Speaker 1: Heys Alek. On February sixteenth, it was announced that Russian
Speaker 1: opposition leader Alexey Navalni had died in prison. From January
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one on, he was in Russian captivity because
Speaker 1: of charges including fraud, embezzlement and extremism. Navalni had recently
Speaker 1: been transferred to a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle,
Speaker 1: where Russian authorities claimed that the forty seven year old
Speaker 1: Putin critic died from sudden death syndrome after taking a
Speaker 1: walk in the penitentiary. Many world leaders have blamed Vladimir
Speaker 1: Putin directly for Navalni's death. In twenty twenty two, I
Speaker 1: spoke with Daniel Roher, the director of the Academy Award
Speaker 1: winning documentary Navalny. The film follows the activist as he
Speaker 1: recovers from a previous Russian assassination attempt and the lead
Speaker 1: up to his voluntary return to Russia. Here's my conversation
Speaker 1: with director Daniel Roher and investigative journalist Kristo Grotzev. This
Speaker 1: is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing
Speaker 1: from iHeart Radio. When Russian opposition leader and fierce Putin
Speaker 1: critic Alexey Navalni fell violently ill on a flight in
Speaker 1: August of twenty twenty. It was suspected he was poisoned
Speaker 1: by Novachak, a Soviet era nerve agent. He was medically
Speaker 1: evacuated to Berlin and fell into a coma, but miraculously survived.
Speaker 1: My guests today, filmmaker Daniel Rohrer and investigative journalist Kristo Grotzev,
Speaker 1: were at the center of the unfolding drama that resulted
Speaker 1: in the gripping documentary Navalni. The film documents the quest
Speaker 1: to identify those responsible for the poisoning and the plight
Speaker 1: of Alexei navan whose anti corruption platform landed him in
Speaker 1: a Russian prison, where he remains to this day.
Speaker 2: Come on poisoned, would's supposed to be not so stupid
Speaker 2: to use this nauvichalk.
Speaker 1: If you want to kill someone, just shoot him.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, It's impossible to believe it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of stupid.
Speaker 3: The whole idea of poisoning.
Speaker 1: With a chemical weapon. What the fuck?
Speaker 4: This is?
Speaker 1: Why this is so smart?
Speaker 2: Because even reasonable people they refuse to believe, like what,
Speaker 2: come on poisoned?
Speaker 1: Seriously prior to Navalney, Daniel Rohr directed the feature documentary
Speaker 1: Once We're Brothers, Robbie Robertson and the Band about the
Speaker 1: rock group. He also shot and directed several short dogs
Speaker 1: and has been nominated for multiple Canadian Screen Awards. Roar
Speaker 1: has been developing his craft since a young a. He
Speaker 1: spent a year at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art
Speaker 1: and Design, but found his passion in a high school
Speaker 1: film class at the Tobacco School of the Arts in Toronto.
Speaker 3: We had this fabulous film teacher.
Speaker 4: He was like a sort of crimugey, cool nice guy
Speaker 4: and he was very same mister Johnson Kevin, and he
Speaker 4: had this film class, and so I had a little
Speaker 4: cohort of film friends. We called ourselves the Man Clan,
Speaker 4: and the joke was we were not manly at all.
Speaker 4: We were a bunch of film nerds and we would
Speaker 4: just This was when DSLRs became a thing, So about
Speaker 4: ten years ago or fifteen years ago, you could buy
Speaker 4: a little DSLR for seven or eight hundred dollars and
Speaker 4: you could get a shallow depth of field an image
Speaker 4: that looked like a movie. And to me, at seventeen
Speaker 4: years old, that was revelatory and so my friends we'd
Speaker 4: run around Toronto. We once had the subway system shut
Speaker 4: down by accident setting off smoke alarms. My dad still
Speaker 4: gives me a hard time for the time I set
Speaker 4: up off the smoke alarm in his house when we
Speaker 4: were seventeen or eighteen. But being creative, making movies, making things,
Speaker 4: and it all started for me in a tobacoats, fabulous
Speaker 4: school that I was able.
Speaker 3: To attend when I was a teenager.
Speaker 1: Now when you went to SCAD, because I love SCAD,
Speaker 1: and Scat's like a lot of these schools who over
Speaker 1: the arc of my lifetime, you know, many decades now
Speaker 1: they have you know, raised the money and grown so significantly.
Speaker 1: And you know SCAD, when you go down there to Savannah,
Speaker 1: they've taken over half the town. You know, every available
Speaker 1: building they bought and have incorporated into that program. And
Speaker 1: you went there for just one year and not even
Speaker 1: a full year.
Speaker 4: I went there for about a year. I was in
Speaker 4: Savannah for one year and amazing place.
Speaker 3: Super cool town.
Speaker 4: But I'm not a school guy, and it has nothing
Speaker 4: to do with that school.
Speaker 3: It's just that no.
Speaker 1: Matter what Kevin Johnson imparted to you, no, you had done.
Speaker 1: I was finished with Kevin Johnson's mic Drop.
Speaker 3: That was it with keV.
