Oliver Stone insisted on making a point about a “new form of warfare” being used against Donald Trump, even waving off a publicist looking to keep the interview on track.

Stone spoke with Variety over the weekend in advance of the Cannes Film Festival about his new documentary Lula, which focuses on Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. While discussing the Brazilian president’s own corruption charges, which led to time behind bars, the conversation turned to former President Donald Trump and his current legal woes, including his ongoing hush money trial in Manhattan.

Variety’s Brent Lang noted that a film publicist tried to steer Stone away from talking about Trump, but the director waved him off and continued.

“The charges on both sides of the Trump-Biden election are pretty wild — that Biden is corrupt and Trump is corrupt,” the director said. “It’s a new form of warfare. It’s called lawfare. And that’s what they’re using against Trump. And I think there’s interesting parallels here in America, as well as all over the world, you’re seeing this kind of behavior. [Trump’s] got four trials and some of these charges, whether you’re for him or against him, they are minor.”

Stone is arguably best known for films like Platoon and JFK, but he’s spent the last eight years focusing solely on documentaries, some of them quite controversial, like his four-part interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, someone Stone has defended in the past. It aired as The Putin Interviews on Showtime.

Stone actually directed Trump in a deleted cameo for his 2008 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, though he’s been plenty vocal in his criticism of him.

The director argued in the Variety interview that “corruption” is a given and should be judged on “scale” while discussing both the Brazilian president and the former President of the United States.

“There is life, there is death and there’s corruption. But it’s a scale,” he said. “You can’t point fingers at another country and say that is a corrupt country and that president has to be removed from office or we have to attack them or end a regime. Who are we to say those things when we are deeply corrupt? Look at the [two] parties. We should be multi-party and we should have public money in politics like they do in Poland. Or look at the English and the French models.”

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