Oliver Stone on "Snowden"

let me introduce you to my little friend who's not who's not so little he's lit a large and capacious filmmaker I'm Ron Susskind we are going to have a discussion with all of stone we have a companion audience at the Harvard Film Archive that will soon at seven o'clock give or take be watching Snowden which will be in movie theaters around America on Friday I've seen the movie I found it extremely enlivening and I lived these issues of intelligence for many years I have written many books and I teach here at Harvard I teach narrative in various ways at the law school and otherwise and this will be an exciting conversation Oliver and I will talk for you and then we will open it up to questions to the audience and and get into it those are harsh spotlight so anything you can do just deflect them a little bit feel like a Monday interrogation here please this is a Guantanamo moment for you Oliver I was here in my exactly I was in ninety I was here in 92 January for JFK with it was quite an interrogation that night but I would be back I'm here actually for the Harvard Film Archive with my friend Hayden guest he invited me here because they waiting for me to die and contribute my papers and stuff those papers I have but and Ron I've known since I read the 1% doctrine which I knocked me out so and I think is really the 1% doctrine applies to this movie as well the 1% doctrine for those of you who don't recall was a book I write in 2006 and the doctrine is also called the Cheney doctrine simply put Cheney at a briefing a few months after 9/11 was given that hair on fire report that Pakistani nuclear scientists had met with bin Laden and Zawahiri the number two I used to call him bin Laden's Cheney and and told them things that were heroin they were trying to get their hands in Laden Zawahiri on on weapons on plutonium and enriched uranium at the end of the briefing Cheney says we need to treat these low probability high impact events in a new way if there's a 1% chance that terrorists could get their hands on these weapons of mass destruction we must treat it as a certainty it's not about our analysis it's about a response this doctrine has been a guiding Doctrine right to this day and in some ways ed Snowden is arguably the most significant character on the stage now as to the consequences of this doctrine and all that it yielded what's interesting Oliver is it I've known you for many years and and you sometimes like to do a little method acting you know you get into the characters your you're creating on screen in this one you kind of felt at times I imagine like an intelligence official you're going to see people in Moscow including meeting Ed Snowden under various carefully crafted provisions tell everyone some of the backstory of how you made this movie and ended up in Moscow briefly uh I didn't want to make this movie I didn't somebody had approached me about the Reich's I knew Glenn Greenwald and much respected what Snowden did when it came out and you know but thank you very much I'm not chasing the news you can't do that with a movie it takes too long to make extort things change things come out of the woodwork there could be a new charge is this that the character dies or reveals himself in another way it's very very tricky so I passed he sold his book to Hollywood and I a few months later was called by actually Snowden's lawyer and said please come and meet him Anatoly Anatoly and buy and consider buying my the book he wrote a fiction book about a spy in a 1984 situation in Russia so it was so interesting idea I went there out of curiosity and I think ed was very wary of me and I was wary of the situation so it took about two more visits actually until June 8 2014 to commit to this thing but to decide we decided to do it realistically after buying anatoly's book which was interesting as well as what was it was it a success yes it's a spy thriller based on but it doesn't like character yes who goes to Russia and of course the Americans trying to get them back and so forth and so on buddy in it there's discussions in a Dostoevsky kind of way confessionals long windy paragraphs about the meaning of the Orwell state and I thought that was pretty interesting stuff so we about the Guardian book became the first basis but then there was corrections to be made in the guardian book right edie started to fill this in over a period wile Tamim aide nine visits several with my co-writer kieran Fitzgerald we learned a lot but we also went back to the records conflicted public record as you know there's a Glenn Greenwald's versions and of course we talked to Kevin does a Gladwell Glen is a you and young I imagine so you and McCaskill he was another reporter there and it was of course Loras Loras film which was available to see as well as whatever we could find on him and talk to whoever knew him including Sarah Harrison and ultimately to Lindsey mills so the challenge you face right off the bat is a lot had been done at that point and you had to do something that was distinctive even with Stoughton becoming a character that had inhabited at that point the imaginations of people everywhere listen it's what it's even worse than that I mean it was by the time we did all the research which is you know reading you love that stuff I don't protective technological details of this stuff ii mindlessly boring i mean the names of the program's themselves or as mindless as a pentagon programs can be called it keystroke prison hundred-plus and that was at this at the surface at that point there was only five or six yeah prison keystroke boundless informant my god and they're unimaginative people these intel attend was eventually is there well we find out it's true but we find out there's hundreds of programs and that mr. snow and the stuff was