His thirst for the limelight has driven him to launch a multilingual blog and issue a string of headline-grabbing statements.
But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was surprisingly camera-shy when his extrovert persona drew the attention of Hollywood, turning down a request by Oliver Stone, the director of JFK, Nixon and Platoon, to make a documentary film about him. He dismissed the American filmmaker as "part of the Great Satan," the Iranian regime's standard term of abuse for the US.
Ahmadinejad's aides said Stone had requested special access to the president after contacting his office through intermediaries in the Iranian film business.
Stone, 60, has made two documentaries about Cuban President Fidel Castro, whom he considers a friend, and another about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
However, Ahmadinejad, who has often criticized Hollywood as a bastion of pro-Zionist interests, was unimpressed by Stone's radical credentials after viewing the films.
"While it is true that Oliver Stone is considered to be among the opposition in the US, the opposition is still part of the Great Satan," the president's media adviser, Mahdi Kalhor, told the semi-official Fars news agency.
"We believe that the American cinema system is devoid of all culture and art and is only used as a device. In the last two years, the global arrogance [Iranian shorthand for the US and Britain] has made a lot of effort to portray their own image of Ahmadinejad, not the one which exists in reality. Hollywood and other Zionist media react to phenomena they don't like through different processes," Kalhor said.
Ahmadinejad's cultural adviser, Javan Shamghadri, said Stone's request might be reconsidered if he could secure the rights for Iranian filmmakers to make a documentary about US President George W. Bush and the CIA without harassment.
Iran has complained repeatedly about how the country is depicted by Hollywood.
Stone's 2004 film, Alexander, a biopic about Alexander the Great, was heavily criticized because of its sympathetic portrayal of the ancient Macedonian king, who is disliked in Iran because he is held responsible for the destruction of Persepolis, seat of the Achaemenid dynasty, in 330BC.
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