He accepted an offer from a Catholic Church group to teach English-speaking high school students in Chalon, a suburb of Saigon, which he did for six months before traveling around southeast Asia.īack in Saigon, he joined the Merchant Marine and worked his way back to the states cleaning boilers, the lowest and dirtiest job on the ship.Īfter a storm-tossed 37-day journey, he was cured of his desire to go to sea, a romantic fascination he had acquired from literature. It takes the reader from his childhood through his service in Vietnam and his struggles as a writer and filmmaker up to 1987 and his great success with his powerful autobiographical film, Platoon, for which he received Oscars for Best Film and Best Director, among others.ĭriven by a youthful urge to escape his internal demons first brought on by his mismatched parents’ divorce when he was 15, Stone dropped out of Yale, his father’s alma mater, where he had enrolled to fulfill his stockbroker father’s dream.

Without it, you have nothing – no exposure that can be seen even what you see with your naked eye needs to be shaped and enhanced by the light.”įor as a true artist living out a marriage between his writing and his filmmaking, his father and his mother, the warrior and the peacemaker, the domesticated and wild man, he has chosen a title that has a double meaning that is subtly woven like a thread through this labyrinthine tale. “One of the first basic lessons in filming,” he writes, “is chasing the light. The title of his fantastic new memoir is a case in point.

Like the wandering and rascally Odysseus upon whom he models his life, Oliver Stone is “double-minded” in the most profound and illuminating ways.

Odysseus and crew escaping the Cyclops, 1896 painting by Arnold Böcklin.

Chasing the light oliver stone