"No Studio Would Support It": Oliver Stone Talks Making 'Snowden'

A movie about the saga of Edward Snowden is powder keg material already, but add to the mix Oliver Stone, who has directed provocative takes on political figures before ("JFK," "Nixon"), and you have a picture primed for controversy. Indeed, according to the director, the subject matter was so hot, no one around Hollywood wanted to touch his upcoming film "Snowden," despite pulling together an ensemble including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Nicolas Cage, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Rhys Ifans, Joely Richardson, Scott Eastwood, and Timothy Olyphant.

“No studio would support it,” he told THR at the Sun Valley Film Festival, which had a work-in-progress screening of the movie. “It was extremely difficult to finance, extremely difficult to cast. We were doing another one of these numbers I had done before, where pre-production is paid for by essentially the producer and myself, where...