Pod Insights The Big Picture 5. ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘W.’ | Mission Accomplished About this episode A pair of tough Texas dramas reckon with the bleakness of the Bush years—resulting in two of the most unpredictable films of the early 2000s.
Host: Brian Raftery
Producers: Devon Baroldi, Brian Raftery, and Vikram Patel
Sound Design: Devon Baroldi
Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville
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Transcript 8,378 words · 20 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 On the night of November 7th, 2000, Oliver Stone sat down to watch the results of the presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. As the results started coming in, and it looked like Bush might win, Stone told me he was feeling worried.
0:17 Speaker 01 It was very scary to me that...I thought something was fucked up, frankly.
0:24 Speaker 00 He'd actually met Bush a year before the election, during an event for graduates of Yale University.
0:29 Speaker 01 He was a very cheery man, gentlemanly, but certainly, there was a hint that there was something behind him.
0:37 Speaker 00 Stone got the feeling that Bush was being controlled by others, that they dictated the way he talked and the way he thought.
0:44 Speaker 01 There was a sense of a brainwashed president, I'd say. Everything was very programmed, like a Manchurian candidate.
0:52 Speaker 00 In early 2001, after Bush had been sworn in, Stone tried to remain optimistic.
0:58 Speaker 01 I didn't know where the country was going, and I was kind of hoping that, you know, you always wish a new president well, no matter what, even if you don't like him.
1:06 Speaker 00 But after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Stone's goodwill toward the new president disappeared. He believed that the Bush administration had rushed into battle without thinking.
1:18 Speaker 01 They declared the enemy before they even knew who they were, and they started to impose all kinds of emergency measures. They created a state of emergency in the country, like this was the worst thing that had ever happened in the United States.
1:35 Speaker 00 From the 1980s through the 2000s, Stone was one of the most influential writer-directors in the world. A filmmaker whose big ideas about American history, some of which were very controversial, shifted how many Americans felt about the country's darker moments. As a Vietnam War vet, he looked at the violence of that conflict and its aftermath in movies like Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He dove into the mysteries surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the Oscar-winning drama JFK. And he examined the greed and corruption of the 1980s in Wall Street. When it comes to trying times, Stone is kind of an expert, and he sees the early 2000s as our lowest point yet.
2:19 Speaker 01 Well, I could say from the beginning of the 21st century on, it was downhill.
2:24 Speaker 00 As a decade went on, Stone became even more frustrated. And before Bush left office, the director began working on a movie that would look at the man Stone believed had veered the country off course.
2:36 Speaker 01 I wanted to bring focus on who this man Bush was.
2:40 Speaker 00 The result was W, a biopic starring Josh Brolin as Bush. Unlike many of Stone's earlier films, W was kind of restrained. The movie follows the president from his college frat house to his Texas ranch and all the way up to the White House. Throughout, Bush comes off as sincere, but kind of a lightweight. A guy who maybe should have paid a little more attention to all those ideas being fed into his head and to the words coming out of his mouth.
3:07 Speaker 02 And I'm just so bone tired of this Saddam. He's always underestimated me.
3:13 Speaker 00 Released in 2008, W was Stone's attempt to understand how one man's actions had led to so much destruction. That kind of domino effect was explored in a very different movie from the year before. This film was also about a Texas tough guy who gets in way over his head. His name is Llewellyn Moss, and he's a Vietnam vet who stumbles upon a bunch of bodies in the desert, right near a suitcase carrying $2 million. He decides to take the money and run, an act of greed that sets off a disastrous chain of events, one that will lead to even more dead bodies, including his own.
3:48 Speaker 02 I think I'll do something dumber now, but I'm going anyways.
3:52 Speaker 00 I'm sure you recognize that voice. It's Josh Brolin again, and you definitely recognize the movie. No Country for Old Men. Though it was set in the early 1980s, No Country for Old Men felt like it was taking the Bush years head on. The movie was a reminder that greed, violence, and sheer hubris had long been part of America's legacy. No Country for Old Men and W arrived just as the Bush era was winding down, and both movies prompted audiences to take stock of the 21st century so far.
4:24 Speaker 00 How had we gotten here? And was our present really so different from our past?
4:28 Speaker 01 We never learned anything from history. That's the American way. We had laid it out in front of us, we know, and we go blundering in again.
4:38 Speaker 00 From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished, Episode Five, No Country For Old Men and W.
4:55 Speaker 03 I'm pro football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit MDDAllies.com to watch my story.
5:20 Speaker 04 Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone.
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6:57 Speaker 00 In early 2008, Jon Stewart, who was a very underrated Oscars host, in my opinion, kicked off the annual awards ceremony with a question for the thousands of Hollywood filmmakers and executives in attendance. Does this town need a hug? What, what?
7:13 Speaker 00 What happened? Stewart was joking. Kind of.