at the tip of the iceberg a lot of that is still unreleased information right fascinating but how to make it into a movie i wanted to make enemy of the state or something like that which of course was a completely unrealistic but fascinating vision of the NSA and then there was the Bourne Identity that CIA but very very little have been written about the NSA the first you know who James Bamford I deeply respect he wrote the first book in 1982 and he grow to more and he's been he's been the one of the most strictest critics of the NSA and did you have GM help you in any way as much as possible but I didn't we didn't hire him we he stayed on the other side of the fence as an independent bill Benny worked as a consultant bill was the first guy a phone man if I whistle blower well he's more than that he was a phone genius he actually figured out thread silver thread thin thread I think was called thinthread the first program he's the Nick Cage characters kind of in the movie for three million dollars he figures out a program to tap the world but do it elegantly with the separation of targeted targets versus the wide mass focus surveillance that we have now Oliver tell me what it was like when you when you first meet snowed now everyone has at that point an impression of Snowden you see him on that grainy screen you know pretty articulate fella to the surprise of many people what did you expect walking in and what did you find you know in Moscow well I just want to fit in one little detail because it's important for the threat of this thing is that from bill Binney the grandfather generation I call it we moved to Tom Drake now Tom Drake is crucial to the story because he's in the movie you'll see it Tom Drake was the other a high high level NSA official who actually took the NSA on and got really scraped to the edge of his skin I mean ruined his life but he won in the end and he was his charges were acquitted so if you find out anything about Tom Drake it gives you the basis of the he's the next generation then ed Snowden comes along this is five years into Obama 2013 which is shocking because Obama was the man who was going to reform the transfer the secret government right we thought which is a point that is made in the movie other me else I was 2008 Edie had joined the in 2004 he had well no actually he joined the the CIA in 2006 but by the time that came along he believed that there would be reforms and by 2013 when I when he broke the documents this was a shock to many people although as because of Ron's book and people like James risin I have to say James Rosen wrote the Year 2005 New York Times piece that was delayed for almost a year plus that piece revealed mass eavesdropping but without the hard evidence it Snowden presented interesting case because you know without in other words a lot of people like Ron knew that something was going on we just knew it but we didn't have that kind of shocking evidence and it really even to Bamford was shocking you know yeah so I just wanted that's the preface of the Moscow story so I went out of curiosity who's going to say no to a meeting like that I found a young man you found probably very articulate very sincere a man who was almost a boy scout I it's a very bright boy scout in the sense that he really believed that his oath was to the Constitution which it is and not to the NSA or the CIA but you know at 29 years old to do what he did merited my attention because I wanted to explore further what how do you do this how do you become this kind of young man and I think the movie reveals that through the course of it's two hours the Ron Kovic story born the fourth of July is somewhat similar right Ron bean and you thought about wrong when you're looking at Ed do you see comparison writer you know I was looking for a thread end and we said let's tell it linear yeah let's start with the military service because people don't know about that let's start with why you wanted to get into the CIA after he broke his legs and couldn't serve all these things give us a background a rich background how he meets Lindsey Mill's on an Internet date it's a first date they meet through the internet it's fascinating it becomes a very important relationship in his life nine years it ended well surprisingly because you know mr. Snowden has said he thought he was a dead man when he left - what he didn't have a exit plan from home call he basically wanted just to get his information out to these journalists who wanted it and then he was clean of the affair and he'd take his chances but he didn't want any of his colleagues to be tracked he left his digital footprints with the NSA they didn't pick up on it very fast which shows you they're not that bright yeah it's not enemy of the state where there on your ass in a second either so and by the time I met him I was i I II was very impressed with it you know what can you say I don't see that he's not a guide hang out with in a bar no so you did nine Bob he's mass goes to this night I can talk to you all night but I can't you know he's a man who's serious and goes and gets behind his computer he lives on New York Times bill and deals with reform issues that matter to him as well as encryption issues which are crucial one of the things that's fascinating about Snowden is how successful he's been at projecting his image around the world from an apartment in Moscow I do he always said this is about the message not you know don't involve even I think the message is clear but people don't pay attention they want a personality that's the nature of that's why movies exist in a way they don't have a person right so they they focused on him and he's the opposite of the celebrity type attention secret yeah not at all but that's part of what you needed to reflect in the movie this is not a particularly vivid character in terms of the traditional tropes of celebrity no Will Smith quiet not a soft I've got no muscles no mossy yes he was a good shot but he never fires a gun in the movie and there's no well there's there is some exotic sex but you know I'm talking about if you've seen the movie I get imagine ed was a little uncomfortable with that scene was the anything he expressed to you in a Skype since then no no he was he approved of it he knew no he knew what this is about I mean I found him to be very actually doesn't see many movies he had seen a piece of my untold history the United States but he didn't know much about movies he's basically computer man but he really understood the needs of drama and that was my biggest fear by the way how are we going to take all this information which is technical and complex and rendered into a movie that can be understood one of the in Alabama one of the points in the movie one of the things I thought was interesting is the idea that that he starts as a kind of conservative patriotic fellow from a conservative family for the most part of politically speaking who has certain ideals of loyalty loyalty to a standard patriotic vision of the right and he changes through the course of the movie that evolution seems to be one that actually does track with Ed's real life but it's one that you've got a render there without people saying oh this is just what Oliver does to make a liberal that had to be handled deftly I imagine yeah and I certainly have first-hand experience having myself growing up as a conservative my father was a Republican all his life an Eisenhower supporter and believed very much and was that the Russians were coming all the way through my youth up and through the 1950s so I've been there and I went to Vietnam on that basis and when I took me along much longer than II D to learn how to my way here's a question what would you say is the nature of that sort of movement from right to left your family Ed's family what's the quality what's the essence of what creates that motion in that direction in terms of principle in terms of life well for me I can revelation consciousness consciousness you learn as your you learn as you go you have to learn from experience because if you have an ideological idea in your head as I did with the world challenges that you consider yourself non-ideological now I try to be yes I try to consider myself a man who lives off the experiences I've had in other words I'm a realist and pragmatic too and I understand certain of need for security and I need some of the things that they're doing I absolutely understand why and still I think ed should be the head of the NSA if you really want to know the truth because he's what he is very good flair now and I say Chief Ed Snowden what would he be like everybody was hurt he would be like one of those Reagan appointees that close the agency down after their appointment yeah it sometimes those people like Reagan who end up actually say hey why do we need nuclear weapons for you know he almost got there except for people like Wolfowitz who were around and told him not to but we came very close sometimes it's Nixon and hated Russia hated the red the communist menace and he ended up making a deal with China and Russia we we learned that a lot of the right-wing people end up moving to the other side well something on the other hand that goes both directions that's called Nixon to China in terms of the political trope Russia - he made the ABM Treaty that was rescinded by mr. Bush don't forget virtue of that you've got your flank covered mr. Bush never moved against timepiece that was what's interesting about my movie about him because he was a man who never had that capability of consciousness he seems it was a two-dimensional character unlike Richard Nixon who I tried to show us a three-dimensional character I'm fascinated by psychology of that then I know people like you do probably who were left wingers in their youth who became extremely conservative any of the folks right George W Bush started on the Left and moved right any less fluid element and as much you don't understand that far they have a bad experience with communism or this or that or let me ask you about this is the thing that I find fascinating about the Snowden journey and your journey with him is is these definitions of reality people see Laura's which was an extraordinary movie they read books now they watch a movie you've got to do certain things in a movie by virtue of embracing dramatic license the things you need to do as a filmmaker but this movie will go probably far beyond the documentary film or many of the books to be embraced as reality or a reality that people find accessible and relatable do you feel that that is an inaccuracy an inaccurate version of what's true or the way we process reality often through movies which has been much of your life's work self questions anything you had a great quote you gave it to me in the back room can you repeat it which one documentary versus drama which one documentary and drama yeah well you know I think that uh that what we find if we live long enough is something that folks on the far Cossack culture eats everything for breakfast some people might disagree with that but these movies for better for worse shape people's notions of reality and I say this humbly is an author someone who's made documentary films when a movie hits theaters it hits so many more people than even the most successful books in most cases and you end up dealing with that notion of what is real as the one that is prevailing and that's the responsibility I think of every filmmaker to recognize that because that's the way we shape the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are as a people it's largely through entertainment