Liberal filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has previously made sympathetic documentaries on dictators Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, now plans to promote Russia's Vladimir Putin, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The director asserted that he "would love to do an interview with [Putin] because he represents a different point of view that Americans don't hear."
This comes in the wake of another project by Stone, a documentary on Edward Snowden. The filmmaker has called the leaker a "hero."
In 2013, the director produced a ten part documentary Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, in which he slammed FDR, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Of Reagan, he attacked:
OLIVER STONE: ...What is Reagan’s real legacy? Once a Roosevelt Democrat, he developed an extreme contempt for government that was legendary. Yet, he spent enormous sums on the military while cutting social programs for the poor. He reduced taxes on the wealthy, doubled both the military budget and the national debt, and in a revolutionary change, transformed the United States from the world’s leading creditor nation in 1981 into the biggest debtor nation by 1985. He deregulated industries, eroded environmental standards, defiantly ripping down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had put on the White House roof, weakened the middle class, busted unions, heightened the racial divides, widened the gap between rich and poor.
On another occasion, Stone excoriated Reagan as a "dumb son of a bitch." In other words, America's 40th president doesn't measure up to men like Chavez, Castro and Putin.
