Playing Edward Snowden | The New Yorker

During the three years he has spent in Russian exile, Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. contractor turned whistle-blower, has maintained a surprisingly steady presence in American culture as a kind of virtual trans-border eminence. He appears via Snowbot and video link at conferences, in museums, and in theatres. He delivers lectures at universities and grants interviews to reporters, including, in 2014, a virtual interview with The New Yorkers Jane Mayer. This past July, he turned up at Comic-Con, at a secret screening to promote Snowden, the new film directed by Oliver Stone, which comes out on September 16th. Snowdens digital omnipresence has an ironic quality: hes a ghost in the screen, a disembodied conscience, a spy in the sky. Yet in his most defining appearances to date, Snowdens voice has come to us in mediated form, shaped by the artists and journalists whom he has engaged as collaboratorsand sounding quite different depending on who is in the editing bay.

For the public, the Snowden story began with a short film by the acclaimed documentarian Laura Poitras, which later became the basis for her Academy Award-winning documentary Citizenfour. The footage, shot in a Hong Kong hotel room where Poitras and the Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill arranged to meet with Snowden, in 2013, showed a pale and unshaven twenty-nine-year-old in rectangular spectacles, explaining eloquently, and with eerie calmness, why he had chosen to reveal the existence of an extensive domestic-surveillance program in the United States, and then to reveal his own identity. He described the system that he helped build as the architecture of oppression, and said that he could not go on living unfreely but comfortably, paid well to spy on unwitting Americans.

The tale, many said, was straight out of a John le Carr novel, especially when Snowden, charged by the United States Department of Justice under the Espionage Act, had his passport revoked en route to Ecuador and spent thirty-nine days in Moscows Sheremetyevo Airport, before being granted temporary asylum in Russia. In his best-selling book No Place to Hide, Greenwald recalls thinking to himself that the Snowden story was a surreal international thriller.

That line must have been a red cape snapping in the faces of Hollywood packagers. Sony secured the rights to Greenwalds book. Stone, on the other hand, optioned Time of the Octopus, a novel by Anatoly Kucherena, the Russian lawyer who negotiated Snowdens asylum, which recounts the adventures of an N.S.A. whistle-blower named Joshua Cold, including his extended stay in Sheremetyevo Airport and his dealings with journalists named Boitras and Greywold. According to a long process piece recently published in the Times Magazine, it was Kucherena who approached Stone, offering access to his client in exchange for the rights to the book, for which a Wikileaks data dump revealed he charged Stone a million dollars. (Stone says that he never intended to use the material.) Turned down by numerous studios, Stone got distribution through Open Road, an independent production company that last year won an Oscar for Spotlight.

Stones Snowden follows the title character, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, from a patriotic impulse to enlist in the Special Forces after 9/11, through a stellar intelligence career and an odd-couple romance with a liberal acrobat and pole-dancer named Lindsay Mills, to his current state of exile. Many scenes re-create Poitrass hotel-room documentary almost to the framein one case, literally, when one side of Snowdens rectangular eyeglasses, jutting past his face, distorts the field of view. (Melissa Leo plays Poitras; Zachary Quinto plays Greenwald; Shailene Woodley plays Mills.) Stone, who is known for his anti-establishment character studies that engage with recent American historyand for conspiracy-theory politicsportrays Snowdens choices as the inevitable actions of a person of conscience. He and his co-writer, Kieran Fitzgerald (grandson of Robert), have named the overreaching spy boss (played by Rhys Ifans in the film) after the zealous Thought Policeman OBrien in 1984.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stone described the film as a close cousin to Born on the Fourth of July, his 1989 movie starring Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic, a paralyzed Vietnam veteran who becomes an antiwar protester. Much like Kovic, Snowden wanted to serve his country, was repelled by what that service entailed, and then found a purer form of patriotism by speaking out against the actions of those in power. As in Born on the Fourth of July, the Snowden character is ennobled by his transformation from insider to outcast; the drama, driven by the heros disgust and disillusionment, centers on his change of sides. In Stones hands, the man who signed his anonymous e-mails to Poitras Citizen is not a character playing ethics chess, as in le Carr, but a hero of apostasyan American archetype as old as the nation itself. When, in the movies final moments, the real Edward Snowden appears, in a gauzy cameo that the Times Magazine reports was shot in Anatoly Kucherenas dacha, we are meant to see him as the ultimate patriot.

