EXCLUSIVE: Oliver Stone opened his 20th narrative feature as a director today with Snowden, a look at the former NSA contractor who exposed a massive U.S. surveillance operation that violated the privacy of its citizens. The film has received some of Stone’s best reviews in years, because of the subtle, non-judgmental nature of his exploration of Edward Snowden’s evolution from a patriot to the disillusioned NSA insider who masterminded one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. intelligence agency history, and left for Russia. Open Road introduced the film first at Comic-Con and then in Toronto. Stone came to this interview with Bill Binney, an elite NSA officer turned whistleblower who is the inspiration for a character played by Nicolas Cage in the film. They left this reporter’s head spinning with tales of spy craft and deeds done in the name of, or at the expense of, democracy. Binney’s voice is limited here; he may be a close cousin to Snowden, but he doesn’t have three Oscars on his mantel, and he didn’t direct Platoon or write Scarface. Stone turned 70 at Toronto, but has he mellowed? Hardly, as he discussed how no studio in Hollywood would touch Snowden, how too many mainstream war movies have fallen into dangerous hero worship fiction, and why Snowden actually might be the kind of hero the soldier-turned filmmaker would admire. Buckle up for this ride, which starts with banter about how Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette was just forced by the military to return $6.6 million in proceeds from his book No Easy Day, which detailed how he and others killed Public Enemy No. 1, the 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
DEADLINE: These worlds you dwell in, Edward Snowden included, it’s so hard to figure out the truth. I was just reading about the soldier who wrote how he and his fellow Navy SEALS took out bin Laden. Any bad guy could have collected a $25 million reward, but this guy was forced to give back almost $7 million.
STONE: That’s good.
DEADLINE: Why?
STONE: Absolutely. I’ll tell you why. I know Bissonnette, I know a couple of those SEALs, and that story is bullsh*t through and through. It would make a great Oliver Stone movie, except that it’s not true. That raid was characterized as a myth by those people. They scored on it. He was supposed to run that book by the DOD. I don’t disagree with that. The guy was out for himself trying to become a star like the other guy. You probably believed him too, the guy who wrote Lone Survivor. His story doesn’t hold up, either. Those guys made up that story. He was the only survivor.
DEADLINE: I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movie.
STONE: They killed about 400 Taliban. They were chased by about seven or eight Taliban. You know when you kill a lot of Taliban for every American that dies that it’s a phony movie.
DEADLINE: One of those slain SEALs, Michael Murphy, is kind of a legend where I come from on Long Island. People are pretty passionate about his heroism.
STONE: Yeah, but that doesn’t make the other guy’s story … the other guy was unstable. I met him too.
DEADLINE: Marcus Luttrell?
STONE: Marcus. He was really nervous and a wreck when I met him. I think the book is more modest than the movie. By the time Mark Wahlberg got ahold of it, it got insane. I mean nothing to do with reality. I mean, every guy that goes down firing, shooting it’s like John Wayne — it doesn’t happen that way in combat. When you get surrounded like that and beaten for position, you get killed fast, you get killed ugly. It’s not pretty.
Sony
DEADLINE: What about Zero Dark Thirty?
STONE: I disagree with that entirely. It has been denied already, that torture. … I mean, several people from the CIA came out very strongly, including [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein. She said it’s absolutely nonsense. [Sen. John] McCain came out against it. Torture didn’t work. There’s no record that it worked in that case. Since then [we’ve learned] the way they got tipped off was that the Pakis told them. The Pakis told them that they had the guy. The story was the Saudi Arabians were paying the Pakis to keep bin Laden safe. In 2000, we found out that he was there in the heart of Islamabad. He was on ice. He was finished. He had no real contacts, no power. That organization was splintered already. When we went into Afghanistan after we chased that first party out, there was about 100 Taliban left, according to Carlotta Gall with The New York Times, who worked there. Most of them were hiding in Pakistan, about 200, 300. So we went to war against about 200, 300 Taliban, which was a shame because it was no longer the Osama bin Laden gang. We transposed the war from against Osama bin Laden into the Taliban war.
