Many of Stone's films focus on controversial American political issues during the late 20th century, and as such were considered contentious at the times of their releases. Stone has been critical of the American foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by nationalist and imperialist agendas. Like his subject matter, Stone is a controversial figure in American filmmaking, with some critics accusing him of promoting conspiracy theories.
WIlliam Oliver Stone was born on September 15, 1946, at Doctors Hospital in New York City, the only child of Jacqueline (née Goddet) and Louis Stone (born Abraham Louis Silverstein). His parents met in his mother's hometown of Paris during World War II where his father, a U.S. Army colonel, served as a financial officer on General Eisenhower's staff. Upon his return to Manhattan after the war, Louis worked on Wall Street as a stockbroker and investment analyst, eventually becoming vice president of Shearson Lehman Brothers. Stone's paternal great-grandparents were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Poland, and his grandfather, Joshua Silverstein, ran successful skirt-making businesses in New York City and New Jersey. The family changed its surname from Silverstein to Stone in the 1920s due to rampant antisemitism in the United States. His aunt was author and editor Babette Rosmond and his cousins are writer Gene Stone and former chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading CommissionJames Stone. Stone himself grew up in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. While his American father was Jewish, his French mother was Roman Catholic, though both were non-practicing. Stone was raised in the Episcopal Church and now practices Buddhism.
Stone attended kindergarten through eighth grade at Trinity School in New York City before being sent to The Hill School, a college-preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He spoke French as his first language, which led to some difficulties as an ESL learner during his early years at Trinity. His father paid him a quarter every week to write one to two pages on a theme; this inspired Stone's early love of writing. Starting at age nine, his primary caretaker was a male nanny, Karlo Stojanac; a Yugoslavian Holocaust survivor, Stojanac was both openly gay and a Socialist, uncommon traits in that time period. Stone later described his nanny as having a fluctuating gender identity, as well as suffering post-traumatic stress from his experiences in a concentration camp. Reflecting on their bond, Stone called their relationship "extraordinarily close" and said that Stojanac "was my mentor in many ways. He took care of me and he loved me." In 1962, while Stone was attending The Hill, his parents abruptly divorced, which shocked him. Following a court ruling that deemed his mother unfit, his father was granted sole custody. With his mother already frequently absent prior to the divorce, Stone was raised under the strong influence of his father, which may explain why father-son relationships are a recurring theme in his work.
Stone often spent summers with his maternal grandparents in France, both in Paris and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre in Seine-et-Marne, where he was fascinated by his grandfather's stories of serving in the French Army during World War I. At 17, he worked as a runner in the Paris Commodities Exchange, a job that later proved inspirational for his film Wall Street. Because of the estrangement from his mother, his French grandmother was his primary maternal figure and her death in 1976 deeply affected him: "She loved me, and she’d always loved me and believed in me. That was a big thing. Something happened at age 30 with her death. And I became more mature, and my success started to flow from there.”
After graduating from The Hill School in 1964, Stone was admitted to Yale University, but left in June 1965 at age 18 to teach high school students English for six months at the Free Pacific Institute in Saigon, South Vietnam. Afterwards, he worked for a short while as a wiper on a United States Merchant Marine ship in 1966, traveling from Asia to the US across the rough Pacific Ocean in January. He returned to Yale, but dropped out again after one semester (in part due to working on an autobiographical novel A Child's Night Dream, published in 1997 by St. Martin's Press). During this period, Stone also battled severe depression and suicidal ideation. He would continue to have episodes of major depression throughout his life: “I was lost for a long time, and I stayed lost."
In April 1967, Stone enlisted in the United States Army and requested combat duty in Vietnam. Upon arrival, he first served (from September 27, 1967 – February 23, 1968) as a infantryman with 2nd Platoon, B Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. In October 1967, he was medevaced for the first time after being shot in the neck during a night ambush, a wound which nearly severed his jugular vein and carotid artery. "It was a miracle I survived the neck injury," he reflected in 2025. Later, while fighting with that same unit in the New Year's Battle of 1968, Stone was knocked unconscious and had his eardrum perforated by the concussive blast of a beehive round, which resulted in permanent deafness in that ear. (As he did not leave duty or receive medical treatment, this injury did not qualify for a Purple Heart. As a result, Stone often refers to himself as "twice wounded," referencing only the injuries for which he was hospitalized and received Purple Hearts.) On January 15, 1968, Stone was wounded and evacuated from the 25th Infantry Division for the final time when, while attempting to aid other injured personnel, a satchel charge implanted in a tree detonated, causing a blast concussion and shrapnel wounds to his legs and buttocks.
