Enlarge / Director Oliver Stone attends the Snowden New York premiere at AMC Loews Lincoln Square on September 13, 2016 in New York City. (credit: Getty Images / Jim Spellman)
On the day the Oliver Stone film Snowden opened in theaters around the world, Mr. Stone was kind enough to give Ars a call (in fact, a Facetime call) to talk about the film’s creation. We had so many questions for Mr. Stone about collaborating with Edward Snowden, how he thinks American warfare has changed, and how much of his film is based on a work of fiction. Here’s a transcript of our Friday conversation, edited for flow and for Mr. Stone’s requested redactions.
Ars: To start, I was curious: How much did your film draw from the forums of Ars Technica, where Edward Snowden was apparently a longtime member and commenter?
Stone: Well, quite a bit of stuff [in my film] had not appeared [up until now]. There was a lot of information that only… let’s say no one really knew. Bart Gellman [the British journalist who appeared in Citizenfour] told me that when he saw the film, he said, there’s stuff here no one knows. And James Bedford [author of The Puzzle Palace], who I respect, they’ve been on the frontier of this, he said [classified programs] like Heartbeat, Epic Shelter—these things, nobody had talked about them.
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Source: Ars Technica – Oliver Stone on the Snowden who graced Ars’ forums: “Now he’s a different man”