The director Oliver Stone got a rare chance to talk to whistleblower Edward Snowden in front of an audience at a Q&A session on Thursday evening, and in so doing, compared Snowden’s anxiety over his own appearance in the film to another amateur actor who was cut from one of his films six years before.
“I directed Donald Trump,” Stone said to an invitation-only audience at San Diego Comic-Con. “It was an outtake in [Wall Street:] Money Never Sleeps.”
Stone said Snowden had gone through a number of takes for his own brief appearance in the new film, and his anxiety was a stark contrast to Trump’s unshakable confidence. “After every take he jumped up and said, ‘Wasn’t that great?’ Honestly, Donald, no. That’s the confidence that’s allowing him to run. I think we did something like nine takes with him, too.”
Snowden, speaking with a delay of several seconds on the same screen that had held the movie, laughed and averred. “I’d like to avoid that association,” he said.
San Diego Comic-Con plays host to a number of unusual celebrities, both in person and over the internet, but perhaps its strangest to date was Thursday’s unofficial inclusion via satellite connection to a Russian webcam of Snowden himself, projected at several times life size on the screen that had just recently shown Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s as the man himself in a film version of the last 10 years of Snowden’s life.
The screening was almost a secret: only press and people associated with the film were invited, and though there are movie premiere venues galore in the convention centre and around San Diego, the event was held on the fifth floor of a nondescript mall. Attendees were searched with black Garrett metal-detector wands before being allowed into the venue.
“The FBI gets a copy of this talk because it’s through Google Hangouts,” Snowden quipped after declining to go into more detail about how the data he passed to the Guardian was removed from the NSA station in Hawaii where he worked. “Anybody basically who asks nicely gets a court order.”
Snowden also offered a rare glimpse into his own personal life, years after his revelation of the NSA’s secret dragnet surveillance of the American public’s internet activity resulted in criminal charges under the espionage act that saw him exiled to Russia.
“I can confirm that I am not living in a box,” Snowden said. “I actually live a surprisingly free life. This was not the most likely outcome. I didn’t actually expect to make it out of Hawaii. I thought it was incredibly risky. I had a lot of advantages in doing what I did; I worked for the CIA on the human intelligence side, I worked for the NSA on the signals intelligence side, and I taught counter-intelligecene. This is not something that’s covered that well in the media. I was about as well placed as anybody could be, and I still thought I was going to get rolled up at the airport and that there were going to be knocks on the doors of the journalists.”
The programme’s moderator, Dave Karger, asked Snowden what he thought of Gordon-Levitt’s performance, much to the latter’s chagrin. “This is one of the things that’s kind of crazy and surreal about this kind of experience: I don’t think anybody looks forward to having a movie made about themselves, especially someone who is a privacy advocate,” Snowden said. “Some of my family members have said, ‘He sounds just like you!’ I can’t hear it myself but if he can pass the family test he’s doing all right.”
Snowden said he agreed to do the film because he thought it could raise awareness in ways his own advocacy couldn’t: “I’m not an actor,” he said, “I don’t think anybody in politics is charismatic enough to connect with people on these issues.”
And Snowden himself still longs for change. “I still can’t come home,” he said. “And we don’t know when that’ll change.”
