Making a film about Roger Stone very nearly killed Christoffer Guldbrandsen and that, for once, is not a bit of Stone or Trump-style hyperbole.
Guldbrandsen’s 91-minute documentary A Storm Foretold takes a shocking swerve when CCTV footage shows him suffering a heart attack, losing consciousness and collapsing on the floor of a gym, where people rush to his aid. A heart surgeon who happened to be working out saved the Danish film-maker’s life.
He was only 49 but suffering a personal crisis after Stone had abruptly ceased cooperating. “It was because of the stress of this project,” Guldbrandsen says over Zoom from his home in Copenhagen. “When we came back and Roger had cut us off, our funding was cut off as well and that was a catastrophe.
“When I’m walking around in the gym and have a heart attack, I have headphones on because I’m on the phone trying to raise funds for the film. When I have the heart attack, I literally drop the phone while I’m talking with an American financier.”
But the heart attack was also an “enormous present”, says Guldbrandsen, now 52, because Stone took pity and agreed to resume filming. It was a rare moment of compassion from the subject of A Storm Foretold, who is seen receiving a get-out-of-jail card from then president Donald Trump and spreading poisonous ideas all the way to the January 6 insurrection.
Stone, 71, who claims in the film to have been smoking cigars since he was seven, earned his spurs on a Richard Nixon election campaign. He regularly gives Nixon’s trademark salute and has a tattoo of the 37th president on his back. The self-proclaimed dirty trickster has been a friend and ally of Trump for 30 years.
Guldbrandsen, who had travelled from Denmark to make a film about the 2020 election, settled on Stone as a gateway into Trump’s “Make America great again” movement and a worrying shift in contemporary politics.
“What astonished me was that the loudest liar wins,” he explains. “We’re all used to, in politics, a contract that you can lie to a certain extent; there was a change in this which I found extremely interesting. I started out looking into all these fascinating false narratives and I came across Roger, looking with the perspective of the 2020 election how that would escalate.”
At first Stone was very cooperative. Like many people in or near politics, his ego was flattered by the camera’s attention. “I’ve made this type of film in Europe as well, especially in European politics, and I’ve made it with the secretary general of Nato,” Guldbrandsen continues.
“They are very controlled and professional politicians but the main traits are the same and the motivations are the same. It’s a mixture of vanity combined with hubris. They always think these stupid journalists, documentarians, it’s not going to be an issue, we can handle that.
“In Roger’s case, he’s unique in the sense that he revels in his notoriety to an extent I’ve never experienced in anyone else … The bottom line was he said if the film came out and it was 60% negative, he would be very happy. That’s an unusual approach and an approach I kind of respect.”
Stone could be nasty and wilfully provocative. Early in the film, as he operates an ice maker on a fridge door, he asks about Guldbrandsen’s last name and remarks: “I won’t give you away but you’ve got to admit that’s got, like, Third Reich written all over it, right? It really does.”
Stone then adopts a faux German accent and goes on: “So, commander Guldbrandsen, good evening, have you brought the list of Jews? Ah, thank you very much.” Rattling an ice shaker and making a martini, he grins and adds in his own voice: “I mean, this is incredible. Do the people in Denmark even know the maker of this film comes from a long line of Danish Nazis? It’s unreal! Of course, I won’t reveal that if I like the final cut of the film but hey, it’s politics, right?”
What did Guldbrandsen make of this performance? “It tells us that he really enjoys to shock people. That was the intention: to see if he could put me off. That plays into a whole discussion about mutual exploitation: making observational films, making documentaries, you need a certain level of cynicism involved and of course his outrageousness communicates the story and also is a very accurate description, in my perspective at least, of that whole movement.
“That’s why I included it. What I enjoy about it is that it’s so outrageous. It has this antisemitic connotation to it and at the same time he then says he will not tell anybody if he likes the final cut of the film. It’s an opening scene that encapsulates the whole approach to politics and political communication, I hope.”
Stone talks about Trump’s fascination with the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard but proved wary of allowing Guldbrandsen to film his communications with the then president. There were signs of cracks in the relationship.
Guldbrandsen says: “When the camera wasn’t rolling, right from the outset, he would refer to President Trump as ‘Mr Ungrateful’, referring to all that Stone had done for him to get to the White House. Stone sees himself as an avid reader, an analytical mind and well-versed in American political history and Trump basically as illiterate, although intuitively a very strong politician. He definitely does not hold him in awe.”
Like Trump, Stone was capricious and could change the terms of the documentary on a whim. “It was very much a process of day by day trying to hang on to the access, accepting his impulsivity. It was a tremendous high-risk project to do because he was free to leave and to kick me out anytime he wanted because there was no transactionality in the work.”
Three months after filming began, Stone was arrested in Florida on seven counts, including witness tampering, obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress, as part of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into election interference in 2016. He was also under an escalating series of gag orders. Access became much more difficult, so Guldbrandsen began turning up at fundraisers and filming him there.
