At the final wrap of this month's Savages, star Blake Lively distributed "I SURVIVED OLIVER STONE" T-shirts. But her experiences likely didn't match what Stone had been putting actors, crews, and himself, through prior to me interviewing him in September 1986. He'd jumped from directing Salvador in Mexico – where "half the crew were down with amoebic dysentery and the other half were starving" – to Platoon in the Philippines, where he'd allowed actors "no more than two hours sleep, in their fox-hole, and only two basic rations, each day, however gruelling".

Stone told me sweatily he'd sidestepped "the Hollywood meat-grinder" with gonzo spirit, agit-prop, dodgy finances, ad-hoc catering and "the dark humour of a severed ear served in a champagne glass".

He'd written Salvador with and about loose cannon journalist Richard Boyle, who had covered death squads, rapes and the civil war in El Salvador. Boyle lived with Stone, his wife and baby son during its writing, and "one night, totally drunk, Boyle ate all the baby milk formula in our fridge".

After ordering chilli from room service, Stone ate it the way I'd expect equally of a tired yet hyper director or a "grunt" infantryman. Back in 1967, "thinking it the gung-ho thing to do", he'd joined the US infantry and once took part in an ambush of Viet Cong eating in the jungle. As the bullets flew, so did fish, rice and chopsticks. In Platoon, he had "exorcised", or at least replayed, such personal demons.

With food caught between his gap front teeth, Stone told me that his father was a machete dealer and predicted "a kid's movie will be my next move".