American film director Oliver Stone addressed the Znanie Youth Forum in Moscow ahead of the 80th anniversary of Victory Day for the Allies in World War II.
TRANSCRIPT
MC
American director Oliver Stone.
Mr. director. This way, come.
Oliver Stone
Hello. Hello. Hello. Yeah. Good. Everybody’s young here. Hello, Fernando. Nice to see you all. Okay. I’m the schoolteacher today. We’re in the history museum, right? So, we’ll talk about history.
Okay. I’m starting.
I cannot limit my perspective today to movies. I love movies, but I love history even more. And this year, 2025, is, I pray, a real turning point in our history of the world. The defining event of my lifetime has been World War 2. I wasn’t born until 1946.
I am very much a child of war, a child of divorce, and finally of history. A child of history. History is the convergence of many rivers into a bigger and bigger river until it becomes an ocean. And then we see how important the rivers are. We call that ocean history.
My mother was a French girl. My father was an American officer in World War 2. They met in Paris in 1944. They married in ’45. The lieutenant colonel took her back to America, to the dream of New York City, in all its splendor and power of 1946, the greatest country on earth, the most amount of money, the greatest opportunity and privilege.
I was born into that. Imagine. Imagine what it was then and what it is today. You could argue that America has truly squandered that power with needless militarism, investment in endless wars without consideration for the welfare of its own citizens. From the apex of 1946 to the degeneracy of 2025.
New York City could be seen as a rotting carcass of greed and power, an oligarchy of corruption. And yet inside it I do not give up. Inside it is a beating heart of hope. Hope? Yes, in artificial intelligence. I believe in it, in good use of technology. Yes, and certainly most of all, I believe in human intelligence and compassion.
When I was a kid, I often dreamed of some super computer, which seems to be buildable now, that would gather together all the possibilities of strategies, moves, and what history has taught us. And sum it all up so that we could always make historically the best decisions.
But that’s impossible because obviously the input would come from people who actively work at controlling the mindset of our population. So it’s never done in the public interest. The Socratic concept, of course, just doesn’t work because they always kill the Socrates. They kill or discredit people who don’t care about private gain. And just think about the good of the common people.
Those people are considered dangerous to the public good, and therefore they’re removed. My generation, sadly, never stepped forward. I didn’t do my job. I never became more than a filmmaker.
But I wish I had, in hindsight. My contemporary, Bill Clinton was the great appeaser who tried to make everybody happy. But he ended up painfully selling out, changing the Democrat Party forever. A great appeaser, yet he pushed NATO to the East. He began that process of betraying the promises made by Baker and Bush to Gorbachev: “Not one inch to the east”.
And we went east, right into the heart of Russia in the form of Ukraine. We started with Clinton. It magnified under George W Bush, who took us into a war on terror that never ended. It’s still going on. A state of emergency has been declared. Our mantra, and in its name, the state can do anything it wants, including changing the laws at will: arresting in the name of security, anybody and anything that crosses the line of what is considered political correctness.
George Bush took us on to a road of unnecessary militarism with his wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and ultimately the greatest war of all. The war he declared on terror, which is still going on today, as we move on bombing, bombing, bombing. From Yugoslavia in 99 to Sudan and Yemen and the so-called lesser folk, who we consider dangerous to our world order.
So. We bring a great waste of our resources. And the height of this futility was a war which Mr. Biden recently dedicated to weakening Russia. This was the war in Ukraine, a retrograde war. The last three years have been harrowing to me in the West. I’ve learned, among other things, the propaganda state in the West is an incredible empire, far bigger and stronger than I ever imagined.
We are unable to see from the inside of the matrix the lies that have enveloped us, that Russia and China and Iran, and so forth are our mortal enemies. This isn’t true, but we have succumb to that because our media, the networks and the elitist media have told us repeatedly inventing lies about our enemies. The worst of it was George Orwell. It’s George Orwell time. Imbecilic accusations against Mr. Putin and his Russia.
In the old days, even in the worst of the Cold War, we never referred to Russia as Khrushchev or Brezhnev. That’s what we’re doing now. We call Russia Putin because Putin, for whatever reason, has been personalized. This isn’t policy.
