George W. Bush’s Administration has been among the stormiest in American history, so it was fitting that his cinematic alter ego arrived in London in the midst of a raging downpour last night.

W., Oliver Stone’s controversial take on the 43rd President of the United States, was The Times gala film at the BFI 52nd London Film Festival.

James Brolin, who plays Mr Bush, was among the stars joining the director on a squelchy red carpet. Despite the foul weather, hundreds of fans pressed against the barriers erected outside the Odeon Leicester Square for the film’s European premiere. They had come to pay homage to a triple Oscar-winning film-maker whose career has spanned the heights of Platoon, Wall Street and Natural Born Killers, as well as the depths of his Alexander the Great biopicAlexander, which never recovered from its intial mauling by the critics, even after it was then revised with a highly unusual two director’s cuts.

Stone, 62, was on pugnacious form. “This is a man we will still be talking about in 50 years’ time: a man who changed America for good or for bad,” he said.

It is Stone’s third film about a President, after the conspiracy-theory rich JFK and Nixon. “The three of them marked my life. I don’t want to do President movies but Bush shocked me – I never thought this would happen late in my life. It is an urgent situation – a deep, deep black place in America and I think we have to deal with it.”

When Stone, a director who has always been a magnet for controversy, announced the project less than a year ago, Republicans were critical of the idea, saying that it was bound to be a hysterical, left-wing hatchet job.

However, the equivocal tone of the finished film, which was made in nine months and delivered in time to influence voters in the presidential election in 12 days, has surprised critics.

“We don’t take a pop at him,” Stone said. “We take a compassionate view. I think the movie is right down the middle. Some people have criticised me the other way – that I didn’t go far enough to criticise him. The truth is he speaks for himself. There is no malice intended in this movie.

“I think if you understand the way he thinks, if you walked in his shoes, you will come to some surprising understanding of about where we are – Americans are – and why we elect these people.

“I’m very excited to open the film here. The English reaction is very important: they know George Bush because they speak the same language . . . or [and here he laughed] they pretend to.”

Stone said he doubted that the President would ever see it. “He’s established himself as a very thin-skinned man. I doubt he would have the tolerance to see himself and he doesn’t examine himself very much. He doesn’t like too much psychobabble.”

Inside the cinema, Stone quoted Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is one that is not worth living”.

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