In the 1990s, biographer James Riordan discovered correspondence from the Treasury Department of the American Consulate in Hong Kong dated 1968, revealing that Louis Stone had used his government connections to request a noncombat transfer for his son following his injuries. However, the consulate's letter stated that, when offered a support position with the CIA, Oliver emphatically declined, adding that he was staying in the Army and looking forward to completing his tour of duty in combat.
Following a month-long hospital stay, Stone briefly served transitional duty as a military policeman in Saigon. He was then transferred to the 1st Cavalry Division, participating in long-range reconnaissance patrols, before being transferred to Troop D, 1st Squadron of the 9th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cav for the rest of his tour. While serving with that unit on August 21, 1968, Stone charged and killed a North Vietnamese sniper who had several squads pinned down during a crossfire firefight near My Khe beach (nicknamed "China Beach" by the U.S.). For that action, he was awarded the Bronze Star with "V" Device for "heroism in ground combat."
On June 30, 1969, the French news program Voila interviewed a then-unknown Stone while filming "on the street" interviews about the war in Central Park. In fluent French, he told them, "My name is Oliver Stone, I’m 22 years old, I’m from New York, and my mother is French from Paris. I served in Vietnam with the American Army for 15 months and I returned to the United States six months ago. It changed me. It changes a lot of boys." He added that drug use was rampant among American soldiers.
Following the war, Stone suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. His PTSD was compounded by a violent mugging he experienced in the East Village in the summer of 1969, during which he sustained defensive knife wounds. Stone has also described long-term physical complications from his military service, specifically combat induced hearing loss and tinnitus, minor discomfort from shrapnel still embedded in his body, and fertility issues he believes were caused by Agent Orange exposure. He commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War's conclusion by sharing his reflections during panel discussions at the Harvard Institute of Politics and San Diego State University's Center for War and Society and in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Stone denied experiencing any hostility upon returning from Vietnam. Instead, he characterized the general attitude to veterans as indifferent, which contributed to his feelings of depression and isolation. In a 2020 BBC interview, he reflected that, despite his later success, he felt his experience as a combat veteran alienated him from both his generation and Hollywood.
Stone attended New York University on the G.I. Bill, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film in 1971, where his teachers included director and fellow NYU alumnus Martin Scorsese and where he had a small acting role in the comedy The Battle of Love's Return. In Scorsese's class, Stone made a short, well received 12-minute film about a disabled veteran, Last Year in Viet Nam. He later worked varied jobs as a taxi driver, PBS production assistant, messenger, and salesman before making his mark as a screenwriter.
In 1979, Stone was awarded his first Oscar, after adapting true-life prison story Midnight Express into the successful film of the same name for British director Alan Parker (the two men would later collaborate on the 1996 movie of stage musical Evita). The original author and subject of the film, Billy Hayes, said the film's depiction of prison conditions was accurate and that the "message of Midnight Express isn't, 'Don't go to Turkey. It's, 'Don't be an idiot like I was, and try to smuggle drugs.' " Stone later apologized to Turkey for over-dramatizing the script, while standing by the film's stark depiction of the brutality of Turkish prisons.
Stone in February 1987 After his breakthrough, Stone continued his successful career as a screenwriter, most notably Brian De Palma's drug lord epic Scarface, loosely inspired by his own addiction to cocaine, which he successfully kicked while working on the screenplay. He also penned Year of the Dragon (co-written with Michael Cimino) featuring Mickey Rourke, before his career took off as a writer-director in 1986. Like his contemporary Michael Mann, Stone is unusual in having written or co-written most of the films he has directed. In 1986, Stone directed two films back to back: the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful Salvador, shot largely in Mexico, and his long in-development Vietnam project Platoon, shot in the Philippines.