I agree I think the documentary is a fine film and I agree with her conclusions and I love what she shows it's but it deals with real time in a week in his life in Hong Kong on this tells you the whole picture and what he's trying to convey he's dealing with surveillance mass surveillance he's dealing with drone warfare and worst of all was cyber warfare it's all in there and you understand what he's scared of what the stakes are for the world so you know milk was a great documentary and it was also as a great feature I don't find it to be contradictory I find it to be complimentary white boys don't cry was a documentary first there's been many versions as you know of Lincoln's life I mean I don't I don't see any contradiction between Raymond Massey and Daniel day-lewis to be honest it's it's all a continuation of an exploration a story can be told many ways and that's part of what we're here to talk about is story and you actually do some strong rendering of reality including a clip we're about to see which really sums up I thought rather brilliantly a world that I reported several books on is the Jim rising and others in a way that's vivid in terms of the way we are living very very much in a surveillance state why don't we play that clip and it's that's so interesting and here you've got a guy like Snowden saying I want to be patriotic contributor to public service and a dilemma arises soon enough that others have felt many whistleblowers that I've dealt with and other reporters where they say what do you do when you find your government has done something illegal and your witness to that are we a nation ruled by laws or men and what is exactly my oath of loyalty here you hear his loyalty oath and then you see it challenged as the movie unfolds that's great loyalty define follow orders you're not in charge the head of the NSA the head of the CIA's in charge if everybody is doing their own thing there is nothing that's accomplished I've heard that many times and what happens if everybody says fine I'm aggrieved this is illegal I'm going to be an Ed Snowden is Snowden creating with this celebrity that you're a part of a generation of Snowden's and is that good for the exercise of power which a nation with this power must and for our democracy the generation of them listen be better off of the whole room of Snowden's this is a very important point throughout history and comes up again and again I was for example on a smaller scale I was in Vietnam I took a loyalty oath to serve and I was in an army in Vietnam and I'll tell you things started to go haywire this is 1967 eight as early as on and we when you see things in villages and you see civilians being ousted and killed abused property stolen etc and rape people rape that's just where do you set the line I am a soldier I don't believe in this is a form of behavior that's been sanctioned yes not by the officers but the officers are not there so what do you do in every individual case when you study the meal I massacre which is crucial to understand what each soldier did and you'll just study that day most of them turned into beasts several percent I'd say 20 percent watched and probably 5 percent actually tried to do something it's a sad sad indictment of general population the mentality and at the NSA we had years and years was it thirty thousand people working there off and on roughly we've had years and year they do not they they sympathize with Snowden some of them they did but they would not cross that law it was their own incomes their families their self-interest that is a hard hard case and it goes on there's good Germans everywhere we don't admit it but it went it's true and Snowden was one of those people and I hope to god there are more whistleblowers in fact we have reasons to believe there are we can discuss that another question but I hope to god we have decent whistleblowers who continue and continue and we need them desperately in our society you know in some ways it's movies an ode to a whistleblower and someone who embraces truth at that level of personal risk has a place in any democracy I don't think anyone doubts that one of the things that's happened in the ensuing years is that folks at the highest levels of enforcing the law the president certainly Eric Holder former attorney general says look maybe Snowden will be a special case what he does created a conversation that changed law someone say some of the changes that were created are the most important since the Church Commission of the 70s and he should be treated with an understanding of that the President himself said the debate Snowden created was a value yeah though he must be prosecuted as any person who violates law is prosecuted and I'll tell you from intelligence sources in Washington there is an understanding that there are two conversations happening at once the public conversation which the President must I think be guided by and a private conversation of some sympathy for Snowden that cannot be expressed publicly because of the fear of precedent if Snowden comes back and does not face prosecution the fear is just what Oliver mentioned a roomful of Snowden's and the consequences of that so with that why do we open up some questions folks there mics all throughout hopup I will I will offer a first question no someone's got to have a question for our fearless uh why don't you come down to the mic so we can hear you the rules and the questions at these forums are state your name um make sure it's just one question and that it ends with a question mark so hi Oliver my name is Caitlin MacCarthy big fan driven from Worcester to see you my question is this how much veto power did Edward Snowden have over the content that was in this film now he turned it over to those journalists who the proviso as in the oh you