Oliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine

00:00:00.000 | If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now,

00:00:04.440 | what kind of things would you talk about here?

00:00:08.460 | What kind of questions would you ask?

00:00:10.360 | The following is a conversation with Oliver Stone.

00:00:15.240 | He's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time

00:00:17.700 | with three Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations.

00:00:21.320 | His films tell stories of war and power,

00:00:24.840 | fearlessly and often controversially shining light

00:00:28.000 | on the dark parts of American and global history.

00:00:31.360 | His films include "Platoon", "Wall Street",

00:00:34.040 | "Born on the Fourth of July", "Scarface",

00:00:36.680 | "JFK", "Nixon", "Alexander", "W", "Snowden"

00:00:41.120 | and documentaries where he has interviewed

00:00:43.720 | some of the most powerful and consequential people

00:00:46.400 | in the world, including Fidel Castro,

00:00:49.000 | Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin.

00:00:52.680 | And in this conversation, Oliver and I mostly focus

00:00:55.520 | our discussion on Vladimir Putin, Russia

00:00:58.320 | and the war in Ukraine.

00:01:00.680 | My goal with these conversations is to understand

00:01:02.920 | the human being before me, to understand not just

00:01:06.040 | what they think, but how they think,

00:01:08.620 | to steel man their ideas and to steel man

00:01:11.240 | the devil's advocate, all in service of understanding,

00:01:14.820 | not derision.

00:01:16.560 | I have done this poorly in the past.

00:01:18.680 | I'm still struggling with this,

00:01:20.520 | but I'm working hard to do better.

00:01:23.840 | I believe the moment we draw lines between good people

00:01:27.160 | and evil people, we'll lose our ability to see

00:01:31.040 | that we're all one people in the most fundamental of ways

00:01:35.080 | and lose track of the deep truth expressed

00:01:37.960 | by the old Solzhenitsyn line that I've returned

00:01:40.900 | to time and time again, that the line between good

00:01:44.400 | and evil runs through the heart of every man.

00:01:47.220 | Oliver Stone has a perspective that he extensively documents

00:01:52.440 | in his powerful controversial series,

00:01:54.640 | The Untold History of the United States,

00:01:57.640 | that imperialism and the military industrial complex

00:02:01.720 | paved the path to absolute power and thus corrupt the minds

00:02:05.460 | of the leaders and institutions that wield it.

00:02:07.780 | From this perspective, the way out of the humanitarian crisis

00:02:12.720 | and human suffering in Ukraine and the way out

00:02:15.800 | from the pull of the beating drums of nuclear war

00:02:18.440 | is not simple to understand, but we must,

00:02:21.840 | because all of humanity hangs in the balance.

00:02:24.580 | I will talk to many people who seek to understand the way out

00:02:28.320 | of this growing catastrophe, including to historians,

00:02:31.680 | to leaders, and perhaps most importantly,

00:02:34.380 | to people on the ground in Ukraine and Russia,

00:02:37.600 | not just about war and suffering, but about life,

00:02:41.080 | friendship, family, love, and hope.

00:02:43.300 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:46.720 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:02:48.920 | in the description, and now, dear friends,

00:02:51.840 | here's Oliver Stone.

00:02:53.520 | You're working on a documentary now about nuclear energy.

00:02:58.660 | - Yes.

00:02:59.500 | - So it's interesting to talk about this.

00:03:01.720 | Energy is such a big part of the world,

00:03:04.520 | about the geopolitics of the world,

00:03:06.400 | about the way the world is.

00:03:08.280 | What do you think is the role of nuclear energy

00:03:10.400 | in the 21st century?

00:03:11.360 | - Good question, and first of all,

00:03:13.080 | everyone's talking about climate change, right?

00:03:14.920 | So here I wake up to that a few years ago,

00:03:17.720 | and clearly we're concerned.

00:03:20.360 | I picked up a book by Josh Goldstein

00:03:25.360 | and his co-author, who's Swedish.

00:03:27.760 | Those two wrote a book called "A Bright Future."

00:03:30.280 | It came out a few years ago, and I lapped it up.

00:03:33.680 | It was a book, fact-based, clear,

00:03:37.980 | not too long, and not too technical,

00:03:40.640 | and it was very clear that they were in favor

00:03:44.040 | of all kinds of renewables, renewable energy, yes.

00:03:49.040 | They hated, made it very clear how dangerous

00:03:52.400 | oil and gas were, methane,

00:03:56.960 | and made it very clear to the layman like me,

00:03:59.840 | and at the same time said that these renewables

00:04:02.900 | could work so far, but the gap is enormous

00:04:06.440 | as to how much electricity the world is gonna need

00:04:10.120 | in 2050 and beyond.

00:04:12.960 | Two, three, four times, we don't even know the damage,

00:04:15.760 | but we have India, we have China, we have Africa,

00:04:17.920 | we have Asia coming onto the scene

00:04:20.560 | wanting more and more electricity.

00:04:22.920 | So they addressed the problem as a global one,

00:04:25.200 | not just as often in the United States,

00:04:27.560 | you get the ethnocentric United States point of view

00:04:31.000 | that we know we're doing well, blah, blah, blah.

00:04:34.200 | We're not doing well, but we sell that

00:04:37.080 | to people that we're comfortable.

00:04:38.440 | We spend more energy than anybody in this country

00:04:41.080 | per capita than anybody, and at the same time,

00:04:45.280 | we don't seem to understand the global picture.

00:04:48.720 | So that's what they did, and they made me very aware.

00:04:50.720 | So the only way to close that gap,

00:04:52.680 | the only way in their mind is nuclear energy,

00:04:55.800 | and talking about a gap of building a huge amount

00:04:58.840 | of reactors over the next 30 years, and starting now.

00:05:03.840 | They make that point over and over again.

00:05:08.600 | So obviously this country, the United States,

00:05:11.880 | is not gonna go in that direction,

00:05:13.280 | because it just is incapable of having that kind of will,

00:05:17.680 | political will, and fear is a huge factor,

00:05:20.560 | and still a lot of shibboleths, a lot of myths

00:05:25.280 | about nuclear energy have confused

00:05:29.560 | and confounded the landscape.

00:05:31.000 | The environmentalists have played a huge role

00:05:33.760 | in doing good things, many good things,

00:05:36.120 | but also confusing and confounding the landscape,

00:05:39.440 | and making accusations against nuclear energy

00:05:41.560 | that were exaggerated.

00:05:43.820 | So taking all these things into consideration,

00:05:48.400 | we set about making this documentary,

00:05:50.120 | which is about finished now, almost finishing.

00:05:53.040 | It's an hour and 40 minutes, and that was a hard part,

00:05:56.120 | getting it down from about three and a half hours

00:05:58.960 | to about this, something more manageable.

00:06:01.200 | - Is it interviews?

00:06:02.760 | - It's interviews among others,

00:06:04.440 | but essentially we went to Russia,

00:06:05.920 | we went to France, which is the most, perhaps,

00:06:08.680 | advanced nuclear country in the world, Russia,

00:06:11.580 | and the United States.

00:06:14.160 | We went to the Idaho Laboratory,

00:06:16.720 | and talked to the scientists there,

00:06:19.840 | as well as the Department of Energy people

00:06:22.640 | that are handling this.

00:06:23.700 | Idaho is one of the experimental labs,

00:06:25.280 | the United States is probably one of the most advanced,

00:06:27.340 | and they're doing a lot of advanced nuclear there.

00:06:29.960 | We also, we studied, well, Russia gave us a lot of insight,

00:06:35.800 | were very cooperative, because they have

00:06:38.520 | some of the most advanced nuclear,

00:06:41.080 | actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor

00:06:43.160 | in the world, at Beloyarsk, at the Ural Mountains.

00:06:46.440 | So we did an investigation there,

00:06:49.720 | and in France they have some very advanced nuclear reactors

00:06:54.720 | and they're building, now they're building again.

00:06:58.360 | They had a little, the Green Party came into power,

00:07:01.600 | not into power, but became a factor in France,

00:07:04.560 | and there was a motion when Hollande was president,

00:07:07.160 | they started to move away from it.

00:07:08.880 | Actually, they were beginning to just abandon,

00:07:12.080 | they let, not complete, in other words,

00:07:17.040 | close down some of the nuclear reactors.

00:07:18.600 | There was talk of that, but thank God, France did not do that

00:07:22.320 | and Macron came in and recently reversed it.

00:07:26.160 | They reversed it and they're building as fast as they can now

00:07:28.840 | especially with the Ukraine war going on.

00:07:32.160 | There's an awareness that Russia will not be providing,

00:07:36.640 | may not be providing the energy Europe needs.

00:07:39.120 | And then China is the other one too.

00:07:42.400 | That's the other factor.

00:07:43.320 | I'm talking about the big boys.

00:07:45.600 | They are doing tremendous work and fast,

00:07:48.720 | which is very hopeful, but of course China

00:07:51.360 | is building in all directions at once.

00:07:53.920 | Coal continues to be huge in China,

00:07:57.080 | and methane too, but China is building

00:08:02.080 | to basically coal, coal in India, in China,

00:08:05.200 | are the biggest users of coal.

00:08:07.040 | And as you know, Germany went back to coal a few years ago.

00:08:13.080 | So all these factors, it's a fascinating picture globally.

00:08:15.960 | So we try to achieve a consensus

00:08:18.480 | that where nuclear can work and where it will be working,

00:08:22.720 | whereas it will be used more and more.

00:08:24.920 | The question is how much carbon dioxide

00:08:27.320 | China and Russia will be putting out.

00:08:30.840 | France is the only one that's not putting it out.

00:08:33.240 | The United States has not changed.

00:08:34.640 | With all the talk and all the nonsense about renewables

00:08:38.600 | and the new lifestyle and all this,

00:08:41.360 | it's great for your guilt complex,

00:08:43.300 | but it doesn't do anything for the total accumulation

00:08:47.200 | of carbon dioxide in the world.

00:08:48.640 | - Who's gonna lead the way on nuclear, do you think?

00:08:51.080 | You mentioned Russia, France, China, United States.

00:08:54.080 | Who's gonna lead?

00:08:54.920 | - Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be

00:08:56.080 | a United Nations kind of thing,

00:08:58.200 | because the world doesn't seem capable of uniting.

00:09:00.480 | We go to these conferences, Kyoto,

00:09:03.880 | and we talk and we agree,

00:09:06.800 | but then we don't actually enforce.

00:09:08.440 | I don't think it can happen that way.

00:09:09.720 | I think it's gonna be an individual race with countries.

00:09:13.120 | They're gonna just do it for their own self-interest,

00:09:16.200 | like China's doing it.

00:09:18.160 | China, the thing is, if it works,

00:09:20.800 | and I'm praying that it will really work on a big scale,

00:09:23.680 | China will back away from coal naturally.

00:09:26.240 | The same thing will be true of India.

00:09:27.960 | They will see the benefits,

00:09:30.140 | because if you go to India,

00:09:31.200 | you see the cities, the pollution.

00:09:33.000 | You walk around in that stuff,

00:09:34.400 | and you get, there's no hope in this,

00:09:38.240 | and you sense it.

00:09:39.080 | So people will move in this direction naturally,

00:09:41.720 | because nuclear is clean energy.

00:09:44.800 | And the amount of casualties of nuclear

00:09:48.580 | is the lowest on the industrial scale

00:09:50.760 | for energy producing, from coal down to oil, everything.

00:09:54.320 | The lowest casualty rate, very lowest,

00:09:57.640 | .002 or something is nuclear.

00:10:00.860 | So not that many people have died from nuclear.

00:10:04.060 | Not that many.

00:10:04.900 | I think 50 people at Chernobyl,

00:10:07.580 | which was the worst accident.

00:10:09.580 | Nobody died at Fukushima.

00:10:12.100 | Nobody died at Three Mile Island,

00:10:13.780 | and that's what you hear all over and over again,

00:10:16.380 | these accidents.

00:10:17.900 | The environmentalists have sold us the idea

00:10:22.420 | that they're dangerous.

00:10:23.660 | And it's, a lot of environmentalists,

00:10:26.940 | thank God, have changed.

00:10:28.320 | They've come off that routine,

00:10:29.640 | and they've saying, we were wrong.

00:10:32.360 | We've done a lot of good work.

00:10:33.960 | Greenpeace did a lot of good work.

00:10:35.440 | Whale, saving this, saving that.

00:10:38.520 | But they admit themselves, not they don't,

00:10:41.440 | but people who have been in the organization

00:10:44.320 | have said, we were wrong.

00:10:46.640 | In 1956, we show the articles in the New York Times

00:10:51.640 | that came out.

00:10:54.100 | The Rockefeller Foundation,

00:10:56.280 | which of course is a big producer of oil,

00:11:00.300 | the Rockefeller family.

00:11:01.660 | And the foundation came out with a study,

00:11:06.660 | which was weighted.

00:11:09.900 | They tipped the scale, put a thumb on the scale.

00:11:13.300 | But it was a scientific expose of radiation

00:11:17.020 | in the study that came out, printed in the New York Times,

00:11:22.180 | because the New York Times publisher, Sulzberger,

00:11:24.660 | was on their board.

00:11:26.060 | He was one of the board members.

00:11:28.040 | So they got a lot of strong publicity

00:11:31.920 | condemning radiation, which started the process

00:11:37.360 | of doubting nuclear energy.

00:11:39.000 | The radiation levels that they pointed out were very minor.

00:11:42.440 | And of course, if you go into a scientific analysis

00:11:45.600 | of this now with what we know, it's just not true.

00:11:49.080 | But it tilted the scale back in the '50s, '60s,

00:11:52.200 | and started the questioning the nuclear business.

00:11:56.440 | - Do you think that was malevolence or incompetence?

00:11:58.920 | - No, I think it was competition.

00:12:01.120 | I don't think it was conspiracy as much as it was a sense

00:12:03.600 | that we don't want this nuclear energy.

00:12:06.160 | It's gonna end the dominance of oil.

00:12:08.800 | Absolutely, and it will.

00:12:10.600 | And it will anyway, because it's the only sane way

00:12:13.080 | for the world to proceed.

00:12:14.480 | But the world will have to learn through adversity.

00:12:20.600 | So in other words, the situation could get worse,

00:12:23.520 | much worse, and certain countries are just gonna have

00:12:26.440 | to adapt like we always do.

00:12:28.240 | When things become too hard, you've got to go,

00:12:30.960 | you have to change your thinking.

00:12:33.400 | - And humans are pretty good at that.

00:12:35.200 | - Yes, talking about human nature,

00:12:36.820 | they're very adept at that.

00:12:39.000 | Germany, for example, I mean, they were,

00:12:41.200 | when the Fukushima happened,

00:12:42.520 | they went out of the nuclear business.

00:12:44.120 | That was shocking to me.

00:12:45.440 | They just pulled out and they destroyed,

00:12:49.320 | destructed several of their nuclear reactors

00:12:51.480 | who were still functioning and put up coal,

00:12:54.960 | or yeah, put up coal and oil, replaced it.

00:12:59.400 | And as a result, Germany drifted into this place

00:13:03.580 | next to France.

00:13:04.760 | Their electricity bills went up and France stayed the same.

00:13:09.500 | They don't have that, they have a different system

00:13:11.240 | in Europe, but more or less, no question that France

00:13:13.760 | was doing a lot better than Germany.

00:13:15.840 | And now, with this Ukraine issue,

00:13:18.880 | it's a very interesting fulcrum point,

00:13:20.840 | whether Germany is, what direction they're gonna go now.

00:13:25.680 | How can they, how can they keep going with coal?

00:13:29.240 | They just can't.

00:13:30.120 | - What's the connection between oil, coal,

00:13:34.060 | nuclear, and war?

00:13:36.640 | Sort of energy and conflict.

00:13:40.200 | When you look at the 21st century,

00:13:43.280 | when you were doing this documentary,

00:13:45.160 | were you thinking of nuclear as a way to power the world,

00:13:48.200 | but is it also to avoid conflict over resources?

00:13:52.480 | Is there some aspect to energy being a source of conflict

00:13:57.120 | that we're trying to avoid?

00:13:58.620 | - I don't have the energy, the history of energy

00:14:06.960 | at my fingertips, and it's a very long history here.

00:14:12.000 | But I would say, apparently not.

00:14:15.480 | It does seem that it's individually,

00:14:17.480 | each country can answer its needs by building.

00:14:21.320 | And up until now, we haven't had conflict,

00:14:24.580 | except in this issue of Russia supplying Europe.

00:14:28.260 | Obviously, the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 has been closed,

00:14:34.880 | and Nord Stream 1 is also probably gonna be phased out.

00:14:38.840 | And the concept of Russia supplying gas to Europe

00:14:43.840 | is now up in the air, and who knows what's gonna happen.

00:14:47.480 | I just don't see how Europe can get away

00:14:50.840 | from using Russian gas.

00:14:53.880 | But Russian gas is not the solution,

00:14:55.460 | because it's methane, too,

00:14:56.840 | and it goes up into the atmosphere.

00:14:58.780 | Methane, in the short term, is worse than coal, worse.

00:15:03.780 | There's all kinds of charts we show in the film.

