Oliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #286
if you could talk to vladimir putin once again now what kind of what kind of things would you talk about here what kind of questions would you ask the following is a conversation with oliver stone he's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time with three oscar wins and 11 oscar nominations his films tell stories of war and power fearlessly and often controversially shining light on the dark parts of american and global history his films include platoon wall street born on the 4th of july scarface jfk nixon alexander w snowden and documentaries where he has interviewed some of the most powerful and consequential people in the world including fidel castro hugo chavez and vladimir putin and in this conversation oliver and i mostly focus our discussion on vladimir putin russia and the war in ukraine my goal with these conversations is to understand the human being before me to understand not just what they think but how they think to steal man their ideas and to steal man the devil's advocate all in service of understanding not derision i have done this poorly in the past i'm still struggling with this but i'm working hard to do better i believe the moment we draw lines between good people and evil people will lose our ability to see that we're all one people in the most fundamental of ways and lose track of the deep truth expressed by the old soldier knits in line that i return to time and time again that the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man oliver stone has a perspective that he extensively documents in his powerful controversial series the untold history of the united states that imperialism and the military-industrial complex paved the path to absolute power and thus corrupt the minds of the leaders and institutions that wield it from this perspective the way out of the humanitarian crisis and human suffering in ukraine and the way out from the pull of the beating drums of nuclear war is not simple to understand but we must because all of humanity hangs in the balance i will talk to many people who seek to understand the way out of this growing catastrophe including to historians to leaders and perhaps most importantly to people on the ground in ukraine and russia not just about war and suffering but about life friendship family love and hope this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's oliver stone you're working on uh a documentary now about nuclear energy yes so it's interesting to talk about this energy is such a big part of the world about the geopolitics of the world about the way the world is what do you think is the role of nuclear energy in the 21st century good question and first of all hobbies everyone's talking about climate change right so here i wake up to that a few years ago and clearly we're concerned uh i picked up a book by josh goldstein and his his co-author who's swedish those two wrote a book called bright future a bright future came out a few years ago and i lapped it up it was a book fact-based clear not too long and not too technical and uh it was very clear that they were in favor of all kinds of renewables renewable energy yes they hated made it very clear how dangerous oil and gas were methane and made it very clear to the layman like me and at the same time said that this renewables can work so far but the gap is enormous as to what how much electricity this kind of the world is going to need in 2050 and beyond 2 three four times we don't even know the damage but we have india we have china we have africa we have asia coming on to the scene wanting more and more electricity so they addressed the problem as a global one not just as often in the united states you get the ethnocentric united states point of view that we need we know we're doing well blah blah blah we're not doing well but we we we sell that to people that were comfortable we spend more energy than anybody this country per capita than anybody and at the same time we don't seem to understand the global picture so that's what they did and they made me very aware so the only way to close that gap the only way in their mind is nuclear energy and talking about a gap of building a huge amount of reactors over the next 30 years and starting now uh they make that point over and over again uh so obviously this country the united states is not going to go in that direction because it just is incapable with its of having that kind of will political will and fear is a huge factor and still a lot of shibboleths a lot of myths about nuclear energy have confused and confounded the landscape the environmentalists have played a huge role in doing good things many good things but also confusing and confounding the landscape and making accusations against nuclear energy that were exaggerated so taking all these things into consideration we set about making this documentary which is about finished now almost finishing it's an hour and 40 minutes and that was a hard part getting it down from about three and a half hours to about this something more manageable and is it interviews its interviews among others but essentially we went to russia we went to france which is the most perhaps advanced nuclear country in the world russia and the united states we went to the idaho laboratory and talked to the the scientists there as well as the department of energy people that are handling this idaho is one of the experimental labs the united states is probably one of the most advanced and they're doing a lot of advanced nuclear there we also uh we studied well russia gave us a lot of uh insight we're very cooperative because they have some of the most advanced uh nuclear actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor in the world at bellairs the ural mountains so we we did an investigation there and uh in france they haven't they have some very advanced uh nuclear reactors and their building and now they're building again they had a little the green party came into power and just not into power but became a factor in france and there was a motion when hollande was president they started to move away from it actually they were beginning to just abandon they let not complete their in other words let close down some of the nuclear reactors there was talk of that but thank god france did not do that and uh macron came in and recently reversed it it reversed it and they're building as fast as they can now especially with the ukraine war uh going on there's an awareness that russia will not be providing or may not be providing the energy europe needs so and then china is the other one too that's the other factor i'm talking about the big boys they have doing tremendous work and fast which is very hopeful but of course china is building in all directions at once the coal continues to be huge in china and methane too but to basically colder coal and india in china are the biggest users of coal and we know as you know germany went back to coal a few years ago so all these factors it's fascinating picture globally so we try to achieve a consensus that where nuclear can work and where it will be working where and it will be used more and more the question is how much carbon dioxide china and russia will be putting out france is the only one that's not putting it out the united states has not changed with all the talk and all the nonsense about renewables and the new lifestyle and all this it's it's great for your guilt complex but it doesn't do anything for the total commun accumulation of carbon dioxide in the world who's going to lead the way on nuclear do you think you mentioned russia france china united states who's going to live i don't think it's going to be a uni united nations kind of thing because the world doesn't seem capable of uniting we don't we go to these conferences kyoto and we talk and we agree but then we don't actually enforce so i don't think it can happen that way i think it's going to be an individual race with countries they're going to just be do it for their own self-interest like china is doing it china the thing is if it works and i'm praying that it will really work on a big scale china will back away from coal naturally the same thing will be true of india they will see the benefits because if you go to india you see the cities the pollution you walk around in that stuff and you know you get it's not there's no hope in this and you sense it so people will move in this direction naturally because nuclear is clean energy and the amount of casualties of nuclear is the lowest on the industrial scale for energy producing from coal down to oil everything the lowest casualty rate very low is .002 or something is nuclear so not that many people have died from nuclear not that many i think 50 people at chernobyl which was the worst accident nobody died at fukushima nobody died at three mile island and that's what you hear all over and over again these these accidents the environmentalists have sold us the idea that they're dangerous uh and it's a lot of environmentalists thank god of changing it they've come off that routine and they've saying this we were wrong we've done a lot of good work greenpeace did a lot of good work whale whales saving this saving that but they admit themselves not they don't but people who have been in the organization have said we were wrong in 1956 we showed the the articles in the new york times that came out the rockefeller foundation which of course is a big producer of oil the rockefeller family and the foundation came out uh with a study which was weighted they tipped the scale put a thumb on the scale but it was a scientific expose of radiation in the uh in the in the study that came out in the printed in the new york times because the new york times publisher salzburger was on their board he was one of them at board members so they got a lot of strong publicity condemning radiation from which killed started the process of doubting nuclear energy the radiation levels that they pointed out were very minor and of course if you go into a scientific analysis of this now with what we know it's just not true but it it tilted the scale back in the 50s 60s and started the question questioning the nuclear business do you think that was malevolence or incompetence no i think it was competition i don't think it was conspiracy as much as it was a sense we don't want this nucle nuclear energy is going to end the dominance of oil absolutely and it will and it will anyway because it's the only sane way for the world to proceed but the world will have to learn through adversity so in other words the situation could get worse much worse and certain countries are just gonna have to adapt like we always do when things become too hard you've got to go you have to change your thinking and humans are pretty good at that yes talking about human nature they're very adept at that germany for example i mean they were when the fukushima happened they went out of the nuclear business that was shocking to me uh they just pulled out and they destroyed uh destructed several of their nuclear reactors that were still functioning and put up coal or or yeah put up coal and oil replaced it and as a result germany drifted into this place next to france their cons their electricity bills went up and france has stayed the same they don't have that they have a different system in europe but you know more or less no question that france was doing a lot better than germany and uh now when with this ukraine issue it's a very interesting fulcrum point whether germany is go what what direction they're going to go now how can they how can they keep going with coal they just can't what's the connection between oil coal nuclear and and war sort of energy and conflict do you see when you look at the 21st century when you were doing this documentary were you thinking of nuclear as a way to power the world but is it also to avoid conflict over resources is there some aspect to energy being a source of conflict that we are trying to avoid i don't have the energy the history of energy at my at my fingertips and it's a very long history here but i would say in my apparently not it it does seem that it's individually each country can answer its needs if by building and up until now we haven't had conflict except in this issue of russia supplying europe the the