In August, 2001, CIA analysts flew to Crawford, Texas, to personally brief President Bush. The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm… At an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing this urgent summer, the vacationing George W. Bush looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer. “All right,” he said. “You’ve covered your ass.”

"Greed is good.”

If the 1980s added a single line of dialogue to the national memory, it was that one, in Wall Street, written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone—and that memmory is evergreen, given the real-life sequel now imploding our Wall Street. Greed is Good—a virtual anthem for corporate takeover, stated bluntly and without apology by Gordon Gekko, whose double-G name echoes the very phrase. Part of the lasting power of that film derives from its makers’ willingness to refrain from preachy attacks on “greed,” and give this time-honored demon its due. Greed certainly feels good. Despite that, the statement is offered without apology, or even irony—at least, not in the immediate moment—but proves in time to be the death sentence on Gekko’s hopes, the battle cry of an unchecked hubris that can only bring his world crashing in on him.

Hubris also seems to be the not-so-secret word at work in the presidency of George W. Bush. Weiser and Stone certainly believe it to be. Hence, W., their first full-on collaboration to reach the screen since Wall Street.

The much-anticipated film was still being cut and tested, unavailable for preview as we sat down with Weiser in late August 2008. The story’s events being so public, however, it was easy to discuss in the abstract. The question for any audience going in will be less What happens? than What does it mean, and how do you deal with it?

Weiser met Stone when they were both film students at NYU, during the early 1970s. “Oliver was nasty and sarcastic, and I was the only one who could tolerate him,” he recalls fondly. “We became friends by default. He was older than other students, and he’d been to Vietnam—which he never talked about, interestingly enough—and he did not tolerate fools. Most of our classmates had aspirations of being Godard and walked around wearing dark glasses and smoking Galois. Oliver, who used to wear all black, would verbally gouge these people—torment them. His politics were more conservative than everybody else’s, but he kept that to himself. His favorite book was Celine’s Journey to the End of Night; his persona was that of an existential maverick; he challenged whatever positions other people would take.”

The two became friendly because they both worked late in the campus editing rooms, and their collaborations are marked by a strong mutual trust. Weiser wrote the first two drafts of Wall Street—“Oliver and I would discuss things, but I had free reign”—then Stone wrote the third draft and subsequent revisions. On W., for which Weiser will receive solo screenplay credit, “I did two treatments, to start—each was 15 pages in length. One was the past, Bush in college and working his way up through the governorship to the presidency. The other treatment started with the ‘axis of evil’ speech and ended with the insurgency, as chief weapons inspector David Kay definitively informs Bush there were no weapons of mass destruction. I showed these to Oliver. He gave me feedback and told me to write the script.” (As Weiser details for us below, his two approaches ultimately merged into one.) “After I did my second draft, we kept working back and forth throughout the movie. I got to attend rehearsals—I wasn’t allowed to talk, but I gave Oliver notes—and got to see he has a laser-sharp mind when he works with actors, his greatest aptitude as a director.”

Photo: Sidney Ray Baldwin  Stanley Weiser on the W. set with Oliver Stone. “After I did my second draft, we kept working back and forth throughout the movie.” Weiser attended rehearsals, observing quietly and relaying notes to Stone.

He and Stone put in years of effort trying to adapt In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peter Matthiesen’s book about Leonard Peltier, the jailed leader of the American Indian Movement. Weiser has visited Peltier in prison, where he is serving two consecutive life-sentences for the shooting death of two FBI agents in the 1975 gun battle at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. (The evidence by which Peltier was convicted was dubious enough that Amnesty International lists him as a political prisoner.) Weiser is also very proud of a script he has worked on for several years, for which he still has hopes. Palestine (the very title provoked one company’s reader to refuse to open it) tells the true story of Adel Hussein, a native of Gaza who married an Israeli woman, and their son, Muhammed Hussein, who is thus half-Jewish and half-Arab. The son served in the Israeli army, proudly hanging on to the name—a trio of lives born for tragic conflict.

Weiser is energetic, open, curious—often asking questions of his own, or interrupting himself midsentence to follow this or that new thought before it hares off into the underbrush. It was with some regret that we had to bypass other topics and focus on the making of W., but Weiser embraces Bush and his vicissitudes with the same lively, unpredictable appetite.

F.X. Feeney: Tell me about W.

