W. (2008) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A chronicle of the life and presidency of George W. Bush . Director: a list of 38 titles created 22 Aug 2011 a list of 22 titles created 20 Nov 2011 a list of 25 titles created 01 Oct 2012 a list of 25 titles created 02 Jan 2015 a list of 36 titles created 7 months ago Search for " W. " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. 1 win & 7 nominations. See more awards » Videos A biographical story of former U.S. president Richard Milhous Nixon, from his days as a young boy to his eventual presidency which ended in shame.

Director: Oliver Stone Now out of prison but still disgraced by his peers, Gordon Gekko works his future son-in-law, an idealistic stock broker, when he sees an opportunity to take down a Wall Street enemy and rebuild his empire. Director: Oliver Stone A New Orleans DA discovers there's more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story. Director: Oliver Stone Two Port Authority police officers become trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center. Director: Oliver Stone A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider who takes the youth under his wing. Director: Oliver Stone The biography of Ron Kovic. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for. Director: Oliver Stone An American photojournalist gets caught in a political struggle at El Salvador in 1980. Director: Oliver Stone The final movie in Oliver Stone's Vietnam trilogy follows the true story of a Vietnamese village girl who survives a life of suffering and hardship during and after the Vietnam war. As a ...

See full summary » Director: Oliver Stone 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.2/10 X The story of the famous and influential 1960s rock band The Doors and its lead singer and composer, Jim Morrison , from his days as a UCLA film student in Los Angeles, to his untimely death in Paris, France at age 27 in 1971. Director: Oliver Stone A rude, contemptuous talk show host becomes overwhelmed by the hatred that surrounds his program just before it goes national. Director: Oliver Stone Edit Storyline Oliver Stone's biographical take on the life of George W. Bush, one of the most controversial presidents in USA history, chronicling from his wild and carefree days in college, to his military service, to his governorship of Texas and role in the oil business, his 2000 candidacy for president, his first turbulent four years, and his 2004 re-election campaign.

Written by Anonymous Biography | Drama | History Motion Picture Rating ( MPAA ) Rated PG-13 for language including sexual references, some alcohol abuse, smoking and brief disturbing war images | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 17 October 2008 (USA) See more » Also Known As: $10,505,668 (USA) (17 October 2008) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia Admiral Deb Loewer , who was on President Bush's detail the morning of 9/11, was the film's technical advisor. See more » Goofs Cheney says "Atta met Saddam's intel chief in Czechoslovakia." Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, ten years earlier. See more » Quotes White House Reporter, John : Mr President. After 9/11 what would you say your biggest mistakes would be and what lessons have you learned from them? George W. Bush : Um... uh... Now, I wish you would have given me this written question beforehand, John, so I... So I could prepare for it. Well... You know, I... I just, uh... uh...

John, I'm sure historians will say, "Gosh," you know. "I wish he could have done better." You know, this way or that way, uh... I... Yeah... I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of the press ... [...] See more » Crazy Credits At the very end of the credits, you see a Christian cross with a period. It morphs into the W-period logo of the movie. See more » Connections (New Jersey, USA) – See all my reviews With his "in the moment" biopic "W." the normally volatile Oliver Stone wisely saves his judgments for history when hindsight will be 20/20. Achingly subdued and slightly satirical, Stone plays it straight and to the bone. Here he presents us with the early years of our current lame duck president, showing Dubya rushing a frat-house at Yale, meeting Laura at a barbecue, living in the shadow of his father and brother, his troubles holding down a job, his failed bid to become baseball commissioner, and his defining moment when he gives up drinking and becomes born-again.

All of which leads us to his first term and the Iraq War quagmire, where Dubya honest-to-goodness truly believes "God" wanted him to become president and that Iraq did have those rascally WMD. In the lead role, Josh Brolin is an endearingly bumble-headed Dubya, and Stone presents him as a simple-minded man with good intentions who has been crippled by his "daddy issues" and has surrounded himself with the most cynical, self-serving, and corrupt administration in modern American history. The supporting cast is a hoot, with highlights including Thandie Newton eliciting big laughs just with her facial expressions as a wicked and moronically faithful Condi Rice, Elizabeth Banks giving a winning portrayal of Laura Bush, and Richard Dreyfuss playing Cheney as the most insipid megalomaniac American politics has ever seen. Stone accomplishes three major coups here that should surprise those who expected a one-sided liberal smear job. First, he humanizes George W. Bush. The director does this with savvy editing showing the back-story of why Dubya does the things he does (i.e.

why he uses nicknames for everyone or why running three miles every day is so important to him), and then juxtaposing that with the inane decisions he has made as president. By utilizing actual transcripts from press conferences, news coverage, and meetings, Stone and scribe Stanley Weiser allow Bush and his administration to speak for themselves, and it's both comically cathartic and occasionally frightening to see it dramatized so well. Second, he redeems the presidency of George "Poppy" Bush (a somewhat miscast but still effective James Cromwell) by showing what a restrained and thoughtful Commander in Chief he was compared to his naive and too-eager-to-please son. Thirdly, he redeems the legacy of Colin Powell (a surprisingly good Jeffrey Wright), who is shown here as the only person in the administration with any hindsight or foresight, and the only sane voice who questioned the motives for entering Iraq, though he eventually caved in and played along. His "f-you" to Cheney towards the film's final act is priceless.