00:15:06.760 | We try not to be too over-factual,

00:15:09.320 | but methane is not the answer.

00:15:12.940 | It's a short-term answer.

00:15:14.280 | Will countries go to war over energy is a question

00:15:22.040 | that I'm trying to think of all the wars that happened.

00:15:24.800 | You could say Germany, of course, during World War II,

00:15:28.080 | needed oil very badly, and it dictated their strategy

00:15:32.440 | with Romania, et cetera,

00:15:34.160 | and getting the oil fields open.

00:15:36.760 | But I don't really, I haven't thought that one through.

00:15:40.680 | I'd have to make a documentary on it

00:15:42.220 | to really understand how energy and war interface.

00:15:46.800 | - It's always part of the calculation,

00:15:49.160 | but it's a question of how much.

00:15:51.560 | Right, that's the question.

00:15:53.440 | I just have to ask,

00:15:54.440 | 'cause you mentioned your mom was from France.

00:15:56.680 | You've traveled for this documentary,

00:15:58.440 | and you traveled in general throughout the world,

00:16:01.520 | in Russia, Ukraine.

00:16:03.140 | What are the defining characteristics of these cultures?

00:16:07.820 | Let's go with Russia.

00:16:09.480 | So I, as I told you, I came from,

00:16:12.680 | I'm half Ukrainian, half Russian.

00:16:14.520 | I came from that part of the world.

00:16:16.280 | What are some interesting, beautiful aspects

00:16:18.840 | of the culture of Russia and Ukraine?

00:16:21.600 | - I can't really speak honestly of Ukraine.

00:16:23.760 | I was there only in 1983,

00:16:27.360 | when I visited the Soviet Union under the communism.

00:16:30.560 | And Kiev was beautiful,

00:16:32.800 | and it was one of the nicer places I went.

00:16:34.880 | But they were very much stultified by the communist system.

00:16:39.760 | They all were.

00:16:41.240 | The best places to visit in Russia were always in the south,

00:16:43.720 | whether Georgia or the Muslim countries.

00:16:48.720 | It was always a better culture in terms of comfort.

00:16:52.480 | But communism was rough, and that was the end of it,

00:16:55.080 | pretty much, Brezhnev regime.

00:16:57.680 | Then Andropov, Gorbachev was three years in the future

00:17:00.760 | when I was there.

00:17:01.800 | So I can't talk about Ukraine,

00:17:04.160 | and they've not been friendly to me since,

00:17:07.200 | of course, since I made the Putin interviews,

00:17:09.640 | Ukraine has banned me, I believe.

00:17:12.680 | They've been very tough on people who are critical.

00:17:16.160 | I think the Russian people have been very special to me,

00:17:19.120 | perhaps because of my European upbringing,

00:17:22.420 | but I enjoy talking to them.

00:17:23.960 | I find them very open, very generous.

00:17:26.280 | And they appreciate support.

00:17:29.280 | They appreciate people who say,

00:17:31.600 | I understand why your government is doing this

00:17:33.800 | or this or this.

00:17:35.360 | I've tried to stay open-minded and listen to both sides.

00:17:39.080 | The thing that I have seen as an American

00:17:40.960 | is, of course, this American enmity towards Russia

00:17:45.000 | from the very beginning.

00:17:46.480 | I grew up in 1940, '46, I was born.

00:17:49.880 | In the '50s, it was so anti-Russian.

00:17:53.880 | They were everywhere.

00:17:54.700 | They were in our schools, they were in our State Department,

00:17:57.080 | they were spying on us,

00:18:00.240 | they were stealing the country from us.

00:18:02.000 | That was the way the American right wing,

00:18:05.640 | not even the right wing, I'd say the Republican Party,

00:18:08.280 | pictured the Russians.

00:18:09.280 | They were actively engaged in infiltrating America

00:18:13.860 | and changing our thinking.

00:18:15.720 | And television shows were based on this.

00:18:17.840 | It was very much the J. Edgar Hoover mentality

00:18:21.080 | that communism was even behind the student protests

00:18:24.960 | of the 1960s.

00:18:26.560 | This was the direction in which the FBI

00:18:28.640 | and the CIA were thinking.

00:18:30.720 | So I grew up with a prejudice.

00:18:33.680 | And it took me many years.

00:18:35.240 | My father was a Republican and he was a stockbroker

00:18:38.800 | and he was a very intelligent man.

00:18:40.120 | But even he, because he was a World War II soldier,

00:18:43.720 | he was a colonel, had fallen under the influence.

00:18:47.480 | In order to be successful in American business

00:18:50.080 | in the 1950s, you had to have a very strong

00:18:53.400 | anti-Soviet line, very strong.

00:18:56.720 | You wouldn't get ahead.

00:18:58.080 | If you expressed any kind of, let's end this Cold War,

00:19:01.640 | any kind of activity of that nature,

00:19:03.440 | you'd be cast aside as a pinko or somebody who was

00:19:07.040 | not completely on the board with the American way

00:19:11.560 | of doing business, which was capitalism works,

00:19:13.920 | communism doesn't.

00:19:16.320 | - And in particular, communism was embodied

00:19:19.680 | by the Soviet Union as the enemy.

00:19:24.400 | So hence--

00:19:25.800 | - Yeah, that's the way you were--

00:19:28.720 | - The narrative behind the Cold War.

00:19:30.860 | - That's correct.

00:19:32.080 | And it basically lasted.

00:19:34.840 | I mean, you saw the ups and downs of it.

00:19:37.480 | When Reagan came in, I was, well, first of all,

00:19:40.000 | we had the crisis of 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:19:44.160 | And Kennedy proved himself to be a warrior for peace.

00:19:47.520 | He resolved that with Khrushchev.

00:19:49.360 | That was a big moment, huge moment.

00:19:51.320 | And people don't give him credit enough

00:19:53.520 | for really saving us from a war

00:19:56.400 | that could have affected all of mankind.

00:19:59.480 | - But it still didn't avert--

00:20:02.800 | - No, because the moment he was killed,

00:20:04.960 | honestly, there was a lot of, we can talk about that.

00:20:08.440 | And as you know, I've made a film,

00:20:10.160 | JFK Revisited is a documentary we released this year

00:20:14.520 | about the movie I made in 1991.

00:20:18.600 | But the moment he was killed,

00:20:20.440 | I would argue that Lyndon Johnson went back immediately

00:20:24.200 | to the old way of thinking,

00:20:25.600 | the old way of doing business,

00:20:26.760 | which was the Eisenhower-Truman way,

00:20:30.360 | which we had adapted since World War II.

00:20:33.280 | That was an interim.

00:20:34.800 | You have to think about it from Roosevelt dies in '45.

00:20:37.560 | Roosevelt has an interim of 16, 15 years

00:20:41.400 | where he has more of a democratic regime, more liberal.

00:20:46.400 | He establishes, he recognizes the Soviet Union

00:20:49.640 | for the first time since the revolution,

00:20:52.040 | and he actually has a relationship with them.

00:20:54.680 | He sends ambassadors who are friendly,

00:20:56.960 | and he has a relationship with Stalin, et cetera,

00:21:01.480 | and at Yalta, or no, at Tehran, rather,

00:21:05.960 | that's where he had the relationship.

00:21:08.040 | - Do you think if JFK lived, we would not have a Cold War?

00:21:10.880 | - No, absolutely not.

00:21:12.560 | And we go into great depth on that in the film,

00:21:15.600 | and I'd urge you to see it,

00:21:17.040 | because it goes into all the issues around the world.

00:21:19.520 | Kennedy was being very much an anti-imperialist,

00:21:21.960 | it turns out, and many people don't understand that,

00:21:24.920 | but you have to look at all his policies in Middle East,

00:21:28.580 | with Nasser, he had a relationship,

00:21:30.840 | and with Sukarno in Indonesia.

00:21:32.780 | With Latin America, he made a big effort

00:21:35.800 | with the Alliance for Progress,

00:21:37.640 | and when Africa, above all, with Lumumba,

00:21:40.800 | he was very shocked at his death,

00:21:42.760 | and tried to defend the integrity of the Belgian Congo

00:21:47.760 | with Dag Hammarskjöld of the UN.

00:21:51.360 | He made a big effort.

00:21:52.800 | Unfortunately, it didn't work out,

00:21:55.200 | because Dag Hammarskjöld was killed,

00:21:57.240 | and then Kennedy was killed,

00:21:58.800 | and Congo descended into the chaos

00:22:01.380 | of Joseph Mbutu's dictatorship.

00:22:04.520 | But Kennedy was very active in terms of,

00:22:07.000 | as an Irishman, not as an Englishman,

00:22:08.880 | he was an Irishman.

00:22:10.680 | And I say that because, well, we'll come back to that,

00:22:12.840 | because Mr. Joe Biden is an Irishman,

00:22:14.560 | but it's a different kind of an Irishman.

00:22:16.000 | They're both Catholic Irish,

00:22:17.120 | but Kennedy really made an effort

00:22:19.960 | to change the imperialist mindset

00:22:25.300 | that still was very strong in America and Europe.

00:22:29.960 | Lyndon Johnson changed back to the old policy,

00:22:33.120 | and we were never able to really keep

00:22:36.360 | detente going with the Russians.

00:22:37.800 | Briefly had it with Carter,

00:22:40.440 | but then Brzezinski came in.

00:22:42.800 | Brzezinski was his national security advisor.

00:22:45.480 | He was put there by Rockefeller,

00:22:46.960 | and Brzezinski was a Pole.

00:22:48.800 | He got revenge from Poland.

00:22:50.720 | Poland has always been attacking Russia,

00:22:53.080 | as far as I remember, back to another century.

00:22:55.760 | I mean, the two world wars that occupied Russia,

00:22:58.880 | and so, tragically, entry points were always through Poland

00:23:02.880 | and Ukraine.

00:23:03.720 | So Brzezinski got his revenge,

00:23:07.680 | and Carter ended up being an enemy of the Soviet Union,

00:23:11.560 | and creating, as Brzezinski took pride in it,

00:23:15.200 | he created the atmosphere,

00:23:16.360 | the trap for the Soviets to go into Afghanistan in '79.

00:23:20.600 | That trap was set, he says, he said, in 1978.

00:23:24.080 | So there was never, except for brief moments,

00:23:29.280 | periods of detente with the Soviets.

00:23:32.320 | And I grew up under that.

00:23:35.160 | I didn't really know anything of this going on,

00:23:37.760 | 'cause I was learning, I was educating myself.

00:23:40.720 | I was going, learning movies,

00:23:42.160 | and trying to be a dramatist, and this and that.

00:23:45.000 | So I wasn't thinking about this.

00:23:47.240 | Then, when Reagan came in, I was worried again,

00:23:50.440 | because it was the old beat,

00:23:52.480 | which was there, the most evil empire.

00:23:54.840 | I mean, it goes on in American history.

00:23:56.960 | It doesn't end.

00:23:57.800 | Reagan got a lot of points for that.

00:24:00.080 | And of course, when Gorbachev came in,

00:24:04.560 | it was a beautiful moment for the world.

00:24:07.360 | It was a great surprise.

00:24:09.000 | It was probably the best years for America,

00:24:11.480 | at least from my point of view,

00:24:13.040 | in terms of this relaxation in the mood.

00:24:16.280 | 1986 to 1991 were great years in terms of ability

00:24:21.280 | to believe, once again, that there could be a peace dividend.

00:24:27.040 | But the world changed again in 1991, '92.

00:24:30.080 | There's an internal mechanism, who knows.

00:24:31.880 | You could blame the United States,

00:24:35.000 | you could blame Russia for...

00:24:36.680 | Gorbachev was perhaps not the right man

00:24:41.080 | to try to administer that country at that point.

00:24:43.400 | He had great visions.

00:24:45.240 | He was a man of peace.

00:24:47.100 | But it was very difficult to hold together

00:24:48.840 | such a huge empire.

00:24:50.040 | - So vision is not enough to hold together the Soviet Union.

00:24:53.520 | - I think the details are interesting.

00:24:56.360 | I followed up on that a little bit,

00:24:58.000 | 'cause I was recently in countries like Kazakhstan,

00:25:01.480 | talked about the negotiations that were going on

00:25:05.360 | and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

00:25:08.360 | It's a very interesting story,

00:25:09.800 | because it involves everything, Ukraine, of course,

00:25:12.160 | everything that's going on now.

00:25:14.080 | Some, what is it, 30 million Russians were left outside

00:25:16.840 | of the Soviet Union when it collapsed.

00:25:19.300 | They had no home anymore.

00:25:21.120 | They were homes in other countries, such as in Ukraine.

00:25:25.640 | So it's an interesting story, and with repercussions today.

00:25:29.220 | Kazakhstan is a good example of keeping a balance,

00:25:34.520 | keeping it neutral.

00:25:36.120 | He played both sides,

00:25:37.520 | because Yeltsin wanted him to join

00:25:42.200 | the Russian Confederation in a certain way

00:25:46.100 | where he'd be supporting, against Gorbachev.

00:25:49.880 | There's a whole inward battle there.

00:25:53.400 | I think the Ukraine came along with Yeltsin,

00:25:57.800 | as well as, I'm sorry, I don't remember now,

00:26:02.280 | but two other regions came with him,

00:26:04.760 | and that was a block that broke up the Soviet Union.

00:26:09.240 | It was Yeltsin's plan to,

00:26:12.280 | and it was to make the Russian Federation, and they did.

00:26:15.800 | - I would love to return back to JFK eventually,

00:26:19.280 | 'cause he's such a fascinating figure

00:26:20.680 | in the history of human civilization,

00:26:23.640 | but let me ask you, fast forward, in 2000,

00:26:27.040 | Yeltsin was no longer president,

00:26:29.760 | and Vladimir Putin became president.

00:26:32.440 | You did a series of interviews with Vladimir Putin,

00:26:36.600 | as you mentioned, over a period of two years,

00:26:39.080 | from 2015 to 2017.

00:26:41.500 | Let me ask with a high-level question.

00:26:45.720 | What was your goal with that conversation?

00:26:49.700 | - Oh, came out in 2017.

00:26:51.920 | I guess I started 'em in 2014.

00:26:54.260 | At that point, the Snowden affair had happened,

00:26:58.600 | and I was working on a movie on Snowden.

00:27:00.800 | That happened in '13.

00:27:02.120 | Ukraine happened in '14.

00:27:06.400 | And one thing after another.

00:27:10.920 | By '14, Putin was enemy number,

00:27:14.240 | again, becoming a wanted man on the American list.

00:27:17.240 | He was enemy, he was certainly in the top five.

00:27:20.620 | But the animosity towards Putin

00:27:24.740 | had been growing since 2007 at Munich.

00:27:27.860 | I remember that speech when he made it.

00:27:29.900 | It's in my documentary.

00:27:31.020 | It's a four-hour documentary, four different conversations.

00:27:34.020 | I mean, we talked over two years, two and a half years.

00:27:37.700 | But I remember that image of him at Munich

00:27:40.120 | making a very important speech about world harmony,

00:27:45.020 | about the balance necessary in the world.

00:27:47.380 | And I remember the sneer, the sneer on John McCain's face.

00:27:52.220 | He was in Munich, obviously eyeballing Putin and hating him.

00:27:56.580 | And it was so evident that McCain had no belief whatsoever

00:27:59.980 | that he was almost treating him like,

00:28:02.300 | is it a communist or back?

00:28:04.020 | And we know that Putin was not a communist.

00:28:05.860 | We know that Putin is very much a market man.

00:28:08.100 | And he made it very clear

00:28:10.540 | and tried to keep an open climate,

00:28:13.380 | a new relationship with Europe.

00:28:15.020 | But the United States always,

00:28:16.620 | certain people in the United States

00:28:17.700 | always saw that as a threat.

00:28:18.840 | Like Putin is trying to take Europe away from us

00:28:21.620 | as if we own it, as if we have the right to own it.

00:28:24.820 | But Putin was making the point,

00:28:26.060 | it's very important, about sovereignty.

00:28:28.500 | Sovereignty for countries is crucial

00:28:32.700 | for this new world to have balance.

00:28:34.980 | That's sovereignty for China, sovereignty for Russia,

00:28:38.220 | sovereignty for Iran, sovereignty for Venezuela,

00:28:41.900 | sovereignty for Cuba.

00:28:43.260 | This is an idea that's crucial to the new world.

00:28:45.980 | And I think the United States has never accepted that.

00:28:48.700 | Sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow.

00:28:53.480 | You have to be obedient to the United States idea

00:28:58.480 | of so-called democracy and freedom.

00:29:02.260 | But much more important is sovereignty for these countries.

00:29:07.100 | And the United States has not obeyed that,

00:29:08.900 | has not even acknowledged it.

00:29:12.020 | And it never comes up.

00:29:13.580 | - So from the perspective of the United States,

00:29:15.540 | when power centers arise in the world,

00:29:18.380 | you start to oppose those,

00:29:23.460 | not because of the ideas,

00:29:24.740 | but merely because they have power.

00:29:28.420 | - Isn't that at the heart of the doctrine

00:29:30.660 | of the neoconservatives?

00:29:32.780 | In the pact for the new American century,

00:29:34.940 | they wrote that in 1996, '97.

