Doing press work during the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, Italy, Director Oliver Stone (Wall Street, Natural Born Killers, Platoon, JFK) gave some interesting background on his new movie “Savages”. With shooting to start in three and a half weeks, the movie features a top cast including Uma Thurman, John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Blake Lively and Benicio Del Toro.

“California has legalized marihuana for medical purposes. As a result very high grade weed is grown in southern California, some of the best in the world in my personal opinion, Very fine quality. They really work at it. They’re good at it.”

“To have a nice brand O.G. LA (original gangster LA) is hard work. It’s also expensive, very expensive. It’s like creating a fine wine. We learned how to do that from other countries, now we make great marihuana. We have great marihuana, better than anywhere in the world. It used to be Thai weed, or afghan, now it’s Southern California.”

“The movie is about those people and people from Mexico who sell their weed everywhere. The Mexican cartels are very aggressive, and competitive with southern Californians. It seems there would be a coming conflict between the two groups, The Mexicans trying to take over the Californian business.”

Some directors specialize in sequels to create movie franchises. Oliver Stone has developed another angle: he does new cuts of “Alexander”.
At the Taormina Film Festival, he presented the third cut, entitled somewhat geeky but certainly precise “Alexander Revisited: The Final Unrated Cut”. In the master class, he talks about the movie, his ongoing Marihuana film project and why he’s not making political films.