The 1991 film, which documents the investigation into the assassination of the American president in 1963 with Kevin Costner in the role of the prosecutor Jim Garrison, is the subject of a collector’s box in high definition, accompanied by a documentary by the filmmaker, released two years ago, on the same subject.
If we talk a little less about him today, we must remember that Oliver Stone made several great films in the 80s and 90s, with a fixed idea: to tell the ills and traumas of America, with works as Wall Street, Platoon et Born on July 4 about vietnam, Born Killers a little later and so JFKfascinating dive into the impossible investigation into the assassination of the American president, a very detailed three-hour film, and embodied by a brilliant cast, Kevin Costner in the lead.
“Initially, I was a big fan of JFK, and we got in touch with Oliver Stone, who loves France and Paris for having lived there, and it was a very strong meeting, I have a lot of admiration for his work. I offered to re-edit the film”, says Hugues Peysson, president of L’Atelier d’images, the publisher who made this box set, “and it is thanks to his intervention that we were able to publish it in France in high definition Blu-Ray, knowing that the rights to the film are shared between several major American studios. So we worked with him, we obviously developed supplements with specialists like Jean-Baptiste Thoret, and we manage to have a beautiful final product.”
Obsessive Quest
For Oliver Stone, who even said it in French at the Deauville festival in 2021, “governments lie” and these are two big “lies” Americans who nourished his life and his work, that on Vietnam (in which he participated as a soldier) and that on the death of Kennedy, his search for the truth even becoming obsessive in the latter case, which explains the realization of the documentary JFK the investigation released two years ago and included in the box set.
“It is the film-synthesis of his work, knowing that this moment changed his life and that of America. For all that, it is his strongest film.”
Hugues Peyssonat franceinfo
For Hugues Peysson, JFK is the filmmaker’s best film: “We are offering the ‘director’s cut’ version which still lasts 3h25, but when we screened the film like this at Cannes on the beach in 2021, people were stuck, because the perceived duration is around 1h30, there has so many shots, different camera choices, archival footage, dialogue, details and wonderful performances by actors: Costner, Donald Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Gary Oldman… It feels like to watch an Otto Preminger movie, those great American trial movies, it’s post-modern and yes it’s a masterpiece.”
And as the thousands (millions) of documents on the assassination of John Kennedy continue to be regularly declassified, one can imagine that Oliver Stone is not done with this American history.