According to Gall, our troops got there and there was not much to do. So we kept going to the villages, kept provoking the villagers, saying, “Where are they, where are they?” Starting a fight amongst them and over-militarizing and overreacting to the situation. The war simmered, simmered — and then when Iraq started, it heated up again. In other words, if we had not done what we had done and played it much cooler, I think we would be far better off. You should thoroughly read the Seymour Hersh account. It makes sense. It’s only 150 pages, in three phases. It tells how this thing happened. You don’t sneak into Paki air space like that for so many hours. They’re very efficient because they’re worried about India. You don’t get into their airspace and stay there at Abbottabad all night, with one of your helicopters blowing up, and nobody knowing about it. They walked into every single alleyway of that town and they told people, “You stay in. Shut up. You didn’t see anything,” basically.
DEADLINE: It was that simple?
STONE: No, it’s not that simple. It’s complicated, but the U.S. blew the story. You have to read Hersh to understand how it happened. Obama was not supposed to say anything about it. They were supposed to take them out, disappear, wait a few days. Then they’d find this guy dead in the middle of the Hindu Kush somewhere and then they’d have that story. They didn’t want him captured in Abbottabad. That was where they blew the story. The U.S. took credit for it. The Pakis were pretty pissed off.
DEADLINE: But you’re saying that Pakistan wanted credit for helping?
STONE: They didn’t want anything to do with having been identified that he stayed there for all those years while we were fighting the Bush war in Iraq or Afghanistan. They were embarrassed by it. So he was killed in 2012, right before the election. It was about 2010 or 2011 even that we found out about him being there. He’d been there all along, growing sicker, his power diminished. There was no resistance. It was basically a mercy killing.
DEADLINE: The details depicted in Zero Dark Thirty of that part…
STONE: The whole thing was bullsh*t. One of the choppers crashed. Tremendous confusion. There were a couple people in the compound. They killed two or three of them. They went upstairs and found the guy and put a bullet in him right away. Then they took him out and chopped him up or whatever the f*ck they did. I heard they sprinkled him over the Hindu Kush. By the way, those bullets do tear you up a bit. Huge spatter.
DEADLINE: So they didn’t drop him in the sea like they say?
STONE: No. That was a big story. You have to read all the details. Seymour Hersh I respect a lot. He broke the My Lai story. I know him, and he’s got great intelligence. People talk to him from all over the world. It’s like the JFK killing. You cover this sh*t up, man. I’m not crazy. This is a disgusting story because Obama got elected on that basis. That was one of the main pushes for his election. There’s a lot of other lies going on. Read the book, The Killing of Bin Laden by Seymour Hersh.
Open Road
DEADLINE: There are those who support Snowden being allowed back here, even pardoned. But he gave up covert secrets and now lives in Russia, which itself brings up a lot of questions about what benefit that country had in taking him in…
STONE: Snowden never got rich off of this. I don’t see any sign of it. I don’t feel it from him. I’ve been over there eight, nine times to see him. I never sensed for one second that he had any financial motive at all. You’d feel it from somebody in my business. Nor does he want to stay there. He’d like to get out and come back to this country, and he’s offered to do that as long as he can present some evidence.
DEADLINE: What is his life like over there?
STONE: His life is limited. We never saw his private residence because we always maintained security precautions. I saw him in lawyer offices and I saw him at a hotel. He’s paid legally. He got out of there with a WikiLeaks ticket and since then he’s been speaking sometimes for money, often gratis. Corporations pay him; universities have paid him. European universities and European institutions. He’s done quite a bit, maybe 100 appearances on cable to promote reform of the Internet. This is very important to him. He’s also the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He leads a life that’s limited because he’s always been antisocial. Not so much unsocial because he’s lived on a computer. I’d estimate that Ed spends 70 percent of his time on the computer, most of the night. He’s not a man who mixes much with people. Not that he’s scared, but I think he feels comfortable now after two, three years of this. He went over in June of ’13, so it’s three years in June.
Lindsey Mills, his girlfriend of 10 years, has joined him. That’s a big factor. In the movie we played that up because it’s important that people can realize — and the press, I think, had minimized her role as a bimbo, as a woman who was a pole dancer, an aerobics instructor. The truth is, she was an extrovert and Ed was her opposite. I think there’s an attraction of…