haven't seen the film but in the film he makes it very clear no names don't hurt people use your responsibility but it takes a lot of technical work for those newspapers to get through these files you have to have people who know how to understand this stuff so was it took a while you know it took a while they're still working at it Glenn has the whole file Glenn Greenwald and and he's with the intercept which is perhaps one of the more progressive organs of criticism I look forward to more from him the other ones have the time the New York Times has it but that's no guarantee of Revelation actually they have the the Guardian files in New York they're the custodians of it The Guardian has done a lot perhaps not enough for Julian Assange and the Washington Post was that your employer at one point I know Journal yeah a Wall Street Journal the mark Elmen Bart Gellman remarked as my board I had the invitation to go and he's writing a book I'm anxious to read the book but he's it's coming out soon actually this month but Bart the post or whatever happened they didn't they didn't go well thank you for has the file yeah I appreciate it thank you very much yeah mr. stone my name is Diego we're hi first of all happy early birthday thank you that's not yet I'm a big fan of movies Natural Born Killers and savages are so my favorites my question here is regarding your movie south of the border it's a movie about Google Chavez and other leftist heads of state in Latin America pull this out here so according to the Associated Press they said you said you felt no need to present the opposition's argument tari Cali the writer for the movie set to the New York Times at the point was not to have an academic debate but to present a sympathetic view of these people right now in Venezuela the GDP is expected to contract by 10 percent it has the highest murder rate in the world and inflation is at about higher than a hundred percent so my question is do you still now hold the sympathetic view of Chavez and the leftist heads of government in Latin America now that the socialist policies enacted in Venezuela have reached their logical endgame thank you I don't think that's a fair statement question I think that mr. Chavez died almost three years ago from a very sudden cancer certainly a lot of people wished him dead and his the leadership was handed over to mr. Maduro who is no it was not as effective not at all effective like Lugo was in leading the country this is a sad story there is a lot of mismanagement in Venezuela and a much of it is exaggerated by his opponents especially the Venezuelan right I remind you that they told us there was press censorship and that Chavez was a dictator he was elected so many times with international monitoring bodies watching it he's no dick T was no dictator he was a choice of the people and he raised the poverty level the extreme poverty by something like 20 25 % they loved him and he would have been reelected if he hadn't been let's say suspiciously dead so you don't have the true picture from the Venezuelan bourgeoisie about you the media that I saw in Venezuela was highly negative about him because all the newspapers were owned by the oligarchy as they are in Brazil which also recently had a coup against a legitimate democratically elected president in Dilma so this is a very tricky I mean the New York Times Simon Romero who was the reporter there for much of this criticism I think I read 99 articles out of 99 were critical highly critical sure that so I would I would really examine the motives of the critics of Venezuela we could do a whole hour on Chavez thank you for your question have it you my friend I hello my name is Frankie Hill I'm a sophomore at the college do you believe there is any chance that Edward Snowden will ever return to the the United States and will he want to she certainly watched to and he would you know he would he would go for trial if it was a fair trial and where you could prove it prove prevent present evidence in his defense he cannot do so under this statute of the Espionage Act of 1917 which limits the which was the sabotage Act and you cannot bring into if the national security matters into the courtroom so everything is national security as far as it's his opposition is concerned everything there is no defense so he would do it under other circumstances he'd be glad to come back and he misses the country but from abroad he remains one of its reformers he believes in the in the defense of the country but properly organized and controlled and right now we are out of control no one's watching this secret government one thing Ron didn't say is that yes Obama has given great lip service to this great lip service done nothing he appointed a commission of five experts terror experts to examine the laws and the NSA laws and they came up with the in December of 2014 they condemned it all heartedly and made 45 suggestions for reform and said there was no evidence that nasty sloppiness solved one single incident of terrorism also I just wanted to make one more point is that the President did nothing with those reforms and continued to build the greatest most massive surveillance system globally in the history of mankind without basically Democratic consent the President did say publicly that he thought the debate Snowden launched was one of value and did change legislation though I mean duly noted you know my question to you is was it cinematic license in the movie to seem to indicate that part of what drove Snowden to his actions was being disputed about how little Obama did because that was a suggestion in the movie I'm not sure if Snowden has ever said that with much clarity he's in a position perhaps he hopes for a pardon oh god do you think that's really the I do the cause I don't know that he this