uh the obviously the pipeline nordstream ii has been closed and nordstrom one is also probably going to be phased out and the concept of russia supplying gas to europe is now up in here and who knows what's going to happen i just don't see how europe can get away from using russian gas but russian gas is not the solution because it's methane too and it goes up into the atmosphere methane is in in the short term is just is worse than coal worse there's all kinds of charts we show in the film we try not to be too over factual but methane is not the answer it's a short-term answer the uh will countries go to war over energy is a is a question that i'm trying to think of all the wars that happened you could say germany of course during world war ii needed oil very badly and they it it dictated their strategy yeah with romania etc and getting the oil fields open but i don't really care i'm not i haven't thought that one through i'd have to make a documentary on it to really understand how energy and war interface it's always part of the calculation but it's a question of how much yeah right that's the question you've uh i just have to ask because you mentioned your mom was from france you've traveled for this documentary and you traveled in general throughout the world in russia ukraine um what are the defining characteristics of these cultures let's let's go with russia so i you know as as i told you i came from i'm half ukrainian half russian i came from that part of the world what are some interesting beautiful aspects of the culture of russia and ukraine i can't really speak honestly of ukraine i was there only in 1983 and when i visited the soviet union under the communism and i uh calve was beautiful it was one of the nicer places i went but they were very much stultified by the communist system they all were the best places to visit in russia were always in the south whether georgia or or the uh the the uh muslim countries it was always a better culture in terms of comfort but communism was rough and that was the end of it pretty much brezhnev regime and then andropov gorbachev was three years in the future when i was there so i can't talk about ukraine with and they've they're not been friendly to me since isis of course since i made their putin interviews you know ukraine has banned me i believe they they've been very tough on people who are critical i think the russian people have been very special to me i and i'm perhaps because of my european upbringing but i enjoy talking to them i find them very open very generous and they appreciate support they appreciate people who say you know i understand why your government is doing this or this or this this is i've tried to stay open-minded and listen to both sides the thing that i have seen as an american is of course this american enmity towards russia from the very beginning i grew up in 1940 46 i was born in the 50s it was it was so anti-russian they were everywhere they were in our schools they were in our state department they were spying on us they were stealing the country from us that was the way the american right wing not even the right wing i'd say the republican party pictured the russians they were actively engaged in infiltrating america and changing our thinking yeah and television shows were based on this it was very much the j edgar hoover mentality that communism was even behind uh the student protests of the 1960s that this was the direction in which the fbi and the cia were thinking so i grew up with a prejudice and it took me many years my father was a republican and he was a stock broker and he was a very intelligent man but even he because he was a world war ii soldier uh he was a colonel had fallen under the influence you it had in order to be successful in american business in the 1950s you had to have a very strong anti-anti-soviet line very strong you wouldn't get ahead if you expressed any kind of let's end this cold war any kind of activity of that nature you would be cast aside as a as a pinko or somebody who was not completely on the board with the american way of doing business which was capitalism works communism doesn't and in particular communism is embodied by the soviet union um is the enemy so hence hence yeah that's the way you were the narrative behind the cold war that's correct and it basically lasted i mean you saw the ups and downs of it uh when reagan came in i was well first of all we had the crisis of 1962 with the cuban missile crisis and kennedy proved himself to be a warrior for peace he resolved that with khrushchev that was a big moment huge moment and people don't give him credit enough for for really saving us from a war that could have could have affected all of mankind but it still didn't avert no because the moment he was killed honestly there was a lot of we can talk about that as you know i've made a film jfk revisited as a documentary we released uh this year about the movie i made in 1991 but the moment he was killed i would argue that lyndon johnson went back immediately to the old way of thinking the old way of doing business which was the eisenhower truman way since we which which we had adapted since world war ii that was an interim you have to think about it from roosevelt dies in 45 roosevelt has an interim of 16 15 years where he he he has he has more of a democratic regime more liberal he establishes he recognizes the soviet union for the first time since the revolution and he actually has a relationship with them he sends ambassadors who are friendly and he wants he has a relationship with stalin etc and uh at yalta and uh uh tehran rather that's where he had the relationship uh do you think if jfk lived we would not have a cold war no absolutely not i and we go into great depth on that in the film and i'd urge you to see it because it goes into all the issues around the world kennedy was being very much an anti-imperialist it turns out and many people just don't understand that but you have to look at all his policies in middle east with had a relationship with sukarno and indonesia uh with latin america he made a big effort with the alliance for progress and uh when africa above all with lumumba he was very shocked at his death and tried to de defend the f the right the integrity of the belgian congo with doug hammershold of the u.n he made a big effort unfortunately it didn't work out because they were dog hammers all was killed and then kennedy was killed and congo descended into the chaos of joseph mubutu's dictatorship but kennedy was very active in terms of as an irishman not as an englishman he was an irishman i say that because well we'll come back to that because mr joe biden is an irishman but it's a different kind of an irishman they're both catholic irish but kennedy really made an effort to change the imperialist mindset that it still was very strong in america and europe and lyndon johnson changed back to the old policy and we were never able to really keep data going where the russians briefly had it with carter but then brzezinski came in brzezinski was his national security adviser he was put there by rockefeller and brzezinski was a pole he got revenge from the poland poland has always been attacking russia as far as i remember back to another century i mean the two world wars that occupied russia and so tragically uh entry points were always through poland and ukraine uh so uh brzezinski got his revenge and carter ended up being an enemy of the soviet union and creating yet as brzezinski took pride in it he created the atmosphere of the trap for the soviets to go into afghanistan in 79. that trap was set he says he said in 1978 um so there was never except for brief moments of periods of death with the soviets and i grew up under that i didn't really know anything of this uh going on because i was i was learning i was educating myself as i was going learning movies and trying to try to be a dramatist and this and that so i wasn't thinking about this then uh when reagan came in i was worried again because it was it was a beat of the old beat which was there the most evil empire i mean it does it goes on in american history it doesn't end reagan got a lot of points for that and of course when uh when gorbachev came in it was a beautiful moment for the world it was a great surprise it was probably the best years of for america from at least from my point of view in terms of this relaxation in the mood 1986 to 1991 were great years in terms of ability to believe once again that there could be a peace dividend but the world changed again in 1991 92 there's an internal mechanism who knows you could blame you can blame the united states you could blame russia for gorbachev was perhaps not the right man to try to administer that country at that point he had great visions he was a man of peace but it was very difficult to hold together such a huge empire so vision is not enough to hold together the soviet union i think the details are interesting i followed up on that a little bit because i was recently in countries like kazakhstan talked about uh the the negotiations that were going on and the breakup of the soviet union it's very interesting story because it involves everything ukraine of course everything is going on now some what is it 30 million russians were left outside of the soviet union when it collapsed they had no home anymore they were homes in other countries such as in ukraine uh so it's an interesting story and with repercussions today kazakhstan is a per is a good example of keeping a balance keeping it neutral yeah he played both sides and he because yeltsin wanted him to join the the russian confederation in a certain way where he'd be supporting against gorbachev there's a whole inward battle there uh i think the the ukraine came along with uh yeltsin as well as uh you'd have i'm sorry i don't remember now but two other two other regions came with him and uh that was a block that broke up the uh the soviet union it was yeltsin's uh plan to and it wasn't make the russian federation and they did i would love to return back to jfk eventually because he's such a fascinating figure in the history of human civilization but let me ask you fast forward in 2000 yeltsin was no longer president and vladimir putin became president you did a series of interviews with vladimir putin as you mentioned over a period of two years from 2015 to 2017. let's let me ask with a high level question what was your goal with that conversation oh came out in 2017 i guess i started him in 2014 at that point the snowden affair had happened i was working on a movie on snowden that happened in 13. uh ukraine happened in 14 and uh one thing after another by by 14 putin was enemy number again becoming a wanted man on the american list he was enemy he was certainly in the top five or uh and but the the animosity towards putin had been growing since 2007 at munich i remember that speech when he made it it's in my documentary that's a four-hour documentary four different conversations i mean we talked over two years two and a half years but i remember that image of him at munich making a very important speech about world harmony about the balance necessary in the world and i remember the sneer the sneer on john mccain's face he was in munich obviously eyeballing putin and hating him and it was so evident that mccain had no belief whatsoever that the that this he was almost treating him like this or the communists are back and we know that putin was not a communist we know that putin is very much a market man and he made no he he made it very clear and tried to keep an open climate a new relationship with europe but the united states always certain people in the united states always sell that as a threat like putin is trying to take europe away from us as if we own it as if we have the right to own it but pun was making the point it's very important about sovereignty and sovereignty for countries is crucial to for for this new world to have balance that's sovereignty for china sovereignty for russia sovereignty for iran sovereignty for venezuela sovereignty for cuba this is an idea that's crucial to the new world and i think the united states has never accepted that sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow they you have to be obedient to the united states idea of so-called democracy and uh freedom but the it's much