Stone hesitated to make Snowden movie
LOS ANGELES — Oliver Stone had no desire to make a movie about Edward Snowden. That might seem surprising for a man who has tackled everything from the Vietnam War to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in his 40-some years as a filmmaker. Wasn’t Stone tailor-made for the story of the NSA whistleblower?
Perhaps, but he’d been burned a few too many times lately. There was the Martin Luther King, Jr. movie that fell apart and the My Lai movie, too. Plus he really didn’t want to do “a computer movie.”
“You stay away from hot current topics because they change, the winds change, something changes, a new person comes out of the woodwork, lawsuits,” Stone said in a recent interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays the title character in Snowden, out Friday. “It’s just a nightmare to do a living person.”
And yet, somehow, Stone found himself in Moscow with his longtime producing partner, Moritz Borman, Snowden, and Snowden’s Russian lawyer talking about just that.
“I was wary of the movie and (Snowden) was wary of a movie,” Stone said.
In fact, Stone was considering making something entirely fictional. Snowden’s lawyer had written a “Dostoyevsky-like” novel inspired by the ordeal that was on the table. Stone had also thought about a version where the character is chased in Russia, like “a Bourne Identity,”some-thing where he goes back to hide in the U.S., or maybe even a James Bond-type story.
“The reality of course is much stiffer. There are no guns, there are no chases, there’s no violence in the movie, and a typical coder at the NSA is not that interesting,” Stone said.
He grappled with questions about how to make it exciting — “a movie as opposed to a documentary.”
Still, in the end, he decided to stay small, and make a more realistic “dramatic interpretation” of Snowden’s 10 year journey from soldier to the man who leaked thousands of classified documents exposing the government’s mass surveillance of private citizens. "
Snowden is also told in parallel with that pivotal 2013 meeting in Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald, Ewan MacAskill and documentarian Laura Poitras, which was chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour.
Stone had “enormous problems” financing the movie. Major studios shied away from it, and he had to cobble together money from France and Germany. He also got a lifeline from Open Road Films, the independent company behind last year’s best picture winner, Spotlight.
The silver lining was that Stone had the support of Snowden himself. That ended up being pivotal to Gordon-Levitt, who took on the challenging title role. Snowden is even out promoting the film from his exile in Moscow.
“I don’t think anybody looks forward to having a movie made about themselves, particularly someone who is a privacy advocate,” Snowden told an audience in July, but said that there was a “kind of magic” to the film and its potential ability to reach a large audience through storytelling. “It was something that made me really nervous but I think it worked.”
For Gordon-Levitt, the film gives the Snowden story an emotional depth that he believes can be particularly resonant to the masses.
“You understand why as a human being he decided to do what he did. That’s really a great entre into understanding what all is going on,” Gordon-Levitt said. “Hopefully it will inspire people to think about it themselves.
“Oliver is the only one who could have made this movie,” Gordon-Levitt added. “He’s the only filmmaker who is willing to say ‘I love my country, but this thing that the government is doing isn’t right and we should look at it.’”