Speaker 1: That was it. I learned everything you needed to know
Speaker 1: from Kevin.
Speaker 4: From Kev's film class, mister Johnson's film class, I learned
Speaker 4: everything I needed to know. And I decided that I
Speaker 4: wanted to make documentaries and the best way to do
Speaker 4: that would be to just make documentary. Why documentary, Well,
Speaker 4: documentaries were this art form that for me existed at
Speaker 4: the confluence of all these things I was interested in.
Speaker 4: I was very curious about traveling and seeing the world
Speaker 4: and history and art and culture and filmmaking, cinematography, editing,
Speaker 4: but also music and drawing, animation, painting. Were your parents
Speaker 4: in the arts, They were in retail, they's smutta business.
Speaker 4: My mom and dad had a clothing store called Higher
Speaker 4: Ground and Higher Round for Kids in Toronto for about
Speaker 4: thirty thirty five years, and so my dad sold outerwear
Speaker 4: like North Face, Patagonia, ur characters, Canada, Goose and so
Speaker 4: we were always the spirit of travel was something that
Speaker 4: we was always imparted onto. My brother and I would
Speaker 4: go on canoe trips in Algonquin Park as teenagers and
Speaker 4: as kids, and so I always had the sense of
Speaker 4: traveling and getting out into the world with.
Speaker 3: Something really important and valuable.
Speaker 4: And my dad has a bunch of corny phrases that
Speaker 4: he always says that are just foundational to my life,
Speaker 4: and one of them is travel off the bet path.
Speaker 4: And certainly that's the choice I chose when I dropped
Speaker 4: out of school and tried to pursue other things.
Speaker 1: Now the film is out.
Speaker 4: The film is going to be released in eight hundred
Speaker 4: cinemas around the US on April eleventh and twelfth. Oh, okay,
Speaker 4: And this is obviously extraordinarily exciting for all of us.
Speaker 4: A screen that's a lot of screens for a dog,
Speaker 4: and certainly Warner Brothers, who were so grateful as distributing
Speaker 4: the film, understands the critical mission of getting this film
Speaker 4: out now as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1: When did you first become aware of Navalne.
Speaker 4: I've been aware of Navalney for a few years now,
Speaker 4: just because I'm interested in Russia and Russian politics and
Speaker 4: geopolitics is something that I'm interested in. And if you're
Speaker 4: in the West and you're interested in Russia and Navalne's
Speaker 4: name is unavoidable. But certainly my interest in him peaked
Speaker 4: in the summer of twenty twenty when news circled around
Speaker 4: the world that he had been poisoned. And I remember
Speaker 4: vividly this three day struggle when he was in this
Speaker 4: hospital in Siberia and the authorities weren't letting him leave,
Speaker 4: and there was this weird behavior happening, something strange was
Speaker 4: going on, weird thing that they wouldn't let him go,
Speaker 4: they wouldn't let him go to Germany, and eventually they did.
Speaker 4: They relented. He was poison to sink in there a
Speaker 4: little longer.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 4: I think, so sink in or fade out, so the
Speaker 4: Germans couldn't detect that. And so that was in my consciousness.
Speaker 4: So at no point did it ever cross my mind
Speaker 4: at that stage that oh, I should go make a
Speaker 4: movie about this guy. It never would have entered my
Speaker 4: my plane of reality.
Speaker 3: Well, I just I was.
Speaker 4: Sitting in Toronto painting an apartment. I just didn't occur
Speaker 4: to me. It wasn't until I was sitting next to
Speaker 4: this man, Krysto Grosev, who's here with us today, that
Speaker 4: I thought, oh, maybe we should go make a film
Speaker 4: about this, Maybe we should go pursue there is.
Speaker 1: The same way with all of even your earlier shorter films.
Speaker 1: You do the one about sex abuse, but from the
Speaker 1: priest and the indigenous People's played.
Speaker 4: Them prolific sex offender in Canadian history as I made it.
Speaker 1: The name of the film is Survivor's Row Survivors because
Speaker 1: his name is Roe.
Speaker 4: The man's name is Ralph Roe, who's an Anglican minister
Speaker 4: that had this little prop plane and he would fly
Speaker 4: up to these communities and everyone adored him. He was
Speaker 4: like this wizard missionary fly in and everyone thought it
Speaker 4: was great. And he'd take the kids on camping trips,
Speaker 4: but only the boys. And it turned out that he
Speaker 4: was one of the most insidious criminals in Canadian history.
Speaker 4: He abused hundreds, if not thousands of boys. And so
Speaker 4: when I was twenty one or twenty two, made a
Speaker 4: short film with this extraordinary film producer in Toronto called
Speaker 4: Peter O'Brien, and we made a film about this man's crimes.
Speaker 1: Was in his idea and he hired you to director.
Speaker 4: That's right when I was twenty or twenty one, and
Speaker 4: that film made a little bit of noise. People saw it,
Speaker 4: and I think was very significant as a tool for
Speaker 4: the community to heal and have that special but it
Speaker 4: was very challenging and we've since entered a different place
Speaker 4: in Canada. I don't know that that's a film I
Speaker 4: would have directed now. I think that we would be
Speaker 4: much better suited finding one of the many indigenous filmmakers
Speaker 4: to tackle that story.