Platoon brought Stone's name to a much wider audience. It also kick-started a busy directing career which saw him direct nine films over the next decade. Platoon won rave reviews (Roger Ebert named it the best film of 1986 and later called it the ninth best film of the decade), massive commercial success, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2007, a film industry vote ranked it at number 83 in an American Film Institute "AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies" poll of the previous century's best American movies. British TV channel Channel 4 voted Platoon as the sixth greatest war film ever made. In 2019, Platoon was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
While Platoon was about Stone's own experience in combat, he followed it with two other films showing different perspectives of the Vietnam War. In 1989, he co-wrote and directed Born on the Fourth of July, based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic, a Marine who became an anti-war activist after being paralyzed in combat. The film was a critical success and received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and earned Stone his second Best Director Oscar. At the 47th Golden Globes, Stone became the first filmmaker to win Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture (as producer) for the same film. (The only other filmmaker to achieve the same feat is Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another.) It was also a commercial success, grossing $161 million against a budget of just $17.8 million to become the tenth highest-grossing film of that year. Heaven & Earth (1993) was the final film in his unofficial Vietnam trilogy, written and directed by Stone based on the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman whose life was drastically changed by the war and its aftermath.
Immediately following the success of Platoon, Stone co-wrote and directed another hit, 1987's Wall Street, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, who received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko. After Wall Street, Stone co-wrote and directed Talk Radio, based on Eric Bogosian's Pulitzer-nominated play. The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Stone his third Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director.
In 1990, Stone produced the Oscar-winning movie Reversal of Fortune. The following year, he co-wrote and directed The Doors. The film received criticism from former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison's former girlfriend, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, who was a consultant on the movie (she also makes a cameo appearance). However, she later wrote in her memoir Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison that Stone ignored her feedback and proceeded with his own version of events. The other surviving former members of the band, John Densmore and Robby Krieger, also cooperated with the filming of The Doors, but Krieger distanced himself before the film's release. However, Densmore thought highly of the film, and celebrated its DVD release on a panel with Oliver Stone.
During the same year, Stone co-wrote and directed one of his most ambitious, controversial and successful films, JFK, which depicts the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and its aftermath. The film was a huge commercial success and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Stone also published an annotated version of the screenplay shortly after the film's release, noting, "I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn." Due to public reaction to the film, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 ("JFK Records Act"), directing the National Archives and Records Administration to collect and house all assassination-related records and release them by 2017. The act also established the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), whose work was the subject of Stone's 2021 documentary miniseries JFK: Destiny Betrayed. On April 27, 1992, Stone testified before the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Legislation and National Affairs in support of the act's passage. Introducing Stone at the hearing, chairman Rep. John Conyers Jr. stated: "You are probably the reason that we're all here today. You've moved the country and your Congress to immediate activity."
In 1994, Stone co-wrote and dircted Natural Born Killers, a violent crime film intended to satirize the modern media. The film had originally been based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, but underwent significant rewriting by Stone, Richard Rutowski, and David Veloz. Before it was released, the MPAA gave the film an NC-17 rating; this caused Stone to cut four minutes of film footage to obtain an R rating (he eventually released the unrated version on VHS and DVD in 2001). The film was the recipient of the Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. That same year, Stone appeared in a cameo as himself in the presidential comedy Dave and produced The Joy Luck Club, the first major Hollywood film made by an Asian director and majority Asian cast about a contemporary Asian-American story.
After over more than a decade (1986–1999), wherein he wrote and directed a new film almost every year, Stone slowed his pace at the turn of the century. He first released his historical epic Alexander in 2004, but it was a notorious box office flop. He later re-edited it into a two-part, 3-hour 37-minute film Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut, which became one of the highest-selling catalog items from Warner Bros. He further refined the film and in 2014 released the two-part, 3-hour 26-minute Alexander: The Ultimate Cut. After Alexander, Stone directed World Trade Center, based on the true story of two PAPD policemen who were trapped in the rubble and survived the September 11 attacks. The film was a commercial success. Stone then wrote and directed the George W. Bush biopic W., which chronicles the president's life up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2016, Stone directed Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as whistleblower Edward Snowden. The film received mixed reviews from critics and was not a commercial success. As of 2025, it remains Stone's final narrative feature film. On May 22, 2017, various industry papers announced that Stone was going to direct his first scripted television series about the Guantanamo detention camp for Weinstein Television. However, Stone quit the project after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 and it was never made.
