Oliver Stone talks about his new film on the presidency of George W bush - 'W'

Why did Oliver Stone wait until now to make a film about George W Bush? Because of his legacy, he tells ALISTAIR HARKNESS

IN 1965, A YEAR BEFORE OLIVER Stone signed up to fight in the Vietnam War, the future Oscar-winning director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July enrolled at Yale University. This is no big deal in itself, until you consider that if Stone had been more interested in frat parties and boozing than in reading Joseph Conrad and taking an active interest in the world around him, he might well have crossed paths with a young, spoiled, alcoholic wastrel and fellow freshman Yale undergraduate by the name of George W Bush – future President of the United States and the subject of Stone's latest film, W.

If this sounds like the kind of contrived plot point you might find in a Hollywood blockbuster, it's perfectly in keeping with the new film. Like many of the facts in this amusing and frightening biopic of the 43rd US President, this coincidence has the kind of couldn't-make-it-up quality you'd instantly dismiss were it in a work of fiction. It also makes it tempting to wonder what might have happened had Bush rather than Stone rebelled against his father by becoming a soldier in Vietnam. Would it have tempered his war-mongering tendencies?

"Oh, I really think it would have done him good if he'd survived it," says Stone, holding court in a London hotel the day after the British premiere of W. "He'd have seen the effects of war on the ground. Carnage and destruction is much more vivid than people realise. When you walk through a landscape after it has been bombed, you understand the effect of our military technology."

Since its US release two weeks ago, W has become a major talking point, but not for the reasons you might think. Starring a spot-on Josh Brolin as Dubya, this is not quite the shock-and-awe attack on Bush one might have imagined. Indeed, for a director better known for channelling his anger and disillusionment with America into excoriating films such as JFK, Wall Street and Natural Born Killers, W is relatively restrained. Like Nixon it makes a determined effort to understand a monstrous and hated figure, with Stone flashing back and forth between Dubya's early life and his first term in office. What may really surprise viewers initially, though, are the things he doesn't deal with: the 2000 election result, Afghanistan and, most tellingly, 9/11.

"I felt that we had an over-familiarity with that and I really wanted the movie to be about how the seeds of the man are sown," Stone explains. "We start with the 'Axis of Evil' speech. 9/11 has already happened. Afghanistan has already happened. We see a newly confident George Bush. He's found a new role as a war president; he's preparing for war even though he doesn't say it. I really don't think the foundation of his character was 9/11. I think that was a response he was waiting to have. He was angry way before that. I think he was angry because he'd been a failure compared to his father. He was the black sheep of the family and was constantly compared to him. That's a hard burden to live with."

W then is something of an Oedipal drama played out on a world stage. It's a fascinating approach, but one that is sure to raise the hackles of both detractors and supporters who'd prefer that a film about Bush stick more rigidly to the documented facts. That, however, comes with the territory of trying to depict the occupier of the highest office in America. We've come a long way since the days of Birth of a Nation (1915) and Wilson (1944) when presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson were depicted in reverential, sentimentalised form. Since the 1960s, portrayals of real and fictional American Commanders in Chief have tended to carry a bit more political import, often reflecting the ideological schisms of the times in which they were made.

Stanley Kubrick's satirical masterpiece Dr Strangelove (1964), for instance, cast Peter Sellers as an ineffectual and slightly crazed leader whose response to the prospect of nuclear annihilation served up a merciless sideswipe at the insanity of John F Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, especially Kennedy's famous address – which, if you read between the lines, essentially argued that the defence of the American way of life justified the obliteration of all life. Compare that to the noble, cool-as-a-cucumber way that Bruce Greenwood portrayed the real Kennedy during the crisis in Thirteen Days (2000), and it's immediately apparent how deeply ingrained the Camelot myth has become over the years.

Stone didn't have to worry about representing the president in that movie, of course, but he did in Nixon (1995). Anthony Hopkins's portrayal was a serious attempt to understand how the president's warring impulses made him such a compulsive liar and a damaging presence on the political scene. Robert Altman felt no such obligation with Secret Honor (1984), letting Philip Baker Hall serve up a lacerating account of Tricky Dicky as a rambling, paranoid man bearing what was left of his soul into a tape recorder during his final days in the White House. By 1999, five years after Nixon's death, it was open season, with Dan Hedaya making a mockery of him in the unsubtly titled teen comedy, Dick. Ron Howard's forthcoming Frost/Nixon, does, however, reclaim the disgraced president as a serious man, tapping into his outsider status to emphasise how out of place he was in the nascent media age.

On the subject of the media age, it's odd given Ronald Reagan's Hollywood career that so few films have reflected his two terms in office. Rip Torn caricatured him in Airplane II (1982) and Jay Koch did the same in Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), which perhaps says a lot about the way America considered a bad actor becoming the most powerful man in the world to be something of a joke.

The same can't be said for Bill Clinton. The 1990s saw an explosion of films featuring fictional presidents that in various ways sought to reflect or redefine Clinton's image. Rom-coms Dave (1993) and The American President (1995) portrayed idealised views of the White House while Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997) turned the president into a caring action hero. Absolute Power (1997) and Wag the Dog (1997) respectively demonised the Commander-in-Chief as an unscrupulous philandering criminal and a slick media manipulator. The film version of Primary Colors (1998) is a satire on Clinton's race for the White House, exploring his southern charm, political acumen and penchant for trashy sexual relations. And Jeff Bridges excavated Clinton's inner Dudeness in The Contender. He didn't inhale joints of course, but he did have a bowling alley in the White House basement. So strong was the Clinton aura that it didn't evaporate overnight when Bush took office. As late as 2003, Billy Bob Thornton could be seen channelling Clinton in Love Actually – although Hollywood's post 9/11-refusal to make anything remotely controversial or political might also have accounted for this.

On TV, of course, Martin Sheen helped liberals escape the Bush administration with The West Wing, a weekly reminder that the president really ought to be able to give a speech without mangling his syntax. There have been other reasons for Bush's continued absence on the big screen. As Michael Moore showed in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), nobody is better at playing Dubya than Dubya. That's why American Dreamz (2006) didn't work. Dennis Quaid's turn as a bumbling, befuddled president who tries to boost his popularity by appearing on an X-Factor-style reality TV show couldn't compete with the real incumbent. Stone understands that, which is why he didn't want to over-egg the comedy in W. "There are satiric elements, sure" he says, "but this is also the light of day. These people have said and done these things. These quotes are not made up; you couldn't make them up. Bush is a funny guy. He puts his foot in his mouth, says the weirdest things at the weirdest times. I pushed Josh to do that, but a little goes a long way."

There will be some who question why Stone didn't make W four years ago and others who feel it would have been beneficial to wait a few more. Stone, however, is adamant his timing is right. "This is an urgent situation," he says. "This man is not leaving in January. He's with us; the Bush Doctrine is our foreign policy. (America] has built an empire. We're spending a trillion dollars a year on the implements of war. You don't spend that kind of money without using it. It's getting us closer to the nuclear terror we felt in the 1950s. So that's why I made it now. I wanted audiences to think about why we elected him, who he was and why we're here now. That's the best we can do as moviemakers: hold up a mirror to what's going on now."

• W is released on 7 November.