Speaker 3: But in that moment you feel sensitive about that, well,
Speaker 3: very much course, absolutely.
Speaker 4: I think now it's very important we have to think
Speaker 4: about who gets to tell what story. And in twenty
Speaker 4: thirteen or twenty fourteen, when I made that movie, I
Speaker 4: had no consciousness of that that's not something that was
Speaker 4: on my radar. It was only years later later that
Speaker 4: I reflected on it and questioned whether or not I
Speaker 4: was the right guy to tell that story. And the
Speaker 4: film was successful and I think the community was appreciative
Speaker 4: that I made it. But I think now I would
Speaker 4: I would really question that, and I would really seek
Speaker 4: community consultation.
Speaker 1: And it's complicating to note that you're you know, when
Speaker 1: you talk about your career in the brief minutes we've
Speaker 1: been talking now, you lose sight of the fact of
Speaker 1: how young you are, you know, So it was we
Speaker 1: tell the audience that you're twenty nine years old, twenty
Speaker 1: eight twenty oh, thank you very much. He's on Hollywood
Speaker 1: full ball now, he's full flag Hollywood now, the twenty
Speaker 1: eight year old Daniel. You don't realize it. You don't
Speaker 1: been doing this for years now, and this inclusivity diversity
Speaker 1: thing has unfolded most vividly during those ten years, during
Speaker 1: your career, your.
Speaker 4: Lifetime, absolutely, and especially in Canada, are consciousness about the
Speaker 4: vital necessity of which communities get to tell which stories
Speaker 4: has really.
Speaker 3: Just come to the forefront.
Speaker 4: It's something that I'm mindful of, as you know, a
Speaker 4: Jewish kid that grew up in Toronto. It's something that
Speaker 4: I really have to think about.
Speaker 1: My view was that, you know, it's the success of
Speaker 1: an individual filmmaker's career leads them to where they are today.
Speaker 1: There's films you are making now that people are benefiting
Speaker 1: from their learning about the world. Documentary films can often
Speaker 1: be the beachhead for people to understand a topic, to
Speaker 1: understand events and history beyond books and beyond classroom learning.
Speaker 1: Documentaries have become tools for learning. And I say to myself,
Speaker 1: the guy that's directing Navalney, let's be grateful for his
Speaker 1: roots and how he got to where he is. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I'd like to just shift for a second, because we
Speaker 1: do have our other guest here, Christo Grosev. You sit
Speaker 1: there and you see that navalney's going to come back
Speaker 1: to Moscow, and you go, why why does he come
Speaker 1: back to Moscow? Knowing he must have known what the
Speaker 1: potential was. It seems to be being charged with embezzlement
Speaker 1: all the time, and the charges dropped and he runs
Speaker 1: for mayor and gets twenty seven percent of the vote,
Speaker 1: which is significant but not anything earth shattering. But he's
Speaker 1: got a political following. I want you to take me
Speaker 1: through this line of right before he's poisoned. Where is he,
Speaker 1: what he's doing. We're going to try you for embezzlement,
Speaker 1: and then we suspend, we don't do this, we don't
Speaker 1: do this, and then we poison you. Take me through
Speaker 1: what's going on with Putin the Russians in the VoMi
Speaker 1: before he's going to get poisoned.
Speaker 2: Well, what we found out actually is that they tried
Speaker 2: to poison him years earlier, so they started tailing him.
Speaker 2: This whole unit of the Russian Security Service to the
Speaker 2: FSB that comprises not only political police like the scary
Speaker 2: muscle guys, but also chemical weapons specialists within the fs
Speaker 2: B and doctors within the FSB. Saw a killed team,
Speaker 2: a poisoned team. They started telling him the moment he
Speaker 2: announced his bid for the presidency that was in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: and they tailed him on a total of six six
Speaker 2: trips around the country throughout his whole campaign, So every
Speaker 2: little village he visited, they were there. They stayed in
Speaker 2: hotels near him. They usually arrived just a couple of
Speaker 2: hours before he arrived or were left just after he left.
Speaker 2: So they were there waiting for a sign off from
Speaker 2: apparently put in for him to be whacked, to be killed.
Speaker 2: But this didn't come for years, or maybe it did come.
Speaker 2: What we don't know is maybe they tried. But Moscow
Speaker 2: four is a phrase that comes out in this film,
Speaker 2: and people who see it will know that it's a
Speaker 2: sort of a cold word for Russia's incompetence at the
Speaker 2: official level, So it could be that they tried earlier
Speaker 2: to poison him but it didn't work out. So the
Speaker 2: only thing we see is that in July, just a
Speaker 2: month and a half before the actual coma poisoning, the
Speaker 2: same team followed him and his wife to their getaway
Speaker 2: to a Baltic coast in Russia, in the Clinograd Coneberg,
Speaker 2: and apparently they tried to poison them there again because
Speaker 2: we see his wife falling almost into a coma because
Speaker 2: she experienced similar symptoms to what he did in months.