7:19 Speaker 00 He was referring to some of that year's contenders, all of which had been released in 2007. The nominees included "There Will Be Blood," starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a sociopathic oilman who beats his longtime foe to death with a bowling pin. But before that, he delivers what's probably the most quotable farewell fuck you of all time.
7:39 Speaker 07 I drink your milkshake.
7:45 Speaker 07 I drink it up!
7:48 Speaker 00 "There Will Be Blood" was one of the night's very downbeat but very satisfying nominees. Along with Michael Clayton, "Atonement," the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," I mean, none of that year's contenders went down easy. Even Juno was pretty tough at times.
8:08 Speaker 00 Then there was the bleakest film of them all, a movie that wound up winning four awards that night, including Best Picture.
8:15 Speaker 08 And the Oscar goes to Joel Cohen and Ethan Cohen for "No Country For Old Men."
8:22 Speaker 00 "No Country For Old Men." And the Oscar goes to... "No Country For Old Men." The Best Picture award had gone to some pretty heavy movies in the 2000s. "Million Dollar Baby," "The Departed," uh, "Crash." But none were as violent, nor as relentless, as "No Country For Old Men." Based on a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, "No Country For Old Men" was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, the filmmaking brothers behind such classic crime dramas as "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing," and "Fargo." To be honest, I hate the word "classic," but I don't know how else you'd describe those movies. As Joel Cohen told Charlie Rose, the filmmakers knew they could have made a very safe, very
9:07 Speaker 00 Hollywood version of McCarthy's novel. But that would have betrayed an idea that runs throughout the book, an idea that, in America, carnage isn't just possible, it's inevitable.
9:19 Speaker 00 You can tell the Coens were determined not to water down McCarthy's book.
9:23 Speaker 09 You know, it's about a character confronting a very arbitrary, violent, brutal world. And you have to see that.
9:33 Speaker 00 No Country for Old Men stars Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell, an aging sheriff in a remote west Texas town.
9:42 Speaker 00 As the film opens in 1980, Sheriff Bell is lamenting the bloodshed he's witnessed in his lifetime, bloodshed that he can no longer comprehend.
9:51 Speaker 10 The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure.
9:55 Speaker 00 Sheriff Bell eventually finds himself at a gruesome crime scene in the desert, where several men have been shot dead, their bodies left baking in the sun. They've been killed over a briefcase stuffed with cash, more than $2 million. The case had been stolen by Llewellyn Moss, a local hunter who goes on the run with the money. Played by Brolin, Llewellyn is tough, quick-thinking, and thoroughly unflappable. Not unlike those big-screen, all-American optimists Hollywood was celebrating when the decade began. At one point in the movie, Llewellyn's wife, played by Kelly Macdonald, expresses her concerns about the stolen cash. In her voice, you can hear a mix of exasperation and fear.
10:37 Speaker 05 I got a bad feeling, Llewellyn.
10:39 Speaker 00 Well, I got a good one, so that ought to even out. But her premonition turns out to be spot-on. Llewellyn is being pursued by a psychopathic hitman named Anton Chigurh, who's played by Javier Bardem. Anton travels through Texas armed with this massive bolt pistol, the kind of device you use to shoot cattle in the head. He also possesses one of the worst haircuts of all time. I'm not even sure how to describe it, except to say that it always kind of reminds me of Slinky Dog from Toy Story. Anton is so lethal that another violent murderer, a bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson, is sent to track him down. This is a classic Woody performance, by the way. He has this low-key menace that gives him a kind of relaxed edginess.
11:23 Speaker 00 Anyway, his character warns Llewellyn not to mess with the dreaded Anton Chigurh. You've seen him. Man, you're not dead.
11:33 Speaker 02 What's this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass?
11:36 Speaker 00 He is. And as Anton pursues Llewellyn, and his briefcase full of money, the body count rises.
11:46 Speaker 00 No Country for Old Men is a lot of things. A neo-Western, a chase movie, a killer-on-the-loose flick. And it does all of those things perfectly.
11:58 Speaker 00 But I don't think that's why this movie felt so monumental when it opened in the fall of 2007. Or why it got such enthusiastic reviews. This is a movie that sticks with you for days. In fact, kind of nags at you. It's a movie that constantly reminds you of your own powerlessness. That your life can be altered, or even ended, in just a single moment, in ways that you never saw coming. And for reasons you'll never understand. Back then, that was something that audiences understood all too well. And it's a point that's hammered home in the film's most famous scene. It takes place early on in the movie, at a remote gas station where Anton, who's already killed two people, is making what was supposed to be a quick pit stop.
12:40 Speaker 11 How much?
12:42 Speaker 00 Sixty-nine cents. The store's owner, played by Gene Jones, then asks his customer a seemingly innocuous question about the weather. A question that clearly enrages Anton, whose mood turns menacing. I know I'm simplifying things here when it comes to describing this scene, but I can't get into every detail. I mean, it's almost five minutes long. Anton interrogates the store owner before slapping a quarter down on the counter. Then he tells this very confused man to call it. Heads or tails?
