A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
BY JON SWAINE
AND DALTON BENNETTMaking a film about Roger
Stone almost killed Christoffer
Guldbrandsen.
It was a Saturday evening in
February 2020, and the Danish
documentary filmmaker was set
to fly to Florida the following
morning for a difficult confronta-
tion with Stone, the longtime
Donald Trump adviser he had
been filming for more than a
year.
Guldbrandsen told The Wash-
ington Post he had learned that
Stone had secretly agreed to sell
the exclusive rights to his story to
a rival production company in
the United States. Guldbrandsen
and Stone had been working
without such a contract, and
Guldbrandsen said he — having
remortgaged his home and raid-
ed retirement savings to help
finance the film — was in no
position to pay.
That evening, Guldbrandsen,
who was then 48, stepped off a
treadmill at a g ym in Copenha-
gen. He began to feel dizzy, bent
over and fell to the floor. Every-
thing went dark.
“My heart stopped beating for
three minutes,” Guldbrandsen
said in an interview with The
Post. “I was brought back to life
by a doctor who was working out
at the gym. Lucky me.”
The filmmaker said his doctors
described stress as a factor in the
heart attack, and he said the
Stone project was the source of
that stress.
After the heart attack, Guld-
brandsen and director of photog-
raphy Frederik Marbell con-
vinced Stone to let them back
into his inner circle for several
more periods of filming over the
following year. The rival compa-
ny eventually abandoned its proj-
ect, Guldbrandsen said.
The Danish team’s film, “A
Storm Foretold,” follows Stone as
he worked behind the scenes to
aid Trump’s effort to overturn the
2020 election. The filmmakers
shadowed Stone inside the Wil-
lard hotel in Washington on Jan.
6, 2021, when pro-Trump rallies
spilled into violence at the U.S.
Capitol, and then as Stone lob-
bied for Trump to grant preemp-
tive pardons to his high-profile
allies and “the America First
movement.”
In advance of its expected
release later this year, reporters
from The Post reviewed more
than 20 hours of video filmed for
the documentary. The footage
was used as the basis for a
detailed Post account about
Stone’s activities during this peri-
od.
Stone declined requests for an
interview. In response to ques-
tions, he said in an email that The
Post’s reporting contained false-
hoods, and he suggested that the
video clips of him reviewed by
The Post could be “deep fakes.”
He did not provide specifics.
Stone said he had no involve-
ment in illegal acts on Jan. 6.
“Any claim, assertion or implica-
tion that I knew about, was
involved in or condoned the ille-
gal acts at the Capitol on Jan 6 is
categorically false and there is no
witness or document that proves
otherwise,” he wrote.
Guldbrandsen trained as a
jour nalist at universities in Den-
mark and the U.K. and previously
made acclaimed films for Danish
public television. Remarks by a
Danish government minister
captured in a documentary he
made in 2003 caused a diplomat-
ic incident with Germany. His
disclosure in 2010 of a govern-
ment leak was partly credited
with causing the resignation of
Denmark’s defense minister.
Guldbrandsen’s work has won
several prizes, and he was part of
a team that won a Peabody
Award in 2012 for films on pover-
ty.
He told The Post that in 2018,
he and his team set out to docu-
ment the forces that were upend-
ing American politics and tearing
through government under the
Trump administration.
“Something is happening in
your democracy that looks like a
significant change and that we
don’t understand,” Guldbrands-
en said. “If the mightiest democ-
racy undergoes these changes
and is challenged in this way,
how will it affect the rest of us?”
They began contacting people
who could shed light on how “the
essence of power in the Western
Hemisphere had turned into a
circus show.” Stone, a friend and
adviser to Trump for more than
three decades, seemed an obvi-
ous target.
During his nearly half-century
career as a Republican operative,
Stone has made himself synony-
mous with the type of populist
showmanship and scorched-
earth political attacks that pro-
pelled Trump’s 2016 bid for the
White House, for which Stone
served as an informal adviser.