more important is sovereignty for these countries and the united states has not obeyed that as not al has not even acknowledged it and it never comes up so from the perspective of the united states when power centers arise in the world yes you start to oppose those not because of the ideas but because they have but merely because they have power isn't that at the heart of the doctrine of the uh neoconservatives and they knew the pact for the new american century they wrote that in 1996 seven they said there shall be no emergence of a rival power it was very clear it was about power and they have they've stuck to that doctrine which is if you if you start to get dangerous in any way or have power we're going to knock you out now that won't work but i i don't believe it can work and that is unfortunately a policy the united states is following and uh the neoconservatives group which is very small but it's very strong apparently and their idea has resonated it was it was behind the george bush's invasion of iraq it was part of not only iraq but cleaning out the whole world draining the swamp going to afghanistan first and then although iraq had nothing to do with al qaeda's attack going after iraq and of course 60 some other countries that where terrorism had some had some uh signs of wherever america judged would be a dangerous country we had the right you're either with us or against us now that is a disastrous policy and led to one thing after another the iraq war never learned a lesson the neoconservatives were never fired never thrown out of office the people who prosecuted that war are still around many of them are still around and they're they're obviously guarding america now let me return to this question of power don't forget the sneer that i saw there that emblemized the united states reaction also there were several other american representatives who were laughing kind of mocking uh putin it was very serious i i felt that was a divide there so since then i mean in a certain sense the europe reaction to putin is crucial and they were they were more with him back then and a big thing for america was always to keep nato to keep europe in its pocket as a satellite and with this recent war of course they've succeeded in in all beyond their dreams if the russians have fulfilled the fantasy of the united states to finally be this aggressor that they have pictured for years yeah we can talk about that later but at that time there was uh europe had significant support for putin yes the united states was sneering in putin that's correct you can say that and then so there's this um it was um there was uncertainty as to the direction as to the future of russia and that's exactly when you interviewed vladimir putin i wanted to know what they thought because we couldn't get the the in the information war that the united states was fighting against russia was in evidence back then it was full out the uh the condemnation of russia on all fronts uh i never saw a positive article about putin and although when i traveled in the world and i traveled a lot doing documentaries it was very clear in the middle east in africa in other in asia there was respect for him that he was a man who was getting job his job done in the interests of russia he was as i said in the documentary a son of russia very much so in in the positive sense a son a son of russia not that he's out there trying to uh destroy the interests of other of other countries know that he was out there to sell the promote the interests of russia but at the same time keep a balance keep it keep it keep the world into a harmony this has always been his picture peace was always his idea in other words he always referred to the united states in all these interviews as our partners and i said will you stop using that word they're not well and he was a little bit slow in waking up to uh what the united states was doing well that said he's one of the most powerful men in the world he was at that time and let me ask you the human question as the old adage goes power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely did you see any corroding effects of power on the man forget the political leader i'm just the human being that carries that power on his shoulders for so many years keep in mind that he's been un unlike most modern leaders he's been in office off and on because of there was a medvedev was president and he was not literally in charge he was he was he was uh he took another appointment at that point and he but he was still very much involved but for 20 years more or less he's been at the administrator of the state the protector of the state and he's apparently done a good enough job that the russian people have kept him there because contrary to what many people think i really believe that if the russian people didn't want him he would be out i firmly believe that i don't think you can let you can go against the will of the people now it expresses itself in many ways at the ballot box and so forth but also in other ways in russia there's a strong occurrence of opinion so contrary to what the the position of him as a dictator he wouldn't last if he was unpopular number one number two russia is much more divided than people know there's other factors in russia he is there's there are always tensions in in around the kremlin who has power who doesn't have power that's been going on for 100 years but the the factions in russia are very much there so when people refer to russia as putin they're they're mistaken and they do this regularly in the new york papers and all this so they say putin did this putin did that putin's doing it but it's russia that's doing it and that's what there's a distinction there that i it's changed in the old days i would read about khrushchev but it was never khrushchev personally it was about the soviet union uh there was respect for a country and now when it started to get personal with putin it it changed it and the our thinking changed in a negative way we we no longer respected it as a country we were seen as a man and the man we had trashed repeatedly repeatedly as a poisoner as a murderer none of which has ever been proven but which has always been repeated and repeated to the point at which it becomes like an orwell mantra it becomes like he is of course a bad guy can i just ask you as a great filmmaker as a human being what was it like talking to one of the most powerful men in the world honestly and i'm not naive i've talked to a lot of powerful people in the movie business there are powerful people and many of them are corrupted i've talked to many people in my life i've been in the military i've seen i've had other jobs i have to say i found him to be a human being i just found him to be reasonable calm i never saw him lose his temper and i mean you have to understand that most people in the most people in the western way of doing business get emotional i don't see that i saw him as a balanced man as a man who had studied this like you there's a calmness to you that it comes from studying the world and having a rational response to it his it's interesting his two daughters one of them is very scientific and the other one's doing very well in another profession but they they're thinking they're thinking family his wife too was uh i can't talk for the new wife because i don't know about it but he's he kept his family with great respect he's raised his daughter's right he served yeltsin the way he looked at it he served yeltsin well and he and he still and he never trashed well uh yeltsin certainly a lot of people did but you know i asked him repeatedly you know was he an alcoholic at this or that but he wouldn't even go that far he just respect and this man yeltsin who was in it was uh in many ways ridiculed but in by the russians and he turned over the power because he felt like he was overwhelmed he turned over the power to this man because why how many people had he fired before him several several prime ministers this that why did he turn power over the outs to uh mr putin because he respected him for his work ethic and his balance his maturity and that's what i can say is i saw in him a a poor person a poor from a poor family who worked his way up through the kgb of americans keep saying he's a kgb agent but it's it's like saying you know george bush was a cia agent but you know he became a pr you grow you grow in your life and he went from the kgb to this technocratic position he re he dealt with many uh problems incl including the chechnyan war which was a very difficult situation as well as the russian submarine probably several things happened early in his that balance that gave him a lot of experience and he handled them all pretty well do you think he was an honest man i do now of course the question of money the charge is that he's the richest man in the world or ludicrous uh certainly doesn't live like it or act like it if you're rich i've i've been around a lot of rich people in my life you'd probably have too in america you run into them so many of them are arrogant i'm actually uh good friends now with the richest man in the world oh of course i saw your interview with mr uh musk who i i appreciate at least he speaks freely i i i'm positive about him owning twitter because twitter has become censorship city yes has all the major tech i mean the censorship that we are now seeing in the united states is so un-american and shocking to me and he's a resistance to that yeah i like i like musk for that just for that only but i also appreciate him his adventures from his nature and his desire to to to explore the world and to ask questions yeah there's certain ways you sound when you speak freely there's certain ways you sound a man sounds when he speaks freely yeah he speaks freely and it's refreshing yeah no matter whether you're rich or not it doesn't matter when you speak freely it's a beautiful actually you must and a major point on going back to nuclear energy you know he was he never believed in it at first apparently uh he was going for batteries right and he did put a lot of money into batteries he made them bigger and bigger batteries but it just as bill gates said it's just it's not going to get us there yeah and uh now i think musk is on another path he understands the need for nuclear yeah he's a supporter of nuclear we're jumping around who never asked for one thing never it was an interview it was free form ask anything you want no no restrictions no rules as with castro frankly castro did the same thing as this chef has so i've had good luck in interviewing free-ranging subjects people willing to express themselves he's much more guarded than castro or chavez because as you know he he's he's setting government policy when he speaks and anything he says is can be taken out of context but there was no restrictions on what to talk about none of that nor any desire to see anything before we published it no need to check it with them it was a completely do you think he watched the final product yes i do but i don't think he made judgments on it i think he was pleased um he doesn't go either way you see he's very it's he's pleased i mean it went well he's happy for us and but i don't think he had great enthusiasm uh expressed it to me and he trusted me and you can see the way he dealt with me each time he warmed up to me uh four times you know the first time i might have been a little stiff you're asking you don't know what who you're dealing with and so forth i understand that but he's used to it now he's he's done a lot of press the worst press he's done frankly has been the american press and not because of his fault but because of the way they have treated them if you look at the interviews they're awful they put first of all i noticed one thing as a filmmaker right away they use a dub an overdub they put a russian speaker yeah for everything he says he was much harsher he speaks russian in a much harsher manner than actually putin does yeah who's very if you on my interview i left him in his original language with translator and i think that's important because he expresses himself very clearly and calmly when you listen to the american broadcast is a belligerent person who looks like he's about to bang his shoe on the table uh and secondly the questions are highly aggressive from the beginning there's no there's no sense of