THE PUTIN INTERVIEWS – 4×60′

Protagonists : 

• Vladimir POUTINE
• Oliver STONE

Based on a series of 12 unpublished interviews carried out over a period of two years with Vladimir Putin, the celebrated filmmaker Oliver Stone, together with his producer Fernando Sulichin (South of the border, Savages, Snowden), presents a 4-hour television series devoted to the Russian President.

Oliver Stone was given unprecedented access to Putin’s professional and personal world. Since he first became president in 2000, Putin has never spoken so extensively and in such detail to a Western interlocutor and with no reservations on any subject.

Under Stone’s prompting, Putin discusses in detail a number of hot topics, including his accession to the presidency of Russia, his relationship to power, his personal relationships with all the American presidents he has known, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump as well as his predecessors Yeltsin and Gorbachev. He also talks about the legacy of Stalin, Perestroika and Reagan, about state security and the asylum Moscow granted to Snowden. He also shares his thoughts on Trump, the accusations of Russian interference in the American election of 2016, NATO, the war in Syria and Ukraine.

Stone films inside the Kremlin, in Putin’s official residences in Sochi, and outside Moscow. He captures the Russian leader in all his intimacy and complexity. He also reveals his vision of the United States and the world.

The exchanges are often incisive, always thought-provoking and occasionally surreal, as in the sequence in which Stone introduces Putin to Doctor Folamour, Kubrick’s satire against the Cold War.

The Putin Interviews is reminiscent of The Nixon Interviews, the series of interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, broadcast in the spring of 1977, just forty years ago.

“If Vladimir Putin is America’s greatest enemy, then we must at least try to understand him,” says Oliver Stone.