A still from the Showtime documentary

COURTESY OF SHOWTIME

JUNE 28, 2017 

Oliver Stone’s televised interviews with Vladimir Putin will be seen in the Russian president’s homeland and in other countries around the world where broadcasters have snapped up the four-part series.

The Putin Interviews” went out on Showtime in the U.S. earlier this month over four nights and was simulcast on Sky in Britain and Germany. National Geographic has now taken rights across Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as well as for Belgium and the Netherlands. Channel One will show the interviews in Russia.

IM Global Television is distributing the series and has also sold it to SBS in Australia. In Europe, DR has it in Denmark, ITI in Poland, and FTV in Czech Republic. In Spain, it will air on pay-TV, on the Movistar+ platform.

“The Putin Interviews” was produced by Fernando Sulichin (“The Untold History of the United States”), New Element Media and Rob Wilson. The producers, who were repped by ICM, sealed the Channel One Russia deal and the agreement with Sky themselves. They also licensed the rights to Eagle Pictures in Italy, which has now placed the series with public broadcaster Rai. In France, they dealt with Folamour Pictures, which in turn licensed the rights to public broadcast channel France 3.

Stone conducted more than a dozen interviews with Putin over two years, with no topic off-limits. The pair talked about Putin’s rise to power, his relations with four U.S. presidents, and his view on U.S.-Russian relations today. “If Vladimir Putin is indeed the great enemy of the United States, then at least we should try to understand him,” Stone said.

“This is a one-of-a-kind series with global relevance from one of the greatest filmmakers of all time,” IM Global’s Stuart Ford and Eli Shibley said in a statement.