Speaker 1: So the wrong people eating the cuss is that the
Speaker 1: problem with the KGB or the FSP. Well, they're just
Speaker 1: not great at poisoning.
Speaker 2: They're they're not great, I mean they but they try again,
Speaker 2: and they have what they lose in competence they make
Speaker 2: up in resilience, so they do it years later. They
Speaker 2: keep trying, They keep trying. They tried it twice on
Speaker 2: another politician who lives here, actually, Vladimir Karamoza, same poisoning,
Speaker 2: they poison here. They poisoned him there, he came back
Speaker 2: here because his family lives here. He decided to go
Speaker 2: back for a campaign trip. Six months later, poisoned him again.
Speaker 2: So they tried. They tried many times, not just once.
Speaker 2: So why that moment in time is the wrong question,
Speaker 2: because maybe they tried for four years and that was
Speaker 2: just the one time that they made enough sort of
Speaker 2: dozage into get into his bloodstream by essentially smearing his underpants.
Speaker 2: That's what happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, I went in through him through his lower
Speaker 1: body parts exactly. So he goes to Berlin. He finally
Speaker 1: gets out of there and goes to Germany to get
Speaker 1: treated and is cured. Navalney, as I see him on
Speaker 1: screen in Daniel's film, is crisp and sharp and alert
Speaker 1: and bright eyed and doesn't seem impaired in any way
Speaker 1: as a figure in the film. And then he gets
Speaker 1: cured and he comes back again. Yeah, Like, like who
Speaker 1: around him is counseling him? Who is advising him that
Speaker 1: you could stay here and be the leader of an opposition,
Speaker 1: You could tour the world and be the darling of
Speaker 1: the Western world. Very few people would command the same
Speaker 1: resources that Navalni camanded in raising money. He could be.
Speaker 1: It could be like the Clinton Foundation, his foundation and
Speaker 1: raising money for his activities. He could be. He's very charismatic,
Speaker 1: and he could carry on his great work. Instead, he
Speaker 1: decides to go home and they put him in prison
Speaker 1: for night. Why does he go home? Why?
Speaker 2: Well, you're preaching to the choir. You're asking the same
Speaker 2: questions that I asked him, and I asked that his wife.
Speaker 2: He looked at me like, I'm an idiot. How can
Speaker 2: you ask this question? If I stay here, I just
Speaker 2: I've become one of the many talking heads that just
Speaker 2: talk to Russians from outside of Russia, and Russians would
Speaker 2: never trust me. Russians would never believe me in unless
Speaker 2: I partake in the daily in their daily misery.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure the people offered him an effective and
Speaker 1: compelling argument to the contrary. I mean, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of great work you could do. What are you going
Speaker 1: to be able to accomplish from a jail for nine years?
Speaker 1: And then they have you that they're going to kill
Speaker 1: you there?
Speaker 2: Probably exactly We got to that conversation and basically says,
Speaker 2: you're right. If I were a journalist, If I were
Speaker 2: a journalists, I would stay here and continue, probably doing
Speaker 2: a better job from here than from there. But I
Speaker 2: want to be a politician. I want to be president
Speaker 2: one day, and I can only do it.
Speaker 1: From there, from prison.
Speaker 2: From well, I asked him, do you realize that you're
Speaker 2: going to prison? He says yes. I asked him, do
Speaker 2: you think it's going to be for a couple of months?
Speaker 2: He said no. Christ they don't get it. It will be years.
Speaker 2: So he was completely open eyed about it. And I
Speaker 2: asked his wife, does she realize that this is going
Speaker 2: to happen? She said absolutely. So it's a different type
Speaker 2: to be, a harder complex could be, could be.
Speaker 1: But what is your opinion? Why did he go back?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure you share some of the same
Speaker 1: opinions he does.
Speaker 4: I think fundamentally, what Alexai was not comfortable with was
Speaker 4: the idea and notion of instructing, of telling, encouraging the
Speaker 4: Russian people to take to the streets, to go up
Speaker 4: against the regime, to risk getting arrested. He was not
Speaker 4: comfortable saying those things, commanding those things, encouraging those.
Speaker 1: From a Parisian hotel, from a Parisian.
Speaker 4: Hotel, from Ville, news from Berlin, from Vienna. If you
Speaker 4: want to be the moral leader of a nation, which
Speaker 4: is the role he currently occupies, you got to talk
Speaker 4: is cheap. You have to be shoulder the shoulder, and
Speaker 4: you have to be there. And I think that what
Speaker 4: he is doing, his courage and bravery, hopefully will be
Speaker 4: an inspiration to the Russian people, and I think that's
Speaker 4: why he went back. But is it something that we
Speaker 4: grapple with and struggle with to this day. Absolutely, was
Speaker 4: it the right decision, I don't know, but that was
Speaker 4: between Alexey Navolny and his higher power, and that's the
Speaker 4: decision he made, and his family is lockstep with him.
Speaker 4: But it's obviously something that we struggled with. And I
Speaker 4: was like, I remember I was making the movie, and
Speaker 4: I was hoping that we would get some sort of uncertainty,
Speaker 4: some semblance of insecurity about the decision or the process.
