If Sean Penn can quiz drug-kingpin-in-hiding “El Chapo” Guzmán when nobody else can, any interview is possible. Need more proof?
Oliver Stone chatted up Russian President Vladimir Putin more than a dozen times over two years, and the result will be shown on Showtime over four nights starting June 12.
“If Vladimir Putin is indeed the great enemy of the United States, then at least we should try to understand him,” the filmmaker said in a statement.
Variety noted: “No topic was judged to be off-limits. Since first becoming the president of Russia in 2000, Putin has never before spoken at such length or in such detail to a Western interviewer, Showtime said.
“The network compared ‘The Putin Interviews’ to ‘The Nixon Interviews,’ the much-scrutinized series of conversations that took place between interviewer David Frost and former President Richard Nixon that aired 40 years ago in the spring of 1977.
Bloomberg News said the interviews were recorded at the Kremlin, in Sochi and at Putin’s home outside Moscow. In one sequence, Putin and Stone watch the Cold War classic ‘Dr. Strangelove’ together.”
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald from Los Angeles, Stone said he originally talked to Putin about the Edward Snowden affair, “and out of that grew, I think, a trust that he knew that I would not edit it so much.”