(Warner Home Video)

It’s a given that most filmmakers evolve over time. But should their films do the same? The Oliver Stone Collection, which includes all of the director’s major films save Platoon and Salvador (at ten films, it is the largest DVD box devoted to a single director, and it involves the unusual cooperation of five studios), asks us to consider an already impressive oeuvre in a completely new light. JFK and Any Given Sunday are presented as “director’s cuts”—and on both, Stone talks openly about what he felt were mistakes in the original versions. Meanwhile, the long deleted scenes from Natural Born Killers and an alternate opening of Heaven & Earth suggest that the director might have produced completely different movies from the footage he filmed. As the saying goes, every work of art is a work in progress. Just even more so for Stone; and one feels deeply grateful to this extraordinary if uneven filmmaker for letting us in on his most intimate thought processes.

Indeed, almost all of the discs are enriched by Stone’s candid commentary: He talks about his Native American influences (The Doors) and his experiences in Vietnam (Born on the Fourth of July). On the JFK disc, he says of Lee Harvey Oswald, “He was a strange fellow, but he had some sort of morality that was very clear to me.” On the engaging, 52-minute interview disc, Oliver Stone’s America, the testosterone-tanked filmmaker even admits, “I tried to make a more feminine movie [Heaven & Earth]. I watch the film and, frankly, I’m a sap. I cry.”

To be sure, Stone—and his movies—can come off as confused and contradictory (at different points, for instance, he argues that the ending of Natural Born Killers is genuinely redemptive and completely satiric). And the lack of extras on the U Turn and Talk Radio discs is disappointing. But mostly, this collection is exactly the way these films should be seen—as a thrilling body of work that lives and breathes.