Oliver Stone’s latest project JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, is a documentary which explores the factual side of the events he dramatized in JFK (1991), which earned him a Golden Globe exactly 30 years ago. JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, narrated by Donald Sutherland and Whoopi Goldberg, premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on July 11, while JFK will be screened on the giant Plage screen. Through the eyes of Louisiana’s District Attorney Jim Garrison played by Kevin Costner, Stone’s film explored the myriad controversies and cover-ups surrounding the dramatic murder of one of the most influential politicians America has ever known. The film won Oliver Stone the Best Director Golden Globe award in 1992 and was nominated for four Globes and eight Oscars, winning two, and remains one of the most financially successful movies of the director’s career. 

Mr. Stone, you said that JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass will provide new evidence never seen before about the conspiracy that brought to Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Is it so?

I want to be very precise because this is not to be fooled around with for a headline that says, “We found Kennedy’s murderer!” I know the way the press thinks. Most of the American Press, and the world Press, has sensationalized this case, with the headline “Who killed Kennedy?” The big question is why, and we tried to answer that in JFK and now in this documentary.

And the answer is?

I made the movie 30 years ago. 28 years before that, Kennedy was killed.  This is 58 years from today, and there is a memory hole, people forget the original evidence, and now there’s been three official investigations, the third one set out by my movie. The Assassination Records Review Board, which existed from 1994 to 1998, did a lot of work, but they were not impaneled to investigate, they were allowed only to declassify. And they declassified a lot of documents, not all, many were held back. The Secret Service for example destroyed many files before, they did it illegally and the Records Review Board condemned them.

Therefore, you’re bringing new evidence with this documentary?

Let’s go in order. I will start with the Warren Commission, which was the first investigation on the assassination. We found out as a result of the Records Review Board that the Warren Commission was even more corrupt than we thought then. The big point is that the [then President] Lyndon Johnson appointed former CIA chief Alan Dulles – who had been fired by Kennedy – to the Board, he was one of the seven. And Dulles controlled very much the meetings and what was shown to the Board, nothing from the CIA of any importance were shown to them. So, the commission members did not know that the CIA had committed foreign assassinations in various countries, they did not know, at the time that Kennedy was in office, that they were trying to assassinate Castro and Kennedy didn’t know it – Eisenhower may have known it. Dulles and his CIA were trying every angle. They used Cubans, they used the Mafia, they used anything they could to kill Castro. They were part of the attempted coup-d’état against DeGaulle in 1961, when the OAS tried to take DeGaulle out. They participated in the murder of Lumumba in Congo. That was the atmosphere at that time. And Dulles’ investigation was not an honest one. 

What about the FBI?

The FBI was a main intelligence (source) for the Board, so many things by Edgar Hoover were given to them, like Lee Oswald did it alone. But anything that was positive about Oswald was removed. So, the testimony was contaminated. For example, there were two agents, two FBI agents, Sylbert and O’Neal, very important people here. We found out that they sat through the whole autopsy at Bethesda. They never saw those wounds that were described in the autopsy, they saw the original head wound in the back of the head and there were many other things that they saw and said and that was never seen by the Warren Commission. And plus, it was lifted for many years, we never heard about it until the AARB came out. So, we have a Commission that essentially cuts off information that doesn’t want to be included, anything negative about the CIA and about all the CIA people that were working on the case, all taken out. That autopsy was a disaster, it was a miscarriage, like an Italian comic opera. They had three autopsy doctors who don’t know what they are doing, who had no experience with gunshots. The best coroners in the world were available but they didn’t call them, they used military people who were under their control, and we have definitive proof of that. We even know that they replaced Kennedy’s brain, which had been dispersed, with another corpse’s brain and closed up his skull again.

We learn that Robert Kennedy knew a lot more than previously thought, right?

Robert Kennedy has strong suspicions. Right after his brother’s assassination, Robert called the CIA and said, “did you do it?” It’s an interesting story, and in the documentary, we get into that, the motivation for the murder. JFK wanted to pull out of Vietnam, no question, and that is a big deal because historians have always attacked me for that. We found a declassified report from the defense secretary, McNamara – a meeting in Hawaii which was declassified by the AARB – from which it is very clear that the pullout was underway, a pullout of units, not individual men, and that was just a small beginning. But definitely Kennedy was sick of Vietnam, he knew, he said if we are not going to go into attack Cuba, which we did not do, why would we send troop to a country so far away as Vietnam?  It’s just crazy.  All this is, it’s important for the historians to understand this because if they attack Kennedy, which many of them do, they say he was involved, started the Vietnam War, actually Eisenhower did by financing the French war, but they say Kennedy did. Kennedy was reversing that policy, and Johnson, the day after he was elected, as I showed it in the movie, reversed the decision to pull out of Vietnam and allowed the expansion of the war. So, Kennedy was shaking up the place in a big way, that was the motivation, he was going to change things. Not only, but we know that Kennedy hated the CIA and had vowed to break it up.

What kind of distribution or platform is Through the Looking Glass expected to have?

This is done in a sober two-hour documentary, which we are showing in Cannes, and it tells the story in a linear fashion in which we explain some of these things, and it’s a record for future generations so they cannot forget that Kennedy was killed in this way. This is an important legacy piece. No US distributor has seen the film. We have an English distributor for Europe, Altitude, which will distribute it in England as well as to world sales representatives.

You hope the documentary will raise awareness?

I would hope so. It’s hard to get outrage. The point is when you shoot a President in broad daylight in Dallas at noon, in front of the whole world, the people really do know that there are forces here at play that are very powerful, it sets up a distrust of what’s going on at the top, which is getting worse and worse. It was a well-done, behind the scenes, staged execution all the way up through its cover-up. America was never the same after that. Since 1963 the intelligence agencies and the military in a sense took over the Government and we never got it back. No President has gone up against them, even Trump said we would go up against them, he didn’t, he backed down.  Clinton started to, he backed down, Obama certainly backed down. And we have basically become a military industrial dictatorship.