Writer-director Oliver Stone came to Wall Street directly after winning an Oscar for Platoon. "I ran into a lot of Vietnam veterans on The Street, and they all told me that it's an extension of combat," said Stone. "There is a certain high to closing a deal, to taking the enemy to a raid, to a merger and acquisition. The language is brutal, violent. Everything is there but the machine gun... So Wall Street is a chance for me to wean myself away from the blood cycle and go do a more domestic, possibly more sophisticated, form of combat film."

"Taking over a company is a lot like a military action," Stone insisted. "In those raids, they stay up for weeks on end on an adrenaline high, and a lot of their terminology is war terminology -- 'We're in the kill zone here,' 'I'm going to rip his throat out.' I'm not talking about refined Morgan Stanley bankers, I'm talking about buccaneers."

Wall Street star Charlie Sheen also saw the correlation between high finance and military combat when he spent six weeks on the trading floors of Wall Street researching his role. "A lot of these guys on Wall Street consider themselves to be warriors. They say, 'I'm going off to war today,' and they're not kidding," Sheen said.

Continue reading "With Wall Street, Oliver Stone Explored a More Sophisticated Form of Combat" »