Snowden: The Only Safe Place Is on the Run

A courageous look at a historic figure.

From Oscar®-winner Oliver Stone, Snowden is a riveting personal look at one of the most polarizing figures of the twenty-first century, the man responsible for what has been described as the most far-reaching security breach in US intelligence history. This official motion picture screenplay edition, written by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone, includes a foreword by David Talbot and dozens of photos from the film.

In 2013, Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) quietly leaves his job at the NSA and flies to Hong Kong to meet with journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), and filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) to reveal US government cyber surveillance programs of epic proportions. A top security contractor with virtuoso programming skills, Ed has discovered that a virtual mountain of data on digital communication is being assembled—not just from foreign governments and terror groups, but from ordinary Americans.

Disillusioned with his work in the intelligence community, Snowden meticulously gathers hundreds of thousands of secret documents that will expose the full extent of the abuses. Leaving his longtime love Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) behind, Ed finds the courage to act on his principles. Snowden opens the door on the untold story of Edward Snowden, examining the forces that turned a conservative young eager patriot into a historic whistleblower and posing provocative questions about which liberties we are willing to trade for protection.

Kieran Fitzgerald is a director, editor, cinematographer, and screenwriter. He is the writer of The Homesman and The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández.

Academy Award-winning Oliver Stone has written and directed over 25 feature films and 6 documentaries, among them some of the most influential and iconic films of the last decades. Some have been at deep odds with conventional myth—films such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, and Untold History of the United States.

David Talbot is the founder of Salon and author of the New York Times bestseller The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.