13:13 Speaker 11 Well, we need to know what we're calling it for here. You need to call it. I can't call it for you. Well, it wouldn't be fair. I didn't put nothing up. Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life, you just didn't know it.
13:29 Speaker 00 At this point, it's clear to the gas station owner and the audience that there's a lot weighing on the outcome of this coin toss. That's the whole setup. Two guys in a gas station, talking at the counter about a coin toss. No flashy camera work, and barely any music. And yet, this scene, it's terrifying.
13:49 Speaker 12 The Coens never told us this, but we both knew that the tension should escalate in such a gradual manner that you were not aware of tension escalating.
14:03 Speaker 00 That's actor Gene Jones, who played the gas station owner.
14:07 Speaker 12 There's no point where you think, oh, my God, something awful is about to happen. But there is kind of a boiling point that you get to, and you keep boiling and keep boiling very slowly. Boil, boil, boil.
14:25 Speaker 00 Jones hadn't read Cormac McCarthy's novel when he took the part in "No Country For Old Men." In fact, he was never offered a chance to look at the full script, and he didn't care.
14:34 Speaker 12 My scene is the Bible, and that's all I need.
14:40 Speaker 00 Still, Jones was surprised when he got to the set in New Mexico and realized the directors didn't have many notes for him.
14:47 Speaker 12 They didn't tell me much of anything, which made me uneasy. It was, I think, the first major role I ever had in film. So I wanted some direction, and they weren't of a mind to give it.
15:04 Speaker 00 Over the course of filming the scene, which Jones says took just a little more than two hours to complete, the Coen brothers tried to stay out of view.
15:12 Speaker 12 Neither Joel nor Ethan watched it while we shot it. Joel kind of folded up in a corner behind the counter and listened. Ethan walked outside and put his ear to the window so he could listen, and they listened, listened, listened, and they never really watched it.
15:34 Speaker 00 This is dorky, even for me, but I listened to the scene with the screen turned off, and somehow, it's even more unsettling. Without being able to see the actors' reactions, you get the sense that the conversation has no rules, no rhythms. It's as if things could take a dark turn at any moment, and you can hear how much control Anton has over the cashier. It's like the guy's being read his last rites, and he doesn't even realize it.
16:05 Speaker 00 Whatever the Coens were listening for, they found it. The scene keeps boiling, boiling, boiling, until finally Anton tosses the quarter.
16:14 Speaker 12 You know what date is on this coin?
16:17 Speaker 11 No.
16:17 Speaker 12 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it's here. And it's either heads or tails. And you have to say, Colin.
16:29 Speaker 00 The gas station cashier chooses heads and wins. There are a lot of elements that make this scene so memorable. There's Anton's casual evil, which is so terrifying. And there's the cashier's confusion, which is so relatable. Still, the real reason this sequence is so affecting is that while the coin fell in the guy's favor this time around, eventually, the odds are going to catch up with him. He's just realized that the isolated, comfortable, and unexamined life he's been living can end at any time. In fact, it will end. It all comes down to the flip of a coin. What's so terrifying about this scene for me is that, you know, this whole movie is kind of about inevitability. And in this scene, everything's about to spiral and you think you can control things, but that's not the way life works.
17:14 Speaker 00 And in life, it all catches up with you at some point.
17:17 Speaker 12 Yes, yes. The appointment in Samarra, the old Middle East story about, "Death won't catch me today because I'm going to Samarra." You know, and of course, that's where death is going the next day, too.
17:30 Speaker 00 There's another key scene from No Country For Old Men that gets at this idea of just how little say we have over our own fates. It happens later on in the film, when Tommy Lee Jones's character, Ed Tom Bell, visits an older relative named Ellis. From the minute they start talking, it's clear the two men have a distant relationship.
17:49 Speaker 12 How you been, Ellis?
17:52 Speaker 10 You're looking at it.
17:54 Speaker 00 Ellis, a retired lawman, sits in the kitchen of a beaten-down house in the middle of nowhere. He's in a wheelchair and lives by himself, surrounded by feral cats. Ellis is played by Barry Corbin, whom you've seen in all sorts of movies and TV shows over the years. War Games, Northern Exposure, Tulsa King. Trust me, you know him. I spoke to Corbin from his home in Texas. He was born and raised in the state, not far from where "No Country for Old Men" is set.
18:23 Speaker 10 You know, it's in my bones. I grew up in that part of the country. I know what that country's like.
18:31 Speaker 10 It is not easy. You know, anything grows is gonna stick ya. Anything that's wild and walking around is gonna bite you or eat you.
18:42 Speaker 00 His scene with Tommy Lee Jones was shot way out in the desert of Marfa, Texas, in a house that held its own real-life dangers.