00:29:38.240 | They said there shall be no emergence of a rival power.

00:29:41.700 | It was very clear it was about power.

00:29:43.980 | And they've stuck to that doctrine,

00:29:46.480 | which is if you start to get dangerous in any way

00:29:49.340 | or have power, we're gonna knock you out.

00:29:51.640 | Now that won't work.

00:29:54.740 | I don't believe it can work.

00:29:55.980 | And that is, fortunately,

00:29:57.460 | a policy the United States is following.

00:30:00.140 | And the neoconservatives group, which is very small,

00:30:04.180 | but it's very strong apparently,

00:30:05.660 | and their idea has resonated.

00:30:08.020 | It was behind George Bush's invasion of Iraq.

00:30:12.640 | It was part of not only Iraq,

00:30:14.560 | but cleaning out the whole world,

00:30:16.140 | draining the swamp, going to Afghanistan first.

00:30:19.220 | And then although Iraq had nothing to do

00:30:21.640 | with al-Qaeda's attack, going after Iraq.

00:30:24.860 | And of course, 60-some other countries

00:30:28.100 | that were terrorism had some signs of,

00:30:34.860 | wherever America judged would be a dangerous country,

00:30:38.280 | we had the right, you're either with us or against us.

00:30:41.300 | Now that is a disastrous policy.

00:30:43.540 | And led to one thing after another.

00:30:45.180 | The Iraq War never learned a lesson.

00:30:47.160 | The neoconservatives were never fired,

00:30:50.180 | never thrown out of office.

00:30:51.540 | The people who prosecuted that war are still around.

00:30:55.620 | Many of them are still around.

00:30:57.340 | And they're obviously guiding America now.

00:31:00.260 | - Let me return to this question of power.

00:31:03.540 | Don't forget the sneer that I saw there.

00:31:07.220 | That emblemized the United States reaction.

00:31:09.460 | Also there were several other American representatives

00:31:12.580 | who were laughing, kind of mocking Putin.

00:31:16.180 | It was very serious.

00:31:17.280 | I felt there was a divide there.

00:31:20.100 | So since then, I mean in a certain sense,

00:31:25.080 | the Europe reaction to Putin is crucial.

00:31:27.760 | And they were more with him back then.

00:31:31.060 | And a big thing for America was always to keep NATO,

00:31:34.460 | to keep Europe in its pocket as a satellite.

00:31:37.500 | And with this recent war, of course,

00:31:39.460 | they've succeeded beyond their dreams.

00:31:42.620 | The Russians have fulfilled the fantasy

00:31:44.780 | of the United States to finally be this aggressor

00:31:47.820 | that they have pictured for years.

00:31:50.180 | We can talk about that later.

00:31:51.640 | - But at that time, Europe had significant support

00:31:56.640 | for Putin.

00:31:58.460 | The United States was sneering at Putin.

00:32:01.700 | - That's correct, you can say that.

00:32:03.380 | - And then, so there's this,

00:32:05.300 | there was uncertainty as to the direction,

00:32:12.260 | as to the future of Russia.

00:32:13.420 | And that's exactly when you interviewed Vladimir Putin.

00:32:16.900 | - I wanted to know what they thought

00:32:20.020 | because we couldn't get,

00:32:21.220 | the information war that the United States

00:32:25.340 | was fighting against Russia was in evidence back then.

00:32:28.020 | It was full out.

00:32:29.380 | The condemnation of Russia on all fronts.

00:32:33.500 | I never saw a positive article about Putin.

00:32:36.820 | Although when I traveled in the world,

00:32:38.380 | and I traveled a lot doing documentaries,

00:32:40.700 | it was very clear in the Middle East,

00:32:42.340 | in Africa, in Asia, there was respect for him.

00:32:45.760 | That he was a man who was getting his job done

00:32:48.380 | in the interest of Russia.

00:32:50.100 | He was, as I said in the documentary, a son of Russia.

00:32:53.600 | Very much so, in the positive sense.

00:32:56.260 | A son of Russia, not that he's out there

00:32:59.140 | trying to destroy the interests of other countries.

00:33:04.660 | No, that he was out there to promote the interests of Russia

00:33:09.020 | but at the same time, keep a balance.

00:33:11.060 | Keep the world into a harmony.

00:33:14.160 | This has always been his picture.

00:33:15.980 | Peace was always his idea.

00:33:17.880 | In other words, he always referred to the United States

00:33:19.780 | in all these interviews as our partners.

00:33:22.740 | And I said, "Will you stop using that word?

00:33:24.260 | "They're not."

00:33:25.960 | - Well--

00:33:26.800 | - And he was a little bit slow in waking up

00:33:28.380 | to what the United States was doing.

00:33:31.120 | - Well, that said, he's one of the most powerful men

00:33:34.460 | in the world.

00:33:35.940 | He was at that time.

00:33:37.980 | And let me ask you the human question.

00:33:40.840 | As the old adage goes, power corrupts

00:33:44.460 | and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

00:33:47.260 | Did you see any corroding effects of power on the man?

00:33:52.260 | Forget the political leader.

00:33:54.220 | On just the human being that carries that power

00:33:56.920 | on his shoulders for so many years.

00:33:59.440 | - Keep in mind that he's been,

00:34:01.000 | unlike most modern leaders, he's been in office off and on

00:34:06.240 | because Medvedev was president

00:34:08.880 | and he was not literally in charge.

00:34:12.400 | He took another appointment at that point

00:34:17.080 | but he was still very much involved.

00:34:18.860 | But for 20 years, more or less,

00:34:20.560 | he's been at the administrator of the state,

00:34:24.620 | the protector of the state.

00:34:26.580 | And he's apparently done a good enough job

00:34:29.780 | that the Russian people have kept him there.

00:34:32.060 | Because contrary to what many people think,

00:34:34.000 | I really believe that if the Russian people didn't want him,

00:34:37.460 | he would be out.

00:34:38.340 | I firmly believe that.

00:34:40.260 | I don't think you can go against the will of the people.

00:34:42.700 | Now, it expresses itself in many ways.

00:34:44.900 | At the ballot box and so forth.

00:34:46.520 | But also in other ways in Russia.

00:34:47.980 | There's a strong currents of opinion.

00:34:51.420 | So contrary to what the position of him as a dictator,

00:34:55.580 | he wouldn't last if he was unpopular, number one.

00:34:58.260 | Number two, Russia is much more divided than people know.

00:35:01.820 | There's other factors in Russia.

00:35:03.420 | There are always tensions around the Kremlin,

00:35:07.780 | who has power, who doesn't have power.

00:35:09.900 | That's been going on for 100 years.

00:35:12.620 | But the factions in Russia are very much there.

00:35:17.380 | So when people refer to Russia as Putin, they're mistaken.

00:35:22.100 | And they do this regularly in the New York papers

00:35:25.000 | and all this.

00:35:25.840 | They say, Putin did this, Putin did that.

00:35:27.980 | Putin's doing that.

00:35:29.060 | But it's Russia that's doing it.

00:35:31.060 | And that's what, there's a distinction there that I,

00:35:34.180 | it's changed.

00:35:35.020 | In the old days, I would read about Khrushchev,

00:35:37.740 | but it was never Khrushchev personally.

00:35:40.000 | It was about the Soviet Union.

00:35:41.820 | There was respect for a country.

00:35:45.000 | And when it started to get personal with Putin,

00:35:48.020 | it changed.

00:35:50.300 | And our thinking changed in a negative way.

00:35:53.340 | We no longer respected it as a country.

00:35:56.140 | We were seen as a man.

00:35:57.460 | And the man we had trashed repeatedly,

00:36:00.060 | repeatedly as a poisoner, as a murderer,

00:36:03.220 | none of which has ever been proven,

00:36:04.860 | but which has always been repeated and repeated

00:36:07.060 | to the point at which it becomes like an Orwell mantra.

00:36:10.900 | It becomes like, he is, of course, a bad guy.

00:36:13.700 | - Can I just ask you, as a great filmmaker,

00:36:17.240 | as a human being, what was it like talking

00:36:20.280 | to one of the most powerful men in the world?

00:36:23.040 | - Well, honestly, and I'm not naive,

00:36:25.280 | I've talked to a lot of powerful people.

00:36:27.740 | In the movie business, there are powerful people,

00:36:30.840 | and many of them are corrupted.

00:36:32.600 | I've talked to many people in my life.

00:36:34.120 | I've been in the military.

00:36:35.660 | I've seen, I've had other jobs.

00:36:38.060 | I have to say, I found them to be a human being.

00:36:40.400 | I just found them to be reasonable, calm.

00:36:43.620 | I never saw 'em lose his temper.

00:36:45.980 | And I mean, you have to understand that most people

00:36:48.540 | in the Western way of doing business get emotional.

00:36:53.100 | I don't see that.

00:36:54.220 | I saw him as a balanced man,

00:36:56.700 | as a man who had studied this like you have.

00:36:59.060 | There's a calmness to you that it comes

00:37:01.240 | from studying the world

00:37:02.420 | and having a rational response to it.

00:37:05.340 | It's interesting, his two daughters,

00:37:08.020 | one of them is very scientific,

00:37:09.580 | and the other one's doing very well in another profession.

00:37:12.500 | But they're a thinking family.

00:37:15.380 | His wife, too, was.

00:37:17.020 | I can't talk for the new wife 'cause I don't know about it,

00:37:20.380 | but he kept his family with great respect.

00:37:23.700 | He's raised his daughters right.

00:37:26.220 | He served Yeltsin.

00:37:27.300 | The way he looked at it, he served Yeltsin well.

00:37:29.700 | And he never trashed Yeltsin.

00:37:32.780 | Certainly a lot of people did.

00:37:34.100 | But I asked him repeatedly,

00:37:35.920 | was he an alcoholic, this or that?

00:37:38.580 | But he wouldn't even go that far.

00:37:40.020 | He just respect.

00:37:41.900 | And this man, Yeltsin, was in many ways

00:37:46.900 | ridiculed by the Russians.

00:37:49.420 | He turned over the power

00:37:52.020 | because he felt like he was overwhelmed.

00:37:53.780 | He turned over the power to this man because why?

00:37:56.180 | How many people had he fired before him?

00:37:57.860 | Several.

00:37:58.940 | Several prime ministers, this, that.

00:38:00.460 | Why did he turn power over to Mr. Putin?

00:38:03.260 | Because he respected him for his work ethic

00:38:07.700 | and his balance, his maturity.

00:38:10.860 | And that's what I can say is I saw in him.

00:38:12.980 | Poor person, from a poor family who worked his way up

00:38:18.720 | through the KGB.

00:38:19.820 | Americans keep saying he's a KGB agent.

00:38:21.740 | But it's like saying George Bush was a CIA agent.

00:38:25.960 | But he became a, you grow.

00:38:27.940 | You grow in your life.

00:38:28.840 | And he went from the KGB to this technocratic position.

00:38:33.020 | He dealt with many problems, including the Chechnyan War,

00:38:38.020 | which was a very difficult situation,

00:38:40.500 | as well as the Russian submarine problem.

00:38:43.100 | Several things happened early in his,

00:38:44.980 | that gave him a lot of experience.

00:38:47.900 | And he handled them all pretty well.

00:38:49.980 | - Do you think he was an honest man?

00:38:52.100 | - I do.

00:38:52.940 | Now, of course, the question of money,

00:38:54.900 | the charges that he's the richest man in the world

00:38:57.300 | are ludicrous.

00:38:59.180 | Certainly doesn't live like it or act like it.

00:39:01.360 | If you're rich, I've been around a lot of rich people

00:39:04.340 | in my life.

00:39:05.180 | You'd probably have too in America.

00:39:06.500 | You run into them.

00:39:07.460 | So many of them are arrogant.

00:39:08.700 | - I'm actually good friends now

00:39:11.380 | with the richest man in the world.

00:39:13.140 | - Oh, of course.

00:39:13.960 | I saw your interview with Mr. Musk, who I appreciate.

00:39:18.180 | At least he speaks freely.

00:39:20.020 | I'm positive about him owning Twitter

00:39:23.780 | because Twitter has become censorship city,

00:39:27.100 | as has all the major tech.

00:39:29.100 | I mean, the censorship that we are now seeing

00:39:30.820 | in the United States is so un-American and shocking to me.

00:39:34.620 | - And he is a resistance to that.

00:39:36.620 | That is true.

00:39:37.460 | - Yeah, I like Musk for that, just for that only.

00:39:39.340 | But I also appreciate him, his adventuresome,

00:39:43.380 | his nature and his desire to explore the world

00:39:47.700 | and to ask questions.

00:39:49.060 | - Yeah, there's certain ways you sound

00:39:51.820 | when you speak freely.

00:39:54.080 | There's certain ways you sound,

00:39:56.260 | a man sounds when he speaks freely.

00:39:58.540 | - Yeah.

00:39:59.380 | - He speaks freely.

00:40:00.420 | And it's refreshing.

00:40:01.900 | - Yeah.

00:40:02.740 | - No matter whether you're rich or not,

00:40:04.500 | it doesn't matter.

00:40:05.320 | When you speak freely, it's a beautiful thing.

00:40:07.020 | - Actually, Musk, at a major point,

00:40:10.500 | going back to nuclear energy,

00:40:12.020 | he never believed in it at first, apparently.

00:40:15.580 | He was going for batteries, right?

00:40:17.180 | And he put a lot of money into batteries.

00:40:19.300 | He made bigger and bigger batteries.

00:40:20.700 | But it just, as Bill Gates has said,

00:40:23.300 | it's just, it's not gonna get us there.

00:40:25.340 | - Yeah.

00:40:26.180 | - And now I think Musk is on another path.

00:40:28.220 | He understands the need for nuclear.

00:40:29.900 | - Yeah, he's a supporter of nuclear.

00:40:31.700 | We're jumping around.

00:40:35.060 | - Poon never asked for one thing, never.

00:40:37.940 | It was an interview, it was free form.

00:40:39.940 | Ask anything you want.

00:40:41.580 | No restrictions, no rules.

00:40:43.480 | As with Castro, frankly,

00:40:46.140 | Castro did the same thing as did Chavez.

00:40:47.780 | So I've had good luck in interviewing free-ranging subjects,

00:40:50.660 | people willing to express themselves.

00:40:52.420 | He's much more guarded than Castro or Chavez,

00:40:57.300 | because as you know, he's setting government policy

00:41:00.180 | when he speaks, and anything he says

00:41:01.980 | can be taken out of context.

00:41:04.020 | - But there was no restrictions on what to talk about,

00:41:06.900 | none of that.

00:41:07.740 | - Nor any desire to see anything before we published it.

00:41:10.900 | No need to check it with them.

00:41:13.600 | It was completely--

00:41:17.780 | - Do you think he watched the final product?

00:41:19.980 | - Yes, I do, but I don't think he made judgments on it.

00:41:23.220 | I think he was pleased.

00:41:24.420 | He doesn't go either way.

00:41:26.300 | You see, he's pleased.

00:41:28.460 | I mean, it went well, he's happy for us.

00:41:30.980 | But I don't think he had great enthusiasm,

00:41:33.380 | expressed it to me.

00:41:34.900 | He trusted me, and you could see the way

00:41:36.620 | he dealt with me each time.

00:41:38.140 | He warmed up to me.

00:41:39.360 | Four times, you know, the first time

00:41:41.740 | it might have been a little stiff.

00:41:44.340 | You're asking, you don't know who you're dealing with,

00:41:47.220 | and so forth, I understand that.

00:41:49.580 | But he's used to it now.

00:41:51.060 | He's done a lot of press.

00:41:53.420 | The worst press he's done, frankly,

00:41:55.540 | has been the American press.

00:41:57.340 | And not because of his fault,

00:41:59.220 | but because of the way they have treated him.

00:42:01.420 | If you look at the interviews, they're awful.

00:42:03.880 | They put, first of all, I noticed one thing

00:42:06.100 | as a filmmaker right away, they use a dub, an overdub.

00:42:09.020 | They put a Russian speaker for everything he says,

00:42:11.540 | who's much harsher.

00:42:12.900 | He speaks Russian in a much harsher manner

00:42:15.140 | than actually Putin does.

00:42:16.620 | Who's very, if you, on my interview,

00:42:18.180 | I left him in his original language with translator.

00:42:21.140 | I think that's important, because he expresses himself

00:42:24.260 | very clearly and calmly.

00:42:26.400 | When you listen to the American broadcast,

00:42:29.340 | it's a belligerent person who looks like

00:42:30.940 | he's about to bang his shoe on the table.

00:42:32.980 | And secondly, the questions are highly aggressive

00:42:37.280 | from the beginning.

00:42:38.120 | There's no sense of rapport, there's no sense of,

00:42:41.900 | well, it's why, Mr. Putin, did you poison this person?

00:42:44.660 | Why, Mr. Putin, did you kill this person?

00:42:46.860 | Why are you a murderer?

00:42:47.900 | I mean, it's blunt, blunt negative television.

00:42:52.260 | - Yeah, it's not just aggressive.

00:42:53.960 | So I obviously speak Russian, so I get to appreciate

00:42:58.100 | both the original and the translation.

00:43:00.660 | And it's not just aggressive, it's very shallow.

