The Neon Bible - Flashback: Salvador
When Oliver Stone said he wanted to take Jameses Woods and Belushi to El Salvador to make a story about US interference there, no one thought he’d get away with it. Or even that he’d get away at all.
In 1985, writer/director Oliver Stone began preparing the film he felt he'd been born to make, a Vietnam War drama called Platoon. Unfortunately while he may have been equipped with first-hand experience of the conflict, a good script and a genuine sense of purpose, Stone lost the financial support of producer Dino De Laurentiis. Dejected, he put Platoon on the back burner and looked for something else to do.
He didn't have to look far. Out driving with an old friend - photojournalist Richard Boyle, famous as the last man to leave Khmer Rouge-plague Cambodia in the mid-'70s - he found a cache of Boyle's recent correspondence in the boot. Boyle had spent the early '80s in El Salvador, attacking America's support of its hard-right government. Stone knew he'd found a project that, while no substitute for Platoon, would certainly give him something to sink his teeth into.
In the end, Salvador would prove almost too much of a mouthful for Stone. Originally aiming to shoot the film in El Salvador with Boyle in the lead, the pair went on a scouting trip to Central America, where they drank beers with the death squads that worked for the increasingly powerful, violently anti-communist Arena party. When the Salvadorian government unsurprisingly refused to support the project, Stone relocated to Mexico and hired edgy leading man James Woods - then best known for Once Upon A Time In America and The Onion Field - to play Boyle. Dysentery, money problems and the presence of maverick supporting actors John Savage and James Belushi ensured the shoot was never anything less than chaotic.
These intense conditions spawned an appropriately intense film. Seen alongside the other thrillers of its day, Salvador looks like a John Pilger documentary, completely shutting the glossy camerawork and whiter-than-white heroes of The Killing Fields and Under Fire. The air of authenticity is reinforced by a career-making turn from Woods as the grotesquely flawed by honourably intentioned Boyle. A pivotal scene in which he breaks down during a stark confessional monologue is superb.
The following year, Stone was finally able to realise his original project, filming Platoon in Thailand in 1985. The release of Salvador was delayed as a result and the film has often suffered by comparison. But while Stone's 'Nam opus is grand, sweeping and rather obvious, Salvador is intense, intimate and ambiguous. Platoon received the Academy Awards. History will decide which is the better film.
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