This week, for the first time, Oliver Stone visited the land where his son famously converted to Shiite Islam and proceeded to paint both President Trump and the United States as the Great Satan — the former, quite literally, and the latter, in so many words.
During his trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the radical left director told Iranian reporters at a press conference on Wednesday that while he once compared George W. Bush to John Wayne, a more apt comparison for Trump is “Beelzebub,” another name for Satan.
While in its report on Stone’s hysterical criticisms of the U.S. and its president, The Hollywood Reporter praises the director for “demonstrating a solid knowledge of regional politics as well as Persian history,” Stone didn’t seem too concerned about Iran’s history of promoting terrorism in the region. Instead, he was more than willing to trash American foreign policy in the Middle East, and threw in some disparaging comments about France’s Emmanuel Macron, who recently met with Trump, for good measure.
THR notes that Stone referred to the war in Iraq as a “proxy war” and to U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 as a form of “creative destruction” with the reckless goal of regime change, “no matter how disastrous the invasion of Iraq was.”
“We made a mess out of Iraq, Syria, Libya, but it doesn’t matter to the American public,” said Stone. “It’s okay to wreck the Middle East. … It doesn’t matter who is president — Bush, Obama or Trump, the U.S. will break any treaty” to promote its own interests.
Trump and Macron’s call for revising the dangerous Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, Stone said, shows that Macron is a man “without much sense of history or memory of the great traditions of France,” and one who clearly wants to revert back to French colonialism.
Asked if he would consider producing a film focused on the Islamic State, Stone said that while it’s a “very good idea,” he cited political “blocking forces and controversies” that would try to prevent him from telling the story of ISIS “honestly.”
Stone also addressed the “ridiculous story” that he wanted to make a film in 2007 about then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but was rejected because the president considered the director a representative of the “Great Satan,” how Iranian leaders generally refer to the U.S.
THR closes out its report by noting that Stone’s son Sean converted to Shiite Islam while visiting Iran in 2012.