Robert Downey Jr, no stranger to nocturnal excess, once observed how an evening out with Oliver Stone was “like pagan Rome, 26AD.” When I meet the director at lunchtime in a hotel room in Edinburgh he looks very much as if he is regretting just such a night-before. His eyes seem wary of the light; his big gap-toothed grin could equally be a wince; he reaches with some fervor for coffee.

In fact, Stone’s fatigue is innocently explained. He has, he says, flown in the previous night from Bangkok where he has been scouting locations for his life of Alexander the Great, starring Colin Farrell, which goes into production this month. (Stone is not a man to shy away from the big subject: Having made his obsessive epics on JFK and Nixon, there are not that many ways to up the stakes, but Alexander is possibly one.)

“We’re doing the stage work in England,” he says, “a lot of other stuff in Thailand and Morocco. It’s a fast shoot. We have to do the whole thing in a hundred days. So it’s going to be like an old-fashioned military machine.”

In the past year, Stone has had a good deal of first-hand experience of how just such an operation might work. He is in Edinburgh to launch the documentary film he has made about Castro’s Cuba, “Comandante,” the result of an unprecedented three days of interviews with the dictator. The film was scheduled to be shown by the HBO network in America in May. “But unfortunately,” Stone explains, apparently surprised, “it got politicized by the Cuban American lobby in Miami. Millions of e-mails were sent to HBO. They really pounded it. And, of course,” he adds, “Castro gave them some juice by arresting these dissidents in April.” HBO pulled the film.

The irony of this is, Stone suggests, straightfaced, that he was not at all trying to make anything political. “I mean, I ask him a few questions. But it was a broad picture of a strong man, a comandante. I wanted to ask him his feelings about life and death, about the future, about globalization, philosophy rather than politics...”

The best moments of their encounter offer little human insights, as Stone’s neurotic camera dwells on the detail of Castro’s life: The dictator’s boots with a Nike logo, the exercise regime he undergoes in his office, keeping in shape, at 75, for his people; his coy admission of having enjoyed “Titanic” and “Gladiator” and how Sophia Loren was his pin-up. Sometimes, too, Stone’s bluff line of questioning works. “Everyone seems to like you, Fidel. Why don’t you hold an election?”

Often though, Stone’s film threatens to take its place alongside the key sycophantic interviews of our times, Clive James on Barbra Streisand, say, or Tony Benn on Saddam Hussein. In part this seems a technical fault. The intimacy Stone is afforded by the use of digital cameras does not sit well with his love of bold gesture and grand emotion; he struggles with subtlety and contradiction and wit. Damien Hirst, oddly, once said that “Oliver Stone had no irony, and I applaud him for that.” That lack is very much to the fore in “Comandante.”

Stone the interviewer is predictably anxious to be a co-star, sporting a dictator’s mustache, and stranded somewhere between acolyte and best buddy. Much of the fascination of “Comandante” thus comes from his increasingly clumsy efforts to establish a kind of locker-room banter with Castro.

At one point Stone, with a leery grin, offers to break the American blockade by smuggling Castro some Viagra (as if, we are invited to understand, either man would ever require it?). In a limo, Stone becomes Ruby Wax and starts rummaging through the stuff on the back seat. Inevitably, he comes up with a gun. “Do you still know how to use it, Fidel?” he wonders, his arm around the older man’s shoulder. Just for a moment Castro looks tempted to remind himself.

Despite appearances, the pair had met only once before, in 1989 at the Havana film festival, which featured “Salvador,” Stone’s first film. “I thought he was a charming man,” he recalls, “and a movie star, no question about it. The hard part of ‘Comandante’ was cutting. We could have used almost anything from the 30 hours of film. I was amazed at his inner strength. His morality. He really believes in a dream. It’s like Don Quixote.”

And is he as naive as Quixote at times, too?

“No, he reads voluminously. He reads the Internet, he reads books, he loves writers, he’s friends with (Gabriel Garcia) Marquez. He’s an introspective man. He talks about the terrible effects of global warming...”

And he also would have sanctioned a nuclear war...

“He had a good life, but he chose a hard path, and he has stuck with it. Stayed in power. The truth is, it seems to me, the people like him.”

