Sean Stone

documentary to film it's it's just a different medium documentary is a different way of making a movie and telling a story but it's still the same fundamental principles right you're either setting up cameras your actors are you're either your participants you know like reality show style or interview style you're sitting down you're talking to someone you're you're feeling okay what's the tempo is this boring you have to cut away to something else where the visual is coming from right

Am I going to archives or am I shooting it? It's the same principle of storytelling. It's just maybe the budget. Generally, the budget is nowhere near what you get with the film. You don't have to stage everything. It's a little bit different, but the same principles of storytelling apply. There are films that can apply the documentary style or the mockumentary style and bring that tempo to it.

Likewise, you can bring cinematic style to documentary. I think there are many different languages. And it's like you go to film school and you watch some of these things and you're like, man, you know, the Maya Deren types and the Brackistan Brackage and things like this. And, you know, there's many others. They're not necessarily the most entertaining films, but it just shows you how...

film you know how do you say we've hollywood has created a certain style for the most part right that's larger than life and you know goes back to let's say you know the epics of griffith and whatnot gone with the wind but if you go across the world there's many different styles of storytelling that

from a Hollywood perspective, would come across as boring, but might resonate more with a more documentary approach, like an Ozo or someone like this, you know, a Japanese approach to storytelling that might be a little bit more like day in the life and a little bit more focused on nuance that maybe a documentarian would be interested in, as opposed to a Hollywood filmmaker, right?

There's different approaches to that same, it's still storytelling, it's just different ways of telling.

But there are people that look at it just as a business. And they're very mercenary. And they just take whatever the gig is. And I think that's the really hard thing to navigate. I mean, Scorsese always said he did one film for himself and one film for Hollywood. It's like a compromise.

Well, no, his dad used to say, right, your dad used to always come out of the movie and say, we could have done it better, right? And so your dad kind of put that into your mind of starting to think about maybe how you would have done a film differently.

83?

There you go.

You know about the forces involved in the coup against the Shah in 79, I mean, 78, 79, that time period, right? You saw it. I have my impression. I want to know which one you think. Which direction are you going? Oh, I think it was a coup. I think the U.S. and British wanted to see him go. I agree. I think he was too independent and powerful. I don't know if it came at the moment.

yeah but that doesn't mean that he didn't become too independent and powerful for their taste and i think that i don't know if it happened at the moment they discovered he had cancer which was i think like 75 six they said okay he's weakening we gotta replace this but i would say that the arc of crisis story remember the arc of crisis that huntington and brudzinski were talking about in the late 70s of this idea of this radical islam they were already perpetuating the notion of clash of civilizations at that time

And it's not just saying there's a clash of civilizations between Orthodox Christianity and Islam. They were pushing for these rifts, as in Lebanon, as in, well, not Syria at that point, but in Iran in particular.

I think the fact that Khomeini was being protected in the West is very indicative, and that the BBC was broadcasting his messages from all of his messages being broadcast by the BBC in Iran is indicative. Because that's intelligence. That's how it works. It doesn't just work with a guy going in coup. There's different dimensions to it. You've got to prepare the population.

You've got to put money towards this. You've got to make sure that you fly the guy in and say, okay, now he's your new leader. I mean, they knew who Khomeini was. You know how crazy it was to send him back, right?

Well, so 2015, 16, I started working for RT America, right? That was a DC-based group that had Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. It had Tom Hartman, a leftist progressive guy, Jesse Ventura, Larry King. We had a lot of really interesting journalists, right? And we were a dissident because at that point, as you know, the media is controlled. I've understood this since I was...

uh seven years old you know being in jfk watching the fallout from jfk seeing the media reaction to jfk how you know how it was dismissed by the mainstream media obviously some historians got it but a lot of the mainstream never accepted that that narrative right they said it's a great film but it's bad history and it's a conspiracy theory fantasy

So I understood from seven, eight years old that the media was lying to us. From the first Iraq war, through the bus, the Serbian war, through the second Iraq war, I knew all this stuff. I was watching it, you know, I literally would try to tell people.

So when I got a chance to work for RT, that was a way of actually having a platform for us dissidents to say things that were not acceptable on ABC, NBC, you know, CNN, right? And they turned that in 2016, they demonized RT America into this Russian

propaganda outlet, that was the, remember when they said that the Russians interfered in the election, half of that report, which was only like 12, 13 pages was about RT America. That was the Russian interference narrative in the Trump election was that RT America was pushing stories that they didn't like about fracking or Syria, whatever it was. And they're saying, we interfered in the election.