Stanley Weiser: To begin with, we called it Bush. We were working on a sequel to Wall Street, but Oliver had a bit of a falling out with the producer so it didn’t happen. Then he decided he wanted to do a movie about Bush.

We had different takes. I was more inclined to doing the psychological story of Bush, triangulating W in terms of “father,” “religion,” and “war.” Oliver was thinking in terms of doing the 2000 election. We discovered Recount was coming out, so he said, “Let’s go to Plan B, with your idea.” I then spent time… See all these books, here?

[There are 17 in all, stacked on a hassock: Hubris, by Michael Issikoff and David Korn; At the Center of the Storm, by George Tenet. Other random titles include State of Denial; The Perfect Wife; Mis-Under-Estimated.]

The most important book [for the script] is The Faith of George Bush, by Stephen Mansfield. It outlines, chronicles W’s religious, spiritual conversion, step by step by step.

[Mansfield] builds to a little-known fact. Bush literally had an epiphany in a little church in Austin. In 1998, when he was governor, the preacher was talking about how Moses was a reluctant leader. He didn’t want to lead the Jews out of Egypt, but nobody else could do -it. Moses wasn’t even a good public speaker, according to this sermon. And while the preacher was preaching it, he was looking down at Bush. His mother, Barbara, whispered to him, “He’s talking to you.” And W says, “I know.” And the preacher went on and on about how Moses accepted the job.

Several weeks later, Bush called James Robeson, one of the top televangelists in America, who was then his brain-trust, his spiritual guru. Was, until later when he let loose a homophobic tirade and Bush dropped him. But in 1998, he told Robeson, “I’ve heard the call.” Robeson replied, “I know, you’ve been growing in your faith.” Bush told him, “That’s not what I mean. I’ve heard the call, and I believe God wants me to be president. I know the toll it takes on your family, having seen my father go through that, and I don’t want to do it. I’d rather just be in the private world, buying my fishing lures at Wal-Mart.” Those are his exact words—this is from a Christian magazine. Bush went on to tell Robeson, “I have the feeling America’s about to go through a very rough period of time, and someone needs to lead with moral values. God wants me to do it. I must do it.”

Now this is documented. So this book by Mansfield was a great insight. And it was written by someone on the inside. The other book that influenced me was Fortunate Son, by J.H. Hatfield. I had a research assistant who read a number of other books and underlined parts. There was a tremendous amount of work that had to be done and very rapidly. I started the screenplay in May 2007. The movie is now coming out—18 months later. So it was a very accelerated clip.

What I did not want to do was to indemnify or vilify Bush. Fahrenheit 911 is a great, great movie, but it’s already been done. Why replicate that? Before taking him on, I could barely listen to Bush when he talked on television, much less immerse myself in his world. The idea of writing about him was the last thing I could imagine. But once embarked, I didn’t want to make him a caricature.

There’s No Success Like Failure

What was the most salient point of compassion you found?

My main point of emotional contact with him is that he was a failure at everything, as his father was a success at everything—and his father looked down on him, in disappointment. That has been the arc of his life. And W, by finding God, was able to rehabilitate his image as a prodigal son and ennoble himself. Now he could look down on everyone, his father especially, but also classmates at Yale, who had looked down on him as “the reprobate.”

Typical of someone who finds God and becomes self-righteous, there is this ugly side, this “looking down,” but I would also say a noble side too, which is, he genuinely wanted to do good. Bush’s greatest fault is an empathy deficit. (This is also Ahmadinejad’s problem, by the way. The Iranian leader’s less charming, less charismatic, but psychologically, he and Bush are cousins.) W simply cannot stomach, cannot understand, anybody else’s point of view. That’s a blindness.

People think his religious piety is an act. I’ve talked to journalist Robert Scheer—he’s convinced it’s an act. But I say nobody spends all of their time going to church, praying, if they don’t mean it. It’s too much work! You cannot devote yourself to this stuff if you don’t mean it: Bible study groups, all the way back to Midland, Texas, before he even stepped into politics.

W’s first effort at being born again came through Arthur Blessitt, the preacher renowned for carrying a crucifix everywhere in the world. Have you heard of this guy? He’s carried a cross farther in the world than any other human being in history. Bush was curious, but found him too off the wall. Blessitt even carried his big crucifix to their appointment, at a Holiday Inn in the 1980s. Parked his cross in the parking lot! This is in the movie.