On Sept. 7, 2018, the Danes
emailed Stone, asking for an
interview and outlining the basic
details of their project.
“Tell me more,” Stone replied
later that day. They exchanged
additional emails, and Stone
soon agreed to be interviewed.The filmmakers attribute
Stone’s willingness to their status
as total outsiders. “I think that it
was refreshing to him that we
met him sort of like a blank slate,”
Marbell said.
Guldbrandsen flew to meet
Stone in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
where Stone lives. The interview
went well, and he decided Stone
should be the focus of the film.
But Stone was initially skeptical.
He wanted to be paid for partici-
pating in the documentary, and
was wary of the Danes’ plans for
fly-on-the-wall footage, Guld-
brandsen said.
“He didn’t want to do anything
observational, where he lost con-
trol of the situation,” Guldbrand-
sen said. “He wanted interviews
and staged situations, which of
course from my perspective is
very boring and uninteresting.”
Yet after what Guldbrandsen
calls a “game of inches all the way
through,” Stone relented.
The filmmakers explained to
Stone that they could not pay
him, particularly because fund-
ing they had received from a
Danish public broadcaster came
with ethical guidelines. Stone
also yielded on the documen-
tary’s observational format, ac-cepting that he would have no say
in how the movie turned out,
they said.
Ultimately Stone said “that if
the film was [only] 60 percent
negative, he would be overjoyed,”
Guldbrandsen said.
He and Marbell went on to
spend days with Stone at his
home and office and followed
him across the country for fund-
raising events and speaking en-
gagements. In November 2019,
they were with him in Washing-
ton for his trial on felony charges
that he impeded a congressional
investigation into Russian inter-
ference in the 2016 election, a
case brought by special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III. Stone was
convicted, but Trump pardoned
him.
The filmmakers captured doz-
ens of hours of footage as Stone
strategized with Republican al-
lies and tried to wield influence
in conservative media and poli-
tics. They recorded Stone work-
ing to lobby Trump’s White
House for pardons on behalf of
convicted criminals, one of
whom said he was prepared to
pay Stone $100,000 for the advo-
cacy. Such payments are legal.
Sometimes, the Danish team’scameras caught clear views of the
screens of Stone’s iPhone and
computer, offering glimpses of
his communications with associ-
ates. On other occasions, Stone’s
side of calls with high-profile
friends, including former nation-
al security adviser Michael Flynn
and Infowars founder Alex Jones,
were picked up on the filmmak-
ers’ microphones.
The documentary is ultimately
a story of “loyalty and betrayal,”
Guldbrandsen said. “Loyalty
toward country and friends —
maybe even accomplices — and
the betrayal of the same,” he said.
Stone stayed loyal to Trump
even as Mueller’s investigators
pressed him on whether he and
Trump had discussed WikiLeaks’
release of hacked Democratic
emails in 2016. Both denied they
had, but witnesses contradicted
them. Stone was filmed telling a
friend in October 2019 that he
could “easily” have avoided pros-
ecution by cooperating with
Mueller and making damaging
allegations about Trump.
Yet after Jan. 6, 2021, Stone felt
badly betrayed by Trump, who
had rejected Stone’s plan for him
to preemptively pardon Stone
and others for trying to overturn
the election. Though he is now
once again a supporter, Stone
denounced Trump in an Inaugu-
ration Day phone call with a
friend, saying he should be im-
peached a second time and lam-
basting members of Trump’s fam-
ily in an expletive-laden tirade.
“F--- these people,” he said re-
peatedly.
The rant was one of many the
filmmakers captured as Stone
angrily revisited grudges against
those who he perceived had
wronged him over the years,
including members of the Repub-
lican establishment. Senate Mi-
nority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) has an “IQ of 70,” accord-
ing to Stone, “plus he looks like
Yertle the Turtle.” When Rep. Liz
Cheney (R-Wyo.) voted to im-
peach Trump after the insurrec-
tion, Stone blasted her father as a
war criminal. “They should dig
his a-- up and try him,” said
Stone, perhaps forgetting that
former vice president Richard B.
