Oliver Stone names his most torturous movie: “It was everything horrible”
Oliver Stone is one of the provocateurs of Hollywood, with a slate of projects that show an astute and unfiltered perspective of the most pressing political and societal issues through films like JFK, Wall Street, Platoon and Natural Born Killers. Because of the subject matter within his films, many of them are seen as deeply controversial and conspiratorial by American audiences, with people slamming his portrayal of John F Kennedy and his leftist views.
But this doesn’t matter to Stone – he has conviction in his ideas and continues to share challenging stories that encourage us to think more critically about the infrastructure of the world around us. While he embraced this challenge, there was one film that was nearly too much for him to handle and created more problems than he bargained for.
Snowden, released in 2016, follows the true story of CIA agent Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents to the press and became a whistleblower about the existence of global surveillance programs. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the lead role in the political thriller, which recounts Snowden’s disturbing experiences as he wrestles with the decision to expose the Secret Intelligence Service.
While the story is right up Stone’s street, with potentially damaging consequences of highlighting a story that the U.S. government probably doesn’t want to be public knowledge, the director struggled to bring it to life, partly because of the pressure to do the story justice.
When asked about the production process, Stone said, “The script was torture. [Co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald and I] ended up going over it and over it — it was coming out of our ears. It was everything horrible: Jargon. No car chases. No violence. Snowden doesn’t look like an active man and is more of an introvert. I wanted to make a political thriller. I loved ‘Enemy of the State’ and ‘War Games’ and the ‘Bourne’ series. This was not that, but we wanted to make it like that”.
Fitzgerald is best known for his work on Snowden, a challenging story to bring to life given the secrecy and protectiveness surrounding this side of history. It is hard to discover the best angle when writing a script based on a true story, as you have to consider the implications for the real-life person and how to do justice to their experiences, especially for something that had such a huge effect on Snowden’s life.
Despite the challenges in carefully choosing the right angle with the script, Stone and Fitzgerald were evidently able to find the right path, and the film shines an uncomfortable light on a future that feels increasingly likely and prevalent in a world dominated by technology and our willing surveillance of ourselves through social media.
Another documentary was also made about Edward Snowden in in 2014 titled Citizenfour, which is a first-hand retelling of the events that led to information leakage from Snowden himself, proving it to be a topic that contains a wealth of relevant information on the threats facing us even today.
