Oliver Stone and Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the challenges of making Snowden

With locations including Hong Kong’s Mira hotel where Edward Snowden blew the whistle on unauthorised global spying on citizens, the biopic shunned by many studios shunned is a stirring portrait of a courageous man

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden in a scene from Snowden shot in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong.

Published: 10:00am, 2 Oct 2016Updated: 5:50pm, 5 Oct 2016

When Oliver Stone announced he was working on a film about Edward Snowden, eyebrows weren’t exactly raised. Stone has made a career out of needling governments, politicians and the media, proffering controversial opinions in films such as J.F.K. and Natural Born Killers. A film about Snowden, who sent shockwaves around the world with his revelations about mass government surveillance in 2013, is right in his wheelhouse.

“He’s the only filmmaker that could’ve made this story, to be honest,” says Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Snowden in the new film.

Director Oliver Stone has made a career out of making films about conspiracies.

Stone, who turned 70 last month, modestly disagrees. “I think there are other people who are as concerned as I am with what’s going on, and they’d like to know more,” he says.

We meet midway through the Zurich Film Festival – thankfully in a room less cramped and shrouded in paranoia than the one in Hong Kong’s Mira Hotel, where Snowden met Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill and documentarian Laura Poitras to hand over digital documents destined to change his life forever.