In 2020, Stone announced his semi-retirement from film-making, though he still occasionally makes documentaries. In July of that same year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published his first memoir, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game, which chronicles his turbulent upbringing in New York City, volunteering for combat in Vietnam, and the trials and triumphs of moviemaking in the 1970s and '80s. The book, which ends on his Oscar-winning Platoon, was praised by The New York Times: "The Oliver Stone depicted in these pages – vulnerable, introspective, stubbornly tenacious and frequently heartbroken—may just be the most sympathetic character he's ever written... neatly sets the stage for the possibility of that rarest of Stone productions: a sequel." In 2024, he announced that he was writing a follow-up memoir for Simon & Schuster. Also in 2024, Stone donated his archives to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In August 2025, Production Weekly reported that Stone would begin filming his final narrative feature, White Lies, a drama starring Benicio del Toro. However, three months later Stone abandoned the project, leaving it uncertain if he will ever direct another film.
Stone with Hugo Chávez at the Venice International Film Festival, July 9, 2009, for the screening of South of the Border In the 21st century, Stone increasingly shifted to making documentaries. His first, Comandante (2003), about Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was followed by two sequels: Looking for Fidel (2004) and Castro in Winter (2012). Also in 2003, Stone made Persona Non Grata, an HBO documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations, in which he interviewed several notable Israeli leaders, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres, as well as Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In 2009 Stone completed a feature-length documentary, South of the Border, about the rise of left-wing governments in Latin America, featuring seven presidents: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Ecuador's Rafael Correa, Cuba's Raúl Castro, the Kirchners of Argentina, Brazil's Lula da Silva, and Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, all of whom are critical of US foreign policy in South America. Stone hoped the film would get the rest of the Western world to rethink socialist policies in South America, particularly as it was being applied by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. Chávez joined Stone for the premiere of the documentary at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2009. Stone defended his decision not to interview Chávez's opponents, stating that oppositional statements and TV clips were scattered through the documentary and that the documentary was an attempt to right a balance of heavily negative coverage. He praised Chávez as a leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, a movement for social transformation in Latin America, and also praised the six other presidents in the film. The documentary was also released in several cities in the United States and Europe in the mid-2010.
On March 5, 2014, Stone and teleSUR premiered the documentary film Mi amigo Hugo (My Friend Hugo), a documentary about Venezuela's late president, Hugo Chávez, one year after his death. The film was described by Stone as a "spiritual answer" and tribute to Chávez.
In 2016, Stone was executive producer and interviewer for Ukrainian-born director Igor Lopatonok's film Ukraine on Fire. The film was regarded by critics as presenting a "Kremlin-friendly version" of the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Kyiv. It was also criticized for advancing the Russian narrative about the revolution.
Stone filmed a series of interviews with Russian president Vladimir Putin over the span of two years, which was released as The Putin Interviews, a four episode miniseries, on Showtime on June 12, 2017. On June 13, Stone and Professor Stephen F. Cohen joined John Batchelor in New York to record an hour of commentary on The Putin Interviews. In 2019, he released Revealing Ukraine, another film produced by Stone, directed by Lopatonok and featuring Stone interviewing Putin. During these interviews, Putin made an unproven claim about Georgian snipers being responsible for the February 20 killings of protesters during the Euromaidan demonstrations, a hypothesis Stone himself had earlier supported on Twitter.
In June 2021, Stone's documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass was selected to be shown in the Cannes Premiere section at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. An expanded version of the documentary called JFK: Destiny Betrayed premiered as a television miniseries later that same year.
In 2021, Stone produced and featured in Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, directed by Lopatonok, a miniseries about Kazakh politician and former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. The series was criticized for its perceived promotion of the authoritarian rule and positive portrayal of Nazarbayev. and for allegedly receiving $5 million in funding from Nazarbayev's own charitable foundation, Elbasy, via the country's State Center for Support of National Cinema, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Stone and Lopatonok denied any Kazakhstani government involvement. According to Rolling Stone, "What little attention Qazaq did receive was largely negative, with critics decrying the film for its glowing depiction of Nazarbayev."
