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Stone’s relationship with his parents was complex. His father, whom he stayed with during holidays, often saw prostitutes, for instance, and made no secret of the fact. When Stone was 15, his father arranged for him to lose his virginity to a prostitute. His mother, too, was open about sex and drugs. “She was outrageous,” he says. “She still is crazy. She’s 87, and still partying hard.” Are they on good terms? “Excellent, much better than it used to be.” And his father? “He was a very intelligent man. I admired him deeply. He died in 1985, at 86.”

A feeling of dislocation and loneliness is largely why Stone dropped out of Yale and went to Vietnam. He was looking for a purpose, and began his tour as a wide-eyed, gung-ho patriot. “I believed in the John Wayne image of America” — until that image was shattered by what he saw there, as chronicled in the film Platoon.

“I was conformist until I went to Vietnam,” he says. “I went nuts there. I saw people napalmed, and chopped up in ways you can’t believe. The smell of death will always be with me. I wish McCain had been on the ground. The air force is another world.” Is he bitter about Bush not going to Vietnam? “If Bush had gone to war he’d never have entered so lightly into this thing in Iraq. My generation is split. Part of us went to Vietnam, and part of us didn’t, and the part that didn’t ended up running the country. That’s the big mistake.”

After earning a bronze star and purple heart for bravery, Stone returned home an embittered anarchist. A failed marriage, stints as a cab driver, and training at film school in New York (taught by Martin Scorsese) matured him personally.

“I came back a wreck. I couldn’t grow accustomed to the triviality of social organisation and the materialistic nature of it all.” Film school was his salvation, allowing him to express his anger and frustration while giving a voice to his enquiring mind. Partying hard, or “letting off steam”, as he calls it, has also helped him over the years.

“It’s a wonderful thing, partying well,” says Stone, grinning. “We’re living in a more puritanical age now. My problem was that I was sometimes excessive… Hey,” he adds, raising his arms in mock surrender, “I still sometimes party too hard, but if I didn’t laugh, I wouldn’t be able to make it.”

Buddhism is now Stone’s guide. He meditates every day around 7.30am. “Which is not to say I’m a great Buddhist,” he laughs. “It’s a simple philosophy — so simple that it’s easy to overlook. We live our lives in layers, I think, and the most important layer is the spiritual layer, and we lose sight of that when we’re under a lot of stress.”

Stone says he’s more grounded than he used to be, living in a quiet corner of the Hollywood Hills with his third wife and their teenage daughter. But things aren’t always easy. Work is still a source of worry and stress. “If W doesn’t make any money, it could be the last one,” he says. “I’ve managed to make 17 movies in the way I wanted to make them. I don’t want phone calls from some exec saying, ‘We can’t show a bullet in a baby’s head.’ It infects everything.”

Let’s hope the veiled threat about retirement doesn’t materialise, for Hollywood would be a poorer place without him. And without films you sense Stone would be lost. “Write a nice piece for us,” he says, as he trundles out the door. “I need people to go see this movie. Lots of people.”

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