As the actual presidency still has a few months to go at the time of the film's release, Stone's biopic was never written a true ending, leaving us with a symbolic image of Dubya looking up to the sky in center field waiting to catch a ball that will never drop. It may be another twenty years before we can pass any accurate judgment on Dubya's legacy, and likewise, Stone's film will have to wait. It's going to be a long time before anyone catches all those balls George W. Bush's administration threw up in the air. 170 of 284 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Oliver Stone to film Bush: the Movie | Film | The Guardian Oliver Stone to film Bush: the Movie Separated at ... well, perhaps not ... George Bush and Josh Brolin. Photographs: Stephen Lovekin/Pool/Getty Staff and agencies Close This article is 9 years old Josh Brolin, currently receiving rave reviews for his slow-burning performance in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men, is to play the current US president, George Bush, in a film to be directed by Oliver Stone .

The Platoon director, who has been one of Bush's most virulent critics, calling him "the wrong leader at the wrong time" in 2005, says his biopic will be "a fair, true portrait of the man" and will "contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors". "It's a behind-the-scenes approach, similar to Nixon [Stone's 1995 biopic of the former US president], to give a sense of what it's like to be in his [Bush's] skin," Stone told Variety. "People have turned my political ideas into a cliché, but that is superficial. I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison and Alexander the Great." Stone says that the forthcoming movie, which could begin filming as soon as April and be released in time for Bush's departure from the Oval Office, will focus on certain key events of the president's life.

"How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world," asked Stone." It's like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I'll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. "It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, preemptive attack on Iraq," Stone added. Regarding its lead star, Stone said Brolin was better looking than Bush, "but has the same drive and charisma that Americans identify with Bush, who has some of that old-time movie-star swagger." The White House has yet to comment on the project. W. Movie Review & Film Summary (2008) | Roger Ebert Tweet Oliver Stone 's "W.," a biography of President Bush, is fascinating. No other word for it. I became absorbed in its story of a poor little rich kid's alcoholic youth and torturous adulthood. This is the tragedy of a victim of the Peter Principle. Wounded by his father's disapproval and preference for his brother Jeb, the movie argues, George W.

Bush rose and rose until he was finally powerful enough to stain his family's legacy. Advertisement Unlike Stone's " JFK " and " Nixon ," this film contains no revisionist history. Everything in it, including the scenes behind closed doors, is now pretty much familiar from tell-all books by former Bush aides, and reporting by such reporters as Bob Woodward. Though Stone and his writer, Stanley Weiser , could obviously not know exactly who said what and when, there's not a line of dialogue that sounds like malicious fiction. It's all pretty much as published accounts have prepared us for. The focus is always on Bush ( Josh Brolin ): His personality, his addiction, his insecurities, his unwavering faith in a mission from God, his yearning to prove himself, his inability to deal with those who advised him. Not surprisingly, in this film, most of the crucial decisions of his presidency were shaped and placed in his hands by the Machiavellian strategist Dick Cheney ( Richard Dreyfuss ) and the master politician Karl Rove ( Toby Jones ). Donald Rumsfeld ( Scott Glenn ) runs an exasperated third. But what made them tick?

And what about Colin Powell ( Jeffrey Wright ) and Condoleezza Rice ( Thandie Newton )? You won't find out here. The film sees Bush's insiders from the outside. In his presence, they tend to defer, to use tact as a shield from his ego and defensiveness. But Cheney's soft-spoken, absolutely confident opinions are generally taken as truth. And Bush accepts Rove as the man to teach him what to say and how to say it. He needs them and doesn't cross them. Advertisement In the world according to "W.," Bush always fell short in the eyes of his patrician father ( James Cromwell ) and outspoken mother ( Ellen Burstyn ). He resented his parents' greater admiration for his younger brother Jeb. The film lacks scenes showing W. as a child, however -- probably wisely. It opens at a drunken fraternity initiation, and " Junior " is pretty much drunk until he finds Jesus at the age of 40. He runs through women, jobs and cars at an alarming speed, and receives one angry lecture after another from his dad. While running for Congress for the first time, he meets pretty Laura ( Elizabeth Banks ) at a party, and love blossoms.

She was a Gene McCarthy volunteer. Did she turn conservative? I imagine so, but the movie doesn't show them discussing politics. She is patient, steadfast, loving, supportive and a prime candidate for Alanon, the 12-step program for spouses of alcoholics. After Bush quits cold turkey, the movie shows him nevertheless often with a beer at his hand, unaware of the ironic AA curse for someone you dislike: "One little drink won't kill you." [In an interview conducted after this review was posted online, Oliver Stone told me that Bush was not drinking real beer in the later scenes, but the non-alcoholic O'Doul's.] Dried out, Bush is finally able to hold down jobs. The movie is far from a chronological record, organizing episodes to observe the development of his personality, not his career. Even several spellbinding scenes about the runup to the Iraq war are not so much critical of his decisions as about how cluelessly, and yet with such vehemence, he stuck with them through thick and thin. At a top-level meeting where he is finally informed that there are no WMDs in Iraq and apparently never were, he is furious for not being informed of this earlier.