night this is his case and I think that II D would like to come back and there's no doubt if you take a position overly critical of the United States from abroad it deepens your dilemma it's a tough position to be in but I you know I do know that he has said the reforms were drapes changing of the drapes in the White House but I know Obama has not been faithful to the concept of reform at all he really hasn't on the contrary he's built it up the opposite one far more than George Bush ever dreamed modely got another question here thank you very much hi hello my name is Jessica Bixby and I am a student here at the Harvard Kennedy School to turn back towards the cinematic side I was wondering how you chose your writer co-writer Karen Fitzgerald and worked with him to develop a narrative that both spoke to the dramatic side as well as tell the story of Edward Snowden how we get it yeah how you chose to work with that writer and then kind of the process of creating that is trial and error it was a tremendously complicated process we went back and forth back and forth we wrote separately keeping it dramatic was the hardest of all because it would get bogged down in all this data so it we the process of screenwriting went on for approximately the entire year including the shooting and then in the editing and we were still doing some rewriting I like to do that in the editor so it was a very tortured process I have to say their script is available by the way in its last form from New York skywars skyhorse publishing thank you very much oh there's a four-minute clip I'd like to show then we'll get right to your question is why we make movies that is incredibly compelling you know you feel that and you feel it's hard not to feel violated when you watch that and that is the the truth of the case the information they have on all of us is that detailed that intimate the founders thought about this it's in the Federalist Papers talking about a man from Hoboken should be safe in this person should not be stopped and violated held against his will no different but this is reality how about over here I'm sorry I ignored this mic is it working yeah I think so um hi my name is Noah from I am from South Africa and I'm a student here at the Kennedy School I have a question regarding the last comment that you made um that the there's a role for for people like Snowden especially in the participatory democracy what then becomes the implications of governments to be able to manage intelligence and how did do institutions like the CIA hire people moving forward in a way that is representative of the interests of citizens powers have always had intelligence services you know the Greeks and the Romans had them too it's been part of the arsenal of what countries do to exercise power to know what they need to know I will say though that people who have spent a life and intelligence and one I'll notice daniel patrick moynihan I suggest there's a terrific book called secrecy that Moynihan wrote late in his life after spending years on the Senate Intelligence Committee and what he says is secrecy is wildly overrated in ways that are stunning and often disastrous what cannot endure sunlight is not material to the way a democracy must conduct itself it's what Moynihan says and he's a heart eye guy and I think one of the questions that this movie raises and others including Assange who has been treated much less favorably than Snowden in the public eye as well as the many whistleblowers or sources that go to Jim Rison or Dinah priests or someone like me they almost all arrive at that place to say the enormous body of secret information is not the thing that is valuable and material to the needs of a democracy that's why they come out into the sunlight at often great risk the question of we need intelligence and how can we do it with people like Snowden well look it's not like we're going to stop doing it but people like snow do provide a check to say if you violate the duly constituted laws which is why Snowden comes out and others come forward the law is stated this is against either the spirit or the letter of the law those people are a Czech and part of the self-correcting checks that are mentioned in that scene as what makes America and other democracies work which are the self Corrections I suppose that would be my answer how about you up here I saw I left you waiting and I'll come back to you hi my name is will I'm a sophomore at the college and actually that clip is an awesome introduction to my question because there was a pretty clear bias in the way that it was produced and so I also noticed on the trailer that when kind of nouns were flashing describing Edward Snowden the word traitor was followed by the word hero and I know that there's a lot of people who feel very strongly about using one or the other adjectives to describe him and so given this is a very current and controversial issue I'm wondering if kind of when making this movie you try to restrict your own bias or if you just kind of like let it have free reign or if you deliberately try to portray the issue one way or the other depending on like how you personally thought a little problem to mic so it was the last part a question he's asking if you are a biased filmmaker very concise thank you if you're just carrying forward some liberal agenda stone or if you tamp that down rein it in to try to appeal you have to be a judgement your purpose I think you have to be the judge of that I you could say this is also is a libertarian film too and you can you know in other words part of me is that too and you know the conservative side they many of them were libertarians and defended Snowden on Paul several people and actually the 50 Republicans voted for the Freedom Act so you have to think about some little what