`How many American movies do you see about jobs any more?" asks Oliver Stone. "They're all about yuppies running around New York, sending emails to each other. It's all very stylish and it's bullshit. You see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock leading their fantasy lives, or some huge action movie with cops, but you very rarely see people working.
"In Wall Street I actually showed people working, and in Born on the Fourth of July I showed blue-collar life in a way that very few movies do."
On a whirlwind European tour to promote his new film, Any Given Sunday, Stone is in ebullient form, happy to claim the mantle of Hollywood's favourite bad boy ("I don't necessarily like it, but I do what I do. I have to live out my destiny.")
He's equally unimpressed by this year's Oscar share-out. "I think it was a very odd year, frankly. People don't seem to know what they think any more. The Oscars have been hijacked by the critics. There are about 15 or 20 critics who pick the movie they like best, and they all echo each other. So by the time the Academy nominates in February, their main concern is not to be embarrassed. If you look at the 10-year record, you'll see that whatever the critics have picked is the Academy's choice, which is a joke.
"There's a bunch of airheads in the actors' division, the kind of people who always want to be more precious or more sophisticated. So when they hear a British accent, they swoon. They're suckers for that stuff. A movie like Rockie or Platoon could never win today. When you make a really gritty American movie, with real dialogue, they don't get it, they're embarrassed by it."
It sounds as if he's referring to Any Given Sunday, which brings Stone's blunderbuss style to bear on the colourful, high-testosterone, big-bucks world of American football, charting a few weeks in the life of the fictional Miami Sharks, a team of fading greats coached by jaded veteran Al Pacino and owned by ambitious heiress Cameron Diaz. It's a typical Stone film, in that it could never be accused of subtlety, but features some terrifically stylish and energetic set-pieces.
Never one to hide his light under a bushel, he clearly still sees himself as the embattled maverick working against the system. It's a little strange, though, in a year which has produced the most interesting and varied crop of American movies in a long time, to hear how unimpressed he is by his contemporaries. I wonder, for example, what he makes of The Insider, Michael Mann's conspiracy thriller which tackles many of Stone's favourite themes - corporate corruption, individual heroism and male bonding - or Three Kings, one of the most original takes of recent times on the war movie (another Stone preoccupation). He's not too impressed.
"Michael Mann is a very talented director, and I've admired his work for years," he says. "But The Insider, to be blunt, is for me not his best film. It's going back to the Alan Pakula 1970s. When I made JFK I junked all that, and decided to go in a much more radical direction in terms of style. Michael's film is far more sober, doing it by the numbers, and it ends up slow, which is why it didn't do much business in America. With Three Kings, as a veteran it's very difficult for me, having been to war, to make fun of that subject. I know I'm missing the humour, but it wasn't like that. War isn't funny."
Of course, Stone has had his own problems mingling violence and humour. When I tell him that Natural Born Killers, which is still banned from commercial exhibition in Ireland, was recently pulled from TV3's schedules under pressure from the authorities, he expresses his disdain for the TV version TV3 would have shown. "It's probably better for that version not to be shown at all."
Natural Born Killers is a long-running sore for Stone. Along with the film's distributors, Warner Brothers, he is still embroiled in a civil action taken by the family of a Louisiana convenience-store clerk shot and paralysed by a couple who claimed they had watched Natural Born Killers several times before setting off on a killing spree. The case, which Stone describes as "pure ambulance-chasing" has been bouncing around the upper echelons of the US legal system for some years now. Along the way, it has become the focus of many of the agonised debates in the US over gun violence and Hollywood's complicity. For Stone, the issue is purely and simply about freedom of speech.
"It should have been dismissed by the Supreme Court, but they sent it back to Louisiana, where Warner Brothers have already incurred a million dollars in costs. It's a complicated issue because there are insurance companies and other interested parties involved, but basically they have to prove that it was my intention to make a product that could end up killing people."
Given his status as America's most famous conspiracy theorist, it's not surprising that he sees the case as part of an ongoing campaign to erode and destroy American civil liberties. "If Bush wins the election, which I pray to God he won't, he will appoint two or three extreme conservatives to the Supreme Court, which will then overturn any legal victory that has been won for civil liberties. Already the Eighth Amendment, on cruel and unusual punishment, is gone because of the drugs war. They're throwing people in jail for life over nothing.
The cops routinely violate search and seizure laws. Due process has been severely compromised by new laws. The Second Amendment, the gun amendment, is being defended, but the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech is really under pressure now."
Any Given Sunday, not surprisingly, touches on some of these themes. But essentially, he admits, it's his love letter to American football, a sport which traditionally has been overshadowed in the movies by the more lyrical, nostalgia-driven imagery of baseball. "A lot of people still like baseball, which is a slow, circular game, with people standing around, chewing tobacco. It's like golf, and it's never been my game. My game was always football. It used to be faster; now it's three hours long, bloated by commercials. Television owns football, like it owns all sports. It arranges the markets to decide who moves where. But in my day it was very pure.
"Now, what happens every year is you have new teams and new franchises coming up, which I guess is good. But the moment you start paying star salaries, you're screwed. It's the same thing in movies and in every walk of American corporate life. And frankly, that's what this movie is really about - the fact that the corporations are getting huger and huger. The entire media is composed of four or five companies now."
To many viewers, especially on this side of the Atlantic, I suggest, the sport seems like an over-extended, over-commercialised exercise in steroid-fuelled brutality. "It is brutal, but you mustn't forget that it's also highly technological. These guys study film of the games all week, they have guys upstairs with binoculars studying every move, they have 200 different plays planned. The quarterback has got to be a rocket scientist to figure all this stuff out. So it's brutal and it's technological, which is the American way."
Any Given Sunday is on general release