00:43:04.900 | They're not looking to understand.

00:43:06.880 | To me, aggression is okay, if that's the way

00:43:09.460 | you wanna approach it, but it should be,

00:43:12.220 | there should be underlying kind of empathy

00:43:15.580 | for another human being in order to be able to understand.

00:43:19.140 | And so some of the worst interviews I've ever listened to

00:43:23.460 | is by American Press of Vladimir Putin.

00:43:25.680 | So NBC and all those kinds of organizations,

00:43:29.600 | it's very painful to watch.

00:43:30.960 | - And you saw the reception to the Putin interviews

00:43:34.080 | in America was hostile without seeing it.

00:43:37.380 | So many people criticized my series

00:43:41.440 | without having seen it.

00:43:43.080 | Even, I went on a show, a television show

00:43:45.540 | with this famous Colbert, you know,

00:43:48.040 | he's very famous in America.

00:43:49.720 | And I was shocked on the show to find out

00:43:51.720 | that he hadn't seen anything of the four hours.

00:43:53.880 | He was just attacking Putin.

00:43:56.160 | And through me, I was complicit,

00:43:58.640 | therefore I was a Putin supporter.

00:44:01.480 | And the show was a disaster.

00:44:03.880 | It's one of my worst television shows.

00:44:05.920 | I actually, I had to shut up and get off the air.

00:44:10.640 | I mean, at some point it was embarrassing.

00:44:13.760 | Because the audience too was clapping for Colbert

00:44:16.160 | on anything he said.

00:44:17.320 | - Well, as an interviewer in that situation,

00:44:20.060 | because between you and Vladimir Putin,

00:44:23.240 | there was camaraderie, there was joking,

00:44:26.080 | there was, are you worried,

00:44:30.080 | do you put that into the calculation

00:44:33.960 | when you're making a film with somebody

00:44:37.620 | that could be lying to you, that could be evil?

00:44:41.520 | You talk about Castro, you talk about,

00:44:43.960 | so are you worried about how charisma of a man

00:44:48.760 | across the table from you can delude you?

00:44:51.880 | - No, I take that into account.

00:44:53.600 | I absolutely take that into account.

00:44:54.720 | I know, I mean, doing Castro, he's a wonderful speaker,

00:44:58.800 | he's charismatic, so is Chavez.

00:45:01.320 | Look at those interviews.

00:45:03.040 | I took it into account.

00:45:04.560 | But Putin doesn't play that game.

00:45:06.360 | He doesn't charm you, he doesn't try to overwhelm you

00:45:09.520 | with his bon ami at all.

00:45:13.760 | He just says, "Ask your question,

00:45:15.560 | "I'll give you my answer straight.

00:45:17.240 | "Here it is.

00:45:18.080 | "And he analyzes it.

00:45:19.240 | "This is the history of NATO,

00:45:20.500 | "this is the history of our relationship

00:45:22.100 | "with the United States.

00:45:23.360 | "How many times have we tried to talk to them

00:45:25.900 | "about such and such and such and such,

00:45:27.660 | "and each time we get nowhere."

00:45:29.960 | In fact, it's a very,

00:45:31.380 | I would like to get along with the United States so much,

00:45:35.440 | he's saying it so clearly in all his words.

00:45:38.800 | - So to play devil's advocate.

00:45:40.760 | - But he's not making a big deal about it.

00:45:42.600 | - But there is a charisma and a calmness.

00:45:44.800 | - Yes, there is.

00:45:45.800 | - So like, let's just calm everything down,

00:45:48.680 | it's simple facts.

00:45:50.000 | That, you can call,

00:45:53.080 | so there's like the Hitler thing,

00:45:56.320 | which is screaming, being very loud,

00:45:59.560 | charismatic, strong message and so on.

00:46:02.120 | And then there's a Putin style,

00:46:03.500 | I'm not comparing those two.

00:46:04.600 | There's the Putin style communication of calmness.

00:46:07.880 | And that, at least to me, my personality,

00:46:10.480 | that can be very captivating,

00:46:12.220 | is bringing everything down, the facts are simple.

00:46:15.200 | But then when you say the facts are simple,

00:46:16.860 | you can now start lying.

00:46:18.440 | And you don't know what's true and what's lies.

00:46:21.320 | - It behooves you to do some research.

00:46:23.160 | - Yes.

00:46:24.000 | - And frankly, when it comes to research,

00:46:26.280 | you're gonna have a problem,

00:46:27.100 | because if you go to the Americanized versions

00:46:30.080 | of Russian history, you're gonna run into a problem.

00:46:33.560 | And that includes even Wikipedia.

00:46:35.680 | They will tell you things

00:46:37.160 | that are just not factually supported.

00:46:39.560 | So it was a problem in terms of,

00:46:42.520 | if you read all the books in the American library

00:46:45.040 | about Putin, there's nothing positive about it.

00:46:48.320 | They're awful, they're awful.

00:46:49.840 | And a lot of them, I had a good relationship

00:46:52.680 | with Professor Stephen Cohen,

00:46:54.160 | who's the most, I think,

00:46:55.480 | one of the most informed men on Russia.

00:46:57.320 | He'd done a lot of research, all his life.

00:46:59.960 | And knew Gorbachev very well.

00:47:02.680 | And was very analytical about all these situations

00:47:07.200 | that happened before his death in 2019.

00:47:11.960 | I'm not quite sure when Stephen died,

00:47:13.560 | but I knew him well.

00:47:15.040 | And he gave me the best information I could get.

00:47:20.040 | I would go to Stephen and I'd say,

00:47:22.360 | I'm confused here, tell me the history

00:47:24.200 | of this accusation of poisoning against this person,

00:47:27.080 | and so forth.

00:47:27.920 | And he'd explain it to me in, I think,

00:47:30.160 | very, the clearest ways that I understood.

00:47:32.800 | And he said to me once, he said,

00:47:34.160 | most of these people who go to Russia

00:47:35.760 | and write this stuff about Putin are going off the internet.

00:47:38.560 | The internet has really been a source

00:47:40.640 | of a lot of fractured facts here.

00:47:43.280 | He said, pure analysis.

00:47:44.760 | You have to go back to the texts,

00:47:46.880 | all the documents, and to really fully understand.

00:47:50.440 | But he spoke Russian.

00:47:52.760 | And his wife and him, Katerina Von Huvel,

00:47:59.040 | who's an editor, publisher of The Nation magazine,

00:48:03.440 | would go to Russia several times a year

00:48:06.280 | and talk to their friend Gorbachev.

00:48:08.360 | And Gorbachev's an interesting character.

00:48:10.440 | I talked to him, interviewed him.

00:48:12.440 | Not interviewed him, but talked to him at length.

00:48:14.400 | And I like him very much.

00:48:16.360 | And I saw the divide, as you saw in the Putin interviews,

00:48:19.160 | between Gorbachev and Putin early on in the interviews.

00:48:22.360 | You sense Putin doesn't particularly care for Gorbachev

00:48:25.440 | because he, in his point of view,

00:48:27.000 | he screwed up the administration of Russia

00:48:29.520 | and is responsible for so much of the disaster

00:48:32.400 | of leaving all those people outside the Soviet Union.

00:48:35.000 | So these are problems that continue into the future.

00:48:39.400 | But they see each other, or he knows he's there

00:48:44.400 | at the May Day Parade we filmed.

00:48:48.520 | And his attitude is funny, it's very human.

00:48:52.820 | He says, you know, he's welcome.

00:48:55.480 | He's a pensioner, he's done his duty.

00:48:59.760 | There's no animus towards him.

00:49:04.720 | Even when Gorbachev in the early days,

00:49:07.000 | as you remember, criticized him for his manners

00:49:09.260 | in terms of democracy.

00:49:11.160 | But I don't know that that, you know,

00:49:13.760 | that becomes a quarrel.

00:49:14.800 | But frankly, by the end of the situation,

00:49:18.840 | it's very clear that Gorbachev has now moved

00:49:21.360 | closer and closer to the,

00:49:22.680 | says Russia is now really under attack.

00:49:24.920 | This is, he sees it.

00:49:26.640 | He sees where the United States has made a concerted effort

00:49:30.400 | to undermine Putin.

00:49:31.840 | And he's repeated this several times about Ukraine.

00:49:35.400 | I think you've seen what he said.

00:49:37.280 | You can quote it.

00:49:39.280 | And Gorbachev is, we have no respect for Gorbachev even.

00:49:42.040 | Even at this juncture.

00:49:43.520 | When can you see Gorbachev's ideas printed

00:49:46.480 | in most American newspapers?

00:49:48.200 | Very rarely, very rarely.

00:49:50.200 | And recently not at all.

00:49:52.120 | So Gorbachev, who was our hero back in,

00:49:54.600 | the American hero back in 1980s,

00:49:56.600 | has now been condemned to the garbage can,

00:50:00.580 | so to speak, of history.

00:50:01.780 | - Well, in this complicated geopolitical picture

00:50:05.360 | you just outlined, can we talk about

00:50:08.440 | the recent invasion of Ukraine?

00:50:12.160 | So you wrote on Facebook a pretty eloquent analysis,

00:50:17.160 | I think on March 3rd.

00:50:21.600 | Let me just read a small section of that

00:50:26.080 | just to give context, and maybe we can talk

00:50:28.760 | a little bit more about both Russia and the man, Putin.

00:50:33.160 | You wrote, "Although the United States

00:50:35.280 | "has many wars of aggression on its conscience,

00:50:37.960 | "it doesn't justify Mr. Putin's aggression in Ukraine.

00:50:41.720 | "A dozen wrongs don't make a right.

00:50:44.420 | "Russia was wrong to invade.

00:50:46.400 | "It has made too many mistakes.

00:50:48.500 | "One, underestimating Ukraine resistance.

00:50:51.360 | "Two, overestimating the military ability

00:50:54.040 | "to achieve its objective.

00:50:55.860 | "Three, underestimating Europe's reaction,

00:50:58.400 | "especially Germany, upping its military contribution

00:51:01.680 | "to NATO, which they've resisted for some 20 years.

00:51:04.940 | "Even Switzerland has joined the cause.

00:51:07.540 | "Russia will be more isolated than ever from the West.

00:51:11.500 | "Four, underestimating the enhanced power of NATO,

00:51:15.040 | "which will now put more pressure on Russia's borders.

00:51:17.980 | "Five, probably putting Ukraine into NATO.

00:51:21.940 | "Six, underestimating the damage to its own economy

00:51:25.760 | "and certainly creating more internal resistance in Russia.

00:51:29.300 | "Seven, creating a major readjustment of power

00:51:32.460 | "in its oligarch class.

00:51:34.720 | "Eight, putting cluster and vacuum bombs into play.

00:51:39.720 | "Nine, and underestimating the power

00:51:43.220 | "of social media worldwide."

00:51:45.360 | And you go on for a while giving a much broader picture

00:51:49.700 | of the history and the geopolitics of all of this.

00:51:53.840 | So now, a little bit later,

00:51:58.480 | two months later, what are your thoughts

00:52:01.760 | about the invasion of Ukraine?

00:52:05.140 | - Well, it's very hard to be honest in this regard

00:52:08.640 | because the West has brought down a curtain here.

00:52:13.640 | Anyone who questions the invasion of Ukraine

00:52:18.360 | and its consequences is an enemy of the people,

00:52:23.360 | it's become so difficult.

00:52:26.760 | I've never seen in my lifetime ever

00:52:30.000 | such a wall of propaganda as I've seen in the West.

00:52:35.000 | And that includes France too

00:52:39.880 | because I was there recently and England.

00:52:42.000 | England is of course really vociferous.

00:52:46.400 | It's shocking to me how quickly Europe moved

00:52:50.240 | in this direction and that includes Germany.

00:52:52.480 | I have German friends who expressed to me

00:52:54.360 | their shock over Ukraine.

00:52:56.280 | I have Italian friends, same thing.

00:52:58.120 | And Italy of course has been perhaps

00:52:59.880 | the most understanding and compassionate of countries.

00:53:04.000 | So it's quite evident that there's a united,

00:53:08.020 | and this attests to the power of the United States.

00:53:11.840 | And of course you have Finland,

00:53:13.400 | which has generally been reasonable jumping

00:53:17.200 | and talking about joining NATO and Sweden too.

00:53:20.640 | Generally there's been some more restraint in Europe.

00:53:26.240 | That's what surprised me the most, Europe.

00:53:29.120 | How quickly they fell into this NATO basket,

00:53:32.600 | which is very dangerous for Europe, very dangerous.

00:53:36.280 | This goes back to my idea

00:53:37.880 | what I was saying earlier about sovereignty.

00:53:40.440 | These countries don't really give me a sense

00:53:44.400 | that they have sovereignty over their own countries.

00:53:47.440 | They don't feel--

00:53:48.640 | - The European nations.

00:53:50.000 | - I'm obviously intuition here is working.

00:53:53.080 | I just don't feel that they have freedom

00:53:56.360 | to say what they really think and they're scared to say it.

00:53:59.720 | When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,

00:54:03.480 | I remember with great, in a sense, satisfaction

00:54:07.960 | that at least France, Chirac,

00:54:11.480 | who I had not really known much about,

00:54:13.560 | stood up and said the United States,

00:54:15.160 | we're not gonna join you in this expedition,

00:54:17.240 | basically into madness.

00:54:19.000 | Schroeder in Germany, same thing.

00:54:21.800 | Of course, Putin condemned the invasion

00:54:24.320 | and Putin had been an ally of the United States

00:54:27.280 | since 9/11, if you remember correctly,

00:54:29.640 | and had called Bush and they were getting along.

00:54:32.320 | So even Putin said, I won't go, don't go into Iraq.

00:54:36.080 | This is not the solution.

00:54:38.920 | He didn't oppose Afghanistan, but he opposed Iraq.

00:54:41.900 | So Chirac and Schroeder stood for the old Europe.

00:54:46.240 | I remember de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle,

00:54:49.920 | he was independent of the United States.

00:54:52.440 | Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO

00:54:54.640 | because he saw the dangers of NATO,

00:54:56.680 | which is to say you have to fight an American war

00:54:59.940 | when they say, and they put nuclear weapons

00:55:02.540 | on your territory in England and France

00:55:05.040 | and Italy and Germany, when they do that,

00:55:09.020 | you're hitched to this superpower

00:55:12.080 | and you have no say in what they're gonna do.

00:55:15.000 | If they declare war and they use your territory,

00:55:18.120 | you're gonna be involved in a major conflict.

00:55:20.840 | I'm talking about sovereignty.

00:55:22.080 | Where is that sovereignty?

00:55:23.600 | They don't have it.

00:55:24.960 | And that has influenced their mindset for years now,

00:55:28.720 | since 1940, since, well, de Gaulle was the '60s.

00:55:32.280 | He actually reversed the whole flow

00:55:34.960 | and he was, I think it was Sarkozy

00:55:38.080 | who put France back into NATO.

00:55:40.040 | And now it's Macron, I hope,

00:55:46.140 | because he was talking to Putin,

00:55:47.300 | would at least have an independent viewpoint

00:55:50.400 | that could be helpful here.

00:55:51.800 | But he rolled it up.

00:55:53.860 | He may have told Putin something else,

00:55:55.360 | but within days he had rolled it up

00:55:57.000 | and gone along with the United States position,

00:55:59.560 | which was enforced by the United States in a very fierce way.

00:56:03.140 | The propaganda, as I say,

00:56:04.840 | I don't know how much time you spend in America,

00:56:06.280 | but it was vicious and everything was anti-Russian.

00:56:10.300 | Russia were killing all these people,

00:56:11.920 | were shooting down civilians.

00:56:16.920 | Although there was no proof of it,

00:56:18.820 | there was just, these are the accidents of war,

00:56:20.780 | but all of a sudden it was a campaign of criminality

00:56:23.520 | and they were talking about

00:56:24.680 | bringing Putin into a war crime trial.

00:56:27.680 | Well, why didn't they talk like that

00:56:29.080 | when Iraq was going on and Bush was killing far more people?

00:56:33.500 | Or for that matter, why were they not talking

00:56:35.280 | about the killings in Donbass and Lugansk

00:56:39.440 | during that 2014 to 2022 period?

00:56:44.440 | That is what is, it's a crime.

00:56:47.200 | There were so many people that were killed,

00:56:49.560 | many of them innocent, many of them innocent.

00:56:51.640 | - What would be the way for Vladimir Putin

00:56:54.880 | to stop the killing in Donbass

00:56:59.880 | without the invasion of Ukraine?

00:57:02.160 | - Yeah, that's a very good question

00:57:03.720 | and I've asked that several times

00:57:05.200 | and I don't have the, I have not talked to him

00:57:07.560 | since about two years now.

00:57:09.620 | It's a very good question.

00:57:13.400 | - What's the mistakes, what the human mistakes

00:57:16.580 | and the leadership mistakes made by Vladimir Putin?

00:57:18.280 | - It's a very good question.

00:57:19.120 | You see, what the American press has not said

00:57:21.960 | and the Western press has not said

00:57:23.240 | is that on February 24, was it?

00:57:26.080 | That was on that day when they invaded.

00:57:28.720 | The day before, if you check the logs

00:57:31.300 | of the European organization that was supervising,

00:57:35.800 | was in the field in Ukraine.