Several people in the room tried to inform him, but were silenced. Colin Powell spends a lot of time softly urging caution and holding his tongue. There is no indication that he will eventually resign. Advertisement The movie's Bush is exasperating to work with. At his Texas ranch, he takes the inner circle on a march through the blazing sun, misses a turn and assures them it's only a half-mile back. Cheney, after three heart attacks, and Rice, wearing inappropriate shoes, straggle along unhappily. His parents are apparently even more disturbed by his decision to run for governor of Texas than by his drinking. Cheney is lectured at a private lunch to remember who is president. He quietly forgets. Many of the actors somewhat resemble the people they play. The best is Dreyfuss as Cheney, who is not so much a double as an embodiment. The film's portrait of George Senior is sympathetic; it shows him giving Junior the cuff links that were "the only real thing" his own father, Sen. Prescott Bush, ever gave him. The name and the oedipal complex were passed down the family tree. One might feel sorry for George W.

at the end of this film, were it not for his legacy of a fraudulent war and a collapsed economy. The film portrays him as incompetent to be president, and shaped by the puppet masters Cheney and Rove to their own ends. If there is a saving grace, it may be that Bush will never fully realize how badly he did. How can he blame himself? He was only following God's will. Advertisement Oliver Stone’s Vision Thing: Bush, the Family - The New York Times The New York Times Movies |Oliver Stone’s Vision Thing: Bush, the Family Search Oliver Stone’s Vision Thing: Bush, the Family W. Photo "W." is Oliver Stone's latest presidential meditation featuring Richard Dreyfuss and Josh Brolin. Credit Sidney Ray Baldwin/Lionsgate The megamillion-dollar question that hovers over Oliver Stone ’s queasily enjoyable “W.,” his Oedipal story about the rise and fall, fall, fall of George W. Bush is: why?

Neither a pure (nor impure) sendup of the president nor a wholesale takedown, the film looks like a traditional biopic with all the usual trappings, including name actors in political drag — Josh Brolin plays the frat boy who would be king, while Richard Dreyfuss creeps around in a Dick Cheney sneer — alternately choking on pretzels and spleen, and reciting all the familiar lines and lies. History is said to repeat itself as tragedy and farce, but here it registers as a full-blown burlesque. Mr. Stone’s take on the president, as comic as it is sincere, is bound to rile ax-grinders of every ideological stripe, particularly those who mistake fiction for nonfiction. History informs its narrative arc from Texas to Iraq, but it should go without saying that this is a work of imagination, a directorial riff on real people and places complete with emotion-tweaking music cues, slo-mo visuals and portentous symbolism. It says nothing new or insightful about the president, his triumphs and calamities.

(As if anyone goes to an Oliver Stone movie for a reality check.) But it does something most journalism and even documentaries can’t or won’t do: it reminds us what a long, strange trip it’s been to the Bush White House. In “W.” that trip starts with the middle-aged Bush wearing the number 43 and standing on a baseball field in an otherwise empty stadium. When the off-screen announcer introduces him — “the 43rd president of the United States!” — he looks around for the crowd that isn’t there. It’s a potent image, and while Mr. Stone overuses it, returning Bush to his, er, field of dreams once too often, it works to underscore the film’s ideas about life, political and otherwise, as a performance. In the story Bush burns through one job and identity after another — partying student, imperfect son, indifferent oilman, serial flirt, attentive husband, sports guy, born-again Christian, newly born politician — before taking on the role of a lifetime. Mr. Stone obviously doesn’t think the role fits, though he goes easier on Mr. Bush on screen than some of his off-screen remarks suggest. In a recent televised schmooze session with Larry King, Mr.

Stone characterized the real 40-year-old Mr. Bush as “a bum.” But the movie shows him more as a boozing womanizer, a spoiled son of power and privilege — James Cromwell plays George H. W. Bush, and Ellen Burstyn does a comically mean Barbara Bush — who, swaddled in privilege and hurting for love (a familiar Stone fixation), doesn’t stick with a single book, job or woman. That all changes with Jesus Christ and a little lady named Laura (Elizabeth Banks), twinned epiphanies who steer him down the path of righteousness and over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Continue reading the main story Mr. Brolin eases through these transitions effortlessly, but it’s a necessarily incomplete performance because, like all the major White House Players, his character looms too large in our lives for him to fully possess. It can be disconcerting when actors play historical figures, and it’s infinitely stranger when those figures aren’t obscured by time. But it’s one thing to watch Paul Giamatti scowling about in a presidential wig, as he did in the recent HBO mini-series “John Adams.” It’s something entirely different to watch Mr.

Brolin sloppily downing drinks in a pantomime of the current president’s younger self, a figure that doesn’t belong to history but to the present and, by extension, to us. Good as he is, he can’t touch the original. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “W.” isn’t as visually baroque as “JFK” (1991) and “Nixon” (1995), Mr. Stone’s darker, more ambitious excursions into the American psyche and presidency, partly because, I think, he does not yet have enough aesthetic distance from his subject and partly because he seems keen to weigh in as more evenhanded than usual. But while he has tamped down his style, he retains a pleasingly fluid approach to narrative. The story repeatedly shifts between scenes of the younger Bush meandering through his life, and the older Bush navigating through the early stages of the Iraq war. This shuttling across time and space undercuts the drama — the story doesn’t so much build as restlessly circle back — but it puts into visual terms Mr. Stone’s ideas about the present and past being mutually implicated.