rapport there's no sense of well it's why mr poon did you poison this person why mr putin did you kill this person why are you a murderer that means it's blunt blunt negative television yeah it's not just aggressive so i obviously speak russian so i get to appreciate both the original and the translation and uh it's not just aggressive it's very shallow they're not looking to understand to me aggression is okay if that's the way you want to approach it but it should be there should be underlying kind of empathy for another human being in order to be able to understand and and so the the some of the worst interviews i've ever listened to is by american press of vladimir putin so nbc uh and all those kinds of organizations it's very painful to watch um and you saw the reception to the putin interviews in america was hostile without seeing it so many people criticized my series without having seen it even even i went on a show a television show with this famous uh colbert you know he's very famous in america and i was shocked on the show to find out that he hadn't seen anything of the four hours he was just attacking putin and through me i was complicit therefore i was a i was a putin supporter and he the show was a disaster it's it's one of my worst television shows i actually i had to just shut up and get off the air i mean at some point it was embarrassing because the audience too was clapping for kobe on anything he said well as an interviewer in that situation because between you and vladimir putin there was camaraderie there was joking there was are you worried do you put that into the calculation when you're making a film with somebody that could be lying to you that could be evil you talk about castro you talk about so are you worried about how charisma of a man across the table from you can uh don't i take that into account i absolutely take that into account i know cat i mean doing castro's he's a wonderful speaker he's charismatic so is chavez i think look at those interviews i took it into account but putin doesn't play that game he doesn't charm you he doesn't try to overwhelm you with his uh bonami at all he just said ask your question i'll give you my answer straight here it is this and he analyzes it this is the history of nato this is a history of our relationship with the united states how many times have we tried to talk to them about such and such and such and such and each time we get nowhere in fact it's a very i would like to get along with the united states so much he's saying that he's saying it's so clearly in all his words so to play devil's advocate but he's not making a big deal about it but there is a charisma in the calmness yes there is so like let's just calm everything down it's simple facts that you can yes you can you can call um so there's like the hitler thing which is screaming being very loud charismatic strong message and so on and then there's a putin style i'm not comparing those two there's the style of communication of calmness and and that at least to me my personality that can be very captivating it's bringing everything down the facts are simple but then when you say the facts are simple you can now start lying and you don't know what's true and what's wrong it behooves you to do some research yes and frankly when coming to research you're gonna have a problem because if you go to the americanized versions of russian history you're going to run into a problem and that includes even wikipedia they will tell you things that are just not factually supported so it was a problem in terms of if you read all the books in the american the library about putin there's nothing positive about it uh they're awful they're awful and a lot of them i had a good relationship with professor stephen cohen who's the most i think one of the most informed men on russia he's done a lot of research all his life and uh knew gorbachev very well and was very ana analytical about all these situations that happened before his death in uh 2019 i'm not quite sure when stephen died but i knew him well and he was the he gave me the best information i could get i would go to stephen and i'd say i'm confused here tell me the history of this accusation of poisoning against this person and so forth and he'd explained it to me in i think very the clearest ways that i understood and he said to me once he said most of these people who go to russia and write this stuff about putin are going off internet the internet has really been a source of a lot of fractured facts here uh he said pure analysis you have to go back to the texts all the documents and to really fully understand but he under he one he spoke russian and his wife and him uh katarina catarina van gaal who's the editor publisher of the nation magazine would go to russia several times a year and talked to their friend gorbachev and gorbachev is an interesting character i've talked to him interviewed him not interviewed him but talked to him at length and i like him very much and i saw the divide as you saw in the putin interviews between gorbachev and putin early on in the interviews you sense putin doesn't particularly care for governor chuck because he in his point of view he screwed up the administration of russia and is responsible for so much of the disaster of leaving all those people outside the soviet union so these are problems and continuing to the future but he at the they see each other at the or he sees he knows he's there at the may day parade i i we filmed and uh he's he his attitude is funny he's very human he says i you know he's welcome he's god he's got he's pension he's a pensioner he's done his duty he's there's no there's no uh animus towards him even when gorbachev in the early days you remember criticized him for his manners in terms of democracy but i don't know that that you know that becomes a quarrel but frankly by the by the end of the situation uh it's very clear that gorbachev has now moved closer and closer to the says russia is now really under attack this is he sees it he sees where the united states has made a concerted effort to undermine putin and he does and has he's repeated this several times about ukraine i think you've seen what he said you can quote it and gorbachev is we have no respect for gorbachev even even at this juncture when can you see gorbachev's ideas printed in most american newspapers very rarely very rarely and not and recently not at all so gorbachev who was our hero back in in the american hero back in 1980s 80s has now been condemned to the garbage can so to speak of history well in this complicated geopolitical picture you just outlined um can we talk about the recent invasion of ukraine so you wrote on facebook a pretty eloquent analysis i i think on uh march 3rd let me just read a small section of that just to give context and maybe we can talk a little bit more about both russia and the man putin he wrote although the united states has many wars of aggression on his conscience it doesn't justify mr putin's aggression in ukraine a dozen wrongs don't make a right russia was wrong to invade it has made too many mistakes one underestimating ukraine resistance two overestimating the military ability to achieve its objective three underestimating europe's reaction especially germany upping its military contribution to nato which they've resisted for some 20 years even switzerland has joined the cause russia will be more isolated than ever from the west four underestimating the enhanced power of nato which will now put more pressure on russia's borders five probably putting ukraine into nato six underestimating the damage to its own economy and certainly creating more internal resistance in russia seven creating a major readjustment of power in its oligarch class eight putting cluster and vacuum bombs into play nine and underestimating the power of social media worldwide and you go on for a while giving a much broader picture of the history and the geopolitics of all of this so now a little bit later two months later um what are your thoughts about the invasion of ukraine well it's very hard to be honest in this regard because the the west the west has brought down a curtain here and anyone who questions uh the invasion of ukraine and its consequences is is an enemy of the people it's it's become so difficult uh we i've never seen in my lifetime ever such a wall of propaganda as i've seen in the west and that includes france too because i was there recently in england england is of course really vociferous it's it's it's shocking to me how quickly europe moved in this direction and that includes germany i have german friends who expressed to me their shock over ukraine i have italian friends same thing and italy of course has been the perhaps the most understanding and compassionate of countries so it's it's quite evident that there's a united uh and this attests the power of the united states and of course you have finland and finland which has generally been reasonable jumping and talking about joining nato and sweden too generally there's been some more restraint in the in the way in europe that's what surprised me the most europe how quickly they fell into this nato basket which is very dangerous for europe very dangerous this goes back to my idea what i was saying earlier about sovereignty these countries have don't really give me a sense that they have sovereignty over their own countries they don't feel european nations i'm obviously intuition here is working i just don't feel that they have freedom to say what they really think and they're scared to say it when the united states invaded iraq in 2003 i remember with great in a sense satisfaction that at least france shirak who i had not really known much about stood up and said the united states were not going to join you in this expedition basically into madness schroeder and germany same thing of course putin condemned the uh invasion and kupun had been an ally of the united states since 9 11 if you remember correctly yes and had called bush and they were getting along so even putin said i won't go no don't go into iraq this is this is not the solution he he didn't oppose afghanistan but he opposed iraq so sharach and schroeder stood for the old europe i'm i remember de gaulle charles de gaulle he was independent of the united states charles de gaulle pulled france out of nato because he saw the dangers of nato which is to say you have to fight an american war when they say and they put nuclear weapons on your territory in england and france and uh italy and uh germany and when they do that you're you're hitched to this superpower and you have no say in what they're going to do if they declare war from there and they use your territory you're going to be involved in a major conflict i'm talking about sovereignty where is that sovereignty they don't have it and that has influenced their mindset for years now since 1940s since well de gaulle was the 60s he was he actually reversed the whole flow and he was it was i think it was uh sarkozy who put the france back into nato and uh now it's macro i i hope because he was talking to putin would at least have an independent viewpoint that could be helpful here but he so he rolled it up he may have told putin something else but within days he had rolled it up and gone along with the united states position which was enforced by the united states in a very fierce way the propaganda as i say i don't know how much time you spend in america but it was vicious and everything was anti-russian russia were killing all these people were shooting down civilians although there was no proof of it there was just these are the accidents of war but all of a sudden it was a campaign of criminality and they were talking about bringing putin into war crime trial well why didn't they talk like that when iraq was going on and bush was killing far more people or for that matter why were they not talking about the the killings in donbass and lugansk during that 2014 to 2000 20 period that is what is it's a crime there were so many people that were killed many of them innocent many of them minister so what would be the way for vladimir putin to stop the killing in dambass without the invasion of ukraine yeah that's a very good question and i've asked that several times and i don't have the i have not talked to him since about two years now uh it's a very good question what's the mistakes what the human mistakes and the leadership mistakes means a very good question you see what the american press has not said and the western press has not said is that on february 24 was it that was on that day what they invaded they were the day before if you check the logs of the uh european organization that was you supervising uh was in the field in ukraine these are neutral observers they were seeing heavy heavier and heavier artillery fire going into uh into donbass from the ukrainian side so they had apparently ukraine had a hundred and ten thousand troops on the border they were about to invade donbass that was the plan that's what i think russia as a as a because of the buildup on the border of donbass brought 130 they say 130 000 troops to the area uh near uh donbass right so you have a build-up of forces on both sides but you wouldn't know that from reading the press in the west you would be you'd believe that the russians suddenly put all these men into into the situation with him with the idea of invading ukraine not only don mass but invading all of ukraine and getting rid of the uh decapitating the government there which is all assumption we don't know what they would intended to do but you at the time is that a lot of people thought that the all the talk of the invasion russian invasion of ukraine it's just propaganda it's never it's not going to happen it's very well i think many of us thought that the united states is building this up into an invasion in other words that's that is the nature of false flag operations when you you create this propaganda they are going to invade they are going to invade and then when they invaded the united states was completely ready and all their allies were completely ready for the invasion correct so why did putin do that he fell into this theoretically into this trap set by the united states that here you're telling all your allies across the board they're going to invade but you why do you think he did it so here is it madness or is it no strategic calculation perhaps this one i cannot answer you faithfully because first of all we don't know what he was told if he was indeed getting the right intelligence estimates from what i said earlier in that art and that in that essay i wrote you would think he was not well informed perhaps about the degree of cooperation he would get from the russia the ukrainian russians in in in in ukraine i that would be one factor that he wasn't he didn't assess the operation correctly remember this mr putin has had this cancer and he's i think he's licked it but he's also been isolated because of covid and some people would argue that the isolation from normal activity which he was he was meeting people face to face but all of a sudden he was meeting people across the table uh a hundred yards away or whatever 10 yards away it was very hard to perhaps he lost touch uh with contact with people so it's not just power it's the very simple fact that you're just this i see i'm speculating i don't know i see that and i also perhaps he thought in his mind that there would be a a faster resolution that the ukrainian because the evidence had been that the ukrainian uh russians the ukrainian army had folded so many times in the and that they were only backed up and they were stiffened by the resistance of the nazi uh or nazi oriented as of battalions that was a factor of course and that is a big factor for the russians because these people are very tough they rush see what people don't understand is that ukraine since 20 2014 has been a terror state and they've been run you know anytime a ukrainian has expressed any uh any uh understanding of a russian of the russian ukrainian position they've been threatened by the state from 2014 to 2022 there's been a set of hideous murders that people don't even know about in the west journalists people who speak out liberals people who uh i i interviewed victor medvedev who they make out to be some kind of horrible person but medvedev was this was a very important figure in the administration of kushma the first ukrainian prime minister in the 1990s and he did a great job on the economy he was a very thoughtful man if you'll see my interview it's called ukraine revealed he's very thoughtful about the future of ukraine he doesn't want to go back and join russia he wants it to be an independent country ukraine is independent and he wants it to be a functioning economic democracy more or less a democracy if you can get that but between that exists in a neutral state a neutral state which ukraine used to be before 2014 it was neutral from 1991 to 2014 neutral very important under poroshenko it just immediately went into an anti-soviet cold war position as an ally of the united states and uh my point was that it was a very dangerous place in ukraine people were being killed death squads were out there medvedev they stripped him of his television stations very suddenly this is olenski the new president said he zaleski was elected on a peace platform remember that he was 70 of the country was for him to make peace with russia he did he ever have even tried to make peace with russia did he attend any of the minsk two um agreements did he did he visit did he pay any attention to putin did he go to russia no not at all the moment he got into office i'm convinced that the the uh the uh militant uh the militant sector of the right sector parties of the uh of ukraine let him know that you will not make a deal with russia there'll be no concessions to russia this is very dangerous this is where this attitude that's very very hostile to russia has hurt us the whole world is being hurt by this and no no one calls them out no one calls them out zelensky backed off from his platform as a running for president and as president has been ineffective did nothing to promote on the contrary went the other way and seemed to support the uh the ukrainian aggression well he found his support in this war you've revealed through your work some of the most honest and dark aspects of war nevertheless this is a war and there's a humanitarian crisis millions of people as uh refugees escaping ukraine what do you think about the human cost of this war initiated by it's horrible whoever just as you write whatever the context whatever nato whatever pressure as you wrote russia was wrong to invade okay yeah let's get back to the original question you said what was he thinking at that time we never answered that yeah now by the way uh you know among those people who are who've been ruined by this war you have to include the fort 2014 to 2022 yes ukrainian russians fourteen thousand uh were killed not necessarily by uh some of them by maybe accident this and that but certainly a large number of that is is responsible to the ukrainian military and the uh the nazi related battalions who have done a good job of death squading that whole area and remember i did a film about salvador i know a little bit about death squads and how they work and i know about paramilitaries because in south america they're all over the place america supports hates venezuela goes on about venezuela but do they tell you anything about colombia it's next door neighbor colombia for years has been plagued by paramilitaries that are right-wing and the united states has said nothing about them except occasionally there's a newspaper report now so this is a this support of death squads by the united states is all over the world it's not just in south america and central america where we see plenty of evidence of it it's here too and this is what's horrible about this whole thing this hypocrisy of america that they can support such evil such evil now going back to your larger question about uh yes it's a terrible refugee disaster but again we have to get the numbers let's get the numbers and get evidence because i i would ask you i'm not sure at this point whether more civilians were killed before 2022 in donbass than have been killed in this latest so we can't talk about this without we can't talk about the invasion ukraine without considering the full war between russia and ukraine since 2014. that's correct absolutely and take the toll on both sides and you might be surprised by the result uh i think the russian military of course i'm not there and i'm not this could be this is speculation the russian military has slowed down and part of that reason is not to keep the civilian corridors open and i think the ukrainian military has made it more difficult on purpose especially some of these battalions that are death squad battalions have gone out of their way to keep the civilians locked into these cities in danger because it's in their interest to do so so there's no reason why ukrainian military who have killed ukrainian civilians for years would change their policies they would have no compunctions about wiping out for example people with white armbands in bucca okay uh as to what putin was thinking at the time i i wondered this and i still do i said okay so putin can say one let's say uh the ukrainian government wants to now invade donbass this is on february 23 and they have artillery they're peppery in the whole place they're going to go in and they're going to get don bass back what do you do and you you have russian uh separatists who are russian ukrainians who are on who are going to fight how far do you go in supporting them can russia at this point say well we can't help you you have to get along you have to somehow you have to be absorbed by uh they kev you're going to be absorbed by them and they're going to be they're not going to give you autonomy and you have to live with them and there's going to be a price to pay you could do that and you can also say well we open our borders to don't ask you can come into our country you can leave and we will help you to to resettle and that's that would be a reasonable approach so you take it to the next stage as putin's thinking you take it to the next stage you you stall it's harder for your people of course there's pressure on putin from inside his own government to say what are you going to do you mean you can't do this there's a lot of nationalists in russia they would certainly bring it would be to his they'd say putin is weak and that's the biggest rap you can ever give a russian leader is you're weak you can't get anything done so there would have been some damage but let's say he goes with that and he says okay we know what the united states intention is it's to get rid of me regime change and to get another yeltsin in that's what they want and they will go to any ends they will destroy ukraine if necessary but they want regime change in russia and then after they do that of course they'll go after china but that's the ultimate policy of the united states this is a country that has no compunctions about going all the way and it will use hypocrisy in all the news propaganda in the world to get what it wants this is the equivalent frankly of germany's uh goals in world war ii uh world domination there's no question in my mind but we're going about it in our way as opposed to hitler's way so just to finish your thought where do they go what's stage two okay you let's say they take ukraine takes back donbass let's say people get killed in in large quantities so we now to the next stage we're finished with the minsk two agreements that were never adhered to so what does russia do they wait for the next aggression which is going to come in one form or another perhaps in georgia perhaps i don't know what what happened what the us is thinking but they would have the u.s cannot say uh russia is has done anything they have not used violence to stop donbass from belonging back to uh ukraine right so you're in a new setup now it's a whole thing rearranges now you have but you still have nuclear weapons and you still have a russian nuclear weapons and they're serious weapons they're very well developed crude but not as refined as the american nuclear force but powerful that becomes another game then you open another board and know what you still haven't been condemned the sanctions haven't been imposed that's a new it's a new game could he have done could he have lived with that that's the question i ask myself so you see ultimately ukraine today as a battleground for the proxy war between russia and the united