In 2022, Stone directed and co-wrote Nuclear Now, a climate change documentary based on the book A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow written by the US scientists Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist. The movie argues that nuclear energy is needed to fight climate change, as renewables alone will not be sufficient for the planet to obtain carbon neutrality before climate change becomes irreversible. Of the film, Stone stated, "People worry about nuclear waste and meanwhile the whole world is choking on fossil fuel waste. That’s silly. Trillions of dollars have been invested in solar and wind and hydropower. Everything possible is being discussed, except for nuclear... It has to be on the agenda."
In 2024, Stone directed Lula, a documentary film about the life of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist president of Brazil, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The following year, he served as on-camera interviewer and producer of RFK: Legacy, a documentary about Robert F. Kennedy directed by his son, Sean.
Oliver Stone with Rino Barillari in "Piazza dé Ricci" exit of the restaurant "Pierluigi" in Rome – September 25, 2012 On September 15, 2008, Stone was named the artistic director of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Asia in Singapore. Stone is also an honorary board member of the nonprofit organizations Veterans for Peace and The National Veterans Foundation.
In November 1997, Stone won an episode of the game show Jeopardy! during "Power Players" theme week, playing on behalf of charity Rock the Vote. As of 2025, that makes him one of only three Academy Award winners who have also won Jeopardy! Calling it one of the most fun experiences of his career, he later admitted that he was high on ecstasy during the game.
Stone has contributed forewords or introductions to multiple non-fiction books, including Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK by Mark Lane,The JFK Assassination, A Portrait of Vietnam by Lou Dematteis, Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood, The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, which features a quote from Stone on its cover that it "blows the lid right off our 'Official History. He has also occasionally written film and literary criticism, beginning in 1972 with a freelance review of Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless for The Village Voice. For The New York Times, he reviewed The Last Emperor and Tom Clancy's novel Executive Orders and, in 1998, wrote an article about conspiracies for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s political magazine George. In 2022, he appeared in the documentary Theaters of War, discussing the role of the military in Hollywood. Stone was also interviewed in the 2021 ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Once Upon a Time in Queens about the 1986 New York Mets.
Many of Stone's films focus on controversial American political issues during the late 20th century, and as such were considered contentious at the times of their releases. Known for a bold editing style, his films often combine different camera and film formats within a single scene, as demonstrated in JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Nixon (1995). Roger Ebert called Stone "a filmmaker of feverish energy and limitless technical skills, able to assemble a bewildering array of facts and fancies and compose them into a film without getting bogged down." Owen Gleiberman, who named Nixon the best film of 1995, praised Stone as the most thrilling filmmaker of his era, writing that his movies don't merely entertain, but emotionally and psychologically absorb the audience, similar to the intensity of drugs.
According to Quentin Tarantino, Stone's films are assertive and impactful, meant to make audiences think deeply about their subjects. He compared him to Stanley Kramer, a socially conscious filmmaker from the 1950s and ’60s, except, "Kramer was kind of a clumsy filmmaker and Oliver Stone is cinematically brilliant." Two of Tarantino's favorite films, Year of the Dragon(1985) and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), were written by Stone. Filmmakers Ari Aster and Christopher Nolan have also cited Stone as an influence on their directing. In a retrospective essay, writer and professor Kiese Laymon argued that Stone constantly subverted portrayals of white saviorism and American masculinity in his filmography, while The Washington Post once described him as "Costa-Gavras meets Frank Capra... as fluent with polemic as he is with throat-catching emotion."
Stone was ranked #12 on Vulture's 100 Best Screenwriters of All-Time and #43 on Entertainment Weekly's 50 Greatest Directors, the latter calling him "Orson Welles with a sociopolitical ax to grind."
Stone has listed Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol as early film-making heroes, as well as fellow combat veteran turned director Samuel Fuller. Stone has particularly cited Greek-French director Costa-Gavras, to whom he is often compared, as a major influence on his cinematic approach. While studying at NYU, Stone first saw the political thriller Z (1969) when Costa-Gavras and actor Yves Montand visited his film class, and that experience had a significant impact on Stone's admiration for politically engaged filmmaking. When later interviewing Costa-Gavras at the 2025 Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, Stone remembered that visit as one of the most significant events of his life.
