(Credits: Far Out / Gage Skidmore)
Great directors rarely arrive at their ultimate masterpiece on their first try. Like any other art form, filmmaking takes time to learn and perfect; you cannot simply stroll onto a set and direct The Godfather with no prior experience. If you look back at the early films of some of your favourite film directors, the learning curves are clear to see. This is at least true in the case of Oliver Stone, who spent a few years finding his feet in film before landing upon an extensive filmography of classic works.
It was during the late 1970s that Stone began to make his first mark in the film industry, adapting the novel Midnight Express into a screenplay and earning himself an Academy Award in the process. Following on from the success of that Alan Parker-directed film, Stone immersed himself in a diverse range of well-recieved projects, writing screenplays for Scarface and Conan the Barbarian. Years prior to Midnight Express, however, Stone had already tried his hand at directing, and the results were less than impressive.
Although in the modern age, that regrettable first film–titled Seizure–barely constitutes a footnote in the extensive career of Oliver Stone, it did give the director a valuable education in filmmaking – namely, what not to do. Recalling the motivation behind the bizarre project, Stone once shared, “Seizure was an interesting idea. I had a dream one night, a nightmare, and I actually wrote down the entire nightmare and it became a movie.”
Dream-based inspiration might work for folks like Paul McCartney, but it didn’t quite work out for Stone. After all, translating a fantastical dream into something real, that you can film, is no easy task. Particularly when taking into account the apparent fact that Stone’s dream involved three homicidal maniacs: the Queen of Evil, a strongman named Jackal, and a dwarf called Spider, and that those villains were slaying his friends and family. “That’s a very rare experience, to write down a dream like that and carry it through to completion as a film,” Stone declared.
If it wasn’t clear from that description, the final Seizure film was an otherworldy anxiety dream translated onto the big screen (and not in a good way). Admitting that the film didn’t exactly go to plan, Stone theorised, “I think my problems with Seizure were that my dream was far better than my execution of it. “ Explaining, “Some of the problem had to do with money. We had very limited funds—$150,000—and it was a very ambitious scope, you know, to bring the surreal into the real.”
That shoestring budget certainly did not aid proceedings on the film, but it is difficult to see how such a flawed plot could be made into a better film even with an unlimited budget. Seemingly, the director was going for the horror surrealism angle, but as he admitted, he didn’t really have “the tools to make surrealism work.”
“So I got stuck, as I did on my next film, The Hand, in that border area, that twilight area between trying to make a horror film that would fit the conventional mode of expectations of an audience, and at the same time trying to reach for the surreal inside the mind,” the director continued. “And I never bridged that gap.”
Still, the experience of making Seizure wasn’t a total waste for Stone. It taught the director a lot about the complexities of filmmaking. “Seizure was crudely done, but it still has a fire and kind of a madness to it that I appreciate,” he said.
“What I learned in terms of financing and in terms of how to make a movie was that it was do-able, but that I had been too ambitious.” He added, “I’d set my sights too high. And I wish, I guess, I had done something a little quieter, a little more personal, a little easier, more about just the world around me rather than going for Dali or Buñuel on my first shot.”
During his later work, writing about the world around him became much easier for Stone, regularly drawing from his experiences serving in the Vietnam War on works like Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July, which were worlds apart from the fever dream composition of Seizure.
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