Oliver Stone, the filmmaker and conspiracy theory enthusiast behind political films such as JFK, Nixon, W., Looking for Fidel, World Trade Center, and Snowden, has confirmed that his next film will be about Vladimir Putin. Called The Putin Interviews, the documentary is the latest in a long line of Stone films about controversial world leaders.
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Stone said that he visited Putin four times over two years and conducted over a dozen interviews, initially while researching his 2016 Edward Snowden biopic and his 2016 documentary about the ongoing Ukrainian military crisis, Ukraine on Fire. (The latter has not been released in the United States.) Eventually the two developed a friendship.
Stone says the film is “not a documentary as much as a question and answer session.” It will cover global political events going back to 2000, the year Putin became Russia’s president. “It opens up a whole viewpoint that we as Americans haven’t heard,” he told the Herald.
Stone also referenced the ongoing conversation around Russia’s involvement in the US’s 2016 presidential election calling it “an internal war of politics in the US in which the Democratic party has taken a suicide pact or something to blow [Trump] up.” He also referred to the US government’s claims about Russian hacking as “fake news” and called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a beacon of integrity and honesty.”
The four-hour documentary will air on Showtime sometime this year, as reported by Variety.