This is a tragic substitution of hatred for intelligence. As a result, we’ve had to relive the whole 1946 to 1962 cycle again. Until that is, Kennedy and Khrushchev began the process of change. I want to emphasize to you students, how very close we came to World War 3 because of the awful leadership we experienced under Joe Biden and his radical advisers, such as Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan.
We survived. Which brings us now to our Trump. Mr. Trump, who has been depicted time and again in our media as a tyrant and a disaster. These people have allowed their personal hatred for Mr. Trump to destroy their common sense. In his first term of 2016, they were the ones who undermined him right away with the false and ridiculous charges of being Putin’s boy because he questioned the key narrative that Russia is our enemy.
John Brennan of the CIA was, I believe, the key instigator of this poison at the heart of the insurrection, abetted by those such as Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Certainly Obama, who knew better and betrayed his intelligence. And Joe Biden, the old Cold Warrior, and the intelligence agencies. And of course, people in Congress such as Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
It didn’t matter to these people or their Democrat supporters that their position against Trump drove us into a full out engagement against Russia by 2022. Not only financing but aiding it with increasing military equipment, our battlefield intelligence, and finally our management. As reported most recently in the anti-Russian New York Times, it was a pure proxy war without our real troops, without us sending our real troops.
And the only reason this unlikely alliance was defeated was the strength of the Russian resistance and the intrinsic arrogance of the Ukrainian military that by 2024 and 25 was now asserting control and taking their own advice. Anyway, that’s the story the intelligence agencies told us. It’s quite possibly true. Ukrainian arrogance is certainly displayed in President Zelensky’s melodramatic demands for world war against the Russian invader, a crusade against Russia in the name of Western democracy and freedom.
How crazy. How nuts. And here we are, all lining up like happy, patriotic idiots to fight the new Hitler, who we call Putin. It was the most frightening circumstance for these people like myself who are praying for sanity, please. Why is the America of not so long ago, 1992, suddenly leading a crusade with an old, demented President Biden against the most powerfully armed and dedicated nation we ever faced?
And on top of that, talking to ourselves up at the same time into taking on the Chinese nation, either simultaneously or right after. Wow, we’re facing a real World World War War 3. How proud, how zealous we became in our war fever. You know, I’ve seen this before, this zealousness, again and again.
It’s in the books that we were taught – the students, you and me, students – in the books about World War 1 and further back in time to the crusades of the medieval ages on behalf of Christianity. I’ve seen it in close up in my lifetime, in Vietnam and again, the first Iraq War. How excited we were after so many years of Vietnam defeatism to watch these mighty bombs and rockets dropping on Baghdad in the dark night, lighting up a world of a new American dominance.
It was horrifying. If you were sane and knew the real facts behind the war, and, for that matter, behind the 9/11 charade, none of which will stand up to the light, to the true light of history, provided we keep that counter narrative alive in our unofficial press. So important for you students to recognize that. We need a counter narrative.
Remember that in the false history they teach us in the American propaganda empire. And by the way, that war the U.S. fought and won in 1991 was followed not too long after by the second Iraq War from 2003 to 2011, which was incredibly messy and stupid, perpetrated by an American administration led by the idiot son of George Bush and his gang of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and a dozen other neoconservatives.
Fascists out to light the world on fire. Oh God, they almost succeeded. But as Shakespeare would have said, they were hoist on their own petard, destroyed by their own stupidity and incompetence in ruling both Baghdad and Washington, both of which they ruined. The worst administration I’ve seen in my lifetime. And of course, you should add the mess they made in Libya, Syria and eastern Africa and earlier in the Balkans.
But we don’t have time for that here. The only time in my life that I feared for our world, even more than living through those Iraq years of chaos, was just a few years ago, when our Biden administration stumbled into its latest misadventure in Ukraine, of all places. Of course, it would be in the heart of Eastern Europe.
It would be the demolition of what we feared as the new Russian Empire, that we said wanted to control the world, but who wanted to control the world, really? And said it without saying it many times, again and again, it was the USA, with, of course, its proxy, NATO and the EU and so forth. And here we are, just ten years after the Iraq debacle was over, rushing into Ukraine as if to forget the folly of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, this time we were smart. It was without our direct presence, or NATO troops. Except, of course, is strategists and weapons handlers. Everything short of fighting itself. And it was finally a giant Ukrainian army that we put into the field by 2016. And by 2024, they came back decimated, as in Vietnam, as in Afghanistan, as in in every American intervention. Trump in his first term sent offensive weapons into Ukraine.