Then Stone pulled the plug without warning, apparently because he had a better offer from a rival documentary team. Guldbrandsen’s project appeared dead and he returned to Denmark empty-handed. He recalls: “It was extremely devastating but it’s his right and it’s not unusual when you do these long-process observational documentaries that access becomes a challenge in the process.
“It’s more the rule than the exception but I have never experienced that anyone sold the rights to the film I was making to someone else. That was taking it to a next level and it was a catastrophe. But I would say it’s on me. The catastrophe was double because it was also my professional failure that I had run this risk and apparently miscalculated.”
(Stone later tells Guldbrandsen that the rival documentary never happened because that team had been working on the premise that he would go to prison, which he ultimately avoided thanks to Trump commuting his sentence then giving him a full pardon.)
The cumulative stress climaxed with Guldbrandsen’s heart attack. “It was very unpleasant but I was very fortunate that there was actually a heart surgeon working out in the gym next to me that saved my life.
“When you’re not that old, and you have never been sick, it takes a while just to get your head around that it’s a tremendous stroke of luck that your life didn’t end that day, and I’m still struggling to understand that was the time I had, and it was only by a slim margin that I’m still here.”
Including this scene in the documentary was a difficult decision for a director who prefers to remain behind the camera. “The films I made beforehand, it has not been my style at all but it was an enormous present to get in the sense of getting Stone to become a more whole character. Obviously he comes across as rather cynical in most of the scenes but what happened in this process was that he actually showed empathy and that’s why I found it important to take it in the film.”
Stone is seen giving Guldbrandsen a warm greeting after the heart attack and filming is allowed to resume. It proved a fateful decision as Trump headed towards defeat by Joe Biden in November 2020, then incited a mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Stone was close to the extremist rightwing group the Proud Boys, including its leader, Enrique Tarrio, who would eventually be sentenced to 22 years in prison for his part in the failed coup attempt. Guldbrandsen says: “It’s an established fact that Roger’s role in the eyes of many Proud Boys members is as an ideological figurehead for them.
“Roger was agitating very strongly for an aggressive reaction in case of an election defeat and he did this to these people and they were extremely close all the way until January 6 and afterwards also. Even though Roger Stone has not participated in any of the violent acts himself, he has encouraged and inspired the most violent groups that were at the forefront of the attack on January 6.
“I don’t think there’s been enough attention to what a key role he actually played in terms of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, how instigating he was. It’s still an open question, the level of coordination and planning that went ahead of the attacks, but he was definitely ideologically the inspiration for particularly the Proud Boys.”
How did Stone react to January 6? “When he returned to Florida he was terrified. He was absolutely certain that his arrest was imminent and I could see when I was with him that he was texting with Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, who was on the run with Joshua James, who was head of Stone’s so-called security detail of Oath Keepers. It was a frenzy driven by a serious concern that he would be arrested. There was a paranoid and weird atmosphere.”
Rhodes was eventually sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges. James pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and, as part of the plea agreement, agreed to cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigation.
As for Stone, A Storm Foretold shows him in the back of a car swearing profusely into a phone and describing Trump’s daughter Ivanka as an “abortionist bitch” after the president refused to pardon him for a second time. He then warns Guldbrandsen: “Obviously if you use any of that, I’ll murder you.”
Three years later, as America barrels towards another election, Guldbrandsen believes that the consequences of “stop the steal” are still being felt. “This inspired a movement that got a hold of the Republican leadership as well, where they convinced millions of Americans not to trust the democratic elections. That is far more dangerous than the tragic violence on January 6 and much more outrageous. His responsibility in a historical perspective is tremendous in that sense.”
He adds: “What happened in those months from November to January, how will you ever be able to put that paste back in the tube again? Especially since they have only enforced it since and it’s not going to be isolated to America. It’s horrific.”
Guldbrandsen is still paying a personal price for his relationship with Stone. Making the film was so costly that he is being forced to sell his house. When Guldbrandsen attended the final congressional January 6 committee hearing, where some of his footage was shown, Stone posted on social media that he looked forward to the film-maker dying from a second heart attack when Stone sues him for $25m.
Despite it all, Guldbrandsen glimpsed complexity in a villain of American politics whom many find irredeemable. “He can be a very charming person and he’s extremely knowledgable and interesting. I learned a lot – and Americans will pull out their hair – about American politics from him. He’s been an eyewitness to presidential politics for decades.
“That’s one of the points of the film: to insist on the conversation with people you disagree very much with and go to your greatest length not to exclude others from the conversation. If there’s any philosophical idea in the film, that’s it. It’s so banal to say so but obviously the things that are problematic about him, the things that he’s doing that are controversial, are elements of his personality, but there are also a lot of other sides to him.”
He adds: “One of the challenges that has come with social media, which has pressured journalism and documentary film-making, is that it is so extremely unforgiving and dehumanising. I’m constantly tempted to do the same when I promote the film.
“When I go on social media I can see the mechanisms pulling but it’s extremely important to insist on not dehumanising each other even despite what happened on January 6. Roger Stone’s role in it is dangerous and destructive but I still don’t want to take that step.”
A Storm Foretold is now playing in select US cinemas and will be released digitally soon with a UK date to be announced