That’s fine, often better than fine, though it’s hard not to wish that Mr. Stone had put history into more dynamic play with politics and ideology and given the Big Daddy Bush thing a bit of a rest. Mr. Cromwell does a nice job imitating a block of wood, but there are only so many ways to voice patrician displeasure. Because the film spends so much time on the pre-presidential younger Bush — first glimpsed marinating in vodka in 1966 — and ends sometime in 2004, more than a year into Iraq, it can’t help feeling like a prologue to a more involved story. At a compressed 129 minutes, it only gestures in some directions (Sept. 11), though Mr. Dreyfuss’s impersonation of Mr. Cheney pulling a Dr. Strangelove speaks volumes, encyclopedias. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Sign Up Privacy Policy Because “W.” focuses on the warm-up and not the meltdown, it leans more toward comedy than toward tragedy, a crucial exception being the graphic images of wounded and dead Iraqis and American soldiers that Mr. Stone drops late into the film and that stuff the laughs right back down your throat. This may be a comedy of errors, Mr. Stone seems to be saying, but it’s a murderously costly one. The intrusion of real horror is bluntly effective, though there is something at once morally and structurally suspect about the use of such images in any fiction entertainment, no matter how high-minded and well intended. It’s not just that the dead can’t argue against their commercial exploitation, but Mr. Stone can’t get to where I think he’s trying to go — deep — without them. He does go deep at that moment, though I’m glad, wrung out by off-screen reality, that he doesn’t stay there long.

In “W.” he doesn’t need to haul out the dead or excavate the depths to keep us hooked: he just needs to show Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton) tightly smiling while Bush rants; Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) flaunting his contempt for presidential power by savoring a piece of pie — Bush has given up sweets to show support for the troops — and Barbara Bush snapping her fingers at the family dog as if calling for its head. The pleasure of Mr. Stone’s work has never been located in restraint but in excess, a commitment to extremes that can drown out the world or, as in this film, give it newly vivid, hilarious and horrible form. “W.” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The film has some extremely graphic images of real war and some expletives. W. Opens on Friday nationwide. Directed by Oliver Stone ; written by Stanley Weiser; director of photography, Phedon Papamichael; edited by Julie Monroe; music by Paul Cantelon; production designer, Derek Hill; produced by Bill Block, Eric Kopeloff, Paul Hanson and Moritz Borman; released by Lionsgate. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.

WITH: Josh Brolin ( George W. Bush ), Elizabeth Banks (Laura Bush), Ellen Burstyn (Barbara Bush), James Cromwell (George H. W. Bush), Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney), Scott Glenn (Donald Rumsfeld), Toby Jones (Karl Rove), Stacy Keach (Earle Hudd), Bruce McGill (George Tenet), Thandie Newton (Condoleezza Rice) and Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell). W. First Look: ‘W,’ Oliver Stone’s Bush Biopic – EW.com PHOTOGRAPH BY PLATON ”Where is George Bush’s bedroom?” Oliver Stone is flinging open French doors inside an enormous brick mansion in Shreveport, La., inspecting locations for his new film about the 43rd President of the United States. ”This one is too small,” he says. ”This one looks like George Tenet’s bedroom. Where did we decide to put Bush’s bedroom?

It’s around here somewhere, isn’t it?” Shooting begins in less than two weeks on W (or dub-ya, as it’s spelled out in the initial sketches for the poster), but not everything is exactly where it should be, and not only here in the house where the First Family’s residence will be re-created. The 32,000-square-foot soundstage the production is renting across town stands empty, waiting for the Oval Office and Cabinet Room sets to get trucked in from Los Angeles. The screenplay still needs work too. It’s gone through two rewrites since an earlier draft leaked to the press last month (some skeptics took it as an April Fools’ joke), but Stone would still like one more pass at it (”It’s evolving,” he says). And while most of the cast has been assembled and outfitted with prosthetic noses and hairpieces — Josh Brolin will play President George W. Bush and Elizabeth Banks will star as Laura — there is one major character still in search of an actor: a heavy named Dick Cheney. Stone is famous for courting controversy with dramas like JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995).

But with W, the 61-year-old filmmaker isn’t merely courting it — he’s grabbing controversy by the lapels and giving it a big wet smacker. For the first time, he’s turning his cameras not just on a living president but on one who’ll still be knocking around the White House when the movie premieres late this year. As if that weren’t provocative enough, Stone could end up releasing the film as early as October, at the height of a presidential campaign in which one of the major issues will undoubtedly be the legacy of the guy on the screen. The movie has become a lightning rod before Stone has shot a single frame.

If that bootlegged script is any indication, the film will feature such flag-waving moments as the Commander-in-Chief nearly choking to death on a pretzel while watching football on TV and a flashback of him singing the ”Whiffenpoof” song as a frat pledge at Yale, not to mention scenes in which he refers to his advisers by dorky nicknames — ”Guru” for Condoleezza Rice, ”Turdblossom” for Karl Rove, ”Balloon Foot” for Colin Powell — while discussing plans for the invasion of Iraq with the coolness of a late-night poker game. NEXT: Stone on meeting then governor Bush at a Republican breakfast: ”I wanted to prove that even though people thought I was a leftist I wanted to hear what they had to say. The minute I walked in the room the sound of the silverware kind of died. People were like, ‘What’s he doing here?

Satan has walked in.’ But I met George Bush and I remember thinking that this man was going to be president.” Show Full Article Oliver Burkeman talks to Oliver Stone about his biopic of the US president | Film | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Almost nobody has yet seen Oliver Stone's forthcoming movie about George W Bush, but already it's hugely controversial. A White House spokeswoman has predicted that it will be full of inaccuracies, and says the president plans to ignore it. Rightwing columnists and bloggers have condemned it as a vicious smear. Leaked pages from an early script have been picked apart by the media. Before interviewing Stone, I rewatched several of his darkly brilliant conspiracy films, and once you've marinated for a while in their pervasive sense that unseen forces are at work in the world, it's hard not to look at the pre-release controversy and wonder: to whose advantage, ultimately, does it accrue? Who's pulling the strings here? Follow the money. Cui bono? Who benefits? But maybe that's unfair: Stone insists he can't bear the label "controversial" and says he doesn't benefit from it at all.

"To be 'Oliver Stone', whoever that is, is to provoke feelings in people before they've met me," he says with some exasperation, hunched forward in an armchair in his tidy Santa Monica office. "[People say] 'I don't want to work with him - he's controversial!' But I'm not controversial. I make people think, sometimes." Stone sighs. "Maybe making people think is controversial." Far from being commercially helpful, Stone's reputation for controversy made the film almost impossible to produce: no big American studio would touch it, and funding had to be cobbled together from several European sources. The actor Josh Brolin, who plays Bush, nearly declined for fear of the potential professional repercussions; other cast members took a lot of persuading, too. "Maybe I'm going to get nauseated and never do another movie," Stone says. "Because they're so hard to do! This was so tough, in terms of getting it together, rushing, getting all these people to work for so little in the hope there'd be a profit. I won't say I'm box office poison, because I'm not, but..." He seems tired. The movie industry, he explains, "is fucked.

Really fucked." Given all this, the surprise is that the film, entitled W, doesn't seem to be an anti-Bush tirade. (I saw brief clips and read detailed production notes.) It's strikingly light in tone, bouncing back and forth between the president's privileged, alcohol-fuelled youth and his first term in the White House, up to the invasion of Iraq, which is presented in oedipal terms. Naturally, it's not a flattering portrait: Bush emerges as an angry loafer, oppressed by his father's achievements and his family's sense of honour, at one point drunk-driving his car on to his parents' lawn and challenging his father - "Mr Perfect, Mr War Hero, Mr Fucking God Almighty!" - to a fist-fight. But Brolin's Bush isn't a mocking parody. He's fundamentally human, even likable, as are some of his inner circle, including Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove, played by the British actors Thandie Newton and Toby Jones.

At least in part, W - co-written with Stone's collaborator on Wall Street, Stanley Weiser - is a good-faith attempt to answer the core question about the president, which Stone frames thus: "How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?" (Hint: Jesus was involved.) It also delivers a frisson, reminiscent of Stephen Frears's film The Queen - which Stone cites as an influence - of being a fly on the wall during recent major affairs of state. The cast of W were chosen to be "feelalikes", not lookalikes, Stone says, but either way the similarities are sometimes close enough to startle. Stone admires Bush's sincerity and self-discipline. "He had tremendous personal problems, and I have to give him enormous credit - he did overcome them, through willpower. Whether he solved them is another issue, but he overcame certain states of mind." The movie isn't angry: Stone says he has no anti-Bush anger left. "I went through this hatred that so many of the American people are going through now, but fortunately I got over it.

I had all this anger for this loss for our country, a serious eight-year loss, and now I just want to say you've got to laugh, a little bit, about this whole thing. It gets so painful that humour is the only antidote. If you didn't, you'd go bonkers. You'd become a raging lunatic on a blogosphere, writing anti-Bush screeds." Nor is it a conspiracy film, not least because the Bush administration's conspiracies are too well-known. Who needs to go to the cinema to be told that the march to war in Iraq involved lies, cover-up and misdirection? W will be released in the US on October 17, right before the election. The timing is useful from a marketing point of view, but Stone insists he had other reasons for rushing it out as its protagonist neared the end of his time in office. "We were here for eight years," he says. "And before we say goodbye in January 2009, we have to exorcise the ghost. We voted for this guy - not everyone, true, but we had him as president: he represents more than just Bush Jr.

He represents a mindset of American history." The early lives of Oliver Stone and George Bush overlapped in several curious ways. They were born within three months of each other, to privileged families; both spent part of their childhood in wealthy Connecticut towns. (Stone's parents divorced as a result of the serial infidelities of his father, a stockbroker.) They both arrived at Yale University in 1964. But then their paths diverged: Bush completed his degree, then spent five years avoiding the Vietnam war with his famously lackadaisical service in the Texas and Alabama Air National Guard. Stone dropped out of Yale twice, and ended up volunteering for Vietnam, where he specifically requested combat duty and was twice wounded in action. His wartime experiences earned him a Purple Heart, and led directly to his unflinching Vietnam films - Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July, both Oscar winners, and Heaven & Earth. "Bush is the [kind of] Yale boy that's completely different from me," says Stone. "I had a thirst for the world. I wanted to go to Vietnam, I wanted to see the world. Africa. This guy went the other way. He stayed inside the entitlement, he operated very provincially, he stays at home.

