Oliver Stone is a filmmaker with 3 Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations. His films include Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Scarface, JFK, Nixon, Alexander, W, Snowden, and documentaries where he has interviewed Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Oliver's Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheOliverStone
Chasing the Light (book): https://amzn.to/3ywb3J2
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:54 - Nuclear power
15:52 - Russia and US relations
21:07 - JFK and the Cold War
26:24 - Interviewing Putin
50:02 - Invasion of Ukraine
59:20 - Why Putin invaded Ukraine
1:13:44 - Propaganda
1:21:02 - Interviewing Putin in 2022
1:28:17 - Nuclear war
1:34:28 - Advice on interviewing
1:38:09 - Interviewing Hitler
1:41:30 - Putin interview language barrier
1:42:41 - Love
1:44:36 - Advice to young people
1:47:42 - Mortality
1:48:44 - Regrets
1:50:41 - Meaning of life

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If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now, what kind of things would you talk about here?

The following is a conversation with Oliver Stone.

He's 1 of the greatest filmmakers of all time, with 3 Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations.

His films tell stories of war and power, fearlessly and often controversially, shining a light on the dark parts of American and global history.

His films include Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth 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 steel man their ideas, and to steel 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, we'll lose our ability to see that we're all 1 people in the most fundamental of ways and we'll lose track of the deep truth expressed by the old Solzhenitsyn line that I return to time and time again, that the line between good and evil runs through 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.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Oliver Stone.

You're working on a documentary now about nuclear energy.

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?

First of all, everyone's talking about climate change, right?

So here I wake up to that a few years ago, and clearly we're concerned.

I picked up a book by Josh Goldstein and his co-author who's Swedish, those 2 wrote a book called Bright Future, A Bright Future, It 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 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 could work so far, but the gap is enormous as to how much electricity the world is gonna need in 2050 and beyond.

234 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 address the problem as a global 1, not just as often in the United States you get the ethnocentric United States point of view that we know we're doing well, blah, blah, blah, we're not doing well.

But we sell that to people that we're comfortable, we spend more energy than anybody in 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, They make that point over and over again.

So obviously this country, the United States, is not gonna go in that direction because it just is incapable of having that kind of will, political will.

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 3 and a half hours to about this, something more manageable.

It's 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 scientists there as well as the Department of Energy people that are handling this.

Idaho is 1 of the experimental labs in the United States.

And they're doing a lot of advanced nuclear there.

We also, we studied, well Russia gave us a lot of insight.

We're very cooperative because they have some of the most advanced nuclear, actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor in the world at Beloyarsk at the Ural Mountains.

And in France they have some very advanced nuclear reactors and they're building.

They had a little, the Green Party came into power, 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, In other words, close down some of the nuclear reactors.

There was talk of that, but thank God France did not do that and Macron came in and recently reversed it.

They reversed it and they're building as fast as they can now especially with the Ukraine war going on.

There's an awareness that Russia will not be providing, may not be providing the energy Europe needs.

They have doing tremendous work and fast, which is very hopeful.

But of course China is building in all directions at once.

But basically coal, coal in India, in China, are the biggest users of coal.

And as you know, Germany went back to coal a few years ago.

So all these factors, it's a fascinating picture globally.

So we try to achieve a consensus that where nuclear can work and where it will be working, 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 1 that's not putting it out.

With all the talk and all the nonsense about renewables and the new lifestyle and all this, it's great for your guilt complex, but it doesn't do anything for the total accumulation of carbon dioxide in the world.

Who's gonna lead the way on nuclear, do you think?

You mentioned Russia, France, China, United States.

I don't think it's gonna be a United Nations kind of thing, because the world doesn't seem capable of uniting.

We go to these conferences, Kyoto, and we talk and we agree, but then we don't actually enforce.

I think it's gonna be an individual race with countries.

They're gonna just do it for their own self-interest, like China's 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.

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 lowest, .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 3 Mile Island, and that's what you hear all over and over again, these accidents.

The environmentalists have sold us the idea that they're dangerous.

And it's, a lot of environmentalists, thank God, have changed.

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 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 show 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 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 study that came out and printed in the New York Times because the New York Times publisher, Salsberger, was on their board, he was 1 of the board members.

So they got a lot of strong publicity condemning radiation from which 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 tilted the scale back in the 50s, 60s, and started questioning the nuclear business.

Do you think that was malevolence or incompetence?

I don't think it was conspiracy as much as it was a sense that we don't want this nuclear energy, it's gonna 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.

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.

They just pulled out and they destroyed, destructed several of their nuclear reactors who were still functioning and put up coal or yeah, put up coal and oil, replaced it.

And As a result, Germany drifted into this place next to France.

Their electricity bills went up and France stayed the same.

They have a different system in Europe, but more or less, no question that France was doing a lot better than Germany.

And now, with this Ukraine issue, it's a very interesting fulcrum point, whether Germany is going, what direction they're gonna go now?