18:49 Speaker 10 You can stomp your foot and you'd hear rattlesnakes under the floor. I said, "Make sure you keep account of those cats, because if one of them gets out, you'll never see him again." And if you watch the movie again, you see when Tommy Lee comes in the front door, a cat runs out. Has gone, never saw it again.
19:14 Speaker 00 The conversation between Ellis and the sheriff is just a few minutes long. And on the surface, it seems pretty straightforward. Just two people talking in a room. The only noise is the wind whooshing outside the house. But as with the coin toss scene, there's a lot more going on under the surface. Ellis was shot years earlier and is now disabled. But he tells Sheriff Ed Tom Bell that he's not angry about it.
19:38 Speaker 10 Well, all the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from you, more is going out the door.
19:46 Speaker 10 After a while, you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it.
19:49 Speaker 00 By this point in the movie, Sheriff Bell has seen Anton's handiwork. And he tells Ellis that it's made him feel, quote, "overmatched," that he feels powerless in the face of all this violence, violence the sheriff believes is unprecedented. But Ellis sets him straight. He tells Sheriff Bell a story about the murder of another family member more than 70 years earlier. That man was killed in front of his wife and buried the next day in the hard ground. What Ellis is really saying is that all that bloodshed the sheriff's been seeing isn't some new invention. It's always been there, and it's not going away. And only a fool would believe that violence could somehow be contained or avoid it altogether.
20:33 Speaker 00 Ellis then offers a closing thought that, for me at least, makes this the single best scene of any film from the 2000s.
20:41 Speaker 10 What you got ain't nothing new. This country's hard on people.
20:51 Speaker 10 You can't stop what's coming.
20:55 Speaker 10 It ain't all waiting on you.
21:00 Speaker 10 That's vanity.
21:04 Speaker 00 "You can't stop what's coming." It's a simple enough idea, but it's one that's rarely presented as starkly as it is in No Country For Old Men.
21:16 Speaker 00 I asked Barry Corbin about that line, about why it resonates so strongly with moviegoers.
21:21 Speaker 10 Well, it's actually very true. You know, the, uh... I don't want to go into this too deep, but last night...
21:30 Speaker 00 Corbin then told me a story. The night before our interview, a friend of his, a guy he's known for more than 25 years, came over to the actor's house. The two of them try to get together every once in a while to watch a movie and drink some beers. And that night, after the movie, the friend collapsed and died in front of him.
21:50 Speaker 10 So that, uh... You never do know what's coming, do you? We're never in control. It's like owning things. You don't own anything. You know, you get here naked and you leave naked, and that's the way it go.
22:08 Speaker 00 There are a lot of hard truths in No Country For Old Men. It's a movie about how we have no control over our lives, no matter what we tell ourselves. And it's about how we'll never get back what we've lost. Those sentiments felt especially spot on when No Country For Old Men was released in late 2007. For the last several years, it had felt as though the nation was spinning out of control. 9/11, Katrina, Iraq, the economy. It was enough to make anyone feel powerless. And anxious. Like there was always some rattlesnake under the floor. But it was those truths that made No Country For Old Men feel almost comforting when it came out. I realize that's a weird way to describe a movie where people get shot in the head with a bolt pistol. But when I saw No Country For Old Men back in 2007, I thought, "Oh, man.
22:53 Speaker 00 Thank God somebody else realizes just how fucked up everything's always been."
23:02 Speaker 00 Still, while it felt good to watch a movie that seemed to be calling out the destruction of the last few years, No Country For Old Men doesn't go down easy. At the end of the film, Anton Chigurh is still on the loose. After killing Llewellyn's widow, Anton is struck by a car. He's badly injured, so he bribes a couple of kids for a new shirt. And for their silence. Then Anton wanders down the street as police sirens roar in the distance. Does Anton eventually get caught? Or does he simply keep moving on?
23:35 Speaker 00 No Country For Old Men has a catchy tagline on the poster. "There are no clean getaways." But in the 2000s, it had become clear that that notion wasn't entirely true. During the Bush years, we learned that evil plays by its own rules. Just like it does today.
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25:41 Speaker 00 Oliver Stone didn't set out to spend so much of the 2000s making movies about the 2000s.
25:49 Speaker 01 I never chased the news, because you can't. By the time you make the movie, it comes out. It's just, you know, it's just things have moved on, and it would be a mistake.
25:58 Speaker 00 But halfway through the decade, Stone read a script about an event that was still on everyone's minds: the attacks of September 11th. The screenplay, written by Andrea Burloff, was about two police officers injured during the attack on the World Trade Center. To no one's surprise, when news broke that Stone's next film would be about 9/11, some people were outraged. He had a reputation for blending fact and myth in ways that could be unsettling. In the movie JFK, Stone had unleashed multiple conspiracy theories about the president's assassination. And in the film The Doors, he'd managed to make the drugged-up rock scene of the 1960s seem even more outrageous. Stone always filtered major historical moments through his own viewpoints,
26:41 Speaker 00 a habit that tends to piss off historians and experts. And there were concerns that the filmmaker would use 9/11, which was still very much a raw wound, to make a political statement. When Stone's World Trade Center movie was announced, columnist Mickey Kous noted, "Stone will probably have some wacky, conspiratorial, left-wing theory to add into the script. Is Hollywood so out of touch?"
