One minute he’s denouncing United States President George Bush; the next he’s accepting an invitation for a biopic from Oliver Stone. No one can accuse Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of leading a dull life.
Barely had the dust settled on the war of words between the Iranian President and his counterpart in Washington on Tuesday than Ahmadinejad was fielding questions about his prospects in Hollywood. To go from a pronouncement about Iran’s nuclear future to a discussion about his own potential celluloid future without stuttering was quite an achievement.
Quizzed about Stone’s desire to make a documentary about his life, Ahmadinejad said: ”I have no objection, generally speaking.” Stone has a history of documentaries on American figures of hate. In 2003, he made a film on Fidel Castro that was praised on the left for debunking the myth of a Cuban monster and condemned by the right for soft-soaping him.
That Ahmadinejad should have no objections to being the next subject of a Stone documentary comes as a surprise, as the last word heard on the matter was a rejection. Last month, the Iranian president’s media adviser said Ahmadinejad was against the movie.
”It is right that this person [Stone] is considered part of the opposition in the US, but opposition in the US is a part of the great Satan. We believe that the American cinema lacks culture and art,” he said.
To accuse one of the US’s most famous artists of coming from a country with no art is one thing; to accuse him of being part of the great Satan quite another. Stone shot back: ”I have been called a lot of things, but never a great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well, and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours.”
Still, all that bad feeling seems to have passed, and lines of communication have been reopened. Could there be a lesson here for Bush? — Guardian Unlimited Â