Chasing The Light

Reviews / Votes

Chasing the Light shows a man who still runs towards the gunfire.This is, you will gather, a tremendous book - readable, funny and harrowing. It's also full of movie-making gossip, scandal and fun. If you want to know what working with a truly difficult actor is like, read his account of handling James Woods on the set of Salvador. Nevertheless, Stone sticks with Woods because "he is a genius". Also if you want to know what it's like to be so intoxicated at a Golden Globes ceremony that your speech is so bad and almost denies you an Oscar, then you need this book... The book is phenomenally well detailed. * The Sunday Times * Raw, savagely honest, as dramatic as any of his movies, Oliver Stone's memoir defies all the Hollywood cliches. * Mail on Sunday * Oliver Stone is a giant provocateur in the Hollywood movie system. His autobiography is a fascinating exposure of Stone's inner life and his powerful, all devouring energy and genius that drove him to become one of the world's greatest filmmakers. Stone rattles cages. He pricks the bubbles of the namby-pambies. He provokes outrage. He stirs up controversy. He has no respect for safe places. Oliver Stone is larger than life. Chasing the Light says it all. * Sir Anthony Hopkins * Oliver Stone's narrative, his life story about the heartbreaks, the near misses, and finally the triumphs is a Hollywood movie in itself. I thank Oliver for writing Chasing the Light, especially for my NYU grad film students-or anybody else with artistic dreams of working in this thing called the movie business. Oliver, in honest and sometimes brutal fashion, lays it out-what it took for him to get to where he hoped to be-a successful writer/director working in Hollywood; the road it took is hard AF. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo. * Spike Lee * Oliver Stone's story is the story of my generation writ large. * Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver * The cover of Chasing the Light is a picture of Stone as a young man, looking at the camera with that strange, haunted expression you find in the faces of shell-shocked US soldiers in Don McCullin's photographs from Vietnam. It tells us he is authentic. His is a soldier's story, not a showbiz autobiography. He has seen the darkness. He has actually been on the front line, with first-hand experience of the nightmarish experiences he later set out to show on screen. This is unlike other contemporary directors who have made war movies over the last 40 years such as Stanley Kubrick, Francis For Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Kathryn Bigelow. * The Independent * Oliver Stone can write a helluva memoir, which isn't surprising when you consider he cut his teeth penning screenplays [...] It's a remarkable read; someone should make a movie about it. * EMPIRE magazine * Oliver Stone's early years brim with drama...Stone grabs your attention fast... He writes brilliantly on being young, lost and reckless, and with punchy immediacy on the sensory assault of war. ...desperate and dangerous...giddily exhilarating. ... Sequel, please? * Total Film * Chasing the Light is a deep book, illuminated and relentless, prose at its best...What Oliver Stone has written will last, because I have never seen anything like his insights into the way the film industry works... * Werner Herzog * I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a rip-roaring read. It left me breathless. * Chris Evans, Virgin Radio Breakfast Show * No one writes a Hollywood memoir with such candour as Oliver Stone. * Mail on Sunday *