27:04 Speaker 01 There were so many groups that came to us and said, "You can't do this movie this way, and you can't do it in New York, and you can't show that." We knew it was a very sensitive issue.
27:14 Speaker 00 The filmmakers did their research, meeting with those who witnessed the attacks.
27:18 Speaker 01 I mean, we dealt with all the rescuers. Many of them are in the movie, and it was quite something to see all those people and to talk to the survivors and get a sense. We relived that day.
27:33 Speaker 00 The result was the movie World Trade Center, starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña. And despite fears that Stone's movie would be a big-screen diatribe, World Trade Center was a somber, often hopeful, story of brave Americans overcoming incredible odds. And it featured one of Cage's most dialed-back performances of the 2000s.
27:53 Speaker 00 Prepared for everything.
27:56 Speaker 00 Not this.
27:58 Speaker 00 World Trade Center was a surprise box office hit, one of Stone's most successful films in years. In fact, the movie was so straight-faced and so proudly apolitical that some of Stone's fans began wondering if he'd lost his touch.
28:12 Speaker 01 They were saying all kinds of nonsense, that I had gone patriotic and that I was no longer anti-American. And I was never anti-American. I was always American. I was always concerned about telling the truth.
28:27 Speaker 00 Stone had planned on following up on the success of World Trade Center with a movie called Pinkville. It was the story of the My Lai massacre, an incident in which US troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians during the war. Pinkville was the sort of unflinching drama that Stone had been making for years. But getting financing for non-franchise films, especially downbeat non-franchise films, had become much tougher in the 2000s. And right before filming was set to begin on Pinkville in early 2008, Stone got some bad news.
28:58 Speaker 01 We had everything kind of ready to go about two, three weeks from shooting. And of course, it was a preliminary to the 2008 meltdown of the stock market. The money got pulled by a stock firm called Merrill Lynch at that time. They didn't have the money. So anyway, the film fell apart, and that was a big hole in my life.
29:21 Speaker 00 Unable to get Pinkville going, he jumped into his George W. Bush movie, which Stone had had on the backburner for a while. Only a decade earlier, a movie like W would have been an easy green light for Stone. After all, he directed or written some of the most critically and commercially successful dramas of the last two decades. But in the 2000s, audiences had mostly been staying away from any film touching on politics. During Bush's second term, a couple of high-profile movies had taken aim at his administration and missed. Movies like American Dreams, a 2006 satire starring Dennis Quaid as a US president whose low drawl and even lower IQ seemed pretty familiar.
30:01 Speaker 07 I'm kind of busy here.
30:02 Speaker 00 Doing what?
30:04 Speaker 07 Reading the papers.
30:04 Speaker 00 For what for? We got people to do that for you. Then there was Rendition, a 2007 drama about a US resident who's mistaken for a terrorist, taken away from his family, and shipped overseas, where he's tortured for information.
30:19 Speaker 13 You have my husband. Just tell me he's okay!
30:25 Speaker 00 That screen belongs to Reese Witherspoon, just one of several major stars in Rendition, alongside Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal. Yet even with that A-list cast, Rendition came and went. Americans had spent the last few years being inundated with round-the-clock coverage of wars and terrorism. People were going to movie theaters to avoid the news, not to relive it.
30:49 Speaker 00 Which explains, in part, why Stone had so much trouble finding support for his George W. Bush film.
30:55 Speaker 01 No studio would touch it. You know, I'd done well with World Trade Center and so forth. I was surprised.
31:02 Speaker 00 Instead, W would be financed with money raised overseas from investors in Europe, Australia, and Asia. Stone even got one of Jackie Chan's producing partners to chip in.
31:12 Speaker 01 He was a gambler. He would go off to Macau, and we gambled, and he was quite a fun guy, a crazy guy.
31:21 Speaker 00 Those were the kinds of backers Stone needed to make his Bush biopic. They were risk takers, many of them from outside Hollywood. And with their help, Stone was ultimately able to raise about $27 million for W.
31:34 Speaker 01 We bricked it together, you know, it was not easy. Not easy to make those movies because, as I said, he was just such a controversial figure.
31:44 Speaker 00 So was Stone, of course. And when word got out in early 2008 that his Bush movie was a go, many people assumed it was going to be a brutal takedown, which is understandable. Stone's last movie about a US leader was Nixon, an acclaimed 1995 biopic about the 37th president. Though that film was relatively even-handed, it didn't shy away from Richard Nixon's darker side: his drinking, his paranoia, his overall chilliness. So there was good reason to assume that Stone's film about Bush would be just as tough. After all, the director had criticized many of Bush's policies, especially his handling of the war in Iraq.
