There’s a lot to love about Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” but arguably the movie’s most iconic scene is a ten-minute sequence that is a textbook guide in how to turn a pure exposition dump into riveting cinema.
That scene, of course, is the ‘X’ sequence in which Donald Sutherland’s mysterious informant and Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison ‘walk and talk’ as Sutherland lays out what he knows about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
It’s a sequence that has every aspect working at top levels – great dialogue and performances, slick editing, it’s visually fascinating, wonderfully scored and tensely paced. It expands the film’s scale and stakes immensely and works in a way that the rest of the film can’t match its energy until the big climactic courtroom sequence.
Turns out though. Stone almost cast another legendary actor in the part and if he had gone with his original choice, the scene would have been very different. Speaking with IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast in Los Angeles this week, Stone revealed:
“I had been dumb enough to go to Marlon Brando. We all love him, of course. But if he’d said yes I would have been f—–. That scene would have gone on for twice the length.”
Stone went in a different direction with Sutherland and was so happy with the actor’s rapid yet succinct delivery of the scene he actually moved up the sequence within the narrative:
“The pictures rises to another level, because Costner realizes what he’s up against and it’s much bigger than he ever thought.”
The scene leads into the final hour as Garrison takes on the Warren Commission’s claims in court. Stone also revealed he had other actors like Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson in mind for the Garrison role and said: “Ford was terrified of it… there’s a risk once you play that role. But Kevin has guts.”
He also revealed he got Warner Bros. to greenlight the $40 million film by selling it as a murder mystery thriller. Stone revisited the work with the docufilm “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” which updates the film to include research uncovered in the 32 years since its release.