00:57:37.880 | These are neutral observers.

00:57:40.000 | They were seeing heavier and heavier artillery fire

00:57:43.360 | going into Donbass from the Ukrainian side.

00:57:48.360 | So they had, apparently Ukraine had 110,000 troops

00:57:55.600 | on the border.

00:57:56.440 | They were about to invade Donbass.

00:57:57.920 | That was the plan.

00:57:59.280 | That's what I think.

00:58:00.800 | Russia, because of the buildup on the border of Donbass

00:58:05.640 | brought 130, they say 130,000 troops

00:58:09.240 | to the area near Donbass, right?

00:58:13.260 | So you have buildup of forces on both sides

00:58:15.880 | but you wouldn't know that from reading the press

00:58:18.260 | in the West.

00:58:19.100 | You'd believe that the Russians suddenly

00:58:21.080 | put all these men into the situation

00:58:24.560 | with the idea of invading Ukraine,

00:58:27.040 | not only Donbass but invading all of Ukraine

00:58:29.520 | and getting rid of the, decapitating the government there

00:58:33.280 | which is all assumption.

00:58:34.820 | We don't know what they would intend it to do.

00:58:36.920 | - But you at the time, is it a lot of people

00:58:40.240 | thought that the, all the talk of the invasion,

00:58:44.800 | Russian invasion of Ukraine is just propaganda.

00:58:48.480 | It's not gonna happen.

00:58:49.320 | It's very unlikely to happen.

00:58:50.560 | - I think many of us thought that the United States

00:58:52.360 | is building this up into an invasion.

00:58:54.840 | In other words, that is the nature of false flag operations

00:58:58.360 | when you create this propaganda.

00:59:00.960 | They are going to invade, they are going to invade

00:59:02.820 | and then when they invaded, the United States

00:59:05.620 | was completely ready and all their allies

00:59:07.500 | were completely ready for the invasion, correct?

00:59:09.820 | So why did Putin do that?

00:59:11.180 | He fell into this, theoretically into this trap

00:59:14.100 | set by the United States.

00:59:16.020 | Here you're telling all your allies across the board

00:59:18.220 | they are going to invade.

00:59:19.880 | But you--

00:59:21.280 | - Why do you think he did it?

00:59:23.420 | So here, is it madness or is it--

00:59:26.140 | - No, no, it's not madness.

00:59:26.980 | - Strategic calculation?

00:59:28.420 | - Perhaps.

00:59:29.500 | This one I cannot answer you faithfully

00:59:31.540 | because first of all, we don't know what he was told.

00:59:34.700 | If he was indeed getting the right intelligence estimates

00:59:38.300 | from what I said earlier in that essay I wrote,

00:59:43.300 | you would think he was not well informed, perhaps,

00:59:47.660 | about the degree of cooperation he would get

00:59:51.620 | from the Ukrainian Russians in Ukraine.

00:59:56.620 | That would be one factor, that he wasn't,

01:00:00.300 | he didn't assess the operation correctly.

01:00:03.380 | Remember this, Mr. Putin has had this cancer

01:00:07.220 | and I think he's licked it, but he's also been isolated

01:00:11.140 | because of COVID.

01:00:12.560 | And some people would argue that the isolation

01:00:15.060 | from normal activity, which he was meeting people

01:00:18.820 | face to face, but all of a sudden he was meeting people

01:00:21.020 | across the table 100 yards away or whatever,

01:00:23.980 | 10 yards away, it was very hard.

01:00:26.420 | Perhaps he lost touch with, contact with people.

01:00:30.220 | - So it's not just power, it's the very simple fact

01:00:33.460 | that you're just distant from humans.

01:00:34.300 | - I'm speculating, I don't know.

01:00:36.540 | I see that and I also, perhaps he thought in his mind

01:00:40.620 | that there would be a faster resolution

01:00:45.060 | that the Ukrainian, because the evidence had been

01:00:48.300 | that the Ukrainian Russians, the Ukrainian army

01:00:52.500 | had folded so many times and that they were only backed up

01:00:56.300 | and they were stiffened by the resistance

01:00:57.840 | of the Nazi oriented Azov battalions.

01:01:02.380 | That was a factor of course.

01:01:04.260 | And that is a big factor for the Russians

01:01:06.100 | because these people are very tough, they rush.

01:01:08.820 | See, what people don't understand is that Ukraine

01:01:11.460 | since 2014 has been a terror state.

01:01:14.460 | They've been run, anytime a Ukrainian has expressed

01:01:18.660 | any understanding of the Russian Ukrainian position,

01:01:25.940 | they've been threatened by the state.

01:01:28.280 | From 2014 to 2022, there's been a set of hideous murders

01:01:32.720 | that people don't even know about in the West.

01:01:34.240 | Journalists, people who speak out, liberals,

01:01:37.920 | people who, I interviewed Viktor Medvedev

01:01:41.000 | who they make out to be some kind of horrible person,

01:01:43.700 | but Medvedev was a very important figure

01:01:46.420 | in the administration of Kushma,

01:01:48.240 | the first Ukrainian prime minister in the 1990s

01:01:52.040 | and he did a great job on the economy.

01:01:54.320 | He was a very thoughtful man.

01:01:55.700 | If you'll see my interview, it's called Ukraine Revealed.

01:01:58.300 | He's very thoughtful about the future of Ukraine.

01:02:00.660 | He doesn't want to go back and join Russia.

01:02:02.700 | He wants it to be an independent country.

01:02:04.900 | Ukraine is independent and he wants it to be

01:02:07.760 | a functioning economic democracy, more or less a democracy

01:02:11.540 | if you can get that, but between,

01:02:13.920 | that exists in a neutral state, a neutral state,

01:02:16.940 | which Ukraine used to be before 2014.

01:02:19.540 | It was neutral from '91 to 2014.

01:02:23.100 | Neutral, very important.

01:02:24.380 | Under Poroshenko, it just immediately went

01:02:28.720 | into an anti-Soviet Cold War position

01:02:31.760 | as an ally of the United States.

01:02:34.120 | And my point was that it was a very dangerous place,

01:02:39.120 | Ukraine, people were being killed,

01:02:44.140 | death squads were out there.

01:02:46.000 | Medvedev, they stripped him of his television stations.

01:02:49.680 | Very suddenly, this is Zelensky, the new president,

01:02:52.480 | said Zelensky was elected on a peace platform.

01:02:55.500 | Remember that.

01:02:56.480 | 70% of the country was for him to make peace with Russia.

01:02:59.820 | He didn't even try to make peace with Russia.

01:03:02.820 | Did he attend any of the Minsk II agreements?

01:03:06.300 | Did he visit, did he pay any attention to Putin?

01:03:09.660 | Did he go to Russia?

01:03:10.500 | No, not at all.

01:03:11.900 | The moment he got into office, I'm convinced

01:03:14.580 | that the militant sector of the right sector parties

01:03:20.580 | of Ukraine let him know that you will not make a deal

01:03:25.580 | with Russia, there'll be no concessions to Russia.

01:03:30.180 | This is very dangerous.

01:03:31.260 | This is where this attitude that's very, very hostile

01:03:34.540 | to Russia has hurt us.

01:03:35.980 | The whole world is being hurt by this.

01:03:37.980 | And no one calls them out.

01:03:40.500 | No one calls them out.

01:03:41.900 | Zelensky backed off from his platform

01:03:45.220 | as running for president.

01:03:46.740 | And as president has been ineffective,

01:03:49.060 | did nothing to promote it.

01:03:50.220 | On the contrary, went the other way

01:03:52.180 | and seemed to support the Ukrainian aggression.

01:03:56.700 | - Well, he found his support in this war.

01:03:59.440 | You've revealed through your work some of the most honest

01:04:02.820 | and dark aspects of war.

01:04:04.860 | Nevertheless, this is a war

01:04:07.940 | and there's a humanitarian crisis.

01:04:10.740 | Millions of people, refugees escaping Ukraine.

01:04:16.020 | What do you think about the human cost of this war

01:04:20.060 | initiated by-- - It's horrible.

01:04:21.900 | - Whoever, just as you write, whatever the context,

01:04:26.140 | whatever NATO, whatever pressure, as you wrote,

01:04:30.620 | Russia was wrong to invade.

01:04:32.860 | - Okay, yeah, let's get back to the original question.

01:04:36.420 | You said, what was he thinking at that time?

01:04:38.300 | We never answered that.

01:04:39.900 | Now, by the way, among those people who are terrorists,

01:04:45.820 | who've been ruined by this war,

01:04:48.460 | you have to include the 2014 to 2022 Ukrainian Russians.

01:04:53.100 | 14,000 were killed, not necessarily by,

01:04:58.100 | some of them by maybe accident, this and that,

01:05:01.080 | but certainly a large number of that

01:05:02.800 | is responsible to the Ukrainian military

01:05:05.740 | and the Nazi related battalions

01:05:09.100 | who have done a good job of death squatting that whole area.

01:05:11.860 | And remember, I did a film about Salvador.

01:05:13.920 | I know a little bit about death squads and how they work.

01:05:15.980 | And I know about paramilitaries,

01:05:17.640 | because in South America, they're all over the place.

01:05:19.900 | America supports, hates Venezuela,

01:05:22.780 | goes on about Venezuela.

01:05:24.380 | Do they tell you anything about Colombia?

01:05:25.820 | It's next door neighbor.

01:05:27.020 | Colombia, for years, has been plagued by paramilitaries

01:05:30.420 | that are right wing.

01:05:31.620 | And the United States has said nothing about them,

01:05:33.380 | except occasionally there's a newspaper report now.

01:05:36.020 | So this support of death squads by the United States

01:05:39.700 | is all over the world.

01:05:40.680 | It's not just in South America and Central America,

01:05:43.620 | where we see plenty of evidence of it.

01:05:46.420 | It's here too.

01:05:47.420 | And this is what's horrible about this whole thing,

01:05:49.540 | this hypocrisy of America,

01:05:51.940 | that they can support such evil, such evil.

01:05:54.940 | Now, going back to your larger question about,

01:05:58.640 | yes, it's a terrible refugee disaster.

01:06:01.980 | But again, we'd have to get the numbers.

01:06:03.860 | Let's get the numbers and get the evidence,

01:06:05.500 | because I would ask you, I'm not sure at this point,

01:06:09.060 | whether more civilians were killed before 2022 in Donbass

01:06:13.460 | than have been killed in this latest--

01:06:15.900 | - So we can't talk about this without,

01:06:17.900 | we can't talk about the invasion of Ukraine

01:06:19.860 | without considering the full war

01:06:21.380 | between Russia and Ukraine since 2014.

01:06:24.500 | - That's correct, absolutely.

01:06:26.540 | And take the toll on both sides,

01:06:29.540 | and you might be surprised by the result.

01:06:31.880 | I think the Russian military, of course, I'm not there,

01:06:35.460 | and I'm not, this is speculation.

01:06:37.540 | The Russian military has slowed down,

01:06:39.240 | and part of that reason is not to keep

01:06:41.660 | the civilian corridors open.

01:06:43.100 | And I think the Ukrainian military

01:06:45.180 | has made it more difficult on purpose,

01:06:47.700 | especially some of these battalions

01:06:49.260 | that are death squad battalions have gone out of their way

01:06:51.980 | to keep the civilians locked into these cities in danger,

01:06:55.720 | because it's in their interest to do so.

01:06:58.420 | So there's no reason why Ukrainian military,

01:07:01.680 | who have killed Ukrainian civilians for years,

01:07:04.340 | would change their policies.

01:07:06.180 | They would have no compunctions about wiping out,

01:07:08.620 | for example, people with white armbands in Bukha.

01:07:12.660 | - Okay, as to what Putin was thinking at the time,

01:07:16.160 | I wondered this, and I still do, I said,

01:07:19.260 | okay, so Putin can say,

01:07:20.980 | let's say the Ukrainian government

01:07:24.920 | wants to now invade Donbass.

01:07:27.740 | This is on February 23, and they have artillery

01:07:30.620 | that pepper in the whole place.

01:07:32.020 | They're gonna go in, and they're gonna get Donbass back.

01:07:35.580 | What do you do?

01:07:36.900 | And you have Russian separatists,

01:07:39.700 | who are Russian-Ukrainians, who are gonna fight.

01:07:44.420 | How far do you go in supporting them?

01:07:49.200 | Can Russia at this point say, well, we can't help you?

01:07:51.620 | You have to get along.

01:07:52.600 | You have to somehow, you have to be absorbed by the Kiev.

01:07:56.980 | You're gonna be absorbed by them,

01:07:58.140 | and they're not gonna give you autonomy,

01:08:00.940 | and you have to live with them,

01:08:02.700 | and there's gonna be a price to pay.

01:08:04.460 | You could do that, and you could also say,

01:08:05.860 | well, we open our borders to Donbass.

01:08:08.140 | You can come into our country, you can leave,

01:08:10.420 | and we will help you to resettle,

01:08:13.740 | and that would be a reasonable approach.

01:08:16.400 | So you take it to the next stage, as Putin's thinking.

01:08:18.700 | You take it to the next stage.

01:08:20.700 | You stall.

01:08:22.140 | It's harder for your people.

01:08:23.700 | Of course, there's pressure on Putin

01:08:25.080 | from inside his own government to say,

01:08:27.820 | what are you gonna do?

01:08:28.660 | I mean, you can't do this.

01:08:29.900 | There's a lot of nationalists in Russia.

01:08:31.660 | They would certainly bring, it would be to his,

01:08:34.540 | they'd say Putin is weak, and that's the biggest rap

01:08:37.380 | you can ever give a Russian leader,

01:08:39.100 | is you're weak, you can't get anything done.

01:08:41.280 | So there would have been some damage,

01:08:42.820 | but let's say he goes with that, and he says,

01:08:44.900 | okay, we know what the United States intention is.

01:08:47.900 | It's to get rid of me, regime change,

01:08:51.660 | and to get another Yeltsin in.

01:08:53.300 | That's what they want, and they will go to any ends.

01:08:55.920 | They will destroy Ukraine, if necessary,

01:08:58.220 | but they want regime change in Russia,

01:09:00.500 | and then after they do that, of course,

01:09:02.740 | they'll go after China, but that's the ultimate policy

01:09:05.500 | of the United States.

01:09:06.340 | This is a country that has no compunctions

01:09:09.580 | about going all the way, and it will use hypocrisy

01:09:12.780 | in all the news propaganda in the world

01:09:15.140 | to get what it wants.

01:09:16.400 | This is the equivalent, frankly,

01:09:17.780 | of Germany's goals in World War II, world domination.

01:09:22.780 | There's no question, in my mind,

01:09:25.300 | but we're going about it in our way,

01:09:27.540 | as opposed to Hitler's way.

01:09:29.740 | So just to finish your thought, where do they go?

01:09:33.060 | What's stage two?

01:09:33.900 | Okay, let's say they take, Ukraine takes back Donbass.

01:09:37.660 | Let's say people get killed in large quantities.

01:09:41.300 | So we now to the next stage.

01:09:42.780 | We're finished with the Minsk II agreements

01:09:45.180 | that we never adhered to.

01:09:46.620 | So what does Russia do?

01:09:47.460 | They wait for the next aggression,

01:09:49.660 | which is gonna come in one form or another,

01:09:52.740 | perhaps in Georgia, I don't know what the US is thinking,

01:09:56.500 | but the US cannot say Russia has done anything.

01:10:02.100 | They have not used violence to stop Donbass

01:10:05.180 | from belonging back to Ukraine, right?

01:10:07.940 | So you're in a new setup now.

01:10:10.100 | It's a whole thing rearranges.

01:10:12.260 | Now you have, but you still have nuclear weapons.

01:10:15.580 | You still have Russian nuclear weapons,

01:10:17.820 | and they're serious weapons.

01:10:19.540 | They're very well-developed, crude,

01:10:21.560 | but not as refined as the American nuclear force,

01:10:24.320 | but powerful.

01:10:26.700 | That becomes another game.

01:10:27.980 | Then you open another chess board,

01:10:29.580 | and you still haven't been condemned.

01:10:31.700 | The sanctions haven't been imposed.

01:10:33.380 | That's a new, it's a new game.

01:10:35.460 | Could he have done, could he have lived with that?

01:10:36.860 | That's the question I ask myself.

01:10:39.140 | - So you see ultimately Ukraine today

01:10:41.960 | as a battleground for the proxy war

01:10:43.960 | between Russia and the United States?

01:10:45.620 | - The United States would have then NATO-ized Ukraine,

01:10:49.140 | or certainly put more weapons in.

01:10:51.140 | You know, the United States has already done a lot

01:10:52.880 | in Ukraine with intelligence, with training advisors.

01:10:57.760 | The intelligence aspect of the Ukrainian army

01:11:00.740 | has been raised enormously

01:11:02.380 | by the United States contribution.

01:11:04.100 | - Is it possible for you to steal man,

01:11:05.880 | to play devil's advocate against yourself,

01:11:07.980 | and say that Vladimir Zelensky

01:11:11.900 | is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation,

01:11:14.900 | and in a way against Russia,

01:11:17.180 | but also against the United States,

01:11:19.060 | it just happens that for now,

01:11:20.780 | the United States is a useful ally.