32:23 Speaker 00 Stone was one of several Vietnam veterans to speak out against America's latest wars. In 2007, he directed a commercial featuring an Army veteran named John Brunns, who'd been in Iraq on day one of the invasion. Brunns spoke movingly about the realities on the ground there, about the fighting between the US troops and the very same Iraqis they were supposedly there to protect.
32:45 Speaker 14 The whole time I was in Iraq, it seemed as if we were just trying to keep a lid on the violence.
32:52 Speaker 00 By that point, the Iraq war was entering its fourth year. For Stone, watching America become engaged in another long-running, expensive, and seemingly endless war was painful and infuriating.
33:04 Speaker 01 It was the same thing as in Vietnam. We were the thousand-pound elephant chasing a mouse around the jungle there. Just doesn't work.
33:14 Speaker 00 Stone believed it was time to bring the troops home. And he wasn't alone. By the late 2000s, many Americans were unhappy with the country's involvement in Iraq. The drawn-out war had a devastating effect on Bush's approval ratings. During his second term, Bush's numbers hit historic lows. It wasn't just the war that had turned so many people against the president. His handling of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the trouble with the economy, had also played a sizable role. But for many, the Iraq war had become Bush's single biggest liability. Still, even though Bush was a ripe target, Stone didn't want his film to be a takedown of the president. For one thing, Stone didn't think there was even that much there to take down.
33:57 Speaker 01 Nixon had many, many issues, but he was a three-dimensional man, whereas George Bush was a very simple man.
34:05 Speaker 00 Stone said he thought of Bush as a character out of a Frank Capra movie. A regular guy who, in Stone's words, "went from 'an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world.'" He didn't see Bush as a malicious figure. To Stone, he was simply a man with a "limited imagination", a guy who could only see things in black and white. And after 9/11, Bush had embraced the idea that...
34:29 Speaker 01 Bad people are out there, the good guys are in here, you know? It's very juvenile, and as I said, that's an American problem.
34:38 Speaker 00 To play the lead in his Bush film, Stone needed a star who could capture the president's blank-faced certainty and likability. Christian Bale was originally cast in the part and spent months studying Bush's mannerisms and speech. But he dropped out after it became clear that no amount of makeup would transform him into W. Stone then turned to Josh Brolin, who'd just come off "No Country for Old Men." The director offered Brolin what, at that point, would have been his most prominent leading role to date. But at first, the actor wasn't even interested. Brolin wasn't a fan of the president, to say the least.
35:15 Speaker 00 In 2008, Brolin and Stone made an appearance on Charlie Rose's show, which was a crucial stop for anyone trying to sell a highbrow movie in the 2000s. As the actor told Rose, he didn't even think that a Bush film was a good idea.
35:29 Speaker 15 Why would we want to make a movie on him when we could just watch CNN?
35:32 Speaker 00 According to Stone, that wasn't the only reason Brolin was so skeptical about the role.
35:36 Speaker 01 He didn't want to do the movie. He was horrified that I thought of him as George Bush. And I said, "Josh, I see it, you know, I understand, I feel it, you can do it."
35:47 Speaker 00 Brolin agreed to think it over and began studying up on Bush's life. He read about the president's early struggles with alcoholism and his later in life discovery of his faith. This President Bush, the one who tried to do the right thing, he impressed Brolin. The actor later made a surprising confession to Charlie Rose about the president.
36:05 Speaker 15 I liked him, I liked his conviction, I liked his steel will, I liked his ability to reassess his life. And then I thought it was very interesting that he didn't carry that ability into politics.
36:19 Speaker 00 After signing on, Brolin and the rest of the W cast, including Elizabeth Banks as First Lady Laura Bush, Jeffrey Wright as Secretary of State Colin Powell, and James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush, assembled in Shreveport, Louisiana in May 2008. By that point, an early draft of the film script, written by Stanley Weiser, had already leaked on the internet. W was being made under heavy scrutiny, and Stone hoped that by holding up in Louisiana, he and the cast and crew could keep a low profile.
36:52 Speaker 01 Personally, we made the film very under wraps. We made it, we didn't want to get into trouble.
36:59 Speaker 00 They'd also need to work fast. Lionsgate, the studio distributing the film, wanted W to be ready for release by the November 2008 elections, giving Stone just five months to complete the entire movie. It was a tough deadline, one that required a lot of late nights and long hours.
37:17 Speaker 01 We shot intensely, intensely, working, you know, all the time.