We pray in his second term that he’s learned the truth behind our motives and is mature enough to resist it. For this, he’s hated by a democratic population that can’t forgive him, even if it means, as it did under Joe Biden, World War 3. That’s how crazy the so-called liberals have become. And this drove many people, like myself, away from their party.
So where are we in the unlikely person of Donald Trump? A real estate hustler from my city hometown of New York. History has taken another U-turn. Can he, with Putin at his side, turn the tables, on the snide intelligentsia of Washington and Europe, and give us peace? A peace that will work.
It’s been almost 80 years now that I’ve been on Earth. And guess what? I believe and I will go on believing. Why not? That there is a possibility of peace. Kennedy talked about it and Gorbachev talked about it. And even Reagan said, why not?
But this is true. This is a moment we can realize the dream. And we should keep in mind that in 2002, Bush tore up the ABM treaty; the INF treaty in 2019, the intermediate nuclear force treaty; and the START treaty is now in jeopardy. Now is the time we can turn this around. What if Trump and Putin actually between themselves, suddenly start destroying our nuclear weapons? Take 10%, 15%, 20% at a time each year with strict investigations from both countries.
It’s possible that we could remove nuclear weapons from this Earth. If that were to happen, the much ridiculed figure of Trump would end up trumping all of them, would end up trumping all of them and turning this whole thing around on its head and becoming one of the most revered leaders of our time.
He would love that because his vanity would be tickled. But… it would be shocking, wouldn’t it? To admit that he was effective in the end and he had a meaning to his life, a real meaning, bringing the peace that John Kennedy dreamed of and Franklin Roosevelt dreamed of. And Abe Lincoln too, in his lifetime.
And before that, so many others who have been known to history for their love of peace. I think now is the time. Of course, there are problems. What about China? What would they do? And Israel, of course. They do what they want. They don’t pay attention to anybody. They control American policy, they say.
There’s France and of course Britain, the war dog that has been an aggressor for centuries now, and a particular enemy of Russia today. India and Pakistan are almost at war. Impossible. So all these things, these are gigantic impossibilities. But remember, if we begin somewhere, one baby step at a time, the first move.
One classic agreement between Russia and the United States, and the rest becomes easier. Believe me, because in the end, as John Kennedy told us in June of 1963, before closing out his life, we all breathe the same air. We all inhabit this small planet. We all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.
These great words, spoken without notice by Kennedy at an American university, ring truer than ever to me. Please let us put the power of good over the power of evil. Let us conquer the beast in ourselves. It can be done. Thank you.
Q&A
MC
Thank you very much, Mr. Oliver. Let’s take a seat. All of us. We have a lot of questions.
Now, I wanted to talk about the past. Your past Mr. Oliver. You volunteered for the Vietnam War, were a private infantryman on the front lines and got injured. You have many awards. What from what happened in Vietnam particularly changed your personal views on life?
Oliver Stone
Well, I would say everything. You know, I don’t know. You don’t. You can’t. My life changed. I made, three movies about Vietnam. I think you will see the results. My perception has changed. My values of life changed. Everything changed. The Vietnamese war was very cruel. One sided. We had all the technology on our side. It was truly a people’s war against a machine. It’s one of the ugliest wars I’ve ever – it was the only war I’ve seen – but it was ugly. Ugly. And I hope it would never be repeated again. But we see a lot of it already going on.
MC
I would also like to further refer to the history after the Euromaidan. You released the film about those events, in Ukraine, about their origins. Why did you decide to focus on this topic, and did you already understand then where it would lead?
Oliver Stone
Well, let me say I produced it. I didn’t directed, it was directed by a Ukrainian, Igor Lopatonok. Igor brought me up to date on the situation in Ukraine. Other people did too. I saw, I talked to a lot of different Ukrainians, but also Russians, and tried to understand the situation. He came to it in about 2 after the, coup d’état in 2014. About 2016, we started to investigate it. And it was a crooked deal.
