Oliver Stone to get lifetime achievement award at Mumbai festival

Oct 28, 2010, 12:41 GMT

New Delhi - Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone is to be honoured Thursday with a lifetime achievement award at the Mumbai film festival.

Two of the Academy Award-winning director's films - South of the Border and Alexander - were shown at the weeklong international festival in India's financial hub, where Stone also delivered a lecture.

Stone said Thursday that he admired Indian cinema but found he could not keep up with the prolific industry. Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, churns out more than 900 films a year.

'I cannot keep up,' the IANS news agency quoted Stone as saying. 'I can't say I have any close understanding; ... however, I love the fact that you can switch from musical to romance to tragedy. I love that flexibility and that mentality.'

Stone said his 2004 film Alexander was partly shot in India's Ladakh region. A new, final cut of the three-hour film, called Alexander Revisited, was screened Wednesday. The film about Alexander the Great stars Colin Farrell Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins.

Stone said he was currently working on a 12-hour documentary series called The Untold History of the United States.

'There's a whole history of this country which has been underreported and which Americans have no clue about,' Stone said. 'The documentary has a left-of-centre approach, and there is a deliberate attempt to tell a story that is factual.'

About his latest film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Stone said it was about a period in the 1990s into this decade when a lot of people got richer and others did not make anything.

'It was a horrible period that came to an end in 2008, I hope,' he said.

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