about two police officers rescued from the rubble of the twin towers. But as a 28-year-old filmmaker, Moukarbel wanted to do more than simply watch Stone's "World Trade Center." He decided to create his own version -- using a bootleg copy of the screenplay and Yale University student actors -- and offer it free on the Internet.