Speaker 4: The veneer of fear. The man's constitution was ironclad. He
Speaker 4: never let on that he was afraid. He'd say, oh,
Speaker 4: Daniel Jesus Christ, of course I have to go back.
Speaker 4: What am I going to do sit in Germany? Forgive it?
Speaker 1: But I would imagine I understand what you're saying. I mean,
Speaker 1: I understand his commitment, but I wonder if it's going
Speaker 1: to be easier to poison him. I mean, is he
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Epstein In the United States, we live in a
Speaker 1: place where people are fatigued by scandal, they are fatigued
Speaker 1: by what I call the conspiranoiac mentality.
Speaker 4: Well, I would not be comfortable equivocating to Valney with
Speaker 4: Epstein for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, But I'm saying in terms of he's a
Speaker 1: sitting duck in a prison. Get the guy in prison.
Speaker 1: If you want to whack and put him in prison,
Speaker 1: you know where he is. You control his movements.
Speaker 3: He is in the custody of the same man who
Speaker 3: tried to murder him.
Speaker 2: Christa, what do you think, Well, just remember that what
Speaker 2: happened to the previous guys that have tried to murder him.
Speaker 2: They're dead now or one of them is most likely, right,
Speaker 2: the guy that the ones that failed, Yes, guy, the
Speaker 2: ones that failed so that they kill you. Well, basically, they.
Speaker 1: If you sit down with a bowl of poison, exactly fail.
Speaker 2: So why would the new guy trying to g given
Speaker 2: me that poison left?
Speaker 4: You remember the scene, the Marquee scene in our film
Speaker 4: when Alexey makes a few phone calls.
Speaker 2: I guess an extraction of confession.
Speaker 3: You remember that that part.
Speaker 1: I don't want to ruin the film for now. Of course,
Speaker 1: there's drama in this film, unlike any other doc I've
Speaker 1: seen in recent memory.
Speaker 4: Well, so we know that some of the individuals who
Speaker 4: were fooled.
Speaker 2: Well, the whole point is there was a set of
Speaker 2: that Fresbee officers who were given the task to kill Navalni.
Speaker 2: They failed, but they lived in with the belief that
Speaker 2: their government, their president, their Kruk president, will protect them
Speaker 2: from publicity, from that publicity, from neighbors taking revenge on them.
Speaker 2: That didn't work out. These guys that tried to kill
Speaker 2: them are now negative celebrities. They all of Russia knows
Speaker 2: their faces. Their neighbors spray painted their their elevator would like,
Speaker 2: our neighbor is a killer because they.
Speaker 1: Were fact totems of the because they were murderous emissaries
Speaker 1: of this government, or because they're actual fans of Navami
Speaker 1: or both.
Speaker 2: No, because the neighbors actually didn't realize that the government
Speaker 2: is a government of murderers, that their neighbors they didn't
Speaker 2: realize that.
Speaker 1: Oh, there are Russians who don't realize that Putin is
Speaker 1: a murderers. Yes, yes, we're gonna We're gonna get that
Speaker 1: in the second. And I do want to put a
Speaker 1: button on what you said. You're very right, I did.
Speaker 1: By no means that I mean to equivocate Epstein with
Speaker 1: a Navalmi for obvious reasons. But I'm just saying that
Speaker 1: that seems to be the key. You want to get
Speaker 1: somebody in prison, because then you have complete control over
Speaker 1: where they go, what they do. There's more opportunities to
Speaker 1: kill them. So he wants to be a part of things.
Speaker 1: He's willing to suffer. He's willing to take on the
Speaker 1: horrible consequences to come back and one day hopefully get
Speaker 1: out of prison. Do people of view Navali as a
Speaker 1: viable political candidate if it wasn't in prison, if they
Speaker 1: weren't trying to poison them all the time? Does he
Speaker 1: have any chance to become the president of Russia?
Speaker 2: I think he does. For years, the people who doubted
Speaker 2: him were twofold. One of one part of Russia that
Speaker 2: didn't like him were fed with propaganda that he's an embezzler,
Speaker 2: so they just, oh, just a crew that just want
Speaker 2: to get some of the government money. And another part
Speaker 2: thought that he is a government proxy, that he's actually
Speaker 2: a fake, full opposition figure, that he's very convenient for
Speaker 2: put in because straw Man, because it's straw Man that
Speaker 2: doesn't have a chance to get into the presidency, therefore
Speaker 2: is an easy one. But after the poisoning, and especially
Speaker 2: after the film and Honestly, any Russian who's seen the
Speaker 2: film sees him as a viable presidential candidate. And that's
Speaker 2: why I think this film has a big future for
Speaker 2: changing minds and hearts in Russia. And that's why I
Speaker 2: think and I know that Putin is so upset with
Speaker 2: the film, not with the investigations so much, not with
Speaker 2: Navande so much, but with the film because people who
Speaker 2: see the film see him as a viable candidate.
Speaker 1: What did they say Navali embezzled?