The whole thing was a crooked deal, because in the United States, they never really acknowledged that there was a coup d’etat, that was managed by America. Never. So the whole thing sucked. And by the way, when the documentary came out, it was taken off the air by the American networks. It was put on, ultimately returned on YouTube. It returned on YouTube. And it’s been around. But you have to basically go to obscure alternate channels and sometimes you see it on YouTube, or… A lot of my documentaries have been removed: Castro, Chavez, Putin. But you can see them, you can see them, but it’s still very difficult to break through to the mainstream.
None of them have been advertised properly. It’s frustrating, you know. It’s frustrating to make movies this way. I hope you understand. It’s not easy, but it’s very important that these movies get made.
MC
Continuing on this topic, continuing from what you just said, you interviewed Vladimir Putin, talked with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and other world leaders whose positions differ from what the West broadcasts. Why did you consider it important to talk to them?
Oliver Stone
Because we don’t hear them. Because we don’t get that point of view in our country. So the best I can do to really bring something new to the public is to show them and let them talk and don’t interpret them. Just ask them and let them express what is going on from their point of view, and let the people react. There’s nothing like the truth. It clears up the confusions. So, well, you know what? It’s freedom .
MC
Thank you. I invite you to ask a question. I am sure there are some. You can do it in Russian. We have set up translation.
Student 1
Hello, my name is Vesta Hobbi. I represent the city of Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan. I have the following question. You film a lot of movies on historical themes. So how do you maintain a balance between artistic fiction and authenticity while remaining interesting for the audience? The balance between artistic, fiction and authenticity, meanwhile being interesting, remaining interesting for the viewer.
Oliver Stone
Okay, that’s a very tough question because, first of all, if you’re making a documentary you have to be honest, straightforward. When you make a feature film you play to an audience that is there to be entertained. So your entertainment is crucial. But at the same time, if you sell out, if you distort the content, that is wrong, and a lot of people do that in order to make entertainment. But don’t do that. Don’t do that. You must respect the need for entertainment, the desire to have a catharsis, to have emotions, to have a climax, but at the same time, don’t sell out the content.
MC
Thank you. Let’s have the next question. Raise your hand. Our moderator will come to you.
Student 2
Hello. My name is Alexandra Portosh. I am from the Leningrad region and I have a question for you. What topics or events from the recent past, in your opinion, deserve to be filmed? Thank you.
Oliver Stone
I tried to make several movies I never got to in my lifetime. I had run into walls. I made I spent about two years, maybe two and a half years on Martin Luther King. I couldn’t get it made because I was telling the truth about Martin Luther King, and I was showing that he had a very, very human, a human life.
He was vulnerable in many ways, and he had relationships with women. But because of the church and because of the Puritanism of America, I couldn’t get it made. So that was very disappointing. I also worked on the My Lai massacre story in Vietnam that did not get made. That was a… I was very close to making it. Three weeks from shooting. We built the village, everything . It didn’t work.
The concept of a massacre made by the United States Army was difficult for them to finance, and in fact, horrified them. The truth about My Lai is so awful. You know, 500 plus villagers were killed in cold blood. There was not one shot fired, not one shot fired by them.
There was no VC there. There was no NVA in the village. It was all civilians and they were brutally murdered. That was quite a story. But I had a great movie because I had two storylines and it was an investigation. Actually, the United States Army investigated itself, and they found the truth. The man who investigated it, General William Peers, was a three star general. He didn’t believe it happened. He said, it’s all bullshit. He went in. He actually was an honest investigator. And it goes to show you the truth is a good thing. He woke up, he saw what happened. He understood by talking to people. He was horrified.
He wrote it all up in a beautiful report which has now been classified. And it’s very hard to find. But read that report. It’s a beautiful report because it reveals the horror of that day. And you know what happened? They prosecuted two men. One was declared innocent. And, Lieutenant Calley was punished, but he was pardoned by Richard Nixon right away.
He brought indictments against, like, 20 other men, including the general, including the general of the whole division, 199th. He brought colonels majors. He brought them all into into indictment. But none of them were indicted by the Army. They were backed away from them, every single one of them. So the whole thing was buried. It came up to nothing.