37:23 Speaker 00 As they filmed around Louisiana, Stone and the rest of the crew ran into resistance from some of the locals. Keep in mind, throughout the 2000s, some Americans had come to see Hollywood, and entertainers in general, as unpatriotic. Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, the Dixie Chicks, they'd all come under attack. Stone saw that animosity up close while shooting in Louisiana. Bush had won the state in 2000 and 2004. I mean, the results hadn't even been close. So the president still had lots of supporters in the state. And some of them refused to rent out locations for the movie, especially after they found out that Stone was directing it.
37:59 Speaker 01 They were assumed that, as Hollywood people, we were gonna eat him up alive. We never had that intention. If you read the script, it's an interesting script because it's more satiric than it is attacking.
38:13 Speaker 00 The script was satiric, but it was also surprisingly empathetic.
38:20 Speaker 00 W the movie takes pains to point out that, even though he was born rich, W the man had to overcome numerous odds. Early in the film, he's berated by his father, who despises W's lack of ambition and self-control. In one scene, the elder Bush delivers a harsh insult, and you can really hear the disgust in Cromwell's voice. Parting, chasing tail, driving drunk? Who do you think you are? A Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one. The movie also portrays Bush's struggles with alcohol, as well as his choice to seek higher office, a decision Bush makes not as some power grab, but as a divine calling. He says God wants him to run for president.
39:05 Speaker 02 I can't explain it. But I think that something's gonna happen. And at that time, my country is gonna need me. And, you know, I think it's part of a divine plan.
39:15 Speaker 00 In many ways, Roland's version of Bush is a lot like the guy Stone met at that Yale event. Cheery and gentlemanly, a nice enough cowboy type who felt the obligation and the pressure to live up to his famous family name. And with the love of his wife and the strength of his faith, Bush just kind of falls into the White House. That's where he's manipulated by the film's real villain, Dick Cheney, played with nasally menace by Richard Dreyfuss.
39:43 Speaker 00 In one scene, set at the White House dining room, Cheney forcefully sweeps Bush into taking military action against Saddam Hussein. The VP lays out the case for the use of American force, a case that many conservatives had articulated in the early 2000s, albeit in slightly less dumbed-down terms.
40:01 Speaker 07 There was a 1% chance of you dying, sir. Would you eat the lettuce in that sandwich?
40:06 Speaker 00 I should probably point out here that, at this point in the film, the two have been talking about a potential E. coli outbreak.
40:13 Speaker 02 1%?
40:15 Speaker 02 No, probably not.
40:17 Speaker 07 Most people wouldn't, sir. And that's the dark side. The 1% chance of a nuclear attack, or an anthrax epidemic, or, God help us, a small fox outbreak. We'd have 200 million Americans dead on our hands.
40:34 Speaker 00 In Stone's movie, Bush is easily influenced by, let's just say, dark forces. But the film doesn't shy away from assigning the president blame. It ends with Bush realizing that the WMDs he claimed would be in Iraq were in fact nonexistent, a monumental error, one that will end up costing thousands of lives. At the end of the movie, during a press conference, Bush is asked, "What mistakes did you make? And what did you learn from them?" Bush struggles to come up with an answer.
41:05 Speaker 02 John, I'm sure historians will say, "Gosh, you know, I wish he could have done better, you know, this way or that way."
41:14 Speaker 00 Bush struggles for more than a minute, and still can't think of any lessons learned. In some ways, the wannabe cowboy Brolin plays in W isn't entirely different from the actual cowboy he plays in No Country for Old Men. Though the two men have very different dispositions, they're both guys who act on impulse, and who get in way over their heads. Still, at least Llewellyn Moss has a moment or two where he realizes he's in trouble. That doesn't happen for George W. Bush, at least not in Stone's movie. He depicts Bush as a guy who's powerful enough to convince a country to go to war, but totally unable to understand the consequences of that war.
41:50 Speaker 02 I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of the press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn't yet.
41:58 Speaker 00 Stone managed to get W to theaters in October 2008.
42:04 Speaker 00 Reviews were divided. Some critics were surprised that Stone's film wasn't more abrasive. They felt W went too easy on Bush. And when you look at the film next to a movie like Nixon, which was frenzied and impassioned and sometimes inflammatory, W does seem like an outlier. You can't help but wonder why Stone didn't go harder on Bush. After all, he's been the past several years angry at.
42:26 Speaker 01 I said at the time to the news, I said, "He's the worst president we've ever had in American history."
42:31 Speaker 00 But when he dug into the president's origin story, Stone found Bush hard to hate.
42:36 Speaker 01 My feelings about Bush, that's true. But we didn't put that in the script. We played him sympathetic.
42:43 Speaker 00 Looking back now, that may be why W struggled at the box office, making a little more than $25 million in the United States. People who still loved the president, and there still were a few of them, had no interest in seeing what they assumed would be a hit job. And those who hated Bush, no doubt wanted something a little more savage. But the biggest challenge for W, Stone says, is that by the time it came out, the president had been in office for nearly eight years, and people were just sick of him.
43:11 Speaker 01 There was no way that people were even tolerating any, any interest in Bush at that point.