Cheney is still alive. Spokesmen
for McConnell and Cheney did
not respond to requests for com-
ment.
Stone took a more favorable
view of Trump’s father, whose
arrest at a 1 927 Ku Klux Klan
parade in New York he discussed
with an associate. “I think he was
connected to a lot of far-right
groups. That doesn’t make him a
bad person,” Stone said. “He was
a great man, Fred Trump.”
During some unguarded mo-
ments, the filmmakers recorded
Stone making potentially offen-
sive or cynical remarks about
minorities, nicknaming his staff-
er Enrique Alejandro “Mongol-
oid” and referring on one occa-
sion to “the Negroes.” In one
interaction, after describing him-
self to a Jewish supporter as a
Zionist, Stone told a member of
his entourage, “That ‘Zionist’ line
always gets ’em.”
Alejandro told The Post it was
an “affectionate nickname that
has no racial connotation what-soever.”
Stone did not respond to a
question about those comments.
Over the span of more than
two years, however, the filmmak-
ers also saw what they call an
“easygoing” and generous side to
the notoriously ruthless opera-
tive. When Stone learned of the
birth of Marbell’s daughter, he
telephoned Marbell in Denmark
to offer congratulations — and to
suggest that the baby girl be
named “Rogina.”
“There is a human behind all
of these characters, and the pub-
lic persona often is a Franken-
stein creature that doesn’t exist,”
Guldbrandsen said.
Like most documentary sub-
jects, Guldbrandsen said, Stone
presented a f acade that had to be
chipped away. “All observational
documentary consists of 80 per-
cent of people performing in
front of the camera, not even
intentionally, but just because we
are aware of its existence,” he
said. “So of course, Roger did
that, and he is, of course, also a
person who wants to control his
messaging.”
The filmmakers recorded
Stone exchanging routine off-
the-record texts and calls with
national media reporters, even as
in other moments he echoed
Trump’s complaints about fake
news. (While being filmed on
Jan. 6, 2021, Stone called The
Post “the single worst newspaper
in the country.”)
At times, Stone’s unpredict-
able behavior and disregard for
scheduling left the Danes exas-
perated.
“We would agree to meet in
Washington, D.C., because he was
going to give a speech at a
demonstration in front of the
White House,” Guldbrandsen
said. “Frederik and I would leave
our families in the middle of the
summer vacation and travel to
D.C., and he would not turn up,
and we would travel back again
empty-handed.”
Despite Stone’s reputation as a
cutthroat operator, the filmmak-
ers said, they were surprised to
learn he shied away from person-
al confrontation. Their film
shows Stone to be a more compli-
cated character than the one he
has lodged in the popular imagi-
nation, at times revealing vulner-
ability behind the bravado.
Early in the production proc-
ess, the filmmakers said, Stone
placed himself in a potential bind
by talking on camera to them
about the charges Mueller had
brought against him. The federal
judge in that case had barred
Stone from discussing it publicly
— especially with the media —
after a photograph of the judge
beside what appeared to be
cros shairs was posted to Stone’s
Instagram account. “He was acci-
dentally forced to trust us, and
then learned that he could trust
us,” Guldbrandsen said.
It meant that in the end,
Stone’s only surviving demand
was that the Danish team not
publish anything before the gag
order was lifted. “Because if we
published, he would likely go to
jail,” Guldbrandsen said, adding:
“We were happy to accommo-
date.”Danish filmmakers followed Stone for years to make their documentary
FREDERIK MARBELL/“A STORM FORETOLD”
Filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen, right, joins a d inner with Roger Stone at the Palm Restaurant in
D.C. Guldbrandsen’s film, “A Storm Foretold,” is expected to be released this year.RUBEN HUGHES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Director of photography Frederik Marbell, left, and Guldbrandsen
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