01:11:23.940 | But ultimately, the man, the leader,

01:11:27.100 | is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation.

01:11:29.580 | - I would think he thinks so, yes.

01:11:31.580 | And he could say that, but he's not acknowledging

01:11:34.500 | that the sovereignty of his nation was stolen in 2014

01:11:38.260 | with a coup d'etat that brought this right sector into power

01:11:43.260 | and they have controlled the country since then.

01:11:47.180 | It's thuggery what they've done.

01:11:49.100 | The Medvedev case is a case in point.

01:11:52.060 | They just take what they need.

01:11:53.800 | They go to a house and they have,

01:11:55.860 | how many people have been killed?

01:11:57.380 | Serious people, journalists killed by these battalions.

01:12:02.380 | That's what people don't realize.

01:12:04.540 | In other words, you can't speak out.

01:12:06.140 | A person like me would have been on the death list

01:12:08.380 | on day five.

01:12:10.020 | There's no opposition to Zelensky.

01:12:13.460 | So he doesn't have a real sovereignty.

01:12:15.980 | It was a stolen sovereignty.

01:12:17.820 | - Do you think President Zelensky

01:12:20.420 | would accept an interview with you today?

01:12:24.180 | - Actually, since I made Ukraine on Fire documentary,

01:12:28.580 | which perhaps you've seen,

01:12:29.940 | which records the incidents of 2014

01:12:34.940 | and the Maidan demonstrations

01:12:37.820 | and shows you the dishonesty behind it.

01:12:40.620 | No, I think that they've been very negative

01:12:42.980 | and they would kill me if I was in Ukraine.

01:12:46.300 | I mean, they don't have any, these people are very tough.

01:12:50.380 | These are as rough as they come, in my opinion.

01:12:52.740 | And I've seen rough in my life.

01:12:54.080 | I mean, these guys are not playing with fair at all.

01:12:56.980 | These are death squads.

01:12:59.340 | No, I don't think,

01:13:00.220 | and Zelensky would have nothing to do with it,

01:13:01.780 | but of course it would be dangerous for me.

01:13:04.420 | And they've been very hostile in their policies.

01:13:07.900 | Any Ukrainians abroad are also threatened.

01:13:11.300 | In other words, you could be in Paris,

01:13:12.820 | but if you speak out too much,

01:13:16.060 | I think Ukrainians know that they're gonna be targeted.

01:13:18.820 | And I think that's part of the reason they don't talk.

01:13:21.660 | A lot of them, you have to take the anti-Russian line,

01:13:24.800 | but I think a lot of them are divided.

01:13:26.480 | - So you think you would be killed

01:13:29.120 | and Zelensky wouldn't even know about it?

01:13:31.000 | So there is--

01:13:31.920 | - Well, I don't think, if I was killed, certainly abroad,

01:13:34.800 | no, they wouldn't kill me abroad.

01:13:35.880 | I think they'd figure out a way.

01:13:37.600 | - No, no, no, no, if you travel to Ukraine, I mean.

01:13:40.320 | - I wouldn't get in, I wouldn't get in.

01:13:42.600 | Except through Donbass, I'd come through.

01:13:44.520 | There are some Americans in Donbass

01:13:46.120 | who are reporting on the war there.

01:13:48.040 | And I read their reports, actually.

01:13:49.600 | They're pretty interesting

01:13:50.820 | because they show you the cruelty of what's going on,

01:13:53.180 | but never mentioned in the West, never.

01:13:55.460 | That's what's so strange about this.

01:13:58.220 | This is a modern world that we're living in,

01:13:59.980 | and yet this information is not coming out

01:14:02.020 | to the mass of the people.

01:14:03.500 | And on the contrary, the United States has closed down

01:14:06.700 | all the RT, all the information centers

01:14:11.700 | that are possible alternative news

01:14:13.540 | getting to the American people.

01:14:15.100 | They've seriously made an effort,

01:14:16.460 | and the BBC, English, and France.

01:14:20.080 | I was shocked when France closed RT down

01:14:22.460 | because RT is actually pretty good.

01:14:24.460 | Yes, they may, it's called, there are distortions,

01:14:27.240 | but you know as well as I do because you speak

01:14:30.380 | that RT has done a very brave job

01:14:33.280 | of putting correspondents into the field

01:14:35.360 | in very dangerous positions,

01:14:36.660 | and they've gotten great footage

01:14:38.660 | of some of the violence that's going on.

01:14:40.800 | - Well, given the wall of propaganda in the West,

01:14:43.760 | I also see the wall of propaganda in Russia,

01:14:47.420 | the wall of propaganda in China,

01:14:49.420 | the wall of propaganda in India.

01:14:51.940 | What do we do with these walls of propaganda?

01:14:54.260 | I talked to-- - Yes, let's talk about Russia

01:14:55.500 | 'cause you would know more about it,

01:14:57.360 | but my last experience there, newspapers,

01:15:00.780 | it was more interesting, put it this way.

01:15:03.440 | When I went to Venezuela, the United States was saying

01:15:06.580 | back then that Chavez controlled the press.

01:15:09.340 | I get to Venezuela, and there's nothing

01:15:11.020 | but criticism of Chavez in the press.

01:15:12.980 | It was owned by the oligarchs of Venezuela

01:15:16.360 | and who hated him, so it was across the board.

01:15:18.680 | That's why Chavez opened the state television,

01:15:22.580 | spent more money on it, and advertised his point of view

01:15:26.200 | through state television.

01:15:27.660 | But in Russia, what I saw was criticism.

01:15:32.220 | I met with a publisher who got the Nobel Prize

01:15:34.520 | of that famous newspaper, and his point of view

01:15:38.140 | at that time when I spoke to him a few years ago

01:15:40.340 | was we're operating, there is criticism of him,

01:15:44.360 | but you can't call for the overthrow of the government,

01:15:48.100 | nor in Venezuela, nor in the United States for that matter.

01:15:50.700 | If you call for the overthrow of the government

01:15:53.020 | of the United States, you're gonna be in deep trouble.

01:15:55.540 | - Well, all right, so to push back on that,

01:15:57.860 | it's interesting, it's so interesting

01:15:59.620 | because we mentioned Elon Musk,

01:16:02.540 | and there's a way that people sound when they speak freely.

01:16:06.460 | When I speak to, I have family in Ukraine,

01:16:09.580 | I have family in Russia.

01:16:11.020 | When I speak to people in Russia,

01:16:12.820 | let's put my family aside, when I speak to people in Russia,

01:16:16.940 | I think there's fear.

01:16:20.220 | I think they don't,

01:16:23.460 | sometimes when you call for the overthrow of government,

01:16:28.380 | that's important, not because you necessarily believe

01:16:30.860 | for the overthrow of the government,

01:16:32.720 | but you just need to test, test the power centers

01:16:36.820 | and make sure they're responsive to the people.

01:16:41.060 | And I feel like there's a mix of fear and apathy.

01:16:45.220 | That has a different texture than it does

01:16:50.220 | in the United States.

01:16:52.460 | That worries me because I would like to see

01:16:58.620 | the flourishing of a people in all places.

01:17:01.540 | - Well, as I said, my impression was that there's far more

01:17:05.460 | freedom in the press than was pictured by the West.

01:17:08.980 | And that means different points of view

01:17:10.860 | 'cause the Russians are always arguing with themselves.

01:17:12.660 | I've never seen a country that's so contentious.

01:17:14.660 | (laughing)

01:17:15.620 | There's more intellectuals in Moscow and the cities

01:17:19.700 | than you can believe.

01:17:20.620 | And you know the Russian people there.

01:17:23.420 | They've been fighting government for years,

01:17:25.600 | back from the 1870s, czarist times.

01:17:27.660 | They're always plotting against the government.

01:17:30.260 | And the intelligentsia is known through history

01:17:32.900 | as being contentious and anti-government in many ways.

01:17:37.140 | And we see the same thing,

01:17:39.180 | educated people turning against Russia.

01:17:40.860 | I don't appreciate those people

01:17:41.980 | because I think they're very spoiled

01:17:43.900 | and they don't understand some of the stuff

01:17:45.280 | that's going on in the West.

01:17:46.620 | But we have a lot of Russians in Europe and America

01:17:51.100 | that attack Russia and sometimes don't understand

01:17:55.060 | that they are under pressure from the United States

01:17:57.220 | and they don't understand the size of the pressure.

01:17:59.940 | And that's why Putin connects with the people

01:18:02.480 | because he represents more the common man

01:18:07.480 | who's saying to you, your interests are threatened.

01:18:10.620 | Russia is threatened.

01:18:11.980 | We are representing only the interests of Russia.

01:18:14.740 | We're not an empire, we're not gonna expand.

01:18:17.220 | He has no empire intentions,

01:18:18.980 | although the West pangs it as empire.

01:18:20.940 | I see no evidence of it.

01:18:24.180 | Why didn't he do something in all these years?

01:18:26.020 | Nothing, he did nothing except defend the country

01:18:29.140 | in Georgia and in Chechnya.

01:18:30.940 | - So the imperialist imperative

01:18:32.500 | is coming more from the West.

01:18:34.340 | - The imperialist, it's the imperialist agenda.

01:18:37.420 | Going back to, I'm sorry, where we left our discussion off,

01:18:40.580 | I mean, I was gonna go on with America

01:18:42.780 | not only being censored, has closed down now,

01:18:47.020 | closed down, and you say it's not fear.

01:18:49.060 | Well, it is fear.

01:18:50.140 | I am scared because if you get your Facebook page suspended

01:18:54.580 | or your Twitter account thrown off,

01:18:58.220 | a lot of good people are getting their thrown off.

01:19:02.060 | You can't speak out, it affects your business.

01:19:04.500 | It goes back to the 1950s, my father's world,

01:19:07.700 | when you could not express any sympathy for a Soviet Union

01:19:12.660 | without endangering your job,

01:19:14.260 | without basically being not trusted.

01:19:16.420 | You had to be part of the program to get along, to go along.

01:19:20.740 | Same thing when United Kingdom,

01:19:22.700 | I mean, for all their talk, this Boris Johnson is an idiot,

01:19:26.340 | but all their talk about,

01:19:27.820 | do you remember their policies with the IRA in Ireland

01:19:30.620 | when Ireland was threatening them?

01:19:32.320 | They cut off the IRA completely.

01:19:34.180 | Jerry Adams, who was a wonderful guy, I met him,

01:19:37.860 | was not allowed to even be heard in Britain

01:19:40.300 | during certain years.

01:19:41.220 | In France, all constantly through the Algerian War,

01:19:44.620 | the Algerians were not allowed to be heard.

01:19:46.660 | The Algerian War for Independence divided France greatly.

01:19:51.060 | You could not even show "Paths of Glory,"

01:19:52.820 | a World War I film in France for, I don't know,

01:19:56.100 | 20 years after it came out.

01:19:57.900 | Censorship is a way of life

01:20:00.380 | when democracies also feel threatened.

01:20:02.940 | They are much more fragile than they pretend to be.

01:20:05.300 | A healthy democracy would take all the criticism

01:20:07.500 | in the world and shrug it off and say,

01:20:09.260 | "Okay, that's what's good about our country.

01:20:11.300 | "Well, I'd like to see that in America."

01:20:13.380 | There are times that it's been like that,

01:20:15.300 | but it's so scary now.

01:20:17.900 | So it is scary, that's what I was trying to say.

01:20:20.060 | It's not unscary to me.

01:20:21.980 | In China, I would say to you,

01:20:24.780 | yes, it's much scarier to me

01:20:26.300 | because there is the internet wall that they cut off,

01:20:30.280 | and I got into problems in China too

01:20:32.660 | because I said something years ago

01:20:34.700 | about you have to discover your own history.

01:20:37.100 | You have to be honest about Mao.

01:20:38.500 | You have to go back and let's make a movie about Mao.

01:20:42.060 | That upset them and show his negatives.

01:20:45.740 | So China has been much more sensitive than Russia

01:20:49.340 | about criticism, much more,

01:20:51.460 | and it is a source of problems,

01:20:53.360 | but on the other hand, China has a lot of grievances,

01:20:56.700 | a lot of going back to the 19th century

01:20:58.700 | and the British imperialism of that era

01:21:01.020 | and the American imperialism.

01:21:02.620 | - If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now,

01:21:07.620 | what kind of things would you talk about here?

01:21:11.580 | What kind of questions would you ask?

01:21:13.480 | - Well, one thing I would certainly ask

01:21:19.260 | is what you were thinking on February 23,

01:21:21.900 | and I would ask him to reply to my question

01:21:24.300 | about what if you took this to phase two?

01:21:26.580 | You surrendered in Donbass.

01:21:28.860 | You had no ego about it.

01:21:30.540 | You just surrendered.

01:21:31.380 | It's in your interest to your country,

01:21:33.100 | and you invited all the refugees from Donbass into Russia

01:21:36.740 | as much as they can.

01:21:37.980 | What would you do now?

01:21:40.460 | What's the US next move in your opinion?

01:21:43.780 | How are you gonna, okay, where are we gonna go?

01:21:46.460 | That would be the key question because it's,

01:21:48.920 | but he didn't go that way.

01:21:51.020 | He chose to take the sanctions and to go this way.

01:21:56.020 | Why he did that is a key question for our time,

01:22:00.480 | perhaps it was a mistake, perhaps it was his judgment,

01:22:03.260 | perhaps, as I said, but I don't,

01:22:05.340 | knowing the man I did, I don't think so.

01:22:07.300 | I think it was calculated.

01:22:09.420 | - Now, this is projection and speculation,

01:22:12.380 | but there is something different about him

01:22:14.620 | in the past several months.

01:22:16.800 | It could be the COVID thing,

01:22:17.980 | the isolation that you mentioned.

01:22:20.180 | I listened to a lot of interviews and speeches in Russian,

01:22:23.940 | and there's something about power over time

01:22:28.120 | that can change you, that can isolate you.

01:22:30.620 | - Well, when I was there, no, he'd been in office

01:22:33.060 | for already 15 years.

01:22:35.820 | He had power.

01:22:37.140 | He didn't misuse it in my opinion.

01:22:38.700 | He was very even.

01:22:39.520 | I saw him go on television and talk to his fellows

01:22:42.220 | the same way he always talked to them.

01:22:44.180 | He grew with it.

01:22:45.220 | He grew in intelligence, in knowledge

01:22:47.700 | because he had dealings with the whole world now.

01:22:50.900 | People had come to him.

01:22:52.260 | He was very well known in Africa and Middle East,

01:22:55.620 | certainly Syria.

01:22:57.280 | And I just never saw misuse of his power.

01:23:01.820 | I saw humility in him actually.

01:23:03.940 | - So perhaps there was a calculation

01:23:07.180 | and he calculated wrong in terms of what happens

01:23:10.460 | if he doesn't invade.

01:23:12.620 | Perhaps there was a calculation.

01:23:14.060 | Perhaps he had a calm and clear mind,

01:23:16.860 | and he calculated wrong.

01:23:18.340 | - Well, he also made the point that he,

01:23:20.340 | the talk of Zelensky saying nuclear weapons

01:23:23.780 | were gonna come into Ukraine.

01:23:25.140 | There was talk about that right before the invasion too.

01:23:28.240 | And certainly that would have set off alarms.

01:23:30.960 | You know, the United States is already kind of doing that

01:23:34.000 | by not only putting its intelligence

01:23:36.460 | and its heavy weaponry into Ukraine,

01:23:39.680 | but you've got to deal with the question,

01:23:41.300 | the next question that comes up,

01:23:42.480 | the most immediate question is,

01:23:44.600 | is the United States gonna start,

01:23:47.680 | and I'm saying this is good.

01:23:49.640 | They're making a lot of noise,

01:23:51.760 | the United States press about Russia using nuclear weapons

01:23:54.820 | and chemical weapons.

01:23:56.360 | That's a lot of noise.

01:23:58.480 | Again, going back to my analogy,

01:24:00.560 | when the United States starts that,

01:24:02.120 | it starts the conversation going.

01:24:04.280 | It's in the interest of the United States

01:24:06.280 | for Russia to be pinned with any kind of

01:24:10.960 | chemical or nuclear incident.

01:24:16.560 | For example, it'd be very, not simple,

01:24:19.560 | but it would be possible to explode a nuclear device

01:24:23.400 | in Donbass and kill thousands of people.

01:24:26.600 | And we would not know right away who did it,

01:24:29.740 | but of course the blame would go right to Russia.

01:24:32.380 | Right to Russia, even if it didn't make sense,

01:24:34.480 | if there was no motivation for it.

01:24:36.320 | It would just be blamed on Russia.

01:24:38.340 | The United States might well be the one

01:24:40.160 | who does that false flag operation.

01:24:42.540 | It would not be beyond them.

01:24:44.580 | It would be a very dramatic solution

01:24:48.260 | to sealing this war off as a major victory

01:24:50.700 | for the United States.

01:24:51.540 | - That's terrifying.

01:24:52.700 | - No, but it can happen.

01:24:53.760 | It can happen.

01:24:54.600 | One kiloton device, low yield.