states the united states would have then nato ashed nato eyes ukraine or certainly put more weapons and you know the united states has already done a lot in ukraine with intelligence with training advisors the uh the intelligence aspect of the ukrainian army has been raised enormously by the united states contribution is it possible for you to steal man to play devil's advocate against yourself and say that vladimir zelinski is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation and in in a way against russia but also against the united states it just happens that for now the united states is a useful ally but ultimately the man the leader is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation i don't think he thinks so yes and he could be he could say that but he's not acknowledging that the sovereignty of his nation was stolen but in 2014 when with a coup d'etat that brought uh that brought this sec this right sector into power and they have controlled the country since then it's it says it's thuggery what they've done the medvedev case is a case in point they just take what they need they go to a house and they they have how many people have been killed aren't serious people uh journalists killed by the these uh battalions that's what people don't realize in other words you can't speak out you can't a person like me would have been on a death list on day day five uh you don't there's no opposition to zolensky so he doesn't have a real sovereignty it was a stolen sovereignty do you think uh president zelansky would accept an interview with you today actually from since i made ukraine on fire uh documentary which perhaps you've seen which records the the incidents of 2014 and the and the maidan uh demonstrations and shows you the dishonesty behind it no i think that they've been very negative and they would kill me if i was in ukraine i mean they don't have any uh these people are very tough these are as rough as they come in my opinion and i've seen rough in my life i mean these guys are not playing with fair at all they they these are death squads no i don't think and zelansky would have nothing to do with it but of course it would be dangerous for me and they've been very hostile in their in their policies to any any ukrainians abroad are also threatened in other words you could be in paris but if you're if you speak out too much you i think ukrainians know that they're going to be targeted and i think that's part of the reason they don't talk a lot of them you know you have to take the anti-russian line but i think a lot of them are divided so you think you would be killed and zelonski wouldn't even know about it so there is well i'd be i don't think i don't if i was killed certainly abroad no they wouldn't kill me abroad i think they'd like figure out no no no if you traveled to ukraine i mean i wouldn't get in i wouldn't get in except through donbass i'd come there are some americans in donbass who are reporting on the war there and i read their reports actually they're pretty interesting because they show you the cruelty of what's going on but never mentioned in the west never that's what's so strange about this this this is the modern world that we're living in yet this information is not coming out to the mass of the people and on the contrary the united states has closed down all the all the prop all the rt all the all the information centers that are possible alternative news getting to the american people they've seriously made an effort and the bbc the english and france i was shocked when france closed rt down because rt is actually pretty good they yes they may you could call there are distortions but you know as well as i do because you hear you speak that rt has done a very brave job of putting correspondence into the field in very dangerous positions and they've gotten great footage of some of the violence that's going on well given the wall of propaganda in the west i also see the wall of propaganda in russia the wall of propaganda in china the wall of propaganda in india what do we do with these walls of propaganda yeah let's talk about russia because i you and you would know more about it but my last experience there newspapers it was more interesting there's put it this way when i went to venezuela the united states was saying back then that chavez controlled the press i get to venezuela and there's nothing but criticism of chavez in the press it was owned by the the oligarchs of venezuela and who hated him so it was across the board that's why chavez opened the uh the state television spent more money on it and advertised his point of view through state television but this in russia uh there is what i saw was criticism i met with the publisher who got the nobel prize of that famous newspaper and his point of view at that time when i spoke to him a few years ago was we're operating there is criticism of him but you know we you can't call for the overthrow of the government nor in venezuela nor in the united states for that matter if you call for the overthrow of the government of the united states you're going to be in deep trouble well all right so to push back on that it's interesting it's so interesting because we mentioned elon musk and there's a way that people sound when they speak freely when i speak to i have family in ukraine i have family in russia when i speak to people in russia let's put my family aside when i speak to people in russia i think there's fear i think they don't um sometimes when you call for the overthrow of government that's important not because you necessarily believe for the overthrow of the government but you just need to test test the power centers and make sure they're uh responsive to the people and i feel like there's a mix of fear and apathy uh that it has a different texture than it does in the united states that worries me because i i would like to see the flourishing of a people in all places as i said my impression was that there's far more freedom in the press than was it was pictured by the west and and that means different points of view because the russians are always arguing with themselves i've never seen a country that's so contentious there's more there's more intellectuals in moscow and the cities and than you can believe and and you know the russian people there they've been fighting government for years back from the 1870s zara's times they're always plotting against the government and the intelligence he has known through history as being contentious and anti-government in many ways and uh we see the same thing educated people turning against russia i don't appreciate those people because i think they're very spoiled and they don't understand some of the stuff that's going on in the west but we have a lot of russians in in them in europe and america that attack russia and sometimes don't understand that they are under pressure from the united states and they don't understand the size of the pressure and it that's why putin connects with the people because he he represents the common more the common man who's who's saying to you your interests are threatened russia is threatened we are representing only the interests of russia not we're not an empire we're not going to expand we he he has no empire intentions all the west pains in his empire i i see no evidence of it uh why didn't he do something in all these years nothing he did nothing except defend the country in georgia and in chechnya so the imperialist imperative is coming more from the west it's the imperialist agenda going back to uh i'm sorry where we left our discussion off i mean i was going to go on with america not only being censored as closed down now closed down and you say it's not fear well it is fear i am scared because if you get your facebook page suspended or your youtube your twitter account thrown off a lot of good people are getting there thrown off you can't say you can't speak out it affects your business it goes back to the 1950s when my my father's world when you could not express any sympathy for a soviet union without endangering your job without basically being not trusted you had to be part of the program to get along to go along same thing when uk united kingdom i mean for all their talk this boris johnson is an idiot but all their talk about do you remember their policies with the ira in ireland when ireland was threatening them they cut off the ira completely jerry adams who was a a wonderful guy i met him was not allowed to even be heard in britain during certain years in france uh all constantly through the algerian war the algerians were not allowed to be heard the algerian war for independence divided france greatly you could not even show paths of glory world war one film uh in france for i don't know 20 years after it came out uh censorship is a way of life when democracies also feel threatened they are much more fragile than they pretend to be a healthy democracy would take all the criticism in the world and shrug it off and say okay that's what's good about our country well i'd like to see that in america it used there are times it's been like that but it's it's so scary now so it is scary that's that's what i was trying to say it's not unscary to me in china i would say to you yes it's much scarier to me because there is the internet wall that they cut off and i got into problems in china too because i said something in in years ago about you have to discover your own history you have to be honest about mao you have to be you have to go back and let's make a movie about mao that upset them you know and show his negatives so china has been much more sensitive than russia about criticism much more and it is a source of problems but on the other hand china has a lot of grievances a lot going back to the 19th century and the british imperialism of that era and american imperialism if you could talk to vladimir putin once again now what kind of what kind of things would you talk about here what kind of questions would you ask well one thing i would certainly ask is what you were thinking on february 23 and i would ask him to reply to my question about what if you took this to phase two you you surrendered in donbass you know no ego about it you just surrendered it's in your interest to your country and you invited all the refugees from donbass into russia as much as they can what would you do now what's the what's the us next move and in your opinion how are you gonna okay where are we gonna go that's that would be the key question because it's but he didn't go that way he chose to take the sanctions and and to go this way why he did that is a key question for our time uh perhaps it was a mistake perhaps it was his judgment perhaps as i said but i don't knowing the man i did i don't think so i think it was calculated now this is projection and speculation but there is something different about him in the past several months it could be the covet thing the isolation that you mentioned i listened to a lot of interviews and speeches in russian and there's uh there's something about power over time that can change you that can isolate you well when i was there no he'd been in office for already 15 years he had power he didn't misuse it in my opinion he was very even i saw him go on television and talk to his fellows the same way he always talked to them he grew with it he grew in intelligence and knowledge because he had heard dealings with the whole world now people had come to him he was very well known in africa and middle east certainly syria and i i just never saw a misuse of his power i saw humility in him actually so perhaps there was a calculation and he calculated wrong in terms of what happens if he doesn't invade perhaps there was a calculation perhaps he had a calm and clear mind and he calculated wrong well he also made the point that he had there the talk of zelinski saying nuclear weapons were going to come into ukraine there was talk about that right before the invasion too and certainly that would have set off alarms you know the united states is already kind of doing that by not only putting its intelligence and its heavy weaponry into ukraine but you've got to deal with the question the next question that comes up the most immediate question is is the united states going to start and i'm saying this is good they're making a lot of noise the united