Oliver Stone: The Great Satan?

Tue., Jul. 3, 2007 1:18 PM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Oliver Stone's had to deal with some pretty harsh reviews in his polarizing career, but we're guessing this stings more than a thumbs-down.

The filmmaker's plans to shoot a documentary on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadis may be shelved after the country refused him permission to make the movie.

"I sent a negative answer by Ahmadinejad to Oliver Stone," the Fars News Agency quoted government media advisor Mehdi Kalhor as saying earlier this week. "It is true that this person is considered part of the opposition in the U.S., but he is still part of the Great Satan."

(The "Great Satan," of course, is how Iran's leaders have referred to the U.S. ever since the country's late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrew the U.S-backed shah in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.)

A number of high-profile Iranian filmmakers revealed last week they had backed the proposal Stone submitted a month ago and urged officials to acquiesce to a sit-down to build stronger cultural ties between Washington and Tehran during the ongoing standoff over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Despite Stone's reputation as a left-leaning rabble rouser and vocal critic of American policy in both his films (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Nixon) and his 2003 Fidel Castro documentary, Comandante, Ahmadinejad and his cronies balked.

"We believe that the American cinema industry lacks culture and art," he said. (Maybe they caught a screening of Alexander.)

Kalhour said the only way Ahmadinejad would allow himself to be profiled by an American would be if President Bush gave an Iranian director similar leeway.

Stone's camp says he has not been formally apprised of Ahmadinejad's rejection, but the filmmaker did release a statement in response to the Fars report.

"I have been called a lot of things, but never a Great Satan," Stone said. "I wish the Iranian people well, and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours."

Stone, whose last movie, World Trade Center, attempted to avoid political connotations, has not exactly been a big Bush booster.

During a trip to the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain last year, he admitted feeling "ashamed" of U.S. policies instituted after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Most recently, Stone, a Vietnam veteran, directed an antiwar TV ad sponsored by MoveOn.org and calling for Bush to bring the troops home.

In any case, Stone's next big-screen venture, Jawbreaker, will reportedly take a similar apolitical tact as he did with WTC, focusing on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion in 2001.