It just was a big… it was heartbreaking. Peers never got his fourth star. He was promised his fourth star, and he disappeared from history. It shows you that honest people sometimes don’t win and they sometimes disappear from history. But he was a good man and he tried. And that’s very important to remember. He tried. We don’t forget.
MC
Thank you very much. Thank you. Let’s have one more question, please. Over here on the right.
Student 3
My name is Violetta Vasilyeva. I represent the city of Pyatigorsk and I have a question for you. What is freedom of speech for you? And, have you encountered censorship when creating your films?
Oliver Stone
Commercial censorship. They never tell you it’s censorship. They tell you it doesn’t play. It’s not something people want to see. They give you 100 different reasons not to make the movie. Censorship is all around us. If you look at what happened just recently with the Biden administration. They started to censor criticism. You cannot hear criticism of the Ukraine war in America.
You cannot hear criticism of the policies. In fact, the Trump administration has censored Israel criticism. You cannot criticize Israel for their massacres in Gaza and the West Bank. You cannot. They call it anti-Semitism. So, you know, it’s everywhere in the world, but it is in America too. You know, it’s very hard.
France has the same problems. England certainly has the same problems.. There is no place in the world. Maybe Greenland? I don’t know where it is completely free.
MC
Thank you. Let’s continue. We can ask a few more questions, please.
Student 4
Hello. My name is Sophia Bulovash. I represent the Sverdlovsk college of arts and culture, specializing in theatrical creativity, I have a question. Where does it start? Film. How do you start working on your project? How do you come up with the theme, write the script and create artistic images? And what is the main advice you could give to a beginning director?
Oliver Stone
You have to work out of passion and love. That’s all I can say. Because there’s so much rejection, so much difficulty and if you have, honesty in your body, a love of truth, it’s very important to follow it. Of course, you don’t have to do that. You can do it just for the reasons of theater. Some people go into theater because they just want to have fun and comedy and this and that, and they do a good job. And there are many things that are written and played for fun, and I don’t want to, you know, the search for truth is not the only reason. But I think the great dramas come from that.
MC
Thank you. Let’s have another question, please. Right here in the center.
Teacher 1
Good afternoon. My name is Denis Sergeevich Domin. I am a math and computer science teacher at school 66, in the city of Kirov. I have a question, in your opinion, which films by Russian directors about historical events hold a special place in world cinema?
Oliver Stone
Oh, well, you know. Sure. I mean, I go back to the, you know, the Alexander Nevsky, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, all that stuff. Yeah. I see movies from every country in the world. Russian movies stand out. I mean, I was never a fan of the science fiction guy, Tarkovsky. I never liked his movies. But, you know, I understand the mentality. There’s a there’s a realness and a hardness to this un-sentimentality to Russian cinema that really is powerful, and I admire that. And after all, you know, well, Stanislavski comes from Russia. So obviously he had tremendous influence on American theater.
MC
Thank you. Let’s continue. Any more questions, please?
Student 5
Good day. My name is Geneva Lena. I represent the exemplary theater studio in Pyatigorsk, and I have a question for you. If you had the opportunity to travel to the past and interview any historical figure, who would it be and why? Thank you.
Oliver Stone
I would have loved to interview Alexander, among others. You know there’s hundreds of characters. I mean, don’t ask me.
MC
Okay, okay, then let’s move on to the next question. We’ll finish with Alexander the Great . Please?
Student 6
Hello, my name is Albert, city of Moscow. You constantly urge American politicians to change their viewpoint, change their behavior, and stop by any means striving to maintain control over the world. Under what conditions can the United States administration recognize that our world is multipolar?
Oliver Stone
That is the question, isn’t it? And if we don’t, we’re in trouble. The world is in trouble if we don’t. If we do, the world has a shot.
MC
Brief and clear. Thank you. Let’s continue. We have more questions, please. Over here.
Student 7
Good afternoon. My name is Paulina Porizkova. I am a student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages in the city of Donetsk, Donetsk State University. My question is this. There is censorship and there is self-censorship, when a person consciously limits themselves in what they say. So is there something you don’t speak about? Where is the boundary of your self-censorship?
