“I’ve been in repressive societies, many of them over the course of my life, and I don’t feel that here,” said Oliver Stone of his experience here in Saudi Arabia. “There’s no sense of a religious police – I think more so in other countries. I don’t feel fear among the people – if anything it’s shyness.”
The Oscar-winning director, who is in Jeddah this week heading up the international jury of the Red Sea International Film Festival, sat down in Deadline’s Red Sea Studio where he continued to voice support for the burgeoning film industry, which only lifted its 35-year-old religion-related ban on cinema in 2018.
“I’ve been here before a few years ago and they are really trying to change things there’s a new landscape, there’s a whole generation of younger people,” said Stone. “They say 70% are under 30 and the Prince is changing a lot. I’ve seen changes already. There’s a very conservative religious element here, a bit like Iran. The modern elements are fighting this.”
Stone, who is also screening his latest documentary Nuclear, about the “story of nuclear energy in our present landscape of climate change,” noted that a lot of the films he has been seeing since touching down in at the festival are “of the first stage of cinema” that he compared to the kind of cinema that came out in Europe post-WWII.
“We saw a world that had come back from deprivation and war,” he said. “Here, in these countries we’ve seen a lot of poverty and the people who don’t have a chance. It’s sad stories – people of migration, stories of not enough money, being screwed by your boss, being screwed by the police, being screwed by anybody with a higher position as many of these films. Each one is done in a different way because society is different. There is a general plea for humanity to stay alive, to keep its dignity.”
He added, “There is less emphasis on action as there is on truth, and that’s very much the first stage of cinema”
Stone emphasized that America is “deprived” of being “in touch with the world.”
“We don’t get out, we don’t know the thinking of other people and we tend to assume that they have to follow our way of thinking and that’s not the case and it tends to be that way and many problems result, politics and so forth.”
When queried if he would consider making a documentary that examined the state of the market in Saudi Arabia, Stone said he was more interested in returning to the world of features in his career right now.
“If I make one more feature or two more features, I’d be very pleased but there are some other subjects I’d want to deal with in my lifetime.”
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