43:21 Speaker 00 The release of W was also overshadowed by the 2008 presidential race, which was heating up in its final weeks. It had come down to John McCain, a longtime Republican senator who'd run against Bush in 2000, and Democrat Barack Obama, a junior senator from Illinois. Now, every election year is chaotic, but the 2008 election was bananas. It had a gazillion competing storylines. There was the rise of Sarah Palin, the fall of Rudy Giuliani—well, the first of many falls, I guess. And there was the growing power of social media, which could amplify every boneheaded campaign comment. And there were lots of those, on both sides. For example, remember when Obama got caught on videos saying that angry working-class
44:06 Speaker 00 people, quote, "cling to guns or religion"? That was disastrous. Almost as bad as when McCain assured Americans that their money was safe, even as the housing crisis was causing bankruptcies across the country.
44:18 Speaker 07 Our economy, I think, still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.
44:24 Speaker 00 My point here is that, in the fall of 2008, people didn't really need a movie like W. They'd already moved on to the sequel. And it was playing on cable TV and the internet 24/7.
44:39 Speaker 00 As for Bush himself, he never publicly commented on Stone's movie, though some of his aides did. Karl Rove, who served as Bush's deputy chief of staff, attacked the film's "suspect Chinese investors." And a White House press secretary called the movie ridiculous before it was even released, and noted that Bush was simply "too busy fixing the economy to worry about the movie." But apparently, Bush did find time to watch W. Not long after the film's release, a copy of the movie was given to Bush by Bill Clinton, who was a friend of Stone's. Later, Clinton shared Bush's review of W with the director.
45:14 Speaker 01 He implied that he wasn't angry about the film. He just said that he was... thought that Josh had done a good job. That's all that I heard from Bill Clinton.
45:24 Speaker 00 Nowadays, Stone looks back at W fondly, though he wishes it had performed better. He told me the movie might have been more successful if he'd waited a few years to make it, so that he would have a greater understanding of the long-term effects of the Bush years, and that audiences would be ready to confront them.
45:40 Speaker 01 I believe, in retrospect, you need a little time away from Bush.
45:44 Speaker 00 But Stone also knows that the kinds of movies he made for decades—wild, energetic, sometimes angry—stories wrestling with America's darkest hours—have become tough for studio executives to sell to American audiences.
45:57 Speaker 01 It's very hard to acknowledge your own past.
45:59 Speaker 00 That was especially true when W came out in 2008. The immediate past had been pretty terrible, so why re-experience it? Especially when, for once, the future was looking to be a slight improvement.
46:13 Speaker 16 Welcome to World News. Tonight McCain and Obama, their final appeals.
46:20 Speaker 00 That's ABC anchor Charlie Gibson on November 4th, 2008, election night. Now, in my mind, I remember this race being extremely close. But when you look back at the polling from that time, it's pretty clear who was gonna win. Barack Obama may have been relatively inexperienced, and a lot of people simply didn't know much about him. But John McCain's party had just overseen two catastrophic administrations. And compared to Obama, who was only in his late 40s, McCain, for all his feistiness, sometimes just kinda came off as an old man. And this was no country for, well, you know. All which is to say that, unlike the 2000 battle between Bush and Gore, which dragged on for days, then weeks, then an entire month,
47:03 Speaker 00 the race between McCain and Obama didn't take long to decide.
47:09 Speaker 00 One of the key states that year was Pennsylvania. If McCain took the state, he could win it all. But if it didn't go his way, his advisers knew that McCain was finished. And by 8:00 PM, it was clear the night was over.
47:22 Speaker 16 Pennsylvania tonight will go to Barack Obama, a key battleground for both campaigns.
47:28 Speaker 00 In the end, it was a blowout, with Obama getting nearly 10 million more votes than McCain. At his victory speech that night in Chicago, Obama talked about the troubled economy he'd inherited from Bush, as well as the ongoing war in Iraq. And Obama made it clear that he intended to do things differently.
47:45 Speaker 17 It's been a long time coming. But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
47:59 Speaker 00 Technically speaking, the 2000s weren't over. But emotionally speaking, well, the decade felt kinda done.
48:11 Speaker 00 Americans were ready to move away from the Bush years, and they wanted to do so as quickly as possible. It was time for new ideas, new leaders, not to mention time for a bold new big screen hero, a guy who looks at all the warfare and destruction before him and says, "No more." His name? Tony Stark. His job? Weapons manufacturer. Albeit with a conscience. I came to realize that I have more to offer this world than just making things to blow up. Tony Stark would soon become known to tens of millions of moviegoers, though many of them called Tony by his other name: Iron Man.
48:55 Speaker 00 This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliet Littman and Sean Fenestra. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by me, Devin Beraldi, and Vikram Patel. Fact checking by Casey Gallagher. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spolane. Sound design by Devin Beraldi. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music you hear in this series is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.
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