Speaker 4: I think they said that he stole donations from his
Speaker 4: from his found foundation. But what we have to understand
Speaker 4: is they have a menu of stuff they just make up,
Speaker 4: like the Russian judicial system saying what do.
Speaker 1: They accuse him?
Speaker 3: They accused him.
Speaker 1: I think there was taking money from his not for
Speaker 1: profit he stole.
Speaker 4: Originally they've said that he stole lumber and some sort
Speaker 4: of commodity and then he stole money from the nonprofit.
Speaker 4: It's nonsense. He insulted a war veteran, that's a crime.
Speaker 4: Just weird, wacky whatever they can come up with things.
Speaker 1: And he was given suspended sentences for two of these
Speaker 1: embezzlement charges. Why why didn't they dump them in the prison.
Speaker 4: Then, well, the first time I think it was in
Speaker 4: twenty thirteen, during his run from mayor of Moscow. He
Speaker 4: was sentenced to five years in prison. But the day
Speaker 4: of his sentence, tens of thousands of people came out
Speaker 4: to the streets in protest, and I think that rattled
Speaker 4: the regime and they said we cannot we don't want
Speaker 4: to deal with.
Speaker 1: So if the response in public is full throated enough,
Speaker 1: if there's a lot of people out there making noise about,
Speaker 1: I'm going to assume that on a public relations level,
Speaker 1: Navalney is a problem for Putin. Well he is.
Speaker 2: But what changed with naval How Navalney made it The
Speaker 2: big problem for Putney is Putin had to take much
Speaker 2: more drastic measures after he returned from Germany than before.
Speaker 2: He had to say the islands of free media completely.
Speaker 2: He had to crush the people coming to the streets
Speaker 2: with force, beat old women like drag young kids in
Speaker 2: horts to detention centers, and that closed a gap, that
Speaker 2: closed the valve. But it actually allows the pressure to
Speaker 2: increase now because these people come go to the streets,
Speaker 2: but they have it inside them that this anger. So
Speaker 2: it's a problem for Putting. Daniel Rhor and Kristo Grotzev.
Speaker 2: The subject of another Daniel Rohor documentary was Robbie Robertson.
Speaker 2: Robertson was also a guest on Here's the Thing check
Speaker 2: out our episode with the legendary musician.
Speaker 5: We ended up recording the basement tapes. I don't know,
Speaker 5: there's something like one hundred and forty songs or something
Speaker 5: in the course of this. And what we would do
Speaker 5: is every day we would go to Big Pink. We'd
Speaker 5: have some coffee, play some checker. Bob would write. He
Speaker 5: wrote on a typewriter, so he would type something up.
Speaker 5: We'd go down into the basement grab everybody would grab
Speaker 5: whatever instrument was closed, might even not be the one
Speaker 5: you play anything because.
Speaker 1: There was no rules.
Speaker 5: We'd sit down, we'd mess around, play through a tune
Speaker 5: and we'd say, wow, that felt kind of good.
Speaker 1: To hear. More of my conversation with Robbie Robertson go
Speaker 1: to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Daniel
Speaker 1: Rhor and Crystal Grotzev tell the story of how they
Speaker 1: convinced Alexei Navalny to allow his life to be filmed.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: The documentary film Navalny was shot prior to the Russian
Speaker 1: invasion of Ukraine. And while there is no shortage of
Speaker 1: of nations to be leveled against the Kremlin, I wanted
Speaker 1: to know what they feel is the most significant criticism
Speaker 1: of Vladimir Putin and his regime.
Speaker 2: Well, it's corruption. It's really corruption. The one key word
Speaker 2: that everybody in rush understance is driving away a value
Speaker 2: from their daily life. They see the wealth of the
Speaker 2: elite that has nothing to do with with what a
Speaker 2: normal Western elite would have.
Speaker 1: And that elite for people to understand in the timeline
Speaker 1: that elite began to accrue on a more concentrated level
Speaker 1: since when. But that's recent, isn't it in the last
Speaker 1: twenty years. Well no, there's always been people who profited
Speaker 1: from that, like in this country, from war, profitia, et cetera. Right,
Speaker 1: But but it seems to me like there's an oligarchical
Speaker 1: suffice here that's bigger than now.
Speaker 2: Suffice it to say that the oligarchical layer are buddies,
Speaker 2: school buddies and judo buddies, and like college buddies have
Speaker 2: put in so they came through him. They're actually hold.
Speaker 1: This has increased dramatically during Putin's reship.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think.
Speaker 1: Before that you didn't have as much of this.
Speaker 2: Well, they had a couple of old and some of
Speaker 2: them survives, but not like no. Yes, So that is
Speaker 2: the one criticism that is exploited by somebody like Navalny
Speaker 2: because it's easy to point out that it's visible.
