Edward Snowden doesn't just endorse 'Snowden.' He's in it.

SAN DIEGO -- Oliver Stone told Comic-Con midday Thursday that Edward Snowden, the subject of the JFK director's latest harsh cinematic light upon the agencies of American government, was a reluctant subject at best. You'd never know it from the way Snowden himself talked about the film on Thursday night.

And Snowden doesn't just endorse Snowden. Turns out he's in it.

Hours after a Hall H panel featuring Stone with stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley, Open Road Films screened the movie on Thursday night in San Diego, among the very first press screenings (reviews are under embargo until the week of release).

And as promised, Snowden himself joined the small assembly via Google Hangouts, giving his wholehearted support to the film's tone and accuracy, not to mention the performances of its cast and crew. And he looked awake and in good spirits, despite that it was 5:30 a.m. in Moscow, where he's been exiled for months.

"I don't think there's a lot of fictionalization in the film," Snowden said. "There's a lot of composition. In my career I was bouncing around from city to city a lot -- I was literally all over the map. So to create living characters you can recognize, you have to make one person out of five people. But in terms of the issues, it was pretty accurate."

Snowden picks up the exiled intelligence contractor's life in 2003, when trouble with his legs forces him out of active duty. It then flashes forward to a Hong Kong hotel room, where Snowden is apprising journalists from The Guardian of his intentions -- then begins to backfill the story of a patriotic, conservative solider and intelligence genius turned whistleblower.

Levitt doesn't just play Snowden -- he affects his particular manner of speaking. At the Hall H panel earlier Thursday, Levitt said he still hadn't heard what Snowden thought of his impersonation. But by night, he got that chance:

"This is one of the things that's kind of crazy and surreal about this whole experience," Snowden said. "I don't think anyone looks forward to having a movie made about themselves. In particular a privacy advocate. ... My family all tells me 'He sounds just like you!' But for me I can't hear it because you can't not hear the voice in your own head."

(Check it out for yourself in the new trailer, which Open Road released Thursday):

One piece of important artistic license that Stone took with Snowden: The way he smuggled the NSA files, which he copied onto a SIM card, out of the high-security facility in Hawaii where he was stationed.

In the film, Snowden hides it in a Rubik's Cube, which he hands directly to a security guard on his way out the door -- "ever play with one of these?" -- to bypass the scanners. But Stone made it clear that no one to this day knows how Snowden pulled that off, adding that the Rubik's Cube idea was Snowden's.

"It was a good idea, we thank him for it," Stone said.

Snowden praised Stone's finished product -- but he also is clearly a fan of the director's subversive body of work.

"One thing that Oliver has going for him that nobody really questions is that he thinks for himself," Snowden said. "And that's something I admire ... you can tell that nobody tells Oliver what to do."

One such choice: to put Snowden -- the real one -- into a scene at the end of the film, a final stamp of approval that will remove any doubt as to whether it had his blessing.

"This is really about the nature of power," Snowden said. "When we move beyond that immediate inflammatory moment [of blowing the whistle] and we start to move to the next steps, if you just work, if you just care, if you just collaborate with people who want to do the right thing ... you can make a lot of progress."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable