Is a Russian Oliver Stone Going to Make a Movie about Donald Trump?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 24 – Vladimir Surin, director of the Moscow Center for the Study of Socially Significant Problems, says a Russian film director should make a film on Donald Trump analogous to the one US director Oliver Stone has made on Vladimir Putin, something that would allow Putin to explain himself and represent a breakthrough in US-Russian ties.

            Stone’s film, Surin says, represents “the start of the geopolitical breakthrough toward the normalization and harmonization of Russian-American relations. The film of the American became an independent and powerful geopolitical factor. Such is the nature of our time.” And Russia must exploit this by responding in kind (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/06/24/vstrechnyj_hod/).

            “’No one besides us.’ This device of Russians in airborne forces can (and should!) be considered as a call to our great film directors. And we have a whole cohort of them: Mikhalkov, Govorukhin, Menshov and others,” Suring continues. 

            “We all must always remember and take into consideration that we live in an era when information decides everything. There is a super-important task which by itself seems not resolvable – the restoration of a strategic partnership of Russia and the US.” Take in isolation “this is a utopia.” But no one should forget that individuals make history.

            According to the media expert, “the global crisis of democracy has a simple cause: democracy has blocked the role of the personality in history. Film, TV, IP-technologies are in a position to overcome this crisis. Speaking concretely: we must immediately organize the filming of a Russian movie, ‘An Interview with D. Trump.’”

            “No one except for us [Russians],” he says, “will be able to pose to the American president those questions on which he would very much like to express himself.” Such a film would free Trump from the constraints the American establishment has sought to impose on him and his actions.

            In sum, Surin concludes, “a Russian film about ‘the Kremlin’s henchman’ D. Trump will be something … [ellipsis in the original]. A talented conceptually developed film-interview with Trump would be worth an entire series of Russian-American negotiations. And such a series would follow…”