Oliver Stone talks 'Snowden,' talks cyber-surveillance, and talks about the big new book with his name on it

'Don't trust the government," Oliver Stone was saying the other day, on the phone from Washington.

"I've always said this, from the beginning of my career, my own experience in Vietnam, and Salvador - what I saw there with my own eyes. Never trust the government. They lie all the time."

Stone, acknowledging that his films tend to be controversial - an understatement if ever there was one from the provocateur behind Platoon, Salvador, JFK, Nixon, World Trade Center, and W - was in the nation's capital to screen Snowden.

On Wednesday night, he presented his two-hour, 14-minute biopic about Edward Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower who leaked a data storm of classified documents exposing the security agency's mass monitoring of Americans' emails, phone calls, Facebook posts, and dating-site missives. Stone's invitees included "politicos, Libertarians, liberals, a few conservatives, some friends."

The movie, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the mild-mannered millennial techie charged by the United States with violating the Espionage Act - and now granted political asylum in Russia, where he lives in an undisclosed location - opens in theaters Friday.

Stone said he visited Snowden nine times in Russia while researching and prepping the production. (The real Snowden shows up in a coda in Stone's movie, looking and sounding a lot like the actor we've just watched portraying him. Kudos to Gordon-Levitt.)

Not surprising, privacy and cyber-surveillance were points of discussion for the Oscar-winning director (for Platoon, for Born on the Fourth of July) and the former CIA data analyst and security contractor.

Depicted as a patriot, a political moderate, a good soldier (trained as an Army Ranger and recruited by the CIA), Snowden, in the movie, reaches a point of no return, experiences a crisis of conscience. He walks out of an NSA facility in Hawaii, taking with him a digital file filled with thousands of classified documents.

In Hong Kong, Snowden meets with journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and begins to spill the beans - beans that would be published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, in Der Spiegel and the New York Times. (Poitras' videorecording of their meetings became the core of her 2015 Oscar-winning doc, Citizenfour.)

The upshot: Post-9/11, the United States has been spying on its own in unprecedented and sometimes unconstitutional ways, culling and cataloging communications in the name of fighting terrorism. The revelations were seismic, with global aftershocks.

"For five years, Ed went along and saw a lot of stuff, oversaw a lot of stuff," Stone said. "But then, as an American with a tremendous conscience, he just said, 'This is wrong. I can't keep doing this. I don't care if everybody else is doing it.' "

Stone sees parallels between Snowden's story and the hero of the filmmaker's 1989 hit, Born on the Fourth of July: Ron Kovic, a U.S. Marine, wounded and paralyzed in Vietnam, who returns Stateside to become a pivotal figure in the antiwar movement. Tom Cruise received a best actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal.

"At 29 years old, I was not at all this kind of young man," Stone, himself a Vietnam vet, and now about to turn 70 - said on Thursday. "So I'm amazed by, and in awe of, Kovic and Snowden and people like them, who make these sacrifices, who are willing at that age to walk away from the money, the job, the girlfriend . . . because they've reached a point where that's the only thing they can do."

As befits a filmmaker whose work has often been called heavy-handed (no, Stone has nothing to do with the recent boxing biopic Hands of Stone), there's a weighty new coffee table book just out called The Oliver Stone Experience (Abrams, $50). Critic Matt Zoller Seitz oversaw the huge compendium, which features a career-spanning Stone interview, surveys of Stone's 25 features, his docs, and prose (in 1997, he published an autobiographical novel, A Child's Night Dream). There are footnotes and photos galore, script pages and memoranda, critical reassessments, and testimonials from colleagues and friends.

"Obviously, I'm biased," Stone said, "but for me, despite a few mistakes, really it's something to treasure. . . . I love the way [Seitz] looks at it freshly, objectively. He's not looking in the old ways that people saw me - I haven't always gotten the best reviews, as you know."

Stone says Snowden has tested extremely well with preview audiences. "The initial screenings in San Diego were very good, excellent, high scores, actually. That's the first time that's ever happened to me. . . . I've always had mixed scores. That's always been the nature of the films I've done."

Stone's distributor, Open Road - the same company that released Spotlight, this year's Academy Award best picture - is positioning the film for the awards-season run.

The good reception gladdens the filmmaker, who spent close to three years on the Snowden project, trying to figure out how to make web coding seem cinematic, how to get around the inevitable fevered-typing-on-laptops scenes. (One way: Focus on the relationship between Snowden and his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, played by Shailene Woodley.)

"I wanted to make this a dramatic thriller as much as possible," he said. "I was always worried that we would get too wonky, it would get too complicated. This technology stuff is over my head, most of it, and to visualize it is extremely difficult. . . . I mean, data-mining work is too boring for a film to show all the details."

But what about that data mining? Does Stone think that "running a dragnet" on a whole country - the whole world, in fact - was justified? Of course he doesn't.

"To hand our private information over to the government, who says to us, 'Here, in order for us to know more about terrorists, we want a contract with you. . . . We have to protect you, and you have to make a deal with us' - that's essentially what they are saying.

"And if you really study this situation and what Snowden has exposed . . . is that they don't really protect you. They have never successfully protected us. No one can."

srea@phillynews.com

215-854-5629

@Steven_Rea