01:24:57.300 | It's possible.

01:24:59.220 | - So when you walk across that line,

01:25:01.860 | you can potentially never walk back.

01:25:05.020 | - Well, I think the United States is calculating

01:25:07.540 | that it's a dangerous, yes, I agree.

01:25:10.500 | But I think the neoconservative arrogance is such

01:25:13.460 | that they really believe they can push their advantage

01:25:16.300 | to the max now.

01:25:18.020 | That because of all these propaganda successes up to now,

01:25:21.500 | the Ukrainian army could be wiped out for all we know.

01:25:23.780 | There's all that's left is their neo-Nazi brigades.

01:25:25.980 | But they're being advised very well by the US.

01:25:29.580 | And they're sending the weapons in,

01:25:30.900 | are huge amounts of weapons.

01:25:31.940 | What about American budget?

01:25:33.020 | No one talks about how much money we're giving to Ukraine.

01:25:36.860 | It's a billion dollars already in weaponry.

01:25:39.200 | And not most of it just poured in.

01:25:41.780 | What about, you know, the Russian budget is,

01:25:45.920 | defense budget is 60 some billion dollars a year.

01:25:51.060 | It's nothing compared to the United States, 1/15 of it.

01:25:54.820 | But yet we've put so much weaponry into Ukraine.

01:25:59.020 | The money we've spent on Ukraine is equivalent almost

01:26:03.100 | to what we spent on COVID in our own country.

01:26:07.100 | It's astounding the distortion of our priorities.

01:26:10.740 | There's also chemical.

01:26:12.900 | Don't forget chemical is probably the easier way to go.

01:26:15.860 | But in Syria, there was far too many incidents of America

01:26:20.540 | in its quest to demonize Assad and the Russians

01:26:25.540 | of all these chemical attacks that were happening

01:26:28.020 | that they were vowing came from Russia.

01:26:31.220 | And in spite of the fact that Russia just pulled out of the,

01:26:36.220 | signed the agreement on chemical arms

01:26:38.500 | and apparently destroyed its stock several years ago.

01:26:42.580 | It's strange that the strangest incidents happened in Syria.

01:26:47.700 | You go back to 'em, trace every one.

01:26:50.340 | Good journalism was done.

01:26:51.900 | The White Helmets got a lot of fame,

01:26:53.620 | but they were corrupted.

01:26:55.040 | And many good journalists tried to point out

01:26:58.060 | the inconsistencies in the American accusations.

01:27:01.460 | Robert Perry among them, who was one of my mentors

01:27:07.100 | at Consortium Press.

01:27:08.600 | A lot of good, you'd have to go back,

01:27:10.100 | but trace each, like you would trace each time

01:27:13.380 | they made an accusation against Putin of murder.

01:27:16.020 | You need that same kind of Sherlock Holmes intensity.

01:27:19.660 | Investigation.

01:27:20.900 | And they don't do it because the United Nations

01:27:23.060 | or the chemical, not the United Nations as much

01:27:25.940 | as the chemical people, the organization

01:27:29.540 | has been tampered with.

01:27:30.740 | If you remember correctly, there was accusations

01:27:33.220 | that the chemical investigative unit,

01:27:36.780 | I don't know the name of it, was tampered with.

01:27:39.980 | And people quit.

01:27:41.340 | People who were working on that commission quit

01:27:43.220 | and said that this is not legit.

01:27:45.380 | So very interesting, that Syria story is wacko.

01:27:48.780 | So the United States is willing to use chemical

01:27:50.700 | in Syria freely.

01:27:52.300 | It did it three, four times.

01:27:53.340 | If you remember correctly, Trump was challenged

01:27:55.420 | that he did not attack after a chemical incident in Syria.

01:27:59.980 | All these newscasters in the United States,

01:28:02.460 | the most heaviest of them were saying,

01:28:04.700 | well, President Trump is now finally acting

01:28:08.860 | like a real president when he attacks,

01:28:11.180 | when he drops missiles in Syria.

01:28:12.900 | They actually said that.

01:28:14.300 | In other words, they wanted Trump to go to war on Syria,

01:28:17.140 | but he didn't.

01:28:17.980 | - Chemical weapons.

01:28:19.180 | - Chemical and nuclear.

01:28:20.020 | - Nuclear is really terrifying.

01:28:23.260 | Do you think, now combine this with the fascinating choice

01:28:28.260 | in your interviews with Vladimir Putin

01:28:31.260 | to watch Stanley Kubrick's--

01:28:33.340 | - Doctor Strange.

01:28:35.660 | - Doctor Strange Love, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

01:28:37.980 | and Love the Bomb.

01:28:38.860 | And given the fact that you did that,

01:28:42.180 | now looking at the fact that the word nuclear,

01:28:46.380 | and it feels like the world hangs

01:28:49.820 | on the brink of nuclear war,

01:28:51.820 | do you think that that's overstating the case?

01:28:55.740 | - No.

01:28:56.780 | That's what worried me from the beginning,

01:28:58.300 | and that's probably why I got involved in all this stuff,

01:29:00.580 | because I go back to the '60s when I was,

01:29:05.100 | when we were so close to nuclear war.

01:29:07.420 | I lived through that period,

01:29:08.700 | and I thought, as many people did,

01:29:11.220 | that this was, it was gonna come now.

01:29:14.900 | So I've lived through that,

01:29:16.620 | and I didn't sense the period in '83

01:29:19.700 | when Reagan took us to the edge,

01:29:21.540 | if you remember correctly, Able Archer was an exercise

01:29:25.300 | that almost brought us to,

01:29:26.660 | 'cause the Russians were really paranoid at that point,

01:29:29.220 | and they were responding to our military exercise

01:29:32.860 | on Able Archer.

01:29:33.700 | There was also the Korean airliner, they went down.

01:29:35.580 | There were numerous incidents in the '80s,

01:29:37.500 | but I never felt the fear.

01:29:39.240 | I thought Reagan was testing the limits,

01:29:43.300 | but perhaps if I'd been younger, I would've felt it.

01:29:46.260 | But anyway, no, we come close.

01:29:48.340 | The United States has risked this several times.

01:29:51.380 | If I told you, it would be hard for you to believe.

01:29:53.540 | If I could set a scene for you in a drama in 1962

01:29:57.980 | when Kennedy has a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff

01:30:01.180 | and the CIA, and they talk about a plan,

01:30:06.180 | a military plan to first strike the Soviet Union and China.

01:30:12.820 | Okay, it was an Eisenhower plan

01:30:15.500 | that had been put into potential operation

01:30:19.540 | in early '60s or '50s, late '50s, SIOP '62.

01:30:26.140 | This was an attack on the Soviet Union's first strike.

01:30:29.820 | That's why the United States has never given up

01:30:32.220 | the concept of first strike.

01:30:33.740 | It's interesting that the Russian nuclear policy posture

01:30:38.540 | is more defensive than the American one,

01:30:41.860 | which leaves options open.

01:30:43.540 | The same options that are open in neoconservative agreements

01:30:49.340 | that we see from the late '90s where they say,

01:30:52.500 | the emergence of a rival power will not be tolerated.

01:30:56.180 | That's a very broad statement,

01:30:58.300 | and it allows you to do a lot, including nuclear.

01:31:01.820 | So you have to understand the United States is always,

01:31:05.660 | first of all, it breaks so many treaties.

01:31:07.940 | We know that from the Putin story

01:31:10.220 | about the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002,

01:31:13.940 | and then the INF treaty of, they broke that one.

01:31:17.260 | That was the intermediate missile.

01:31:19.980 | That was 2019.

01:31:21.380 | I don't know when they broke it off,

01:31:22.940 | but the United States has not been very faithful

01:31:25.060 | on its nuclear agreements.

01:31:27.340 | And so I don't know that we can even deal

01:31:30.540 | with the United States diplomatically.

01:31:32.140 | It seems to be impossible.

01:31:34.220 | Now, brings me to Biden.

01:31:35.780 | - Yes, another Irishman.

01:31:38.860 | - This is the opposite of Kennedy.

01:31:40.260 | Kennedy was a Catholic Irish anti-imperialist.

01:31:43.860 | Biden seems to be the opposite.

01:31:45.340 | He seems to be a get-along, go-along guy

01:31:48.340 | who's been not only old,

01:31:50.820 | but he's also gone along with this program,

01:31:52.780 | which I voted for Biden because I feared Trump,

01:31:56.180 | but I thought Biden at a certain age would mellow.

01:31:59.060 | I really did.

01:32:00.300 | He's not mellowed, apparently.

01:32:01.700 | He's still listening to these people, and he believes them.

01:32:05.060 | And it seems that his, that horrible woman,

01:32:08.340 | Victoria Nuland, who was Undersecretary of State,

01:32:10.580 | he appointed her to this sector of the world.

01:32:14.620 | She's very influential,

01:32:16.060 | and she's been one of the worst people on Ukraine.

01:32:19.000 | She obviously was behind the coup.

01:32:21.220 | She was the one who boasted that, you know,

01:32:24.740 | we got our man in, Yats, whatever, Yatsinuk,

01:32:28.820 | and also, remember the famous statement, "Fuck the EU."

01:32:32.820 | All these things, but she's back,

01:32:34.440 | and she said the other day about,

01:32:36.380 | if the Soviets, if the Russians use nuclear weaponry

01:32:40.380 | of any kind, there's gonna be a horrible price to pay.

01:32:43.540 | That was, she was out of the blue.

01:32:44.900 | I said, "What the hell is she doing?"

01:32:46.720 | She's talking nuclear all of a sudden.

01:32:48.740 | And then since that day, everybody in the US press,

01:32:52.780 | all the shows have gone,

01:32:54.180 | talked nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.

01:32:55.620 | Secretary of State has done it, Blinken.

01:33:00.060 | It scares you.

01:33:05.620 | If you think about it, the United States scares me.

01:33:08.300 | - So that's the military industrial complex machine,

01:33:11.320 | fully functional, fully operational behind this whole thing.

01:33:14.140 | - It certainly is.

01:33:14.980 | - Is that what's to blame?

01:33:16.220 | - It certainly is.

01:33:17.460 | That's why I showed him "Strange Love,"

01:33:18.900 | because I wanted him to show him,

01:33:20.700 | I wanted Mr. Putin to say, "Look at this film.

01:33:22.820 | "You never saw it.

01:33:23.660 | "How can you not say you never?"

01:33:24.860 | It's a seminal film in American history

01:33:27.740 | to those people who care,

01:33:28.940 | and it shows you the, Kubrick had a pacifist, thank God,

01:33:34.100 | anti-war mentality, which he showed in "Paths of Glory,"

01:33:39.100 | as well as "Strange Love."

01:33:40.900 | And it's such a dire, well-done scenario

01:33:46.180 | that I wanted Mr. Putin to be aware

01:33:48.700 | of the way the United States thinks.

01:33:50.500 | - Yeah, the absurdity of escalation,

01:33:53.940 | the absurdity of war at the largest scale,

01:33:56.500 | the absurdity of nuclear war especially.

01:33:59.460 | Can we walk back from the brink of nuclear war?

01:34:03.740 | - Can we? - Can we?

01:34:05.220 | - Yes, yes, we can. - What's the path

01:34:07.140 | to walk back? - Reason.

01:34:08.140 | (laughing)

01:34:09.380 | - Reason and diplomacy. - Between who and whom.

01:34:11.380 | - There's no reason, I mean, talk to the guy.

01:34:15.180 | Mr. Biden, why don't you calm down

01:34:17.860 | and go and talk to Mr. Putin in Moscow?

01:34:20.860 | Why don't you just sit across the table

01:34:23.020 | and try to have a discussion

01:34:24.300 | without falling into ideologies and stuff like that?

01:34:28.440 | - Can I ask you for advice?

01:34:31.160 | You did some of the most difficult interviews ever.

01:34:34.720 | Do you have advice that you can give to someone like me

01:34:38.460 | or anyone hoping to understand something

01:34:40.540 | about a human being sitting across from them

01:34:44.780 | about what it takes to do a good interview?

01:34:47.880 | - You're doing one.

01:34:49.280 | (laughing)

01:34:50.340 | - Well, no, but there's a, listen,

01:34:52.720 | there's levels to this game.

01:34:55.080 | And interviewing somebody like Vladimir Putin,

01:34:58.080 | also language barrier.

01:35:01.120 | Sit across from the man, try to keep an open mind,

01:35:04.900 | try to also ask challenging questions,

01:35:08.820 | but not challenging with an agenda,

01:35:11.020 | but seeking to understand and understand deeply.

01:35:14.340 | How do you do that?

01:35:15.940 | - Seeking the truth.

01:35:17.220 | It's very simple, seeking the truth.

01:35:19.040 | Being a questioner like you are,

01:35:20.980 | you wanna know what is really going on.

01:35:23.380 | I could not get anywhere with Biden or Bush

01:35:26.980 | or for that matter, Obama, they'd be opaque with me.

01:35:30.100 | There's no interview possible

01:35:31.380 | with the President of the United States

01:35:32.660 | because he's gotta stand for all the stuff

01:35:34.920 | that they stand for, which is imperialism,

01:35:37.660 | which is control of the world.

01:35:39.180 | How can you defend that?

01:35:40.380 | No one's gonna come out and say that.

01:35:42.580 | They're always gonna blame the enemy.

01:35:44.740 | They're gonna blame Iran, they're gonna blame China.

01:35:47.920 | - So some people, it may not be possible

01:35:50.060 | to break through the opaqueness.

01:35:51.340 | - You can't, you can't.

01:35:52.160 | I mean, have you ever seen an interview with the President

01:35:54.260 | besides being personable

01:35:57.480 | where he actually discussed American policy?

01:36:00.200 | - Yeah, I mean, not really, but maybe after their President.

01:36:03.600 | I could see Obama being able to do such an interview.

01:36:06.880 | I could see George W. being able to do such an interview.

01:36:10.200 | Or are they not able to reflect at all on the--

01:36:13.360 | - George W. hasn't shown much conscience

01:36:15.200 | in thinking about what he's done.

01:36:17.680 | You've seen that.

01:36:18.640 | You ever see my movie, W?

01:36:20.520 | I think that's one of my best movies

01:36:22.240 | because it shows a man who's just out of his depth

01:36:25.400 | and has no, he has a conscience at the end of the movie,

01:36:28.320 | if you remember correctly, he talks to his wife

01:36:31.080 | and he says, "I don't get it.

01:36:33.140 | "I'm trying to do good in the world.

01:36:34.380 | "I've done, I believe in good and right,

01:36:36.780 | "and why do people not understand that?"

01:36:39.280 | You know, that kind of complaint

01:36:40.920 | as if he can't get outside himself

01:36:42.660 | to understand the way other people think.

01:36:45.060 | Empathy, walking like a dramatist is what I do.

01:36:47.800 | You walk in the footsteps of other people.

01:36:50.720 | When I did a movie about Richard Nixon,

01:36:52.440 | it wasn't because I liked him.

01:36:54.080 | It was because I wanted to,

01:36:55.840 | I think I understood a part of him because of my father

01:36:57.960 | and I think I wanted to walk in his footsteps.

01:37:00.680 | That's not to say I sympathize with him because I didn't.

01:37:03.160 | I don't think he helped the American cause at all,

01:37:05.920 | but it was empathize as opposed to sympathize.

01:37:08.920 | Same thing with Bush.

01:37:10.080 | People were shocked when I did the Bush movie.

01:37:11.720 | They said, "How can you be in any way,

01:37:13.860 | "any way receptive to this guy?"

01:37:18.360 | That's wrong.

01:37:19.720 | Dramatists don't have political positions.

01:37:22.120 | They walk in the shoes of.

01:37:23.960 | That's why Bush movie perhaps was surprising

01:37:27.200 | and many people didn't care for it.

01:37:29.400 | Maybe that's what,

01:37:30.360 | but that's, you've got to go there.

01:37:34.520 | No, if you did a movie about a villain, you have to go there.

01:37:38.120 | - You have to walk in their shoes.

01:37:41.040 | - Yes.

01:37:41.880 | - So see them, 'cause they usually,

01:37:43.680 | villains usually see themselves as the hero.

01:37:46.640 | - Yes.

01:37:47.600 | - So you have to consider what is it like

01:37:50.040 | to live in a world where this person is the hero?

01:37:53.920 | - Yes.

01:37:54.760 | - Is that a burden?

01:37:57.000 | Is that hard?

01:37:57.840 | - Not for George W. Bush.

01:37:59.960 | He's bitching because they didn't understand him,

01:38:02.640 | but he had a good vision, he said, of democracy.

01:38:05.200 | And you know, democracy forgives a lot of sins.

01:38:09.760 | - Can I ask you a hard question on that?

01:38:11.800 | - Yes, sure.

01:38:13.320 | - So because empathy is so important to a great interview,

01:38:16.920 | let's ask the most challenging version of empathy,

01:38:19.440 | which is when you're sitting across

01:38:22.440 | from a man on the brink of war

01:38:24.080 | that leads to tens of millions of deaths, which is Hitler.