The National Guard was really about staying at home, too - not just not going to Vietnam, but staying at home." They never met at Yale, and didn't cross paths until 1999, when the two-term Texas governor was plotting his bid for the presidency. Bush was speaking at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills when Stone staggered in late. "It was 8.30 in the morning - Republicans always have these breakfasts! - and here I am, completely dressed in black, and I think I'd been up having a couple the night before, so I looked like some version of Dylan Thomas, I think. I walked into the room and you could hear the silverware stop for a moment." After Bush had delivered a speech about "tough love" in the Texas penal system ("It was all about the people he'd executed, and why"), the two were introduced. "He surprised me," Stone recalls. "He said, 'We were at Yale together!' I never knew that. And then he told me a bunch of stuff about his buddies in Vietnam... He had power, man. He had charisma that day. You could tell he was going to be president." One wonders what Bush made of Stone.

Back then, the director was at the height of his notoriety, midway through a five-year legal battle in which his film Natural Born Killers was blamed for a spate of copycat crimes. His personal reputation for bad behaviour was at its height, too. He and his production team reportedly scouted locations for the movie while high on psilocybin mushrooms; the year he met Bush, he pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of drugs. That kind of thing seems to belong to the past now. "It's a function of age," Stone says. "Once you've done certain things, you get them out of your system. Blake was right: better to kill an infant in its cradle than to repress an unacted desire. I've done a lot of things, no questions. I'm sure I've been an asshole at times. I'm sure I've been stupid, ignorant, dumb, fucked myself up, shot myself in the foot, everything. But I had a lot of learning to do in my life." He lives somewhat more quietly now in Los Angeles with his third wife and their teenage daughter, Stone's third child. He also claims, these days, to be tired of defending his movies.

When Alexander received a critical drubbing in 2004, he didn't fight back; in a sequence of newspaper interviews, he gave elaborate mea culpas, saying he felt he'd failed Alexander the Great. But he remains full of contempt for the "complete morons" who took Natural Born Killers to be glorifying violence, and the "literalists" who objected to the liberties JFK took with the truth. (Its details are indeed shaky. But as a speculative exploration of the theory that Kennedy was killed by an alliance of military men, CIA agents and anti-Castro nationalists, upset at the president's growing independence of mind on Vietnam and Cuba, it remains enormously powerful; many of the attacks on Stone accused him of making allegations that aren't contained in it at all.) And don't get him started on the label "conspiracy theorist", which is an "ugly and ominous" term used, he says, to tarnish the reputations of anyone who thinks conspiracies ever occur, as clearly they do: his movie Nixon is all about one conspiracy that nobody now disputes.

Contrastingly, Stone says, he examined the conspiracy claims surrounding 9/11 and found them unconvincing; accordingly, his 2006 film World Trade Center was a human drama about two police officers trapped under the rubble. Rightwing critics, taken aback, praised it as one of the most patriotic films they'd ever seen. Unsurprisingly, they've been less impressed by his documentaries on Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and a project - now apparently abandoned - involving Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. Stone showed W to "a very senior American journalist", he says, who warned him to expect a new deluge of hostility. "There are lines in the movie from Bush that are out of context, but I think you used them in the correct spirit," the journalist told him. "You didn't cross the line. But there are those simpletons who will go after it - they'll say, 'Well, he didn't actually say that in his pyjamas at that time.' " Good historians, Stone says, "understand that dramatists who deal with history have a licence they don't have.

It's so ridiculous for me, in the 21st century, to be defending a position taken by Shakespeare. By Aeschylus. Sophocles. And yet here you are, years later, and you get USA Today or someone asking, 'Are you a historian or a dramatist?' What's wrong with our education system that we can't get past that?" Being Oliver Stone seems like an exhausting undertaking, necessitating constant combat. But Stone appears not to feel as if he has any choice in the matter. "I am destined to do what I do, and ultimately I'll do it at any price, if it needs doing," he says, with a "what-can-you-do-about-it?" shrug. And then there are the internal battles. I meet Stone the day after his 62nd birthday, and can't resist mentioning that my own is the following day. "You're an Oliver Virgo? You're very lucky, you know that? Unfortunately, though, we're cursed with too much insecurity and doubt. Well, at least I am.

My biggest harm I do to myself is I put all this pressure on myself." He describes himself as a Buddhist, and says daily meditation has helped calm him down: "But even at my age, I feel the need to accomplish a certain thing every day, or things, and I go through that process of torturing myself, and then often put it off till the end of the day, or not at all, which is worse. So, of course, I suffer the consequences of procrastination: delay, doubt. General worthlessness." He laughs, tiredly. "But apart from that..." · • W premieres at the London Film Festival on October 23 and 24, and is released nationwide on November 7. W. (2008) - Full Cast & Crew - IMDb Full Cast & Crew Create a character page for: Create » second second assistant director (as Anastasia Carmel Nemec) Art Department special effects (as Shane R.

Gross) Visual Effects by camera intern (as Jaroslava Kostkova) Casting Department a list of 43 titles created 17 Dec 2012 a list of 39 titles created 03 Jan 2013 a list of 35 titles created 27 Jan 2013 a list of 46 titles created 02 May 2013 a list of 24 titles created 1 month ago IMDb Everywhere Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Lionsgate Acquires Oliver Stone's W - ComingSoon.net May 9, 2008 SHARE Lionsgate announced today that in a deal with Omnilab Media it has acquired North American distribution rights from QED International to W , a biopic about President George W. Bush directed by Oliver Stone from a screenplay by Stanley Weiser (Wall Street). Lionsgate will also distribute W in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The announcement was made today by Lionsgate President of Theatrical Films Tom Ortenberg. W stars Josh Brolin as George W.

Bush, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, James Cromwell as George Herbert Walker Bush, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, and Ioan Gruffud as Tony Blair. The film’s producers are Moritz Borman, Jon Kilik and Bill Block. W begins production on May 12th in Louisiana. Lionsgate is releasing the film on October 17, 2008. “It’s an honor to be in business with Oliver Stone, a brilliant and consistently adventurous filmmaker,” said Ortenberg. “With ‘W,’ he again demonstrates his creative vitality and genius for speaking to our times.” Commented Block, “‘W’ is in the most innovative hands with Lionsgate and Omnilab Media. With the backdrop of the election this fall, ‘W’ will be an event picture that will be eagerly anticipated.

Oliver Stone, Moritz Borman and myself could not be more excited about Lionsgate leading the charge this October.” Christopher Mapp said, “We had a great experience with Lionsgate on ‘The Bank Job,’ and we are delighted to reunite with them as we continue our strategy in investing in quality films that are made by innovative and unique storytellers.” Said Stone, “The impact of George W. Bush’s presidency will be felt for many years to come. Despite a meteoric, almost illogical rise to power, and a tremendous influence on the world, we don’t really know much about Mr. Bush beyond the controlled images we’ve been allowed to see on TV. This movie’s taking a bold stab at looking behind that curtain. I’m real pleased that Lionsgate has the independence necessary to bring this provocative story to an American audience.” Whether you love him or hate him, there is no question that George W. Bush is one of the most controversial public figures in recent memory. In an unprecedented undertaking, acclaimed director Oliver Stone is bringing the life of our 43rd President to the big screen as only he can.

W takes viewers through Bush’s eventful life — his struggles and triumphs, how he found both his wife and his faith, and of course the critical days leading up to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Stone Fills Out Cast for Bush Movie - ABC News ABC News Stone Fills Out Cast for Bush Movie By MARCUS BARAM Email Oliver Stone is filling up the cast for his upcoming warts-and-all film about President Bush. The controversial director is reportedly in final negotiations with "Mission Impossible II" star Thandie Newton to play Condoleeza Rice in his upcoming "W," which starts filming this month. And "Fantastic Four" star Ioan Gruffudd is the favorite to play British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The film already stars "No Country for Old Men" star Josh Brolin as Bush, "Forty-Year-Old Virgin" star Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, "Babe" star James Cromwell as George Bush Sr. and Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush. Though the movie is scheduled for release in 2009, there is a chance that it might be pushed up to come out before the November election, say insiders.

According to an early script obtained by ABCNews.com, the movie is a classic American story: In the prime of his life, a man who parties too much and lives in the shadow of his esteemed father turns his life around. He gives up alcohol, embraces religion and finds a new purpose. But will his desire to impress his dad and purge his personal demons put the world in danger? The film's script captures purported notorious moments in Bush's life: Rumors that his father pulled strings to get him into Harvard Business School. His arrest during college for tearing down the goalposts at a football game. Almost getting into a fistfight with his father when he comes home drunk one night in the 1970s. His vow to quit drinking when he wakes up with a wicked hangover soon after his 40th birthday. It also covers plenty of his administration's lowlights -- from Bush's reported obsession with invading Iraq, which Stone will portray as a desire to avenge Saddam Hussein's assassination attempt on Bush's father and his frustration with the failed search for WMDs to his penchant for malapropisms and cheery optimism about the chances for civil war in Iraq.

Hard Drinking, Family Feud The first scene, in which Bush and his advisers brainstorm different terms to describe their global enemies, from "Axis of Hatred" to "Axis of Unbearably Odious," is followed by an early glimpse of the hard-drinking young man when he was a college student at Yale. Drinking vodka mixed with orange juice out of a trash can at the DKE frat house, Bush impresses the fraternity leader with his ability to memorize the names of his fellow pledges. Asked whether he'll follow in the steps of his politician father and grandfather, Dubya quips, "Hell no, that's the last thing in the world I'd want to do." Years later, after Dubya drains a pint of Wild Turkey and runs over a pile of trash cans while driving home, his angry father tells him to call Alcoholics Anonymous, prompting Dubya to sarcastically deride his dad as "Mr. Perfect. Mr. War Hero. Mr F-- God Almighty." Stone, who mined psychological motives in his previous presidential movies, from the conspiratorial "JFK" to the dark character study of "Nixon," makes much of Bush's competitive relationship with his father and how it fueled his desire to invade Iraq.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld purportedly confronts Bush in 2002 about his obsession with Saddam: "What's the big deal about Saddam? Bin Laden's the trained ape that wrought this hell on us," Dubya's response sounds like a line out of "The Godfather": "You don't go after the Bushes and get to talk about it. Ya got me?" After his born-again experience, Bush says that he doesn't ask his dad for advice because "there's a higher Father I appeal to." When his father cries after losing to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush sticks it to his dad by telling him that he would have won if he'd ousted Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War. When Bush's parents tell him to hold off running for governor of Texas until after younger brother Jeb Bush has a chance to wins Florida's top spot, Barbara tells him that he can't win because "you're loud and you have a short fuse." Stone also portrays the president as stubborn and aggressive when it came to prosecuting the war in Iraq. Before the invasion, he tells a shocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair about alternative plans such as baiting Saddam by painting a U.S. spy plane in U.N.

