Oliver Stone saunters off the elevator at SCAD’s Jen Library and takes a moment to acknowledge everyone in the lobby awaiting his arrival. He’s dressed in all black with the exception of a button down white shirt peeking from the collar of his sweater. He’s surprisingly soft around the edges—his eyelids weigh heavily on his dark pupils, and his mouth appears to be frozen in that moment just before a smile cracks. As if something has struck him funny but it hasn’t fully registered.

Stone is tired, having just flown in from Los Angeles, and a bit self-conscious, which is endearing for an three-time Oscar winner. I overhear him ask someone, “Do I look like shit? Because I feel like shit.” A young man delivers him a cup of coffee with the urgency of a live organ donation and that seems to help.

Just as I’m about to pose my first question, Stone catches me off guard. In a voice made for radio, he asks me where I’m from, how long I’ve lived in Savannah and if my husband is a construction worker (I’m not sure about this last line of questioning, but I’m willing to play along—this is Oliver Stone, after all). He seems genuinely interested in the people around him. He uses their names. He looks them in the eye. Maybe that’s just his shtick, but at 65 years old, I imagine he’s given up on shtick a long time ago.

“Don’t get swallowed up by this image shit,” he warns the newcomers to the film industry. “Keep your heart, because that’s the hard part.”

It’s clear that Stone has heart. Later, in the question-and-answer session following the screening of his film Born on the Fourth of July, he’s asked why he chose to screen that movie at this year’s festival. He quips: “I don’t know. Red, white and blue. Savannah, Georgia.” But then he adds in all seriousness, “I’m really proud of that film.”

Stone seems to recall every character, edit, and shot, lighting and sound choice he’s made in his films. His work is carefully constructed pieces of art, with no detail left unexamined. But he’s not a slave to the art. Eventually the bottom line comes begging and the film has to get made. “Perfection is the enemy of good,” Stone explains. “You’ve got to move on. You’ve got to get the movie done.”

In his prolific career, Stone has directed two-dozen films and has had a hand in writing almost all of them. And in spite of his complaints of exhaustion and jetlag, it doesn’t appear that he’s going to slow down anytime soon—at least not when conspiracy theories are alive and well. He refers to the invasion of Panama as “George Bush senior needing another war” and even recommends that the United States get rid of the Pentagon and “start over.” Some audience members take this as their cue to leave. Others applaud. They might agree with Stone’s politics, but it’s more likely that they simply appreciate the fact that he’s one of the few men in Hollywood who practices what he preaches: “You’ve got to put your passion on every project.”