Speaker 4: And what Nevalde would say if you were here is
Speaker 4: that every single issue in Russia, it's its foundation is
Speaker 4: in corruption, and if we can tackle corruption, we can
Speaker 4: start to heal the society. But alex there's one thing
Speaker 4: I want to speak to Earlier, you asked Chris so
Speaker 4: quite appointed question, and that's whether or not Alexey actually
Speaker 4: has a reasonable chance of ever becoming president. And one
Speaker 4: thing I asked him the same question. I was like, dude,
Speaker 4: are you like delusional? Like how is this actually going
Speaker 4: to happen? And what he spoke to was the Moscow
Speaker 4: mayoral race of twenty thirteen, and why that is an
Speaker 4: interesting case study is because he started that race with
Speaker 4: two percent of the vote. People didn't like him. They
Speaker 4: caricatured him as just a blogger and some wacky Internet guy,
Speaker 4: and he finished with twenty seven percent of the vote.
Speaker 4: It wasn't a fair election. There was malfeasans. He narrowly
Speaker 4: avoided a runoff, and I think the Kremlin, who let
Speaker 4: him run in that election was so nervous about his performance.
Speaker 4: He ran an American style campaign. He was kissing babies,
Speaker 4: knocking on doors in the subways, distributing literature, tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of volunteers. There has never been a political organization
Speaker 4: in Russia like that. They were afraid. I don't know
Speaker 4: if the guy will be president, but what I hope,
Speaker 4: at the very least is that he will have the
Speaker 4: chance to compete in a democratic election. Whether the Russian
Speaker 4: people elect him is up to their own agency, is
Speaker 4: up to the Russian electorate. I just hope, I dream
Speaker 4: for a future or he can run.
Speaker 1: In this country, you have people who voted for a
Speaker 1: candidate in twenty sixteen and again in twenty twenty. Who
Speaker 1: does what a lot of conservatives do, which is they
Speaker 1: give them a lot of predigested pablem about what the
Speaker 1: conditions are in this country. You know, that's what Fox
Speaker 1: News is. There's people that need their news predigested. Is
Speaker 1: it the same in Putin's Russia. Is it like America?
Speaker 1: Meaning does this Putin enjoy the support like Trump of
Speaker 1: a massive number of poorly informed people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are the lazy informationally lazy people. They are
Speaker 2: fine with is getting their news from late night State TV,
Speaker 2: which is the equivalent of Fox here, which is premesticated,
Speaker 2: pre pre chewed, and they don't have time, patience, or
Speaker 2: interest in getting more. This would be about sixty percent
Speaker 2: of the population. Another twenty percent would be the people
Speaker 2: who always doubted everything and would consider both sides to
Speaker 2: any debate to be bad guys because in Russia, that's
Speaker 2: how they grew up, being disappointed by the political elite
Speaker 2: through centuries. And then twenty percent are the younger guys
Speaker 2: who are actually interested in information actively. What changed with
Speaker 2: the Navali poisoning and the protests after that is that
Speaker 2: this twenty percent that was the disinterested twenty percent, they
Speaker 2: actually became interested and they figured out finally that put
Speaker 2: In is the bad guy here. But they were afraid
Speaker 2: to go out to the streets. But that's still progress
Speaker 2: because that doesn't make them uninformed, They just made them
Speaker 2: makes them afraid.
Speaker 4: But the one other thing I want to speak to
Speaker 4: which is piggy backing awful what Chrystal just said. I
Speaker 4: think it's true that a large majority of the country
Speaker 4: is being spoon fed this state media, but I don't
Speaker 4: think it is totally the agency of the people. It's
Speaker 4: like there's literally a vacuum of information. It's impossible to
Speaker 4: obtain if you're living in the middle of the country,
Speaker 4: if you're not savvy but anything stats and so Absolutely,
Speaker 4: it's a totally different dynamic. It's a different dichotomy, and
Speaker 4: it just really needs to be understood that in Russia
Speaker 4: you cannot access other points of view, other information unless
Speaker 4: you're a super savvy person who knows how to use
Speaker 4: VPNs and who knows how to get around censorship.
Speaker 2: I disagree with you, because even before this censorship was introduced,
Speaker 2: there were islands of free media there. You could get
Speaker 2: to Twitter, you could get to Facebook. People are just
Speaker 2: too lazy. The next sixty seven percent of people just
Speaker 2: don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: I want to note for our listeners, this is the
Speaker 1: first moment where Daniel and Cristo are in disagreement. Let's
Speaker 1: mark this in this This is what we always dream
Speaker 1: of on these shows. Now, how did you first, I
Speaker 1: mean you investigated the poisoning, and you did a lot
Speaker 1: of work writing about it and exposing the poisoning, correct,
Speaker 1: you know, without giving away company secrets if you will,
Speaker 1: and proprietary information. How do you go about that? How
Speaker 1: does that begin? How did that begin? For you describe
Speaker 1: in vague terms who you start calling.