Zapping Bush didn’t work. Shakti, the Hindus call it. Bush went instead to Billy Graham, and through him had the experience of being born again.

In so doing, he could put the bad part of himself in jail. The outlaw self. The alcoholic, the dry drunk—put that person safely away, under psychological lock and key. This also intuitively makes him “better” than his father. George H.W. Bush would never say he was “born again.” He was too old-fashioned, too high church for that.

In the 1988 race against Dukakis, W worked as a liaison to the Christian right. He was the emissary to bring them on board with the father, because George H.W. refused to say he was born again. He let Karl Rove bring in all these guys, and they would vet the speeches, put all this subtle coding in. W has this “coding” in a lot of his own speeches, words that speak to the evangelical right. They know just what he means—and he believes in this. It’s not an act.

He’s absolutely certain this has made him a better person. He told Queen Elizabeth when they met that he was the Black Sheep of the family. He was a cheerleader at Yale, while his father was a successful athlete—a baseball star. His father was successful at oil; W was a failure. The irony—the other part of the movie that’s very Freudian—is baseball. W’s dream was not to be a politician, but to be Baseball Commissioner. Bud Selig led him on and kept the job for himself after he said he was going to give it to him. So my logline for the movie: “He could’ve cleaned up baseball. Instead he fucked up the world.”

The writer never gets to call the tagline. Another one was, “All he wanted to do was change the world.” That, I do believe.

So, that’s the approach in the movie, to show the triangulation of the father, God and Iraq. There are all the obvious things that people know, that I’m not going to go into, of how he wanted to win the war when his father couldn’t finish it. And what an influence Cheney had.

Are you able to go into The Lie? In his book, The Way of the World, Ron Suskind reports that Sadaam’s own intelligence guy and foreign minister, separately and at great risk to their lives, contacted U.S. and British intelligence well before the invasion and told them: a) Saddam has no weapons, that’s what we tell Iran so they won’t invade; and b) he’s paranoid and isolated and increasingly cut off within his own power-structure. Bush was angry when he heard this, saying, “Tell these guys to tell us something we can use, so we can invade.”

That’s all in there, and the meeting postwar, where he’s told, “We’ve found nothing. It was a complete mistake. He outbluffed you, there’s nothing in there.” We also have Tenet trying to vet out the uranium speech in Cincinnati.

I had more of that whole drama in the original draft. Tenet kept striking [the uranium reference] from the speech, but Bush’s speechwriter was in collusion with Bush and Cheney, kept trying to use the British document as the source that he has WMDs. And Tenet, oddly enough, was fighting to strike it out. He was working to find chemical and biological weapons. Those were still a real possibility, in his mind, but nuclear was out of the question.

He knew there were no nuclear weapons. He kept striking it out. They had, as he saw it, a potential slam dunk on the chemical front, even though the little they had in hand was all flimsy stuff. We have this in the movie—rockets on stands, shadowy images; dodgy tapes of Iraqi soldiers. But Bush didn’t buy what Tenet had on the biological weapons front, and Tenet would not let Cheney slip the British white papers into a speech. That was secondhand information that goes back to the Italians. Tenet knew that was fraudulent.

What finally happened? Tenet got so overly tired that he actually fell asleep while Bush was delivering the State of the Union speech in 2002 and didn’t even hear firsthand that it was slipped back in. He was so exhausted that he didn’t bother to look at the last draft of the speech, where it was stuck back in again, by Cheney’s and Wolfowitz’s sources at the CIA and Bush’s own speechwriter. And Bush didn’t really know—to my knowledge there’s no proof, no source that he knew it was stuck back in—because he was so pissed off later on, when David Kay told him there were no WMDs.

So Bush couldn’t admit it. He still couldn’t admit it, even when he was briefed after the war. “They still have them,” he felt sure—even though everybody around him was resigning. W was like Ahab, “It’s got to be true.” It would break his psyche to know how wrong he was. That kind of person who is in denial that way, believes they’re doing the right thing. So I show from his mind, that he thinks what he is doing is helping the world. He believes, errantly, no matter how many times you tell him he’s wrong. It’s like that old line, “If everybody tells you you’re drunk, lie down.” He just won’t.

You say to yourself, How does Bush live with himself? Soldiers die over the weekend, how does he have a good weekend when this happens? Who does he talk to?