states press about russia using nuclear weapons and chemical weapons that's a lot of noise again going back to my analogy when the united states starts that it starts the conversation going it's in the interest of the united states for russia to be pinned with any kind of chemical or nuclear uh incident except for example it'd be very not simple but it would be possible to explode a nuclear device in non-bass in donbass and kill thousands of people and we would not know right away who did it but of course the blame would go right to russia right to russia even if it didn't make sense if there was no motivation for it it would just be blamed on russia the united states might well be the one who does that false flag operation it would not be beyond them they would it would be a very dramatic uh solution to sealing this war off as a major victory for the united states that's terrifying no but it can happen it can happen at one kiloton device low yield this it's possible so when you walk across that line you can potentially never walk back well i think the united states is calculating that it's a dangerous yes i agree but i think the neoconservative arrogance is such that they really believe they can push their advantage to the max now that because of all these propaganda successes up to now the ukrainian army could be wiped out for all we know there's all this leftists are neon not see brigades but they're being advised very well by u.s and they're sending the weapons in huge amounts of weapons what about american budget no one talks about how much money we're giving to ukraine we get it's a billion dollars already in weaponry and not most of it just poured in what about uh you know the the russian budget is uh defense budget is 60 some billion dollars a year it's nothing compared to the united states 1 15th of it but yet we we've put so much weaponry into ukraine the money we've spent on ukraine is all equivalent almost to what we've spent on on coven in our own country it's astounding the distortion of our priorities uh there's also chemical don't forget chemical is probably the easier way to go but in syria there was far too many incidents of of america in its quest to demonize uh assad and the the russians of all these chemical attacks that were happening that they were vowing came from russia and uh in spite of the fact that russia is pulled out of the uh signed the agreement on chemical arms and not and apparently destroyed its stock several years ago it's it's strange that the the strangest incidents happened in syria you go back to trace everyone good journalism was done the white helmets got a lot of fame but they were corrupted and many good journalists tried to point out the inconsistencies in the american accusations robert perry among them uh who was one of my mentors at consortium press a lot of good journey you'd have to go back but trace each like you would trace each time you they made an accusation against putin of murder you need that same kind of sherlock holmes intensity investigation and they don't do it because the united nations or the chemical not the united nations as much as the chemical people the the organization has been tampered with if you remember correctly there was accusations that the chemical chemical uh investigative unit i don't know the name of was tampered with and people quit people who were working on that commission quit and said that this is not legit it's a very interesting that syria story is wacko so the united states is willing to use chemical in syria freely it did it three four times if you remember correctly trump was challenged that he did not attack after a chemical incident in syria all these newscasters in the united states uh the most heaviest of them were saying well president putin is uh president trump is now finally acting like a real president when he attacks when he drops missiles in syria they actually said that in other words they wanted the trump to go to war on syria but he didn't chemical weapons nuclear is really terrifying do you think now combine this with the fascinating choice in your interviews with vladimir putin to watch stanley kubrick's uh doctor dr strangelove or how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb and given the fact that that you did that now looking at the fact that the word nuclear and it feels like the world hangs on the brink of nuclear war do you think that that's overstating the case no that's what worried me from the beginning and that's probably why i got involved in all this stuff because i i go back to the uh 60s when i was a you know when we were so close to nuclear war i lived through that period and i thought as as many people did that this was it was gonna it was gonna come now so i've lived through that and some i didn't sense the period in 83 when reagan took us to the edge if you remember correctly abel archer it was an exercise that almost brought us to include the russians were really paranoid at that point and they were they were responding to our military exercise on able archer there was also the korean airliner they went down there were numerous incidents in the 80s but i never felt the fear i thought reagan was testing the limits but perhaps if i'd been younger i would have felt it but anyway no we come close the united states has risked this several times i if i told you it would be hard for you to believe if i could set a scene for you in a drama in a in in 1962 when kennedy has a meeting with the joint chiefs of staff and the cia and they talk about a plan a military plan to uh first strike the soviet union and china okay it was called uh it was an eisenhower plan that had been put into opera and put into a potential operation in uh the in early 60s or 50s late 50s sio p 62 this was an attack on the soviet union first strike that's why the united states has never given up the concept of first strike is it's interesting that the russian police nuclear policy posture is more defensive than the american one which leaves options open it's the same options that are open to neo-conservative uh agreement that we see from the late 90s where they say the emergence of a rival power will not be tolerated that's a very broad statement and it allows you to do a lot including nuclear so you have to understand the united states is always first of all it breaks so many treaties i mean we know that from the putin story about the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002 and then the inf treaty of the they broke that one that was the intermediate missile that was 2019 i don't know when they broke it off but the united states has not been very faithful on its nuclear agreements and so i don't know that we can even deal with you i'd say so diplomatically it seems to be impossible now brings me to biden yes and this is another irishman this is the opposite of kennedy kennedy was a catholic irish anti-imperialist biden seems to be the opposite he seems to be a goal get along go along guy who's been not only old but he's also gone along with this program which i voted for biden because i i feared trump but i thought biden at a certain age would mellow i really did he's not mellowed apparently he's still listening to these people and he believes them and it seems that his uh that horrible woman victoria newland who was under secretary of state appointed her to these to this sector of the world she's very influential and she's been one of the worst people on ukraine she obviously was behind the coup she's she was the one who boasted that uh you know we got our man in yachts one of hers yatsenuk and also remembers the famous statement fuck the eu all these things she's but she's back and she said the other day about if the soviets if the russians use uh nuclear weaponry of any kind there's going to be a horrible price to pay that was uh she was out of the blue i said what the hell is she doing she's talking nuclear all of a sudden and then since that day everybody in the u.s press all the shows have gone talk nuclear nuclear nuclear secretary of state has done it uh blinken uh this it scares you if you think about it the united states scares me so that's the military-industrial complex machine fully functional fully operational behind this whole thing is that is that what's the blame it certainly is that's why i showed him strange love because i wanted him to show him i wanted mr putin to say look at this film you never saw it how can you not say you know it's a seminal film in american history to those people who care and it shows you the kubrick had a anti had a pacifist thank god anti-war mentality which he showed in powers of glory as well as strange love and it's such a dire well-done scenario that i wanted mr putin to be aware of the way the united states thinks yeah the absurdity of escalation the absurdity of war at the largest scale the absurdity of nuclear war especially can we walk back from the brink of nuclear war can we can we yes yes what's the path to walk back season reason between hormones and diplomacy there's no reason i mean talk to the guy mr biden why don't you calm down and go and talk to mr putin in moscow why don't you just sit across the table from and try to have a discussion without falling into ideologies and stuff like that they ask you for advice you did some of the most difficult interviews ever you have a device that you can give to someone like me or anyone hoping to understand something about a human being sitting across from them about what it takes to do a good interview you're doing one well no but there's a listen there's levels to this game and interviewing somebody like vladimir putin also language barrier sit across from the man tried to keep an open mind i try to also ask challenging questions but not challenging with the with an agenda but seeking to understand and i understand deeply how do you do that seeking the truth it's very simple seeking the truth being a questioner like you are you want to know what is really going on i could not get anywhere with uh biden or bush or for that matter obama they'd be opaque with me there's no interview possible with the president of the united states because he's got to stand for all the stuff that they stand for which is imperialism which is control of the world how can you defend that you can't see no one's going to come out and say that they're always going to blame the enemy they're going to blame iran they're going to blame china so for some people it may not be possible to break through the opaque case i mean have you ever seen an interview with the president besides being personable where he actually discussed american policy yeah i mean not really but maybe after their president i could see obama be being able to do such an interview i could see george w being able to do such an interview or are they not able to reflect at all george w hasn't shown much conscience in terms of thinking about what he's done you've seen that it was you ever seen my movie w i think that's one of my best movies because it shows a man who's just out of his depth and has no he has a conscience at the end of the movie if he if you remember correctly he talks to his wife and he says i don't get it i'm trying to do good in the world i've done i believe in good and right and why do people not understand that you know that kind of complaint as if he can't get outside himself to understand the way other people think empathy walking like a dramatist is what i do you walk in the footsteps of other people when i did a movie about richard nixon it wasn't because i liked him it was because i wanted to i think i understood a part of him because my father and i think i wanted to walk in his footsteps that's not to say i sympathize with him because i didn't i don't think he helped the american cause at all but it was empathize as opposed to sympathize same thing with bush people were shocked when i did the bush movie they said how can you be in any way uh anyway receptive to this guy that's wrong dramatists don't have political positions they walk in the shoes of that's why bush movie perhaps was surprising to many and many people didn't care for it maybe that's what but that's you've got to go there no you if you did a movie about a villain you have to go there you have to walk in their shoes yes so see them because they usually villains usually see themselves as the hero