Why Oliver Stone’s Snowden film remains a terrifying surveillance warning 10 years on

Oliver Stone is no stranger to controversy. Whether exploring conspiracy theories in JFK, attacking the media in Natural Born Killers or cosying up to authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez for his documentaries, he has never been afraid to fight to get his voice heard. This makes him the perfect candidate to tell the story of whistle-blower Edward Snowden in the narrative film Snowden, which turns 10 this month. Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who told the world we were all being spied on via our mobile phones – an act that saw him accused of treason and left him stranded in Russia when the US revoked his passport. A fraught production Adapted by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald from two different source books, Snowden was always going to be a complex beast. However, when asked about it at an American Civil Liberties Union event, Stone said, “It was really a horrible experience in every way” – not least because his mother died during the shoot and he was unable to attend her funeral. “I’d said goodbye before I left, but I was in Germany when she passed,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I couldn’t go back for the funeral because I would have had to cut like four days of film. And we couldn’t afford it. We were so tight. That was hard.” This was not the only difficulty the production faced. Stone could only meet Snowden – who appears briefly in the film but had no script approval – in Russia. He could not raise money in America for obvious reasons, so financing came from Europe, where most of the shoot took place. Other locations included The Mira Hong Kong hotel, where the real Snowden met Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald (played by Zachary Quinto) and documentary-maker Laura Poitras (played by Melissa Leo). Poitras’ Oscar-winning documentary, Citizenfour, had come out two years before Stone’s film, but was still being edited when Stone began his project, causing him much consternation. According to Poitras in an interview with Vanity Fair, Stone asked her to delay her release so “his would be the real movie. When I told him I would not delay my film, he put his hands around my neck and mock-strangled me while his producer sat watching,” she said. During filming, Stone’s biggest concern was security. “We felt like we were at risk here [in America],” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We didn’t know what the NSA might do, so we ended up in Munich.” To make sure the film was not itself leaked, Stone and ethical hacker Ralph Echemendia kept phone and email chat to a minimum and saved the script on “air-gapped” computers – that is, ones that had never been connected to the internet. Tension on screen From an audience perspective, the effort was surely worth it. Snowden is fascinating – by far Stone’s best film of the 21st century and an interesting counterpoint to Citizenfour. The hotel scenes with Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras and The Guardian’s Ewan MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) are incredibly tense, with every noise in the corridor causing them to freeze in panic. Dynamically shot and edited, the rest of the film whizzes us through Snowden’s career in the army, CIA and NSA, showing a rigorously moral man who simply cannot keep his country’s terrible secrets any longer, even knowing that revealing them will destroy his life. An apt visual symbol is the Rubik’s Cube Snowden keeps playing with – brightly coloured and entertaining on the surface, but fiendishly complicated underneath. Gordon-Levitt is excellent in the title role, capturing Snowden’s flat voice and old-fashioned integrity. Stone told Vanity Fair he cast him because “there’s an interesting blandness to him in the same way that Jimmy Stewart might’ve been considered bland”. The supporting cast is equally strong. As Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s loyal girlfriend who followed him to Russia, Shailene Woodley gives a much more layered performance than her role as audience proxy requires. Rhys Ifans’ fictional CIA deputy director, Corbin O’Brian, makes for a glowering bad guy, spitting out tub-thumping pronouncements to his new charges such as, “Most Americans don’t want freedom, they want security!” Hank Forrester, Nicolas Cage’s similarly fictional token agency good guy, does not have as much impact. But then this is hardly a story about good guys winning. Hauntingly, the film ends with the real Snowden, stranded in Russia, telling the audience he is at peace with his choices. “I think the greatest freedom that I have gained [is] the fact that I don’t have to worry about what happens tomorrow, because I’m happy with what I’ve done today,” he says, creating an oddly upbeat conclusion. But is anything in the world really any better today? As Stone told Noema magazine, “Companies like Google profit enormously from data-mining of your personal searches, behaviour and habits. There is more money in selling that data than in selling a product. It’s surveillance capitalism. It really is a new kind of totalitarianism.” That is why we will always need people like Snowden, Poitras – and, for all his many flaws, Stone – to speak truth to power, wherever it resides. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook.

Why Oliver Stone’s Snowden film remains a terrifying surveillance warning 10 years on

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}We revisit the 2016 film about NSA analyst Edward Snowden, who leaked mass surveillance programmes and was branded a traitor by the US

A fraught production

We revisit the 2016 film about NSA analyst Edward Snowden, who leaked mass surveillance programmes and was branded a traitor by the US