you're saying is don't going along those old-fashioned lines I can let me ask you you're asking a very pertinent question journalists often find this if whatever they are politically you know left to right they have to be aware of that and try to rein that in in their reporting so it's a common dilemma and I guess he's asking if you recognize your political beliefs as such and you are mindful to rein them in I mean what do you say to that I mean I did as much research with my co-writer as we possibly could I think we saw the statements that Hayden made and Alexander we saw the debates with Glenn Greenwald and and Dayton we read the journalists that were critical of them I I don't know how much further you can go then I made nine visits to Moscow to try to get his side of the story there's only so far you can go before you got to say enough I got to get there's a drama here there's a story and when we told that when we stripped the the all the research out you you got to make a movie that works because people want to see what happens next I would never consciously distort the truth for that goal never remember I never felt that I have I felt like I've abided by the spirit of the truth mistress mr. Snowden agrees but that's of course his version of the story but that's not what we told we told that the way it makes sense to us as dramatists that's what that's the line I finally remember I did a movie about Richard Nixon that so many people criticized for being too friendly I did a movie about George Bush people were angry with me from the left because it wasn't critical enough but that was the role of a dramatist the dramatist walks in the shoes of the person he's portraying from his point of view and that's what I call empathy not sympathy empathy that's what I tried to do in this case thank you my name is Tomas over here mrs. Dunn I'm I'm Thomas I'm software at the college and I know that the material in this film is very sensitive its covers a lot of very controversial topics and I imagine that making the film was not an easy task but that being said for you and or your writer what was the easiest part of this film for you to make the easiest the easiest part the easiest part I don't know that there was one uh how about the hardest part it was just a physical challenge to build all his sets with some degree of accuracy described to us by Edie Snowden to keep within a budget that was so tight because we didn't have major studio support it was done by independence if we had fallen a day behind it would have been if we would have been in trouble so those are tents there was attention to this whole thing the making it the editing process trying to do it in two hours two hours and ten minutes six minutes actually how do you tell that story without violating it without stripping it of essentials one thing we did find it's true about drama is that actually we caught something that very few journalists caught they made they treated Lindsey mills very lightly when you see the movie I think you'll understand that part of this is the relationship between him and her that's a steadiest thing in his life it keeps him let's say human keeps him considerate that she has an opposite point of view and then as the story blends they become he comes closer to her point of view and we revealed the think we revealed what it means to him when he loses her in the film so without that story I don't think you really understand that Edie Snowden is a human being he's he would be a drone he'd be another NSA drone essentially it's very important that's what drama can do that sometimes journalism cannot do and as to journalism you know I have to say Bart Gellman is one of the toughest journalists in the world he knows his stuff he told he told me after he saw the movie Point black he said there's things in this movie that no one knows he's referencing certain programs that are mentioned that are not been in the news so we did both sides I mean we did a lot of research but at the same time we tried to keep it human we talked to Lindsay we realized the degree the depth of that relationship isn't that a fantasy of yours to make a movie that makes news and did you do that here things in the movie that haven't even been discussed discovered yet so I'm going to hold off on that until it comes out because I think some interesting things will come out I think some NSA people may not immediately speak but there might be something later I know I have a feeling and I'm not alone in this Jim Bamford very strongly believes that this DNC hack so speak easily blamed on the Russians is actually an inside job and he thinks there is a second leaker which would be great news for most of us it'd be nice to know there's someone on the inside who still cares there's going to be stuff like this there's information about programs in this movie that has not been revealed yet you just have another minute or two let me ask you a question do you think all over your movie will encourage other leakers is that what you're hoping well I wasn't the reason I made it to make a good movie to make it to make to tell this story as accurately as we can side effects are out of my control right you know this is one of the reasons that we love to sit with Oliver Stone because he is every bit as interesting and I dare say more interesting than many of the subjects in his movies so without further ado we're going to go to the Harvard Film Archive is going to show the film now and we are going to give it up for Oliver Stone you you

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 225,796

Rating: 4.7935977 out of 5

Keywords: Harvard Institute of Politics, Harvard University, Oliver Stone, JFK Jr. Forum, JFK, Snowden

Id: 5rC0qpLGciU

Length: 48min 41sec (2921 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2016