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I am reading aloud to Oliver Stone some of the notes that I’ve scribbled down for a story I am planning to write about Oliver Stone. “Director. Artist. Killer. The Norman Mailer of Cinema. Megalo-maniac. Conspiracy theorist. Radical genius. Nut job. A man’s man. A man well past his prime. A man trying to do interesting, maybe even important, films.”

Oliver Stone is sitting in his office in West Los Angeles, listening to my list of superlatives and insults. The walls are red. The couch is red. He is wearing red socks and a red shirt. His face is red. His eyes are veined with red. There is a bottle of red wine on his desk and an unopened Band-Aid in his breast-coat pocket. At first there is silence. Finally he looks up from his fingernails and smiles.

“That’s cool, man,” Stone says. “That’s your article right there, man. That’s your movie.”

I am conducting this exercise with Stone, now 62, because I am trying to avoid writing one of those kneepad Hollywood profiles, the sort you quit halfway through a bathroom pit stop.

“I get that a lot,” Stone says. “I don’t like to talk much anyway; I’ve been burned so many times before.”

The sun is pouring in through the window. The architecture outside his office is typically crap Los Angeles—a stacked parking garage holding dozens of SUVs. He can’t keep staring at it. He squints. Stone’s got a headache. He’s been editing up to the last minute on his latest picture. He pours me a glass of wine. None for him, though. He parties hard, he admits, but he’ll get his drink on after midnight, after work.

Oliver Stone is about to reveal his latest controversy. This one is called W.—a stylized version of the life and times of George W. Bush, starring Josh Brolin in the title role and opening in theaters this month. The film chronicles the younger Bush’s rise from the profligate, wastrel, fucked-up first son to the sober, God-fearing leader of the free world who eventually takes the planet to the precipice. The story is based on truth. But the movie is, without a doubt, a supposition, a polemic, a piece of fiction from the mind of Oliver Stone. And it is a parlor trick: Never before has a film been made about a president still holding office.

The movie, which costars James Cromwell as George Sr. and Elizabeth Banks as long-suffering Laura Bush, was shot in six weeks in the hot Louisiana summer and edited over the course of the next two months in Los Angeles so that it can be released just weeks before the presidential election. The media, the political right, and the White House have reacted predictably. They say that Stone, the bleeding-heart propagandist, is trying to swing the election to the Obama side with another of the director’s historical fantasies.

This is untrue, Stone says, explaining his motivation for the quick turnaround. “Why release it before the election? Because Bush is still around. I think if the ghost leaves Washington in January, you ought to give him a nice exorcism. He’s not going away. Bush is still very young. He’s not going away.”

“Look,” he says, “I did three Vietnam movies, and what good did they do? People still lined up in support of the Iraq war. People don’t remember. It shows you the futility of what we do.” He pauses. “But we do it.”

The explanation may be true, but it is a half-truth, to hear the film’s producer Moritz Borman tell it. There’s another reason for the timing, he says. Money. “I don’t know if it was his idea or mine, but we thought a film about Bush would do better when he was still in office,” Borman says. “For the interest sake of it. We thought the timing might give the film a little marketing boost.”

The maker of such incendiary dramas as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, and Wall Street, the three-time Oscar winner is still, despite some artistically and commercially lean years, the most eclectic, politically outspoken director in Hollywood. For this reason, Stone says, writers and profilers are always angling to make him out to be a conspiracy nut, even though he insists his films are spiritually, if not quite factually, correct. “You tend to get paranoid sometimes about people’s intentions,” he says. “So much crap has been written about me. So many unfair things have been said.”

I want to ask him if he has brought that reputation on himself with his willingness to stretch or even make up facts in his biographical pictures. Consider, for one, that he insinuated that the assassination of JFK was an inside job, just maybe engineered by Lyndon Johnson.

Then my cell phone rings, mid-interview. It’s my mother. I ask Stone if he minds if I take the call. “Of course not. By all means,” he says.

“Hi, Mom,” I say into the receiver. “Is everything all right? Good. Listen, I’m interviewing Oliver Stone right now…” She interrupts. “You want to ask him a question?”

I turn to Stone. “You mind?”

Oliver Stone says, “Sure.”

“She’s a Bushie,” I warn him.

He takes the phone. His face is strained now. He looks like a man whose ex is calling. He speaks in a smooth baritone.

Stone: “Hello? How are you, ma’am. I’m OK. Good.” Pause. “ What can I do for you?” And then: “Oh…oh…oh.” There is a prolonged, strained silence, and then his face falls. The gap-toothed smile is gone.

He continues talking to my mother: “Well, I hope you see [the film] as opposed to hear about it, because those are two different things.”

Another long pause. “Well, World Trade Center is a story that sticks to the facts, and is also about the heroism of these people,” he says, referring to his 2006 film.

“I hope you see the new stuff and judge for yourself.”

More silence.

Stone: “OK. Sure. I’ll return you to your son.”

Me: “Bye, Ma.” I hang up and say, “Jesus, Oliver. What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘I don’t know why you’ve turned into this poisonous guy.’ She said that she thinks I’m very talented, but she doesn’t know why I do all these vitriolic political stories and stuff.”

He looks crestfallen. “I don’t know if she’s seen my films.”

Stone stares out the window. “That happens a lot. It’s about the Oliver Stone thing. Who ‘Oliver Stone’ is. It’s fine,” he continues. “You don’t think I can take criticism? You don’t think I take it all the time? It happens a lot. The misidentification of people. The labeling of false enemies. Setting up straw men. It happens all the time. And in our generation it’s gotten worse.”

Stone explains: “It started to get bad with Nixon. Now we’re in this era with all the Ann Coulters out there. The right wing came to power by the demonization of liberalism. I don’t agree that my films have a liberal bent. The JFK issue could have been taken on by conservatives very easily because the old conservatives—who had a healthy suspicion of big government—should have been against the war, because it was a completely fraudulent exercise, and transparent. True conservatives would have objected. I thought there would be more sympathy.”

Stone, the citizen of the United States, has little sympathy for Bush, who he says is responsible for tens of thousands of needless deaths abroad and the corrosion of civil liberties at home and the fortune of future generations squandered.

But the real question: Is W. going to be a good Oliver Stone movie or just an OK Oliver Stone movie?” He laughs. “How the fuck am I supposed to know?” he says. “But I love what I shot.”