01:38:28.640 | So if you could interview Hitler in 1939,

01:38:31.300 | as the drums of war start to beat,

01:38:35.200 | or 1941, when they're already full on war,

01:38:39.160 | but there's still a lot of pacifists,

01:38:40.920 | there's still a lot of people unsure

01:38:44.120 | what are the motivations behind what Hitler's doing.

01:38:48.360 | How would you do that interview?

01:38:49.640 | - Well, it depends when you do it.

01:38:50.760 | If you do it in '38, I certainly would have,

01:38:54.480 | no, you have to, if you sit down across from Hitler,

01:38:57.120 | you empathize.

01:38:57.960 | What is your beef?

01:38:59.080 | Where have you been?

01:39:00.680 | What is your consciousness?

01:39:02.200 | Why do you hate Jewish people?

01:39:05.200 | Why, what is, you know, all these questions that come up.

01:39:10.200 | His sense of grievance as a result of World War I.

01:39:13.840 | There's justifications there, et cetera.

01:39:16.360 | But if I, and by the way,

01:39:18.280 | Churchill was trying to make a deal with them in '38.

01:39:21.120 | That's a fact that people don't know.

01:39:23.040 | Churchill himself, and you know,

01:39:24.600 | there was still the desire in England

01:39:26.200 | to make peace with Germany.

01:39:28.160 | And it was seen as a possible,

01:39:32.040 | what Churchill really wanted was Hitler

01:39:35.440 | to go against Russia.

01:39:36.880 | And he, anything to destroy the Bolsheviks.

01:39:40.080 | So he was using Hitler as much as he could

01:39:42.760 | to go after Russia.

01:39:44.320 | But Hitler was too elusive to get, to pin him down.

01:39:48.640 | But if you remember, Hitler was very kind at the end of,

01:39:51.680 | kind is not the right word,

01:39:53.040 | was, did not go after the British Empire

01:39:57.200 | when he had France, and he could have.

01:39:59.560 | He had another objective, which was obviously the East.

01:40:04.320 | So Hitler's goal, I think,

01:40:07.560 | he always had an admiration for England.

01:40:09.480 | It's an interesting story, always.

01:40:13.040 | - And the Empire.

01:40:15.320 | - Yes.

01:40:16.160 | And certainly Churchill,

01:40:17.960 | we have no doubts now from history revisionism

01:40:20.800 | that Churchill's interest, main interest, was not Germany.

01:40:24.520 | It was the British Empire.

01:40:25.800 | - Yes.

01:40:26.640 | - And to preserve it to India,

01:40:27.560 | the road to India and all that, and Middle East.

01:40:31.200 | Churchill fought the entire war

01:40:33.640 | with the concept of preserving the British Empire.

01:40:36.140 | All his goals, he sent America on a goose chase into Italy.

01:40:39.880 | You could argue instead of establishing

01:40:41.800 | a sincere second front in Western Europe.

01:40:44.440 | Interesting man.

01:40:49.080 | So I would have tried to get,

01:40:50.440 | I think I would approach it the same way.

01:40:52.600 | In 1939, it would have been a different story

01:40:55.060 | because at that point, he'd attacked Poland in 1940 France.

01:41:00.060 | So it's another ballgame.

01:41:02.400 | But certainly, at whatever point you talk to him,

01:41:05.280 | I would try to understand his point.

01:41:07.080 | So I'm not judging you, Hitler.

01:41:09.160 | I'm saying to you, tell me what you're thinking.

01:41:11.320 | Why are you invading Russia?

01:41:12.520 | What's your thought?

01:41:13.760 | That's all an interviewer should do.

01:41:15.120 | He shouldn't be expressing his contempt for Hitler,

01:41:18.040 | which is like an American journalist interviewing Putin.

01:41:21.400 | I'm getting brownie points for expressing my contempt

01:41:24.880 | for you?

01:41:25.720 | That doesn't wash with me.

01:41:27.840 | That's ugly.

01:41:28.880 | - Yeah, seek to understand.

01:41:30.240 | - Yes.

01:41:31.080 | - This is a technical question,

01:41:33.720 | but was language a barrier as an interviewer?

01:41:36.840 | - To some degree.

01:41:37.760 | It's very hard to learn Russian.

01:41:40.120 | But they have excellent translators in the Kremlin.

01:41:43.080 | Excellent.

01:41:43.920 | They are people who are trained very seriously

01:41:47.520 | for months or years before they...

01:41:50.440 | These people are young and they're very bright.

01:41:53.680 | I was very impressed with the Russian translator.

01:41:55.520 | - It's interesting.

01:41:56.360 | I mean, I'm impressed as well,

01:41:58.220 | but there's a humor that's lost.

01:42:00.520 | There's a wit, a dry wit.

01:42:03.640 | There's stuff said between the lines

01:42:05.760 | that's not actually have much content,

01:42:09.360 | but it's more kind of the things

01:42:12.680 | that make communication more frictionless.

01:42:15.240 | There's a kind of sadness to a Russian humor

01:42:20.880 | that permeates all things,

01:42:22.680 | and that sometimes is lost in translation.

01:42:24.800 | The translation is a little bit colder,

01:42:26.920 | meaning it just conveys the facts.

01:42:29.800 | - Would you call it sardonic humor?

01:42:31.680 | - I would say so, yeah.

01:42:33.400 | And so it's interesting.

01:42:34.280 | But I think you could see that from facial expressions

01:42:36.400 | when you're sitting across from the person

01:42:38.120 | and you can feel it. - I feel it, yeah.

01:42:41.280 | - Let me ask you in general,

01:42:42.920 | what's the role of love in the human condition

01:42:48.480 | in your life, in life in general?

01:42:50.720 | You've talked, you looked at some of the darkest aspect

01:42:53.680 | of human nature.

01:42:55.580 | What's the role of this,

01:42:57.200 | one of the more beautiful aspects of human nature?

01:42:59.560 | - I think without love, I wouldn't,

01:43:01.080 | I don't think I'd be able to carry on.

01:43:02.960 | I think that love is my,

01:43:05.240 | love is the greatest,

01:43:06.960 | the ability to love is the greatest virtue you can have.

01:43:11.160 | It's the ability to share with another,

01:43:15.000 | with your family, with your children, with your wife,

01:43:17.720 | with your lover, your partner.

01:43:19.480 | It's an ability to extend yourself into the world,

01:43:22.400 | and it brings empathy with it.

01:43:23.920 | If you love well, I think you expand it

01:43:26.840 | to the human race too.

01:43:28.400 | And it's the strength behind the great novelists,

01:43:32.440 | the great artists of our time.

01:43:35.340 | I think,

01:43:36.360 | part of the reason I suppose we're scared of science

01:43:42.300 | sometimes is because the scientists sometimes

01:43:44.340 | don't express that clearly.

01:43:45.660 | - You can lose that when you focus on the facts,

01:43:50.340 | on empirical data, on the science of things.

01:43:54.500 | You can lose the humanity that's between the lines.

01:43:58.380 | - I'm often struck by when I talk to scientists,

01:44:00.740 | and I've talked to a few,

01:44:02.080 | that how arrogant they can be about,

01:44:03.980 | they don't talk to you if you don't understand their world,

01:44:06.980 | and they talk to each other,

01:44:08.140 | and there's an arrogance, a closed circle kind of thing.

01:44:10.660 | Oh, he's not at my level, I can't,

01:44:12.580 | there's no discussion to be had with this person,

01:44:14.620 | he's a human being.

01:44:16.220 | - That arrogance is terrifying to me

01:44:18.100 | because it's next door neighbor to closed mindedness,

01:44:23.060 | which then can be used by charismatic leaders

01:44:25.460 | as it was in Nazi Germany

01:44:27.460 | to commit some of the worst atrocities.

01:44:29.780 | The scientists can be used as pawns

01:44:34.100 | in a very cruel game.

01:44:36.820 | What advice would you give to young people?

01:44:39.600 | You've done, first of all, some of the greatest films ever.

01:44:43.740 | You've lived a heck of a life.

01:44:47.980 | You were fearless and bold in asking

01:44:51.720 | some really difficult questions of this world.

01:44:54.020 | What advice would you give to young people today,

01:44:56.300 | high school, college, about career?

01:44:59.800 | How to have a career they can be proud of,

01:45:02.820 | or how to have a life they can be proud of?

01:45:04.980 | - Well, I have three children,

01:45:07.860 | so obviously I'm not necessarily

01:45:09.580 | the best advisor in the world.

01:45:13.340 | And I do find that the children,

01:45:15.700 | I've raised them with a sense of freedom,

01:45:17.500 | and they do what they want.

01:45:19.340 | In the end, it's their life, their destiny, their character.

01:45:22.840 | That's what comes out.

01:45:24.540 | You can try to influence it,

01:45:27.060 | but you can try to get your daughter to wake up

01:45:30.420 | at a certain hour in the day, but it never works.

01:45:32.860 | So I long ago gave up on that.

01:45:37.340 | And my children are all grown now.

01:45:40.240 | But aside from that, I think if I was a teacher

01:45:43.840 | in a school and teaching film,

01:45:46.820 | I'd say to the students, get an education.

01:45:49.980 | You can't just look at film,

01:45:52.740 | because it's not a full education, it's not the spectrum.

01:45:55.940 | I don't think you should teach film as a,

01:45:57.980 | I think you need a base in other worlds.

01:46:02.780 | One of the greatest courses I took at NYU was,

01:46:05.860 | and I was a war veteran on the GI Bill,

01:46:08.580 | so I was older than the other students.

01:46:10.900 | I took a class outside the film school in Greek classics,

01:46:15.580 | because I hadn't had much history,

01:46:18.220 | and I wanted to know more about the world of Homer

01:46:20.700 | and so forth.

01:46:21.540 | And the teacher opened my eyes to so much in that class,

01:46:25.700 | and I wrote about it in my memoir,

01:46:27.940 | it's called "Chasing the Light,"

01:46:29.620 | about Professor Leahy and what he did to me.

01:46:32.620 | He gave me the concepts clearly of consciousness,

01:46:36.620 | which is the Homeric theme of Odysseus.

01:46:39.660 | And also, lethe, L-E-T-H-E, which is sleep,

01:46:47.300 | and how most of the crew,

01:46:51.540 | Odysseus' crew were experiencing lethe,

01:46:54.740 | and how necessary it was to stay awake.

01:46:57.500 | So it's not just film, it's just you have to learn

01:47:01.900 | the world as much as you can when you're young.

01:47:04.500 | And so that, I think, is the basis of a good education,

01:47:09.500 | and a classic one is important.

01:47:12.080 | A basis.

01:47:15.460 | I think then you go on and you can learn computer,

01:47:18.140 | if you want to.

01:47:19.300 | But that's specialization, you know.

01:47:21.900 | If you're a computer geek, is that a life?

01:47:24.600 | Does that give you enough satisfaction?

01:47:26.380 | Do you get the joy out of people?

01:47:29.860 | - No, just like filmmaking is a skill.

01:47:32.100 | - Yes, right.

01:47:32.940 | - You need to have the broad background

01:47:35.580 | to understand the world.

01:47:36.660 | Literature.

01:47:37.580 | - Yes.

01:47:39.020 | - History.

01:47:40.340 | - Absolutely.

01:47:43.780 | - So one of the things about being human

01:47:46.140 | is life is finite.

01:47:48.540 | It ends.

01:47:50.020 | Do you think about your death?

01:47:52.180 | Are you afraid of your death?

01:47:53.380 | - Yeah, sure.

01:47:54.340 | Absolutely, you have to come to terms with death.

01:47:56.660 | And that's a tough one for many people.

01:47:58.660 | It's always there.

01:47:59.500 | I'm older than you, obviously,

01:48:01.340 | and I'm getting closer to it.

01:48:02.940 | Couldn't happen any day, actually.

01:48:04.820 | When you get to a certain age,

01:48:06.260 | you can't assume that you're gonna be alive tomorrow.

01:48:08.500 | So I try to deal with that.

01:48:10.380 | - Are you afraid of it?

01:48:12.340 | - Much less so than I was when I was younger.

01:48:15.540 | Remember, I was in Vietnam,

01:48:16.780 | but I thought I dealt with it there.

01:48:18.340 | But when I came back, I realized that I wanted to live.

01:48:21.820 | So yes, I've learned over time

01:48:24.620 | to get more and more used to it and get ready for it.

01:48:27.980 | - What's a good answer to the question of why live?

01:48:31.020 | So the realization that you wanted to live.

01:48:33.500 | What was the reason to live?

01:48:36.620 | - Because it was better than being one of those corpses

01:48:38.760 | that I saw in the jungle.

01:48:40.760 | You know, I saw how finite death is.

01:48:43.320 | - Are there things in your life you regret?

01:48:48.140 | - Oh, sure.

01:48:48.980 | (Lex laughing)

01:48:50.180 | Too many.

01:48:51.020 | - Is there something you wish

01:48:56.740 | you could have done differently?

01:48:58.060 | Like if you could go back to do one thing differently?

01:49:00.620 | Or that regrets always?

01:49:01.860 | - You should ask Musk this, I'm curious.

01:49:04.100 | What'd he say?

01:49:04.940 | - Offline all the time.

01:49:09.640 | - No, no.

01:49:11.520 | - You'd be curious to know.

01:49:12.680 | - He's an engineer too,

01:49:13.960 | and engineers really value mistakes.

01:49:17.360 | - Engineers value--

01:49:18.200 | - They value mistakes and errors

01:49:19.600 | because that's an opportunity to learn.

01:49:22.400 | I mean, this is what you do with systems

01:49:24.120 | is you test them, then test them, then test them.

01:49:26.520 | And errors is just information.

01:49:28.560 | He did that with the rockets.

01:49:29.400 | - Well, the same thing is true in its way of filmmaking.

01:49:31.240 | There are certain things you learn as you build films

01:49:35.240 | and you make mistakes.

01:49:36.720 | It's like putting an engine together

01:49:38.240 | and you, oh, the film is flawed in that way, you know it.

01:49:42.300 | Other people may or may not see it,

01:49:43.900 | but the car runs or it made money or it didn't make money.

01:49:48.300 | It can be good and it didn't make money,

01:49:49.940 | but it didn't, the point is that everything is a build.

01:49:53.180 | Every film is a construction.

01:49:54.820 | Same thing as he goes through on a Tesla,

01:49:57.580 | we go through on each film.

01:49:58.900 | - But films are art.

01:50:03.140 | It's a little--

01:50:03.980 | - Yeah, the thing is one film does not lead

01:50:05.780 | to a lifetime guarantee of copyright.

01:50:09.840 | - Well, yeah, you have the movie game as you've called it.

01:50:16.600 | - Yeah.

01:50:18.020 | - Is a complicated and cruel game.

01:50:22.680 | - But it takes enormous amount of work,

01:50:24.960 | enormous amount of work to make a film.

01:50:26.560 | People underestimate that.

01:50:28.840 | It's extremely complicated to have something be successful

01:50:34.920 | because it has so many elements of luck involved

01:50:38.180 | and reception and so forth.

01:50:41.900 | - What do you think, I apologize for the absurd question,

01:50:46.300 | but what do you think is the meaning of life?

01:50:48.540 | Why are we here?

01:50:50.260 | The why.

01:50:51.100 | - I think to realize ourselves,

01:50:52.060 | to realize more of what you are,

01:50:54.700 | to realize what life is, to appreciate it,

01:50:57.700 | to grow, to honor our life, to honor the concept of life

01:51:02.580 | and to understand how precious life is,

01:51:04.620 | the preciousness of life as the Buddhists say,

01:51:08.900 | and of course the immediacy of death all around us.

01:51:12.380 | The causes of death are all around us

01:51:14.740 | and our life is like, as they say,

01:51:18.600 | is like a lantern in a strong breeze existing

01:51:23.600 | among the causes of death.

01:51:25.620 | So life is so precious and at the same time,

01:51:29.980 | immediacy of death and then of course the continuation

01:51:32.660 | of life in whatever form it's gonna take.

01:51:35.020 | - But in this life, to wake up to the preciousness of it,

01:51:40.180 | to the preciousness--

01:51:41.020 | - Yeah, that's a wonderful thing.

01:51:42.140 | By the way, I didn't have that when I was young.

01:51:43.780 | I took it for granted.

01:51:44.880 | - Oliver, like I said, I'm a huge fan.

01:51:49.860 | You're an incredible human being,

01:51:51.780 | one of the greatest artists ever.

01:51:53.880 | So it's a huge honor that you sit with me

01:51:57.300 | and talk so deeply and honestly

01:52:00.700 | about some very difficult topics.

01:52:02.500 | Again, you're an inspiration and it's an honor

01:52:05.180 | that you will spend your valuable time with me.

01:52:06.860 | - Thank you very much.

01:52:07.700 | - Thanks for talking to me.

01:52:08.520 | - Fun being here.

01:52:09.980 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:52:11.460 | with Oliver Stone.

01:52:12.660 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

01:52:15.060 | in the description.

01:52:16.300 | And now, let me leave you with some words

01:52:18.360 | from Oliver Stone in the untold history

01:52:20.560 | of the United States.

01:52:22.540 | To fail is not tragic.

01:52:24.700 | To be human is.

01:52:26.420 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

01:52:30.220 | (upbeat music)

01:52:32.800 | (upbeat music)

01:52:35.380 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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