On Sunday, Oliver Stone showed his Snowden film, due out this Christmas, to a group at the Sun Valley Film Festival with a Q&A following. From the Hollywood Reporter:
“We moved (filming) to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S, (Stone said.) “We felt like we were at risk here. We didn’t know what the NSA might do, so we ended up in Munich, which was a beautiful experience….”Despite the director’s involvement in the movie, which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden and Shailene Woodley as Mills, “No studio would support it,” he said. “It was extremely difficult to finance, extremely difficult to cast. We were doing another one of these numbers I had done before, where pre-production is paid for by essentially the producer and myself, where you’re living on a credit card.”
Eventually, financing came through from France and Germany. “The contracts were signed, like eight days before we started,” he noted. “It’s a very strange thing to do [a story about] an American man, and not be able to finance this movie in America. And that’s very disturbing, if you think about its implications on any subject that is not overtly pro-American. They say we have freedom of expression; but thought is financed, and thought is controlled, and the media is controlled. This country is very tight on that, and there’s no criticism allowed at a certain level. You can make movies about civil rights leaders who are dead, but it’s not easy to make one about a current man.”