colors and assassinating the Iraqi leader. When he hears about French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's desire to give weapons inspectors 30 more days to work in Iraq, Bush explodes: "Thirty days! I'd like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of s--'s throat!" The Lighter Side of Bush Stone includes many lighter moments, such as Bush's fondness for nicknames and teasing, like calling Colin Powell "Balloon Foot" and telling Paul Wolfowitz to trim his ear hairs. In one scene, Bush practices his parachute landing in the White House pool but forgets to properly release the harness and sinks to the bottom. In another scene, Rumsfeld doodles a drawing of Condoleeza Rice standing on a piano with a globe spinning on her finger. During the planning of the war, Bush and his top advisers are shown locking the war-wary Powell out of a room, erupting into laughter when they finally let him in. Other times, Bush's light touch seems blithely out of touch with reality. While he munches on bologna and cheese sandwiches on white bread, he brags to Cheney about how his running time has improved since the Afghanistan invasion.

And he compares the troops' ordeal in the deserts of Iraq to his ability to run in 100-degree heat. At one point, Bush describes giving up sweets as "my personal sacrifice to show support for our troops." He interrupts a meeting with Prince Bandar, in which he informs the Saudi ambassador about plans to invade Iraq, so that he can catch the rest of the 2002 Miami Dolphins-Baltimore Ravens playoff game. Bush is later shown choking on a pretzel and passing out during the second quarter. But the film also strives to paint a humanistic portrait of the commander in chief, with Bush once telling the Rev. Billy Graham that "there's this darkness that follows me." "People say I was born with a silver spoon, but they don't know the burden that carries." Soon after a disastrous news conference in April 2004, Bush retreats to the White House den to watch a Texas Rangers game in the final scene of the script. Popping open a nonalcoholic beer, he lapses into his favorite dream: playing center field for the Rangers. Hearing the crack of the bat, he looks up for the ball but he can't find it in the sky. Is it Accurate?

Stone, who was accused of reanimating long-discredited conspiracy theories in "JFK" and bending the facts in his other films, might come under fire for his portrayal of Bush as an impetuous leader. Already, one former Bush administration official objects to the accuracy of the film. One explosive scene in the movie features press secretary Ari Fleischer complaining to Bush about longtime reporter Helen Thomas who questioned the run-up to the war in Iraq. Bush explodes in a profanity-laced outburst , "Did you tell her I don't like motherf-- who gas their own people! Did you tell her I don't like a-- holes who try to kill my father! Did you tell her I'm going to kick his … a-- all over the Middle East?" "It's fantasy," said Fleischer. "He used to talk like that before he was president? But he never talked like that around me. He mentioned his father once, in a public setting, at a fundraiser in Houston in 2002. " Fleischer doesn't blame Stone, explaining that the screenwriter did his research and that there are erroneous accounts of the administration in books and magazines.

"Hollywood is Hollywood." The White House declined comment on the movie and its portrayal of the president. How Will It Do? One film columnist, who has read the script, thinks that it's a well-written story that could do well. "The lifeblood of this film is not content, there's nothing revelatory or stunning in it, but acting opportunities especially for Josh Brolin as Bush," said Jeffrey Wells, who runs the movie blog Hollywood-elsewhere.com . "It's about a guy who's got a life-long identity crisis but he finds himself when he goes to war. He uses the Iraq War to assert himself and make him feel like he's his own man." If the movie, which also stars "40-Year-Old Virgin" star Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, comes out before the election, it could have an effect because John McCain's support for the Iraq War remains a central part of his message.

"It's happened before where movies such as 'All the President's Men' have had an impact on an election," said Robert Brent Toplin, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and the author of "Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11: How One Film Divided a Nation." "That movie hurt Gerald Ford by revealing the investigation and focusing on the corruption of the Nixon administration. He lost by a few points in 1976 and the movie came out early that spring." Moore's" Fahrenheit 9/11" came out before the 2004 election but it didn't prove to have much of an effect. "The right-wingers did a good job of discrediting the message and the messenger," said Toplin. Many political movies, such as "Primary Colors" and "Wag the Dog," didn't have much of an effect and didn't do that well at the box office. "But if Stone can make this entertaining, the timing could be superb." 0 Shares "W." Bush Trailer Directed by Oliver Stone - YouTube "W." Bush Trailer Directed by Oliver Stone Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video?

Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on Jul 28, 2008 Directed by Oliver Stone. No Country For Old Men star Josh Brolin as George W. Bush. This is NOT fake. When autoplay is enabled, a suggested video will automatically play next. Up next Oliver Stone is Kinda Crazy - Duration: 16:38. JoBlo Movie Trailers 6,520 views 16:38 Nixon (1995) HQ "Do you ever think of death, Dick?" - Duration: 10:44. 1accon 181,968 views 10:44 Evidence that George W. Bush had advanced knowledge of 9-11 - Duration: 3:43. babylonsfalling 6,474,065 views 3:43 George W. Bush discusses his father, Jeb in 2016, and the Iraq War - Duration: 8:50.

Cbsfacethenation1 261,526 views 8:50

Question: Which 2008 presidential biopic was directed by Oliver Stone?
Answer: W