In his memoir Chasing the Light, Stone additionally described the profound influence of Elia Kazan's films on his work, as well as the parallels he saw between their life experiences. He also detailed a significant friendship with one of his other idols, Billy Wilder, during the final two decades of Wilder's life. Stone is a longtime friend of fellow New York filmmaker Spike Lee, and is given special thanks in the credits of Lee's film Malcolm X.
Oliver Stone and his wife Chong at the 2018 Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran Stone has been married three times, first to Najwa Sarkis Stone, a United Nations protocol attache, on May 22, 1971. They divorced in 1977. He then married Elizabeth Burkit Cox, an assistant in film production, on June 7, 1981. They had two sons, Sean (b. 1984, who took the middle name Ali upon conversion to Islam) and Michael Jack (b. 1991). As a child, Sean acted in supporting roles in several of his father's films, and later worked for the Russia state media company RT America as a program host from 2015 to 2022. Oliver and Elizabeth divorced in 1993. Stone also has a daughter, Tara Chong Stone (b. 1995) with his wife, Chong son Chong (Korean: 순중 정, alternately Westernized as Sun-jung Jung), whom he has been married to since 1996. He credits the success of that marriage to his wife being his opposite politically, culturally and spiritually (she is a Christian conservative Republican, originally from South Korea). All of Stone's children had cameos in his films, first as babies and continuing at various ages, though only Any Given Sunday features all three. Stone and his family live in Los Angeles and he holds dual U.S. and French citizenship.
Ten days after returning from Vietnam in November 1968, Stone was arrested and jailed for two weeks in San Diego for attempting to smuggle two ounces of marijuana across the border from Mexico, where he had been partying. The charges were eventually dismissed. The dirty and inhumane conditions he experienced while incarcerated deeply impacted his view of the American justice system. While in the San Diego jail, law enforcement found Stone's military ID among his possessions and, suspecting he was AWOL, turned him over to the Army upon his release. He admitted to keeping the ID card as a souvenir instead of surrendering it during active duty out-processing as required. After spending one night in custody while the Army confirmed his separation status, he was released without penalty.
In 1999, Stone was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and possession of drugs, specifically fenfluramine/phentermine, meprobamate and a small amount of hashish. He pled guilty to two counts of driving while intoxicated and was ordered into a rehabilitation program. He was arrested again on the night of May 27, 2005, in Los Angeles for possession of marijuana. He was released the next day on a $15,000 bond. In August 2005, Stone pleaded no contest and was fined $100.
For a brief period in the early 1970s, Stone both used and sold phencyclidine (PCP) out of his apartment in New York. Describing it as "a brief period of employment," he noted, "I was too intellectual a drug dealer, but I met some interesting people." He quit dealing after anarchist writer Emmett Grogan stole his supply during a visit.
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Stone was addicted to cocaine. During that time, he also frequently took Quaaludes and was an occasional heroin user. Stone is a long-time and frequent user of marijuana, referring to it as "God's gift" to humanity. He is also an advocate for the use of psychedelics, citing his positive experiences with substances such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and MDMA (ecstasy). For a time, he took what he described as "too much" Prozac but stopped when he felt the antidepressant was no longer effective for him.
In 2017, former PlayboymodelCarrie Stevens alleged that in 1991, Stone had "walked past me and grabbed my boob as he waltzed out the front door of a party."
I'm a believer that you wait until this thing gets to trial. I believe a man shouldn't be condemned by a vigilante system. It's not easy what he's going through, either. During that period he was a rival. I never did business with him and didn't really know him. I've heard horror stories on everyone in the business, so I'm not going to comment on gossip. I'll wait and see, which is the right thing to do.
Later that day he withdrew his remarks, saying that he had been unaware of the extent of the allegations due to his travel schedule. "After looking at what has been reported in many publications over the last couple of days, I'm appalled and commend the courage of the women who've stepped forward to report sexual abuse or rape."
Melissa Gilbert accused Stone of "sexual harassment" during an audition for The Doors in 1991. Gilbert alleged that she was told unexpectedly to recite sexually explicit dialogue from the script (as character Pamela Courson), refused and left the audition in tears, calling it humiliating. Stone released a statement denying the accusation. The film's casting director, Risa Bramon Garcia, also denied the story, noting that all actresses and their agents were warned about the explicit dialogue when given the pages prior to the audition, adding, "No actor was forced or expected to do anything that might have been uncomfortable, and most actors embraced the challenge."
Stone (right) with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (left) and Greek politician Alexis Tsipras (center) in 2013 Stone has been described as having left-wing political views. Per FEC data, he has an extensive history of political donations, almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and PACs. In a December 2024 podcast interview, Stone defined himself as an independent opposed to neoconservatism and a "real liberal" influenced by John Stuart Mill rather than a Democrat, citing a perceived right-wing shift in the Democratic Party. He has also drawn attention for his opinions on controversial world leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin. In Showtime's The Putin Interviews, Stone called Joseph Stalin the biggest villain in history, stating that Stalin ruined the legacy of Communism due to his atrocities. Stone has also endorsed the works of author and United States foreign policy critic William Blum, saying that his books should be taught in schools and universities.
In 2012, Stone endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican nomination for president, citing his support for a non-interventionist foreign policy. He later clarified that he only supported Ron Paul in the Republican primary, but would not vote for him in the general election due to his domestic policy stances. According to Entertainment Weekly, Stone voted for Barack Obama as President of the United States in both the 2008 and 2012 elections. He praised Obama for his intelligence and calm handling of crises. However, at the 2017 San Sebastián film festival, Stone added that many Americans had become disillusioned with Obama's foreign policy, having originally thought he would be "a man of great integrity" but instead became disappointed that Obama continued many aspects of the Bush-era policy and created a massive global security surveillance state.
In April 2018, Stone attended a press conference at the Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, where he likened President Donald Trump to Beelzebub, the biblical demonic figure. Although Stone voted for Joe Biden in 2020, he criticized what he perceived to be the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party. Stone argued that the Democrats were not as concerned about Russian electoral interference as they had been in 2016 when Trump won and also feared that neoconservatives would ultimately control Biden. Conversely, Stone detailed 11 reasons why he could never vote for Trump (whom he had known socially prior to the presidency), including Trump's policies on Israel, Cuba and Venezuela, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani and his pardons of three court-martialed U.S. military officers who were accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. He additionally cited Trump's stances on climate change and immigration. Despite his public criticism of President Trump, Stone visited the White House for the second time in 2025, as a guest of his longtime Brazilian producer Fernando Sulichin at a Christmas reception (though he did not meet the president).
In response to Trump's 2025 executive order to release the final three percent of the investigative files related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, Stone wrote that Trump deserved praise, especially for also ordering the release of still classified files on the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. However, Stone noted that the files should have been originally released in October 2017, and cautioned that he supported the proposed oversight committee. On April 1, 2025, Stone testified before the House Oversight subcommittee on federal compliance with the JFK Records Act, having previously testified in April 1992 to support the legislation, which had been inspired by his film JFK. In his statement to the committee, he urged Congress "in good faith, outside all political considerations," to re-open the investigation of Kennedy's assassination.
Oliver Stone in Tehran. 2018 Fajr International Film Festival In a January 2010 press conference announcing his documentary series on the history of the United States, Stone commented that historians were too focused on Adolf Hitler as a single bad actor, and not focused enough on his collaborators and the context which allowed him to come to power. Those remarks drew controversy, with Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center arguing that trying to put Hitler in context was akin to trying to explain cancer.
Interviewed by The Sunday Times later that year, Stone noted that more Russians died in World War II than European Jews, and said that ignoring Russian losses was an example of a Cold War-centric view of history. He objected to what he termed "the Jewish domination of the media," appearing to be critical of the coverage of the Holocaust by adding that Israel had an outsized influence on United States foreign policy. The remarks were criticized by Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, which compared his comments negatively to those of Mel Gibson. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticized Stone's remarks about Jewish domination of the media and influence over U.S. foreign policy which, according to Foxman, echoed harmful stereotypes about Jewish power and control.
A day later, Stone replied:
In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity—and it was an atrocity.
Two days later, Stone issued a second apology to the ADL, which was accepted. Foxman stated that the apology was thoughtful and productive and put an end to the matter.
Oliver Stone is a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In June 2012, Stone signed a petition backing Assange's bid for political asylum. The following August, he co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times with filmmaker Michael Moore, underscoring the importance of WikiLeaks and the broader implications for free speech. In April 2013, he visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, stating that most Americans underestimate the significance of Assange's work. He also criticized the documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks and the film The Fifth Estate, arguing that Assange was being unfairly targeted despite his contributions to press freedom.
In June 2013, Stone and numerous other celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning.
Stone has called Saudi Arabia a major destabilizer in the Middle East. He also criticized the foreign policy of the United States, condemning the U.S. role in conflicts across Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and expressing frustration that the American public appears indifferent to the region's ongoing turmoil caused by those interventions. Stone has also been critical of Israel's foreign policy, particularly during the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has interviewed. In March 2002, Stone was filming a documentary in the West Bank when Operation Defensive Shield was launched. He and his crew were forced to flee Ramallah with assistance from the Canadian government. Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, Stone has been outspoken against purported Israeli war crimes and has alleged that Hollywood "destroys" those in the entertainment industry who take a pro-Palestinian stance.
Stone has had an interest in Latin America since the 1980s, when he directed Salvador, and later returned to make his documentary South of the Border about the left-leaning movements that had been taking hold in the region. He expressed the view that those movements were a positive step toward political and economic autonomy for the region. He supported Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and admired the Colombian militant group FARC. Stone skipped the 68th Academy Awards ceremony, where his film Nixon received four nominations, to visit the Zapatistas of southern Mexico. Joking that he had no Oscar statuettes to give, guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos presented Stone with a tobacco pipe instead.
In the early 1980s, Stone visited the Soviet Union for the first time to interview anti-Communist dissidents as research for a screenplay. He also used the trip to covertly smuggle Western goods into the USSR on behalf of a French human rights organization. His activities eventually drew the attention of Soviet authorities and he was briefly detained in Tbilisi, Georgia before being allowed to leave the country. The resulting screenplay, Defiance, was never made.
In December 2014, Stone made statements supporting the Russian government's narrative on Ukraine, portraying the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity as a CIA plot. He also rejected the claim that former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (overthrown as a result of that revolution) was responsible for the killing of protesters, and that Yanukovych was the legitimate president forced to leave Ukraine by "well-armed, neo-Nazi radicals." He added that the United States was interfering in the domestic policy of Ukraine. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Stone wrote, "Although the United States has many wars of aggression on its conscience, it doesn’t justify Mr. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. A dozen wrongs don’t make a right. Russia was wrong to invade," an opinion he reiterated in March 2025. However, he continued to blame the source of the conflict on the U.S. and NATO, emphasizing his fear of a potential nuclear war and accusing the U.S. of seeking to dominate the world. In a May 2023 interview discussing Nuclear Now, Stone declined to comment on Russia's foreign policy, but praised the country (along with China) as a leader in nuclear energy, and added that Putin was a great leader for his country who had support from his citizens.
Russia passed a law in 2013 banning alleged "gay propaganda" to minors, which has been criticized as being used for a crackdown on LGBTQ support. In a 2019 interview with Putin, Stone commented that the law might be sensible. Stone later denied being homophobic. In 2025, Stone met Putin again when both attended an educational event commemorating the end of World War II at Moscow's WWII Victory Museum.
Stone took the Russian Sputnik V vaccine for the COVID-19 virus while filming in Russia and the Pfizer vaccine upon his return to the United States, calling himself "a pin cushion for American-Russian peace relations."
On July 4, 2024, Stone was awarded the rank of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, the highest civilian honor in France, for cultural contributions to both the country and the film industry. He was previously awarded the rank of Chevalier in 1992.
Wills, Garry. "Dostoyevsky Behind a Camera: Oliver Stone is Making Great American Novels on Film". The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 280, No. 1, July 1997. pp. 96–101.
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