yes so you have to consider what is it like to live in a world where this person is the hero yes is that a burden is that hard not for george w bush he's bitching because they didn't understand them but he had a good vision he said of democracy and you know democracy forgives a lot of sins can i ask you a hard question on that yes sure so because empathy is so important to a great interview let's ask the most challenging version of empathy which is when you're sitting across from a man on the brink of war that that leads to tens of millions of deaths which is hitler so if you could interview hitler in 1939 as the drums of war start to beat or 1941 when they're already full-on war but there's still a lot of pacifists there's still a lot of people unsure what are the motivations behind um what hitler is doing how would you do that interview what depends when you do it if you do it in 38 uh i certainly would have no you have to if you sit down across from hitler you empathize what is your beef what are you what are you where have you been what is your consciousness uh why do you hate uh jewish people why why uh what is you know all these questions that come up his sense of grievance as a result of world war one there's justifications there etc but if i and by the way churchill was trying to make a deal with him in 38. that's a fact that people don't know is churchill himself and you know there was still the desire in england to make peace with germany uh and it was seen as a possible what hit what churchill really wanted was hitler to go against russia and he he anything to destroy the bolsheviks so he was using hitler as much as he could to go after russia but uh hitler was too elusive to get to pin him down but if you remember hitler was very kind at the end of kind is not the right word was did not go after the british empire when he had france and he could have he had another objective which was obviously the east so hitler's goal i think he always had an admiration for england it's interesting story always and the the empire yes and certainly church we have no doubts now from history revisionism that churchill's interest main interest was not germany it was the british empire yes and to preserve it to india the road to india and all that and middle east churchill fought the entire war with the concept of preserving the british empire all his goals he sent america on a goose chase into italy you could argue instead of establishing a sincere second front in western europe uh interesting man so i would have tried to get you know i think i would approach it the same way in 1939 it would have been a different story because at that point he'd attacked poland and uh in 1940 france so there's it's another ball game but certainly if whatever at whatever point you talk to him you i would try to understand his point so i would i'm not judging you hitler i'm saying to you tell me what you're thinking why are you invading russia what's your thought that's all an interviewer should do he shouldn't be expressing his contempt for hitler which like an american journalist interviewing putin it's i'm getting brownie points for for expressing my contempt yeah for you that that does i don't that doesn't wash with me that's ugly yeah seek to understand yes uh this is a technical question but was language a barrier as an interviewer to some degree it's very hard to learn russian but i had very they have excellent translators in the kremlin excellent they are people who are trained very seriously for for months or years before they they these people are young and they're very bright i was very impressed with the russian transit it's interesting i mean i i i'm impressed as well but there's a humor that's lost um there's a wit a dry wit there's stuff said between the lines that's not actually have much content but it's more kind of the things that make communication more frictionless it's the there's a there's a kind of sadness to a russian humor that permeates all things and that sometimes is lost in translation the translation is a little bit colder meaning it just conveys the facts would you call it sardonic humor i would say so yeah and so it's interesting but i think you could see that from facial expressions when you're sitting across from the person and you can you can feel it let me ask you in general what's the role of love in the human condition in your life in life in general you've talked you looked at some of the darkest aspect of human nature what's the role of this one of the more beautiful aspects of humanity i think without love i wouldn't i don't think i'd be able to carry on i think that love is my love is the greatest the ability to love is the greatest virtue you can have it's it's it's the ability to share with another with your family with your children with your wife with your lover your partner it's an ability to extend yourself into the world and it brings empathy with it if you love well i think you expand it to the human race too and i it's it's it's the strength behind the great novelists the great artists of our time uh i think part of the reason i suppose we're scared of science sometimes is because the scientists sometimes don't express that clearly you can lose that when you focus on the facts on empirical data on the science of things like you can lose this the humanity that's between the lines i'm often struck by when i talk to scientists and i've talked to a few and how arrogant they can be about they don't talk to you if you don't understand their world and they talk to each other and there's an arrogance a closed circle kind of thing oh he's not at my level i can't there's no discussion to be had with this person he's a human being that arrogance is terrifying to me because it's next door neighbor to closed-mindedness which then can be used by charismatic leaders as it was in nazi germany to commit some of the worst atrocities the scientists can be used as pawns in a very in a very cruel game yeah um what advice would you give to young people you've done first of all some of the greatest films ever you've you've lived a heck of a life you've uh we're fearless and bold in asking some really difficult questions of this world what advice would you give to young people today high school college about career how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of well i have three children so obviously i'm not necessarily the best best advisor in the world i and they i do find that the children i've raised them with a sense of freedom and they do what they want in the end it's their life their destiny their character that's what comes out you can try to influence it but you see you can try to get your daughter to wake up at a certain hour in the day but it never works you know uh so i i i long ago gave up on that and my children are all grown now but aside from that i think if i was a teacher in a school and teaching film i'd say to the students get an education you can't just look at film you can look at because it's not a full education it's not the spectrum i don't think you should teach film as a i think you need a base in other in other worlds one of the greatest courses i took in nyu was and i was a war veteran on the gi bill so i was older than the other students one of the great i took a class outside the film school in greek classics because i hadn't had much history or and i wanted to know more about the world of homer and so forth and the teacher opened my eyes to so much in that class and i wrote about it in my memoir it's called uh chasing the light about the professor leahy and what he did to me he just he gave me the concepts clearly of consciousness which is the homeric theme for of odisha's and and also lethae l-a-t-h-e-l-l-e-t-h-e which is sleep and how most of the uh crew auditious crew were experiencing lethal and how unnecessary it was to stay awake uh so it's not just film it's just you have to learn the world as much as you can when you're young and so that i think is the basis of a good education and a classic one is important a basis i think then you go on and you can learn computer uh if you want but that's specialization you know if you're a computer geek is that a life does that give you enough satisfaction do you get the joy out of out of people no just like filmmaking is a skill yes right you need to have the broad yes background to understand the world literature yes uh history absolutely um so one of the things about being human is life is finite it ends do you think about your death are you afraid of your death yeah sure absolutely you have to come to terms with death and that's a tough one for many people it's it's always there i'm older than you obviously and i'm getting closer to it couldn't happen any day actually when you get to a certain age you can't assume that you're going to be alive tomorrow so i try to deal with that are you afraid of it much less so than i was when i was younger remember i was in vietnam but i thought i dealt with it there but when i came back i realized that i wanted to live so yes i've learned over time to get more and more used to it and get ready for it what's a good answer to the question of why live so the realization that you wanted to live what was the reason to live because it was better than being one of those corpses that i saw in the jungle uh you know i saw how finite death is are there things in your life you regret oh sure um is there something you wish you could have done differently like if you could go back to do one thing differently or that the regrets are trans musculus i'm curious what do you say off offline all the time uh no no you'd be curious to know he's an engineer too and engineers really value mistakes engineers value making mistakes and errors because that's a opportunity to learn they i mean this is what you do with systems is you test them to test them and test them and errors is just information he did the same thing is true in its way of filmmaking there are certain things you learn as you build films and you make mistakes it's like putting an engine together and you oh the film is flawed in that way you know it other people may or may not see it but the car runs or made money or didn't make money it can be good and it didn't make money but then the point is that everything is a build every film is a construction same thing as he goes through on a tesla we go through on each film uh but films are art it's a little yeah the thing is one film does not lead to a lifetime guarantee of copyright well yeah you have uh the movie game as you've called it yeah is uh it's a complicated and cruel game but it takes enormous amount of work enormous amount of work to make a film people unders underestimate that it's extremely complicated to have something be successful because it has so many elements of luck involved and reception and so forth what do you think i apologize for the absurd question but what do you think is the meaning of life why are we here the why i think to realize ourselves to to realize more of what you are to realize what life is to appreciate it to grow to honest honor our life to honor the concept of life and to understand how precious life is the preciousness of life as the buddhists say and of course the immediacy of death all around us the causes of death are all around us uh and our life is like a as they say is like a lantern in a strong breeze among the existing among the causes of death so life is so precious and at the same time immediacy of death and then of course the continuation of life in whatever form it's going to take but in this life to wake up to the preciousness of it to the preciousness yeah that's a wonderful thing by the way i didn't have that when i was young i took it for granted oliver like i said i'm i'm a huge fan you're an incredible human being one of the greatest artists ever uh so it's a huge honor that you sit with me and talk uh so deeply and honestly about some very difficult topics again you're an inspiration and it's an honor that you will spend your valuable time with me thank you very much thanks for talking fun being here thanks for listening to this conversation with oliver stone to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from oliver stone in the untold history of the united states to fail is not tragic to be human is thank you for listening and hope to see you next time