{"id":75861,"date":"2018-03-22T17:05:44","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T00:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=75861"},"modified":"2018-03-22T17:05:44","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T00:05:44","slug":"oliver-stone-on-vladimir-putin-the-russian-people-have-never-been-better-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/03\/22\/oliver-stone-on-vladimir-putin-the-russian-people-have-never-been-better-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Stone on Vladimir Putin: ‘The Russian people have never been better off’"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Dominic Rushe\u00a0Courtesy The Guardian<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n
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The veteran director has been accused of pandering to Putin for his four-hour documentary on the Russian leader, but he remains unrepentant. Could it be the climax to his career?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>Oliver Stone: \u2018Everything I did was examined by a certain light. And as an artist it\u2019s very limiting.\u2019 Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/header>\n
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\u2018H<\/span><\/span>ave you ever been beaten?\u201d\u00a0Vladimir Putin<\/a>\u00a0poses the question to Oliver Stone close to the end of Stone\u2019s extraordinary four-hour documentary on the Russian leader. Yes,\u201d says Stone. So, it\u2019s not going to be something new, because you are going to suffer for what you are doing,\u201d says the Russian leader, before striding out of a room that conjures the spirit of the Sistine chapel crossed with the most fevered fantasies of Donald Trump\u2019s interior designer.<\/p>\n

In this instance, Putin was right. Stone\u2019s epic four-part film The Putin Interviews was described by the Daily Beast as a wildly irresponsible love letter\u201d to Russia\u2019s president. It says as much about Oliver Stone as it does Vladimir Putin\u201d, said CNN. Flattery, but little scepticism<\/a>,\u201d said the New York Times.<\/p>\n

Harsh words for a project that took a lifetime of achievements to secure and two years to make. Does Stone mind? I mean, it affects movies, you know. You work very hard on a movie and sometimes it\u2019s judged more by the person who made it than by what the content is. I can say I\u2019m a black man in that way. It\u2019s not the content, it\u2019s not the content of my character, but it\u2019s the nature of my probing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stone is a lot of things. Sitting in the glittery Conrad hotel in lower Manhattan, an Elizabeth Peyton hanging on the wall of his suite, he\u2019s the Oscar-winning director of classic films including Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Natural Born Killers, and clunkers such as Alexander (with Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great). He wrote Scarface and summed up 1980s Wall Street in a single speech, in the film of the same name: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.\u201d He is a decorated Vietnam war veteran. He is not a black man. It is exactly the sort of statement that gets men \u2013 and it\u2019s nearly always men \u2013 his age into trouble these days. At the risk of losing the rest of the interview before it starts, I let it slide, hear him out.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that kind of decision \u2013 on a much larger scale \u2013 that has plunged Stone\u2019s project into trouble. In the first half of the documentary, Putin reveals\u00a0he does not have bad days because he is not a woman\u201d<\/a>. I am not trying to insult anyone,\u201d he says, as he does exactly that. That\u2019s just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles.\u201d He also reveals that he would rather not shower next to a gay man. Why provoke him? But you know, I\u2019m a judo master.\u201d This from the leader of a country with an increasingly\u00a0disturbing record of abuses against the LGBT community<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Stone lets the comments slide. Why didn\u2019t he challenge Putin? It\u2019s not my job to do that,\u201d he says. What he wanted to do was build a rounded portrait of arguably the most fascinating and frightening world leader in a generation. If that is how he thinks, that is what Stone wants you to know about. He is not trying to change Putin\u2019s mind, but to show it.<\/p>\n

Stone\u2019s larger point is that Putin is not so very different to many world leaders \u2013 not even on social issues. Obama was against same-sex marriage as late as, what, 2014, 15?\u201d says Stone (it was 2012, but fair point and let\u2019s not get started on the Clintons). So, what\u2019s the big deal? Everyone\u2019s got to be on the frontline, and if you don\u2019t mouth the politically correct thing, that\u2019s what they do in America, every fucking show. Bill Maher says something stupid [the late night comedian recently\u00a0caused a furore after he used the N-word on his show<\/a>], and it\u2019s like there\u2019s nothing else to do but to have a sin-bashing orgy. That\u2019s all. That\u2019s all it is, they love to do this. To Trump, too,\u201d says Stone.<\/p>\n

What does Stone make of Donald Trump? Don\u2019t bait me with that one,\u201d he says. That\u2019ll be the headline. Instead of it being about my movie, it\u2019ll be about this headline.<\/p>\n

[With Trump and the press] it\u2019s excitement, it\u2019s a game, it\u2019s fun, but it doesn\u2019t satisfy the requirements of civilisation, which are peace, security, peace, security, peace, security. And we\u2019re not aligning to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the reviews of Stone\u2019s Putin documentary so far have been written after critics saw just the first two hours. They form a sympathetic portrait of Putin and his emergence from the wild west days of the Yeltsin presidency, which Stone describes a sort of mad capitalism, and alcoholism, sort of like a Dostoyevsky orgy\u201d. But The Putin Interviews do get more critical as the episodes go on. In the second half, Stone pushes Putin on hacking the US election, on the oligarchs, on how long he intends to remain in power. Putin\u2019s sphinx-like mask occasionally cracks, although he remains the judo blackbelt.<\/p>\n

In one way, Trump\u2019s election couldn\u2019t have been better for Stone. The hacking of the Democratic National Convention by \u2013 allegedly \u2013 Russian forces and Trump\u2019s seeming embrace of Putin before the election have given the documentary a timeliness that might, perhaps, have been missing under a Clinton presidency.<\/p>\n