Oliver Stone
Of course, of course. I mean, fear, humanity. The concept is, that you… I’m very conscious of the things I do. And realize that sometimes I go too far. I’m pushing things, and that’s my nature. I push, I push, and, often I’m very self-critical. I’ve been in my hotel the other day, I was writing, working on a new script I want to make and I talked to my producer Fernando. And I told him, I can’t I’ve been on this thing for a year, and there are things I hate in it, and I wish I could write better. So, you know, I’m always being self-critical. And it gets worse when you’re older. But by the way, the material is pretty risqué. The material is very risqué…
MC
Thank you. Let’s have one final question, please.
Student 8
My name is Petra. I am a 10th grade media class student at school 2120. And I have a question for you. Artificial intelligence has penetrated all areas of our lives. How do you use it in your work?
Oliver Stone
Not yet, I tried it one time. I looked at it and it’s scary, because it takes from you, you know, they steal my style. My style is my style. I don’t want my style to be copied. On the other hand, how do I stop it? You can’t stop it. But I just feel my own purity is at stake. And I don’t want to go and say, I’m going to, let me write this in a Steven Spielberg way so I can make a lot of money.
MC
Thank you very much. We had a very interesting, unusual conversation. In any case, we have two more questions. Let’s ask, two short questions. Yes.
Student 9
Hello. My name is Janina Diana. I am from Tumen, and I would like to ask the following question. In American literature and cinema, the topic of what would have happened if the Vietnam War hadn’t occurred is often discussed. In your opinion, how would the history of the USA have changed?
Oliver Stone
Well, the United States, for one, I think would have been a far better nation, far, far more. You realize how damaging that war was to the United States? I mean, it corrupted and coarsened a generation. So many people came back bitter, hostile and a civil war. Basically. If you look at my movies, I pictured a civil war that was going on inside our own country and I see evidence of it still. That civil war never went away. It’s polarized. If anything, it’s polarized.
If the United States had been the kind of country like, let’s say, like Thailand or Switzerland or Norway or Sweden or Denmark or even France, you know. But it wasn’t meant to be. America was a very violent country, very violent from the beginning. From the beginning, we fucked every Indian that existed. Every treaty was broken. We never kept our word. We embraced slavery, obviously, in a very ugly way, which led to a tremendous civil war with a lot of… it was the most violent war we ever had. So America is a shoot first think second kind of country.
MC
Thank you for the answer. Now let’s have the final question and wrap up, please. Yeah.
Student 10
Hello. My name is Nick Miroff. I am a student at the physics and mathematics school in the city of Tumen. I would like to ask a question. Who can you name as your main teacher and inspiration? And why did this person influence you?
Oliver Stone
Oh, you know, many, many. Geez, I mentioned him negatively, but, you know, certainly Spielberg did a very interesting job with the Lincoln movie. That was very well done. And although he goes sometimes into the patriotic mode, there was something honest about Lincoln, which I really appreciated. Very special movie. There’s many good movies. I very much liked, the recent movies. I liked very much Wicked. Okay. You’re going to laugh. But you know, movies are movies. I
love entertainment, and I enjoy them, I love musicals. I tried to make Evita for a long time. Evita was a musical that I loved. I wanted to make it. Came very close. Never happened. You know, I did The Doors, about music. I like crime movies. I did gangster movies. Natural Born Killers, Savages, U Turn. I mean, I don’t just do political movies, I like to mix it up.
I wish I could have done more, but I had problems because I kept fighting the system. One of my teachers was Marty Scorsese, who’s good. Very good. He was at NYU, New York University. You, you know, you name the artist, and I’ll just tell you. Yes, I love them, you know.
Student 10
You are my inspiration. Thank you.
MC
Thank you. Let’s wrap it up. Thank you very much. Thank you for the conversation. Thank you, Mr. Oliver. Let us also thank Mr. Sanchez for his help. Thank you for helping. Thank you for coming. Thank you for this wonderful conversation. Thank you very much. This is a place for us, for you.
So once again, applause for our guest, filmmaker, screenwriter, producer Oliver Stone here at the Knowledge First Marathon. And Mr Sanchez. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Source: Consortium News