Oliver Stone does not like the American president. During an interview for conspiracy theorist Russell Brand’s British podcast, which aired July 28, the four-time Oscar-winning director explains why he regrets voting for Joe Biden. The filmmaker claims that the American president could drag the United States down a “suicidal” path, even into a confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
According to him, the American president hates the former Soviet Union and tends to confuse it with the Russian Federation. “It looks like we are heading stupidly towards a confrontation with a power that is not going to give in, he believes. These are their borders. It’s their world. NATO is entering Ukraine. It’s a whole different story.” According to Oliver Stone, the President of the United States, too Manichean for his taste, did not understand the reasons for the war in Ukraine. “Americans like to simplify and say this is a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s very simplistic and very black and white”, describes the director.
This is not the first time that Oliver Stone has gone on a crusade against Joe Biden. In May, in an interview with the Guardian, he compared him to John Kennedy – his favorite president. “If you put the two presidents next to each other, you will find that John Kennedy is a lover of peace. Joe Biden is an old cold warrior, in the worst sense of the word”.
In 2017, Oliver Stone produced Ukraine on Fire, a documentary that critics paint as “a Kremlin-friendly version of events.” For its part, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project castigates a film which gives pride of place to “Russian narrative on the Ukrainian Euromaidan revolution of 2014, describing it as a nationalist coup d’etat orchestrated by the United States”. The director sees “the origins of the war in Ukraine in the coup in 2014 which was financed by the United States”. “It was a very deep plan to penetrate the Soviet Union… uh the Russian Federation,” he adds. In 2017, Oliver Stone signed another documentary, entitled Conversations with Mr. Putin, a film for which he was criticized for his complacency towards the Russian president. At the time of the pandemic, the director had received a dose of the Russian Sputnik vaccine, against the advice of American medical authorities.
Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022, Olivier Stone has not revised his position on Vladimir Putin. In May, he told the Guardian that he is “the best president for Russia and his people love him”. Regarding Joe Biden, the filmmaker warns: we must “stop what Biden is doing”. “I voted for him, it was a mistake, he regrets. I thought he was an old man now that he would calm down, that he would be softer, I didn’t see that at all.”