“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie" with Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In August of 2022, author Salman Rushdie, speaking onstage about how to protect writers at the venerable Chautauqua Institution in western New York, was attacked by a 24-year-old man with no prior criminal history who stabbed him 15 times, nearly killing him. Salman (“Midnight's Children”, “The Satanic Verses”, “Fury”, and “The Golden House”) and Rachel Eliza Griffiths (“Miracle Arrhythmia”, “Mule and Pear”, “Seeing the Body”, “The Flower Bearers”) join Mike to discuss “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” Alex Gibney's documentary built from Rushdie's memoir of a similar name and the raw footage Griffiths began shooting in the trauma ward in the attack's immediate aftermath. 

 

Eliza, who served as cinematographer and executive producer, explains how filming began not as a movie but as a way to "take back a little power" and document recovery, using a professional camera a friend sent her rather than a phone. The two discuss Gibney's decision to withhold the actual attack footage until deep into the film, building tension the way Truman Capote structured “In Cold Blood”, and the striking device of restaging the memoir’s imaginary conversation between Salman and his assaulter using a scene from Kurosawa's “High and Low” with the attacker rendered mute and subtitled only. 

 

Salman reflects on grappling with the attacker's seemingly motiveless violence, the painful history of “The Satanic Verses”’s backlash within South Asian communities, and how the film's Kurosawa/Cat Stevens/Dylan-laced structure mirrors his own maximalist, allusion-driven imagination. Both guests explore the tension between public disclosure and private boundaries, noting the film reveals intense vulnerability while still preserving certain "no-fly zones." They also talk candidly about friendship and loss (Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver), Rushdie's recurring "through the looking glass" framework for the major relocations of his life, and the emotional return to the Chautauqua stage 13 months later that gave Rushdie an unexpected physical sense of a weight lifting. 

 

The conversation closes on what happiness and gratitude look like after coming close to death, with both Griffiths and Rushdie describing a hard-won, "wounded" but genuine joy toward the strangers who intervened to save Rushdie's life.

 

“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” opens at the IFC in New York on September 17th, followed by a North American-wide release later in the fall, and forthcoming rollout in the UK and Ireland.

 

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