Years ago,, Oliver Stone asked Putin to be his 22-year-old daughter’s godfather. “Does she want to become an Orthodox Christian?” Putin asked when Stone floated the idea during a sit-down in the Kremlin.
Putin appeared to wriggle his way out of the proposal (“You have to ask her,” he said) before Stone went on to complain about “American culture,” taking particular issue with what he described as a focus on gender identity and people labeling themselves as “transgender” and “cisgender.”
Stone quickly steered the conversation toward a controversial 2013 Russian law banning “homosexual propaganda” among minors, “It seems like maybe that’s a sensible law,” Stone said.