Everyone wants to know what Putin has to say about Trump and Russia\u2019s alleged hacking of the US election. Sadly, it\u2019s not a lot: the hacking accusations are silly\u201d, he says. Certainly we liked [the idea of] President Trump, and we still like him because he publicly announced that he was ready to restore American-Russian relations.\u201d Putin adds that it\u2019s a good thing to have economic cooperation and to fight terrorism.<\/p>\n

Stone keeps pushing: So why did you bother to hack the election then?\u201d Putin picks his nails and looks down before answering: We did not hack the election at all.\u201d Stone pushes him once more on Russia\u2019s cyber-attack capabilities. Putin doesn\u2019t give anything away but looks, says Stone, like a fox who just got out of the hen house\u201d.<\/p>\n

There may be no gotcha!\u201d moment but the director\u2019s aim, he says, is to start a debate not to end one. For many in the US, Putin is \u2013 to quote John McCain \u2013 a butcher\u201d and thug\u201d and a worse threat than Isis. For Stone, the public should worry about the US\u2019s cyber abilities, too. The world is a worrying place; both sides have bad intentions. Simply demonising Putin \u2013 and, by extension,\u00a0Russia<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 is dangerous, says Stone, and wrong. They have freedom of worship, they do what they want. They have travel, the Russian people have never been better off. But of course in America, they\u2019re [the Russians] miserable, dictated to, in stalags, in gulags, they\u2019re all being chopped up by this monster. It\u2019s just crazy,\u201d he says. And the British are worse. I mean, this is Murdoch\u2019s lies, he\u2019s told lies about the entire world, they created wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a view that will gain much support in the corridors of power in Washington or London. And it will be disputed by many in Russian, too, including\u00a0Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader jailed<\/a>\u00a0and physically attacked for leading protests against the Putin regime.<\/p>\n

As if to underline how little there is here to satisfy Putin\u2019s many critics, the documentary is being shown uncut in Russia; clearly, there is much that the Russian establishment are pleased with.<\/p>\n

But while the merits of what Stone has produced are up for debate, there\u2019s no doubting what a coup he and his long-time documentary producer, Fernando Sulichin, have pulled off. The pair first met Putin while working on their movie about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Sulichin, who oozes a steely charm, has a way of getting what he wants. During the filming of Spike Lee\u2019s Malcolm X, he convinced the Saudis to allow them to film in Mecca \u2013 the first time the country had allowed a non-documentary film crew to shoot in the holy city.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>Photograph: Komandir\/Showtime<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once Putin had been convinced, they spent two years putting together the documentary, interviewing the Russian leader more than a dozen times, most recently in February after the US presidential elections. Kremlinologists have been hard at work to decipher what exactly we learn, if anything, about Putin\u2019s and\u00a0Russia\u2019s role in the Ukraine<\/a>, cyberattacks, Syria \u2013 all topics of lengthy discussion that have experts poring over the footage for signs and tells from this most slippery of statesmen. But, for the average viewer, the opportunity to watch Putin so closely, over so many hours, is mesmerising.<\/p>\n

The documentary has its lighter moments, too \u2013 not all of them intentional. Putin and Stone are a classic odd couple. The messy, craggy, ursine Hollywood wildman and the pantherine, inscrutable politician. It isn\u2019t David Frost v Richard Nixon, oil v grease, but more The Jungle Book\u2019s Baloo and Shere Khan transported to the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

At times it feels like a game. You pat my back, I\u2019ll pat yours. Walking down the corridor to Putin\u2019s office (it used to be Stalin\u2019s) a TV just happens to be playing\u00a0Putin\u2019s 2007 speech in Munich<\/a>\u00a0in which he dropped all diplomatic niceties to accuse the US of provoking a nuclear arms race with its almost uncontained hyper-use of military force in international relations\u201d.<\/p>\n

You could have been a movie star,\u201d says Stone, looking at the screen and playing the flattery card. They walk through to Putin\u2019s office, where the president returns the compliment: there\u2019s a copy of Stone\u2019s book,\u00a0The Untold History of the United States<\/a>, on his desk. Putin has, allegedly, cracked a lot of spines but this one looks untouched.<\/p>\n

In another telling scene, Stone is setting up a shot in which Putin is supposed to walk into a room and the pair will act as if they have not spoken in months. Action,\u201d shouts Stone. Nothing happens. Action,\u201d he repeats. Still nothing. He asks the translator to shout. Still nothing. Cut to Putin, who winks to camera and then strolls in carrying two cups of coffee. If you had any doubt who\u2019s in charge, you don\u2019t now.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not how Sulichin sees that scene. He says Putin was shy around the camera. His reading is jolly, good-natured, humanising. For others, even Putin at play will send shivers. Sometimes it\u2019s hard to detangle the message from the messenger. It\u2019s an issue that Stone is well aware of. He is beginning to sound a little weary now. Everything I did was examined by a certain light. And as an artist, it\u2019s very limiting. I hate that. I try to avoid it, and you can see, I\u2019ve made a whole variety of films. I wish I\u2019d made some more, but there were always blockages of some kind. I maintained independence, I haven\u2019t done a film I didn\u2019t want to do. I\u2019m responsible for them all, including the ones that didn\u2019t do so well, but I\u2019m still, at my age, I\u2019m making what I think is right. Unless you have that sense of freedom in your heart, you can never really be at peace with yourself,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n