Q&A with Director Oliver Stone Page 7

But they still filtered into pop culture - into things like cartoons and sitcoms. Yeah, they did, they did. But maybe they're not important now because Europeans films aren't teaching us things we want to know - we're not excited or inspired by them. The best European films have been totally anarchic and nihilistic, in a sense. But recently it's been stuff like Irreversible that's supposed to out-shock the Americans. So I don't know that the Europeans are really showing us an aesthetic that works, whereas the Asians have. The Koreans and the Japanese and the Chinese have done remarkable things in movies. And we've all learned from it at a certain place, and it seeps into our culture. The Departed is a remake of a Hong Kong movie, so there you go. Maybe the culture is now Eastern as opposed to European. The case of Crouching Tiger was amazing. It was impossible in the '60s to have a foreign film even do close to the business that film did.

American critics forget that movie audiences have grown enormous since the 60s. People were watching TV back then. It wasn't until they started coming back to movies that films started making these box-office boffo grosses. Now the critics tear that apart and say that was the end of movies. But the truth is, more people are seeing movies now than they were in the 50s and 60s, when the industry was kind of dying down because of television. So something happened to revitalize film. The Godfather and The French Connection were sort of the birth of that, and then Jaws and Star Wars - the big movies that sealed the events of the shift, that brought the new audience in.

Movies were redefined in the 80s by the videocassette revolution, which redefined financing and also segmented the market, so that there were niche and cult movies all over the place. And now with the Internet and DVD, it's completely fragmented - it's possible we'll go to niche levels on everything. The blockbusters will continue to be the centerpieces, but I think they're harder to make now because you know you have to make a movie that really cuts across the population, which is so divided in its tastes. It has to cut across children, old people, gay people, feminism, you know, just to make a movie that a combined group of people wants to see - and not that many people see even hit movies. That's very difficult, but it's beautiful if you can do it - not only for America but if you can do it for the world, which is what World Trade Center did.

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