I discovered in the course of my own research that he does have some counseling. James Robeson, the evangelical Christian, was seen going to the White House, many times, and it was documented in a Texas newspaper that Bush actually used him as a counselor. Robeson told him: “Confess your sins. Get it all out there.” He gives him advice on speeches. This was something that, for legal reasons, we couldn’t get in. But the theocratic fundamentalist—the double-edged sword of being messianic but at the same time bringing about destruction—is the essence of the movie.

Oliver focuses more directly on the Freudian element of the competition between father and son—a shared characteristic of all of Oliver’s movies—and in this case, that theme in reality is, without a doubt, huge.

How do you interpret W’s intellect?

Fortunate Son has a terrific take on this topic. The Bush family forced this writer J.H. Hatfield—they forced his publisher—to withdraw this book from publication years ago, in the wake of 9/11. Lamentably, he later committed suicide, before it was finally published. His book is the best yardstick of reporting on Bush’s youth and his early life. All the books that have been written thereafter take from Fortunate Son. There’s an important anecdote in it that has been corroborated from other sources. At Yale, during a fraternity session, all the pledges were asked to name all the people in the room. They were all stumped except Bush—he rattled off all 40 names. He has a great mnemonic skill, where he uses nicknames with people’s faces as a reinforcement to memory. He has compensatory tools that he uses, to make up for his lack of genuine, probing intelligence. He has extreme Attention Deficit. Reports have to be under three pages. We have a scene Oliver put in where Bush says, “Good,” because a particular signing statement Cheney has about torture comes in at less than three. W is also very adept at reading people’s body language. He looks people in the eye; he has a kind of hypervigilance and intuitive skills, to compensate for lack of curiosity, that lack of deep thinking.

Hatfield’s book was suppressed after 9/11. But now W is easy pickin’s. Books tracing Hatfield’s conclusions are a dime a dozen.

To focus on body language is a kind of “animal intuition.”

He compliments people on their body language. He studies people, checks them out.

My script was pilfered, and the Hollywood Reporter sent it out to biographers. They criticized it. I wrote a letter, which the Reporter didn’t print, asking, “How would these biographers like it if their books were taken in manuscript and given for review while still in-progress?” I was criticized for having a line where Bush says to Cheney, “Keep your ego in check.” And now it comes out, I believe, in the new book by Scott McClellan—or is it Salman?—that Bush did tell Cheney, “Stay in the background.” Because Cheney is always forcing the “1 percent solution” down Bush’s throat, like Iago baiting Othello, to make up for the blunder of not having gone all the way to Baghdad in 1991. Cheney to me is the most dangerous man in the world. Rupert Murdoch, second!

W’s fatal flaw is that he lacks the ability to empathize. It’s always “us” versus “them.” He wins friends over—he has this kind of surface charm—you talk to people who’ve gotten to know him, even briefly, and you realize his whole personality is geared this way. I had a line that we’ve cut out of the movie—it’s too well-known—where it’s asked, “Who would Joe Public rather have a beer with?” And that’s it. Gore, who has a ramrod up his ass, or Bush, who’s an alcoholic? The problem is, Bush can’t empathize—a deficit of sociopaths.

A Death in the Family

Do you deal with the death of his baby sister, when he was about four? She died, and his parents didn’t even tell him for years. Talked about her as if she were still alive and looking forward to coming home from the hospital. That’s the moment when I feel compassion for Bush. Here he is at age four, praying for his sister to live, and they don’t even tell him she’s dead—for several years? What kind of relationship to the truth can you have, if that’s your first experience of getting bad news? Is that in the movie?

No. It’s too heated. And in a movie the moment would become too big—it would let him off the hook. We have enough of the father denigrating him for being a loser.

This happened: His father told him straight out that he was a disappointment. Jeb was the favorite son. Another key point is that when Bush told his mother he was going to run for governor, even she put him down—Barbara Bush could be quite crudely truthful, and this is from Woodward. She told him: “You can’t run against Ann Richards.” And he asked why, and she said: “You have a loud mouth. You’re opinionated—just like me. Jeb is more like his father—he’s level-headed. He thinks before he talks. You’re not like him.” She said that.

They didn’t want him to run for governor of Texas—they wanted Jeb to succeed in Florida. His father couldn’t even talk to W—I think he was even scared of him. There was an incident in the 1970s where young Bush challenged his dad to a fight. This is a key moment in the movie.

