Oliver Stone: 'I make films about underdogs'

Oliver Stone has said that he likes to make movies about underdogs and "tortured" men in power.

Speaking to AV Club, the acclaimed director highlighted his presidential biopics Nixon and W. as pictures that are representative of his larger body of work.

"I also do films about a lot of underdogs, I hope you realise," he said, citing Natural Born Killers and Born On The Forth Of July as examples.

Stone continued: "I'm not only interested in power, per se. I'm interested, I suppose, in tortured power. The tortured power of Richard Nixon and Alexander [the Great] fascinate me. I can't say the tortured power of George Bush, because [W.] is exactly the opposite. He's not self-tortured, so I guess my thesis doesn't hold up on that one.

"W. interested me because he so affected our time, the 2000s, and I just felt we had to have some kind of dramatic interpretation of what happened. It was so shocking that this fella could become president."

The Wall Street filmmaker added that he was disappointed when "hollow, superficial" comparisons were made between Bush and Alexander when W. was first released.

"[W.] doesn't qualify as an Alexander-type movie, although at the time it came out, in 2008, if you remember, there were these hollow, superficial comparisons between him and Alexander, unfortunately because of Baghdad," he commented. "And nothing could be further removed from the truth."