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Over 30 years after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel “The Satanic Verses,” the author traveled to Chautauqua, N.Y., in 2022, for a speaking engagement. Rushdie was about to give a talk about artistic freedom when Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old New Jersey man, rushed the stage and stabbed Rushdie in the face, neck, and abdomen multiple times with a knife. The author survived the attack and wrote a memoir about the event titled “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” which was published in 2024.
Before Rushdie wrote the book, he met with veteran documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney about making a film about the ordeal.
Rushdie’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, shared never-before-seen footage with Gibney that she shot in the days and weeks following the attack. This material was graphic, unflinching, and deeply intimate. It also traced Rushdie’s physical and spiritual recovery, including the challenges he continues to face, from losing an eye to the reduced use of one hand.
“I think the idea of this visual record of his recovery from this brutal attack was something that was really interesting to Salman and Rachel,” Gibney says. “The idea of making a record of this event and (showing) what terror looks like and is literally scarred into the flesh of Salman Rushdie, I think they felt strongly about.”
Gibney spent two years making the doc. The result is “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which debuts at Sundance on Sunday.
Inspired by Rushdie’s 2024 memoir, “Knife” blends reportage with fictionalized dialogue to explore the attacker’s mindset, probing the “why” behind the violence. At its core, the film is a portrait doc about Rushdie’s resilience and strength.
“The simple plot of the story is that Salman gets attacked, and he recovers from his injuries and gets better,” Gibney says. “But along the way, Salman reflects on his own life, and that’s very much the structure of the film. There was one cut of the film where it was more of a record of the recovery. There wasn’t much about writing in there, and we thought, ‘Well, that’s not right. He is a writer. An artist. We needed to show in some fundamental way how he was reckoning with his own art as a means to recover.”
Variety spoke to Gibney ahead of the Sundance world premiere of “Knife.”
Animation, blurry recreations, and, eventually, video footage are used to illustrate the violence inflicted upon Rushdie in August 2022. Why did you decide to wait and show the video footage at the end of the film instead of the beginning?
It was a little bit organic, and part of it had to do with the fact that when we started out, we didn’t have the footage of the actual attack. We only got that later from the district attorney as part of the legal proceedings. That said, I felt strongly that the whole film is about recovery. And part of recovery is mental recovery. It’s not just physical recovery. How does one perceive that kind of attack? Memory’s a tricky thing. That kind of memory that comes out of some sort of PTSD is tricky. So the idea was to create a kind of impression. We shot something that was intentionally impressionistic of the attack. It feels real, but it wasn’t a record. The idea is that over time, Salman works through the attack and probes his memory, and then comes back to the scene of the crime and literally stands in the place where he was attacked and reconstructs it as a way of working through what actually happened so that he can move on.
Hadi Matar is not in the film. Did you reach out to him for an interview?
I did. I tried to talk to him, and he wasn’t interested. But I certainly would have been interested in talking to him.
Do you think audiences will be surprised to learn that Hadi Matar never even read “The Satanic Verses”?
He wasn’t even born when the fatwa happened. He was just living in New Jersey. He was somewhat radicalized by the videos he was watching online. He chose to kill Salman to express that purpose and mission, even though he never read “The Satanic Verses,” because I think most of the people who objected to “The Satanic Verses” never read it. (The book,) became this convenient foil. ‘You are attacking us. You are assaulting our identity, therefore you must die.’ It’s a powerful comment on the moment that we live in, where you can become radicalized and just see people as the other, because you believe that they are somehow insulting your religion or your culture, or your identity, and that gives you license to assault or kill someone.
We are living in a tumultuous time. People are bombarded by news about violence every day. Has that made it hard to find a distributor for this film? Or was it intentional to make this film independently?
For various reasons, we decided to produce this independently. I hope distributors will be interested because, I mean, obviously, it includes a lot of violence, but it’s really about recovery. And as much as we see the reports of these attacks, and sometimes the moment of the attack is shared online, what happens after the attack is almost never talked about. The pain and suffering that the families of the victims endure, or the pain and suffering that the victims themselves endure if they survive. The hope is that by investing in that idea of recovery, we take (the doc) to a different kind of place. Salman says in the film, something to the effect of I wanted to go from an act of hate to a place of love.
The doc marketplace is unpredictable, but Salman Rushdie is a celebrity. As we both know, streamers like celeb content. Do you think the film will sell?
He is a celebrity, and he’s a world-famous author, and deservedly so. This was an event that happened, and it was extremely public. In some ways it’s also a true crime story. So, it’s a true crime story with a celebrity component.
English (US) ·