W comes home drunk, with his youngest brother—and he smashes over garbage cans in the neighborhood. He’s hitting them, knocking them over. He gets out of his car—the neighbors hear, and everything. He goes in the house. Everybody starts yelling upstairs. W challenges his father to a fistfight. He said, “Let’s go mano a mano, right now. I’ve had it with you.”

Barbara and Jeb broke it up before it could turn into a real fight, and Jeb stuck up for him, telling their dad, “He was out celebrating. He just got into Harvard Business School.” Then W cut in: “I got in,” he said, “but I’m not going. I just wanted to show you I could do it.” Now, what W doesn’t see is that his father obviously pulled the strings to get him in.

But the fact that he challenged his father to a fight—after that, George senior could never really talk to him, just sends him notes. When Bush was elected governor of Texas, there was a very touching moment—there’s a lot of humanity in the father—where he gives W a pair of cufflinks that Prescott gave him when he went off to World War II. But he doesn’t say anything—he hands him a letter. The father is very cut off emotionally; he’s in his head. Feelings don’t come out easily for him. “These are my most treasured possession,” he wrote in the note. “They were given to me by my father, who never gave me anything. They mean the world to me, and I’m sure you’ll make a good governor.” This was after discouraging him.

When Jeb suffered a defeat, W said, “Why can’t my father be happy for me? He seems more upset that Jeb lost. Why can’t he be happy that I won?” So there is this Oedipal tension. We don’t even have to hit it hard—it’s there. But: Why does W, if he’s not such a bright guy—and he’s not—why, and how, does he get where he does? Because he has tremendous willpower.

To understand his character, understand he had the willpower to stop drinking when he turned 40. He went out running and he threw up—he got terribly sick—and he vowed he was going to stop drinking. He wasn’t going to go to AA. He stopped on a dime. He did it. Same way he stopped smoking, later, when he was on a golf course. He’s a “dry drunk.” His behavior is still out there in terms of extreme behavior. But if he says he’s not going to do something, he follows through. So you have to respect his will, his charm.

He stands up to his father who’s cold and tyrannical, by finding God. “I’m better than my father. I’m a 100 percent believer, born-again, whereas my father would not be born again.”

That leads to what I think is the most important moment in the movie—audiences will determine what’s really important, but this was crucial as I see it—where the father writes an editorial in the New York Times, under the signature of Brent Scowcroft. The father couldn’t sleep right before the invasion of Iraq. He had his best friend Scowcroft publish an op-ed piece warning about the dangers of invading Iraq, but it was obvious it came straight from him. Once again, the father can’t tell the son directly—he has to write him a note.

W sees that and is really pissed off. Once again, his father is criticizing him, and doing it in a letter, through an intermediary. That’s when Woodward asked that question: Do you ever talk to your father about the war? He replied, “No. He doesn’t have that kind of strength. I appeal to a higher father.”

We then have a scene where George senior, even though he knows his son is mistaken, defends him when asked about the war directly. He says, “It’s the hardest job in the world. You don’t know what it’s like.”

They’re like the mafia, these Bushes—they might feud in private, but in public they stick together. You figure there have to be tremendous blockages, extremely fixed emotions, if a son won’t ask his father—who’s been president, who’s actually invaded the same country, fought with Saddam Hussein—for advice about the war. Or at least get his take about the dangers and pitfalls! Any normal human being would do that. Why not Bush? This is gargantuan.

Some of our German money people criticized the script, saying, “It makes Bush look too human.” When we were filming in Louisiana, we needed an oil derrick and spoke to 26 different derrick owners, and they wouldn’t give us permission—being oil people, they automatically judged the film to be anti-Bush. They wouldn’t even look at our script. We managed to find one guy. The movie’s going to be too right for the left, and too left for the right. If they loathe Bush, they’re going to complain we humanized him; if they love Bush, they’re going to say we demonized him. The thing is to convince a few people who are in the middle about what happened, about how this country was hijacked by one ego, surrounded by a collection of egos.

A collection of egos surrounding the tragic mineshaft disaster that is the mind of this one guy.

What if Bud Selig had given Bush the Baseball Commissioner job? There’d be no Iraq war. The whole world would be different. So I blame it on Bud Selig! I don’t know how that guy lives with himself!

Screenwriter and critic F.X. Feeney is a frequent contributor to WRITTEN BY and the author of Roman Polanski (2006), published by Taschen.