What's the connection between oil, coal, nuclear, and war?

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're trying to avoid?

I don't have the energy, the history of energy at my fingertips and it's a very long history here.

It does seem that individually each country can answer its needs by building.

And up until now, we haven't had conflict except in this issue of Russia supplying Europe.

Obviously the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 has been closed and Nord Stream 1 is also probably gonna be phased out.

And the concept of Russia supplying gas to Europe is now up in the air and who knows what's gonna 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.

Methane is, in the short term, is worse than coal.

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.

Will countries go to war over energy 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 it dictated their strategy with Romania, et cetera, and getting the oil fields open.

But I don't really, I haven't thought that 1 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.

You've, 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.

What are the defining characteristics of these cultures?

So I, as I told you, I came from, I'm half Ukrainian, half Russian.

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 when I visited the Soviet Union under the communism.

And Kiev was beautiful, it was 1 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 the 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 3 years in the future when I was there.

So I can't talk about Ukraine, and they're not been friendly to me since, of course, since I made the Putin interviews, Ukraine has banned me, I believe.

They've been very tough on people who are critical.

I think the Russian people have been very special to me.

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.

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 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.

Edgar Hoover mentality that communism was even behind the student protests of the 1960s.

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, he was a colonel, had fallen under the influence.

In order to be successful in American business in the 1950s, you had to have a very strong 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'd be cast aside 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 as the enemy, so hence the narrative behind the Cold War.

And it basically lasted, I mean you saw the ups and downs of it, 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 really saving us from a war that could have affected all of mankind.

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 is a documentary we released 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, which we had adapted since World War II.

You have to think about it from Roosevelt dies in 45.

Roosevelt has an interim of 16, 15 years where 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 has a relationship with Stalin, et cetera, and at Yalta, or no, at Tehran rather, that's where he had the relationship.

Do you think if JFK lived, we would not have a Cold War?

No, absolutely not, 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 don't understand that but you have to look at all his policies in Middle East with Nasser, he had a relationship with Sukarno in Indonesia, with Latin America, he made a big effort with the Alliance for Progress, and when Africa, above all, with Lumumba, he was very shocked at his death and tried to defend the integrity of the Belgian Congo with Dag Hammarskjold of the UN.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out because Dag Hammarskjold was killed and then Kennedy was killed and Congo descended into the chaos of Joseph Mobutu's dictatorship.

But Kennedy was very active in terms of, as an Irishman, not as an Englishman, he was an Irishman.

And 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 still was very strong in America and Europe.

Lyndon Johnson changed back to the old policy and we were never able to really keep Bétanc going with the Russians.

Briefly had it with Carter, but then Brzezinski came in.

Brzezinski was his national security advisor.

He was put there by Rockefeller and Brzezinski was a Pole.

Poland has always been attacking Russia as far as I remember back to another century.

I mean, the 2 world wars that occupied Russia and so tragically, entry points were always through Poland and Ukraine.

So Brzezinski got his revenge and Carter ended up being an enemy of the Soviet Union and creating, as Brzezinski took pride in it, he created the atmosphere, the trap for the Soviets to go into Afghanistan in 79.

That trap was set, he says, he said in 1978.

So there was never except for brief moments, periods of detente with the Soviets.

I didn't really know anything of this going on because I was learning, I was educating myself.

As I was going, learning movies and trying to be a dramatist and this and that.

Then when Reagan came in, I was worried again because it was a beat of the old beat which was there, the most evil empire.

I mean, it goes on in American history, it doesn't end.

And of course, when Gorbachev came in, it was a beautiful moment for the world.

It was probably the best years for America, 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.

There's an internal mechanism, who knows.

You could 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 followed up on that a little bit because I was recently in countries like Kazakhstan, talked about the negotiations that were going on and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

It's a 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 were homes in other countries, such as in Ukraine.

So it's an interesting story, and with repercussions today.

Kazakhstan is a good example of keeping a balance, keeping it neutral.

He played both sides, and because Yeltsin wanted him to join the Russian Confederation in a certain way where he'd be supporting, against Gorbachev.

I think the Ukraine came along with Yeltsin as well as, I'm sorry I don't remember now, but 2 other regions came with him and that was a block that broke up the Soviet Union.

It was Yeltsin's plan to, and it was to make the Russian Federation and they did.

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 2 years, from 2015 to 2017.

What was your goal with that conversation?

At that point, the Snowden affair had happened and I was working on a movie on Snowden.

And 1 thing after another, by 14, Putin was enemy number, again, becoming a wanted man on the American list.

He was enemy, he was certainly in the top 5.

But the animosity towards Putin had been growing since 2007 at Munich.

I remember that speech when he made it, It's in my documentary, it's a 4 hour documentary, 4 different conversations.

I mean, we talked over 2 years, 2 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.

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Oliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #286