The 'not making of' Oliver Stone's latest film would make a good script in itself. In 2006, the US director approached Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's people, hoping to make a film about the Iranian president's rise to power.

Unsurprisingly, he was turned down - albeit a year later, via the media, and in typically coded governmental speak.

'I sent a negative answer by Ahmadinejad to Oliver Stone,' the local Fars agency quoted Mehdi Kalhor, media adviser to the president, as saying. 'It is right that this person is considered part of the opposition in the US, but opposition in the US is a part of the Great Satan.'

In a statement released on Monday, Stone said that he'd 'been called a lot of things, but never a Great Satan.' He continued: 'I wish the Iranian people well, and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours.'

Stone's Ahmadinejad biopic would've followed his films about former US

presidents Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, and his 2003 documentary Comandante about Cuban President Fidel Castro.

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