Filmmaker Oliver Stone had to shoot his Edward Snowden film outside the U.S. because he feared government interference.
Snowden is based on Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena’s novel, Time Of The Octopus, and centres on the former technical contractor and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, who was charged with committing espionage against America after confessing to leaking confidential information about mass surveillance operations undertaken by U.S. and U.K. government officials on their own citizens.
The upcoming project was originally slated to shoot in the U.S., but Oliver decided to move the production to Munich, Germany to avoid any problems with officials at the National Security Agency.
“We moved to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S.,” Stone said during a question and answer session at the Sun Valley Film Festival in Idaho.
“We felt like we were at risk here. We didn’t know what the NSA might do, so we ended up in Munich, which was a beautiful experience.”
However, the move didn’t ensure that the director would have an easier time and he still wrestled with concerns about German companies connected to the U.S.
“The American subsidiary says, ‘You can’t get involved with this; we don’t want our name on it’,” he continued. “So BMW couldn’t even help us in any way in Germany.”
Oliver was initially hesitant to make the film, but he was impressed by his meeting with Snowden, who is in exile in Moscow, Russia, and was eager to tell his story.
But it wasn’t easy. “No studio would support it,” he added. “It was extremely difficult to finance, extremely difficult to cast. We were doing another one of these numbers I had done before, where preproduction is paid for by essentially the producer and myself, where you’re living on a credit card.”
Financing for the film came through days before production began, but funding had to come from outside the U.S. as well. “It’s a very strange thing to do (a story about) an American man, and not be able to finance this movie in America,” he explained.
“And that’s very disturbing, if you think about its implications on any subject that is not overtly pro-American. They say we have freedom of expression; but thought is financed, and thought is controlled, and the media is controlled. This country is very tight on that, and there’s no criticism allowed at a certain level. You can make movies about civil rights leaders who are dead, but it’s not easy to make one about a current man.”
Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is slated for release in September (16). This isn’t the only Snowden film that will hit the big screen – James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli is also working on a movie about the 30-year-old, based on journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. and the U.S. Surveillance State.
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