Oliver Stone’s Vladimir Putin Interviews to Air on Showtime as Four-Hour Documentary

May 1, 2017 | 09:30AM PT

Snagging an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin has stood as a Holy Grail for several news organizations. ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos has been pursuing just such a “get,” and the idea has surfaced elsewhere as well. Premium cable network Showtime appears to have gotten the scoop.

The CBS Corp.-owned pay-cable network will over four consecutive nights in June air “The Putin Interviews,” a series of conversations between filmmaker Oliver Stone and the Russian chief of state. The documentary program will debut on Monday, June 12, at 9 p.m. eastern, with three more segments slated to appear over the next three nights.

“If Vladimir Putin is indeed the great enemy of the United States, then at least we should try to understand him,” Stone said in a prepared statement.

Stone and his longtime documentary producer Fernando Sulichin, interviewed the Russian leader more than a dozen times over the course of two years, Showtime said, most recently in February following the U.S. presidential elections. No topic was judged to be off-limits. Since first becoming the president of Russia in 2000, Putin has never before spoken at such length or in such detail to a Western interviewer, Showtime said. The network compared “The Putin Interviews” to “The Nixon Interviews, the much-scrutinized series of conversations that took place between interviewer David Frost and former President Richard Nixon that aired 40 years ago in the Spring of 1977. in the spring of 1977.

“The Putin Interviews” is produced by Fernando Sulichin, New Element Media and Rob Wilson.

During the interviews, Putin expresses his views on relations between the U.S. and Russia; allegations of Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections; NATO; and turmoil in Syria and Ukraine. He also discusses such topics as his rise to the Presidency, and his long tenure there; his personal relationships with Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump; Edward Snowden’s flight to asylum in Moscow, and the resignation of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Some of the exchanges are surreal. According to Showtime, Stone introduces Putin for the first time to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire “Dr. Strangelove,” which the two proceed to watch together.

This isn’t the first time Stone has held forth with a controversial world leader. In documentaries such as “Comandante,””Looking for Fidel,” “Persona Non Grata” and “South of the Border,” Oliver Stone he has sparred verbally with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Benjamin Netanyahu, among others. Stone’s last project with Showtime was 2012’s “The Untold History of the United States,” which examined factors behind seminal world events such as the Cold War, and the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

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Randy Rhodes says:

I saw the first segment of this interview and frankly I was horrified to see Putin put in a light of a hero (a murderer)and Stalin put in the light of a hero (also a murderer) totally blew me away in the reason is this Stalin had over 20 million of his own people killed nightly he went over the list of men women and children to be executed there’s nothing here like about any of those people there is nothing glorify about them put in himself has single handedly by his own hand murdered people and ordered execution of thousands of others including American news anchors bankers in Russia putting men and women in prison for political gain the man has stolen the country’s assets I know the American media on the left side would rather have you believe communism is some great thing but it’s not it has failed America is now heading for a civil war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people because of the greed of many and the desire of others to have something they never worked for it’s called selfishness it’s a horrible thing the news media on the left and right are pushing for this thing to happen. more than the left than the right they want you to believe the anybody with money is evil when the fact is this most of those people have worked their asses off to get to where they are. the worst part is this the right has most of the guns and a lot of bullets…. Jesus Christ said this no greater love has a man they lays down his life for a friend I would lay down my life for my children for my wife my grandchildren and my friends I do not believe that a man should lay down his life because of another person’s greed or Envy of another person’s wealth one is as bad as the other Democrats Republicans look at this and think

LOL @ liberal fiction of collusion and Trump! * months of #FakeNews and Comey and Stone show how low the Democratic Party has gone.