WELL, I WASN’T EXPECTING THIS: The Pro-Nuclear Power Oliver Stone.

“They always say, if there is an accident with nuclear, it’s gonna be the end of the world. That’s bulls***,” says Oliver Stone. The great, daunting topic of nuclear energy sits at the centre of Stone’s latest film, the documentary Nuclear Now. The multi-Oscar-winning director built his reputation on snap and excess: the violent crime odyssey Scarface (as screenwriter); the visceral Vietnam war drama Platoon; the insatiable Eighties satire Wall Street; the three-hour-long conspiracy-theory-laden thriller JFK. His latest project, though, is one of frill-less conviction.

I’m meeting with Stone, and Nuclear Now’s producer Fernando Sulichin, in the bar of a central London hotel. They are in the country for a pair of private screenings, and they begin by reflecting on the previous night’s event. Unusually, none of the talk really concerns how the film was enjoyed as a work of cinema, but rather, how receptive the audience were to the film’s argument. This makes sense: Nuclear Now is filmmaking as manifesto. The documentary has an ardent message, and it doesn’t waste much time entertaining alternative points of view. Nuclear energy, both men aver, is the only practical road to a green future, and the survival of our species.

“I was a young man in the Seventies and Eighties,” Stone explains. “I believed what Jane Fonda was saying, and Ralph Nader, and Bruce Springsteen. They were heroes – so I went along with it. But as the situation deepened and the years went by… It’s been over 20 years since the year 2000, and still, 84 per cent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels.” Stone is no longer a young man, of course – he’s 76, to be exact – and has an air of world-weariness about him. When he speaks, though, it is with a bearish intensity. “Obviously I’m not gonna be here in 2050,” he says. “But my children, and hopefully grandchildren, will be.”

Nuclear advocates emphasise the technology’s relative cheapness, scalability and reliability – unlike wind or solar, its output is not beholden to weather patterns or day-and-night cycles. “We’re not saying [these clean energies] are bad,” Sulichin assures me. “But in order to power the electric grid of England, with the wind you have here, you need to surround practically the whole island of Great Britain with turbines.”

I’ve always been pro-nuclear power. But if Oliver Stone is for it…