The outspoken helmer recalls clandestine meetings with the exiled whistleblower, missing his mother's funeral to make 'Snowden' ("I would have had to cut like four days of filming. And we couldn't afford it") and why he cut Donald Trump out of 'Wall?Street': "He was good. I have no complaint."

Edward Snowden was given no script approval, nor did he receive any payment for Snowden, says director Oliver Stone. His new movie tells the story of the former NSA operative and how he came to reveal that the U.S. government was secretly monitoring domestic telephone calls.

The 69-year-old filmmaker and renegade met after Snowden's Russian lawyer "contacted me because he wanted to sell me his book, which he had written about Snowden," said Stone. "But it was a fictional book. He had fictionalized it. And it was an interesting Russian novel. Very Dostoevsky. Really it's about a young man from America who comes over and reveals a 1984 world. I didn't know at that point in time whether we were going to make a fictional movie with an unnamed character, or else we would make the story as realistic as possible about Snowden, because I didn't know if Snowden would cooperate."