“I was very happy to learn Oliver Stone had decided to make a film about Edward Snowden and believe this is a powerful and inspiring film”.
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The movie “Snowden”, which dramatizes the protagonist’s rise through the Central Intelligence Agency and eventually the NSA as set against his famous Hong Kong hotel room meetings with journalists Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), has been made with a surprising degree of restraint given Stone’s characteristic propensity for sprawling cinematic flourishes.
“The idea of him being charged under the Espionage Act or branded as a treasonist is absurd”, Quinto added.
“Americans don’t know anything about it because the government lies about it all the time”.
Bringing his latest film, Snowden, to the 2016 Toronto Film Festival (TIFF2016) Oliver Stone took the chance to voice his opinions on the ongoing controversy.
The docudrama thriller stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the former NSA analyst-turned-whistleblower, who shocked the world in 2013 with his revelations of the NSA’s mass electronic surveillance of foreign nations as well as US citizens.
The U.S. government filed espionage charges against Snowden and he was granted asylum in Russian Federation, where he has lived since, with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt said he was “honoured” to portray Mr Snowden in the film and he had a “valuable” four-hour meeting with the whistleblower in Moscow.
“In reading up on him and really learning about what he did and why he did it, I felt grateful for what he did and honored I got to play him”, the star said, adding that it would be hard to assign just a “single label” to the whistleblower.
“As we become so visible in the digital world and leave an endless trail of data behind us, exactly who has our data and what they do with it becomes increasingly important”, Gabriel said of his inspiration for the song.
However, his lawyers say that they hope to secure a presidential pardon before Barack Obama leaves office in January, and commentators have noted that Snowden has criticised his Russian hosts several times in the build-up to his attempt to gain a pardon.
Stone made it obvious that he thinks a pardon is a remote possibility given that Snowden “is being prosecuted vigorously – because they hate whistleblowers – under the Espionage Act”. “It is the most extensive and invasive surveillance state that has ever existed and he’s built it up”. “So this is pretty serious but he’s created this world”.
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When asked about Snowden’s future, Gordon-Levitt said: “I know he would love to come home and I hope for that”. “As Snowden said himself the other day, ‘It’s out of control, the world is out of control'”. “The world is out of control”. “I hope for that!”