In conversation, as in his work, Stone is not inclined to shades of gray. In the film he happily lets Castro get away with his assertion that Cuba is the “most democratic country on earth.” I wonder whether Stone decided not to press him on this issue because he thought it important simply to give Castro a platform?

“Whether he is in denial or not, my job is not to judge the veracity of his answers,” Stone says. “My job is to try to open him up, really like a movie director tries to open up an actor. If you see deception, it is up to you. If you see him lying about torture, then that is up to you. I did not see it, but I present it for you to judge.”

He suggests there are some freedoms in Cuba that are not enjoyed in America, the freedom to see his film for a start. Could he work there, live there, do a Hemingway?

“No,” he says, with slightly belligerent illogic, “because I was raised in the North, in North America. But if I grew up in Cuba I would grow up healthy, with an education, no doubt a foreign language, whereas if I grew up in Honduras or Guatemala I would probably get sick, likely die before I was three. I’d be scared shitless of government troops coming through and taking my mom and dad out and saying, ‘Who did you vote for in the last election?’”

But Castro has been in a position to create proper democracy?

“The people in these places do not care about elections,” Stone says. “They care about good water and healthcare. The things of life. The things that Iraq for example needs now. No one there is wondering about voting, they want electricity and sanitation. That’s what matters.”

It would be fair to say that Stone, the Vietnam veteran, has never run away from a controversy. (Rather, he’s prepared to fly half way around the world to promote one.) “Comandante,” of course, offers him another chance to expose some raw nerves at home, and for good measure he has just completed a similar film about Yasser Arafat. These are the latest chapters in a career in which he has spent Oscar night with Mexico’s Zapatista guerrillas and been sued for responsibility in the murders committed in America by a young pair of teenage lovers who had stayed up all night watching his film “Natural Born Killers.” (The case was thrown out, but the film, a glamorously violent “attack” on glamorized violence, struggled to recover.)

Though he is reluctant to say so, Stone’s element is this kind of scandal. It allows him to indulge his maverick self-image. In some respects he proves, according to Michael Douglas (who won an Oscar in his film Wall Street) “that in Hollywood you can be an artist and a capitalist at the same time,” though Stone’s critics would dispute the first description and he would take exception to the latter.

For a while, at least, he seemed to have understood the trick of making powerful issue-led films (“Salvador,” “Born on the Fourth of July”) that also appealed to the box office. (“Platoon,” his “anti-establishment” Vietnam film, made $160 million.) He says he sees all of his films as coming out of the same place. “I work from a need to dramatize what I see in the world around me,” he says, a vision that typically involves an element of megalomania, a dose of paranoia, and a liberated relationship with historical fact.

Are his insights about Castro feeding into his idea of Alexander the Great?

“Being with a world leader, seeing him work, has given me more insight into power, certainly. It is interesting to feel it, that power. The thing about these people, be it JFK or Nixon or Castro, is that the things that they are dealing with are the things we all deal with except on a much grander scale. I mean Nixon’s government, it seemed to me, was a result of his childhood demons. Castro had a very happy childhood. And that seems to be the root of his sense of morality. He has married just one time; he may have many other children, but he has stayed true to that idea of marriage.”

Despite his apparent obsession with powerful men, though, Stone does not believe that he is in thrall to power himself, still less trying to force the world to fit his idea of it. “I don’t for one second assume I have any power,” he says. “I can make a movie that has an effect on the world, like ‘JFK’ say. But real power is something you build on, can hold on to. In movies you start over every time. I am concerned about power, but I have no power.”

I quote to him something his wife once said — “I don’t think Oliver could make a movie without being completely in love with the main character” — and wonder if that applied to Castro?

“To a degree,” he says. “But that does not mean that I would be in love with a dictator if I did not admire him. I mean I’m not going to fall for Saddam Hussein. But I would try to humanize him. Nixon was the greatest liar of all. But I tried to humanize him. We should not get into the Hollywood thing of always having a sympathetic hero, because it undermines drama. Can we really say we like Oedipus? Or Lear? But they make great drama.”

- 11 September 2003