“Odysseus thought he would return home when he left Ithaca,” he writes, “I wasn’t sure of anything…” Army in Vietnam to expiate his guilt, shame, and self-loathing, thinking that perhaps God would take his life for him.

Suicidal at nineteen, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. His novel was subsequently rejected and he fell into a deep depression and self-loathing. This twisted parental inculcation of shame and fear cast a deep shadow on Oliver’s soul and became one of the ghosts that he spent years trying to outrun by becoming a workaholic desperate for success. Lou Stone thought Oliver might turn into a “bum,” a painful refrain in this memoir. He then quit Yale for good, to his father’s great disappointment. He reentered Yale but only lasted a few months since his heart was not in the placid life of academia, having already had a taste of the wandering life.

He wrote a novel called, “A Child’s Night Dream.” Through writing he could control his story. The lesson: Books are not life, nor are movies – they are ways to shape and illuminate it.īack in the states he threw himself into writing, his first love and the place where his “anxieties could be relieved” and where he felt he could confirm his independent existence separate from his parents. After a storm-tossed 37 days journey, he was cured of his desire to go to sea, a romantic fascination he had acquired from literature. Back in Saigon, he joined the merchant marine and worked his way back to the states cleaning boilers, the lowest and dirtiest job on the ship.

He accepted an offer from a Catholic Church group to teach English-speaking high school students in Chalon, a suburb of Saigon, which he did for six months before traveling around southeast Asia. It takes the reader from his childhood through his service in Vietnam and his struggles as a writer and filmmaker up to 1987 and his great success with his powerful autobiographical film, Platoon, for which he received Oscars for Best Film and Best Director, among others.ĭriven by a youthful urge to escape his internal demons first brought on by his mismatched parents’ divorce when he was fifteen, Stone dropped out of Yale, his father’s alma mater, where he had enrolled to fulfill his stockbroker father’s dream. Without it, you have nothing – no exposure that can be seen even what you see with your naked eye needs to be shaped and enhanced by the light.”įor as a true artist living out a marriage between his writing and his filmmaking, his father and his mother, the warrior and the peacemaker, the domesticated and wild man, he has chosen a title that has a double meaning that is subtly woven like a thread through this labyrinthine tale. “One of the first basic lessons in filming,” he writes, “is chasing the light. The title of his fantastic new memoir is a case in point. Like the wandering and rascally Odysseus upon whom he models his life, Oliver Stone is “double-minded” in the most profound and illuminating ways.

Chasing The Light by Oliver Stone