Gordon-Levitt, like Snowden, was born in the early eighties. A former child actor, he retains an eager boyishnessnot enigmatic so much as blank-slate. In last years Robert Zemeckis bio-pic The Walk, he portrayed the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit with what Richard Brody characterized as the antic perkiness of a salesman. As Snowden, the actors innate jauntiness is suppressed; hes watchful, grim, and courteous. To prepare for his role, he spent several hours with his subject in Moscow; he found him to be polite and slightly formal, in a Southern way. (Snowden is from North Carolina.) When Stone called him about the part, Gordon-Levitt knew little about Snowden. Since then, he has become an evangelist for Snowdens cause, donating most of his acting fee for the film to the A.C.L.U.the organization for which Snowdens American lawyer, Ben Wizner, worksand embarking on a collaboration between HitRecord,an online collaborative community that he started a decade ago, and the A.C.L.U. to explore the role that technology should play in a democracy.

Not long ago, I went to see Gordon-Levitt at the HitRecord offices, a loftlike space in a suburb of Los Angeles. It was lunchtime, and employees were gathered around a communal table eating takeout. HitRecord brings together half a million animators, editors, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other content generators, who collaborate on various kinds of projects, some prompted by Gordon-Levitt and his editorial team. (The team also produced an Emmy-winning television show, HitRecord on TV, for the millennial-oriented network Pivot.)

Gordon-Levitt, who was wearing khakis, Pumas, and a T-shirt, led me over to a quiet seating area and eased into an armchair. He said that, when he met with Snowden in Moscow, he discovered that the two have common ground. Like Snowdenwho, according to Vanity Fair, spent his late adolescence onlineGordon-Levitt, a native of the San Fernando Valley, grew up around computers. His dad, who runs a small software business, had a Commodore 64; Gordon-Levitt got his first e-mail address in high school. I dont think I ever thought of computers or the Internet as something that could be leveraged to the detriment of the human race, he told me.

The A.C.L.U. collaboration, which is called Are you there, Democracy? Its me, the Internet (pace Judy Blume), required participants to respond to the prompt Is todays technology good or bad for Democracy? In one video, a Pakistani student, Ayesha, starts her recording by removing a sticker that coversher Webcam. (In Stones film, Snowden castigates Mills for not taking the same precaution.) She describes the first time she voted, in 2013. The polling station was full of people pressuring voters to cast their ballots for a certain candidate; Ayesha and others recorded videos and posted them on the Internet. By recording or sharing our sentiments about what happened in our supposedly awesome democracy, we actually started a conversation about the fairness of the election process, she says.

The notion of using surveillance to create transparency is an inversion of the Snowden narrativebut, then again, so is the contribution that Gordon-Levitt solicited from Snowden himself. In the HitRecord office, an editor was working on the footagea recorded Google Hangout sessionand Snowdens face was talking in front of a green screen. Look, nobodys gonna argue that theres not a lot of places where technology does hurt, he said. There are days when, you know, I think that things are pretty bad. But there are also moments that I see that things could get really good. The recorded Snowden continued, What technology can ultimately provide, if we make sure it works for us rather than against us, is liberty. People are more liberated to be creative. People are more liberated to share. People are more liberated to engage in their democracy.

In a (https://hitrecord.org/projects/2894051/highlights) posted on HitRecords Web site, under the title Snowden Optimistic Project, Gordon-Levitt calls upon animators and illustrators to contribute to the projecthe envisions an enormous collage, with a hand-done feel, that will visually convey the ideas Snowden expresses, through line drawings, paper cut-outs, stop-motion animation. A sample clip made by HitRecord shows an animated drone flying across the screen and dropping a bomb as Snowden says the words places where technology does hurt. At the words mass surveillance, a row of grabby hands rises from bottom of screen, while a boxy surveillance camera swivels like a curious creature searching for morsels. One contributor tackled the next linesThere are days when, you know, I think that things are pretty bad. But there are also moments that I see that things could get really goodwith an animated illustration of dark clouds being swiped away, Apple style, on a smartphone.

Gordon-Levitt, who communicates with Snowden using encrypted video chat, has said that Snowdens sunny outlook surprised him. People think of him as symbolizing the negative sides of technology, he told me. The actor, by contrast, has come to see Snowden as an idealist. I think Snowden has a lot of love for the Internet and what it could and should be, he said. People like him and me and younger identify with it. He believes its spreading connection, collaboration, and compassion. He risked his life for it.

Whereas in Poitrass film Snowden was a pensive philosopher, and in Stones hes a principled patriot, through the lens of Gordon-Levitt and his team Snowden seems on his way to becoming a different sort of cultural icon. He is an indie Internet celebrity, an advocate for the very type of digital community that HitRecord seeks to cultivateupbeat, open, appealing. And in place of the vast and threatening thing he exposed is a vast and comforting faith in what is to come. Gordon-Levitt told me, Socrates wouldnt write anything down. He said, Itll put your mind in a prison. We think of the written word as a positive and liberating technology. I think the same applies to computers. Its just starting! Its starting now.

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Playing Edward Snowden | The New Yorker