Speaker 2: It never starts with that investigation. It always starts with
Speaker 2: the previous investigation that you've learned something that you keep
Speaker 2: it at the back of your mind and it comes
Speaker 2: handy later. So what happened in this case? We investigated
Speaker 2: the poisoning of remember the Scripples, the former Russian double
Speaker 2: spy who went to the UK and the Russian military
Speaker 2: intelligence tried to poison them with novichjok in Salisbury in
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen. So we had investigated this, we had cracked
Speaker 2: this crime. We found out where the poisoners had taken
Speaker 2: their physical poison, their Novi chok, and this turned out
Speaker 2: to be a particular institution in Russia. And we're not
Speaker 2: giving too much away, but it's a lab that we
Speaker 2: discovered and presumed is giving poison to anybody who needs it,
Speaker 2: like any government agency who wants to kill somebody gets
Speaker 2: the poison from there. So we decided to trace those
Speaker 2: guys from that institute, from that lab and see with
Speaker 2: whom they talked in the days before Navali was poisoned.
Speaker 2: And that's how we.
Speaker 1: Found And how do you find that with it?
Speaker 2: Well, that's the beauty of this crazy Russian corrupt system.
Speaker 2: Because Russia is corrupt and dictatorial. The government wants to
Speaker 2: have information on anybody at any given time, so they
Speaker 2: gather all this.
Speaker 1: Information on you, and that information is for sale.
Speaker 2: That information is for sale because it's correct, because Putting
Speaker 2: cannot survive if it doesn't allow his FSB underlinks to
Speaker 2: actually make money on selling whatever.
Speaker 1: Some of them are vulnerable, some of them are probable,
Speaker 1: like you exactly.
Speaker 2: They usually sell this to criminals. And suddenly here come
Speaker 2: journalists who are taking a bit of the I've.
Speaker 1: Got these voicemails from navalny. How much you want to
Speaker 1: give me fifty? Come on, two hundred rubles? Come on,
Speaker 1: you're joking.
Speaker 2: But I had this literal conversation with one of the
Speaker 2: data traders who likes getting this data from FSB officers
Speaker 2: and selling it. And when he found out that we
Speaker 2: are actually publishing investigations that he wrote to me this
Speaker 2: angry email. He said, I thought, to you, just a criminal,
Speaker 2: you're a journalist.
Speaker 1: How dare you?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: He was so upset.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's it's a crypt system and we exploited
Speaker 2: the corruption to get the data.
Speaker 1: You first met Navalny.
Speaker 4: Where we first met Navalney in the Black Forest, a
Speaker 4: small town called Saint Plasian on the German French Swiss sport.
Speaker 1: And what was necessary describe for us? I mean, you're
Speaker 1: a filmmaker and getting people to sit down with you
Speaker 1: in front of a camera sometimes that's a pretty herculean
Speaker 1: feet Well that's was it easy to get him in
Speaker 1: the room or not?
Speaker 4: That's the art of documentary filmmaking is getting in the room,
Speaker 4: it's being in the right place right. Well, I think
Speaker 4: we had the best shot of anyone in the world.
Speaker 4: And the reason that was is we were writing on
Speaker 4: the coattails of Christo. Christo came to me one day
Speaker 4: and I was there with my producer, Odessa Array, one
Speaker 4: of the producers of the film, and Christo and I
Speaker 4: were working on another project that wasn't going well. Christo
Speaker 4: walks in, he says, there's something else and I was like,
Speaker 4: what's that Crystal. He says, you know that navalne guy.
Speaker 4: I said yeah. He says, I think I have a
Speaker 4: lead and who tried to poison him? And I go,
Speaker 4: who's making that movie?
Speaker 1: Christo?
Speaker 3: He goes, I don't know? Should I ask?
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, you should fucking ask right now. And
Speaker 4: because of the work Crystal had done on the screenpole Case,
Speaker 4: he had cracked that very famous Russian poisoning story only
Speaker 4: a few years earlier. Navollney was receptive and Ivonne understood
Speaker 4: that this is the guy to be taken seriously. So
Speaker 4: Crystal reached out. A week later, we were sneaking across
Speaker 4: the German Austrian border, which is closed because of the COVID.
Speaker 4: Where were you at the time we were in Vienna?
Speaker 1: What were you doing there?
Speaker 4: We were in Vienna in limbo, waiting to see if
Speaker 4: we could go back to another recruited.
Speaker 1: You into the the NSA when you were you left
Speaker 1: scad after You're come on, who recruited you? Come on?
Speaker 1: I am? I mean I just had you in Vienna.
Speaker 4: You can't even joke about that. Because the Russians are
Speaker 4: gonna take this interview. They're gonna take your voice saying
Speaker 4: that to me. They're going to put it on state
Speaker 4: media and they're gonna say, look, here's the evidence Alec
Speaker 4: Baldwin knows that he.
Speaker 1: Works for the same joking Vladimir. Yes, literally, it's too late.
Speaker 4: They're gonna take this and they're no, watch it happen, crosp,
Speaker 4: it's gonna happen. You're gonna be on Russian state propaganda
Speaker 4: calling me a CIA asset, even.
Speaker 1: Though you were.
Speaker 4: This is how these Russians operate. They're like, oh, he
Speaker 4: works for the state Department, he works for the stand.
Speaker 4: They already said that, and so you joke. But it's
Speaker 4: like I'm here being like wo woa, whoa, whoa. They're
Speaker 4: going to use your voice calling me a say yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a joke, Vladimir, let's we'll get that
Speaker 1: on the cake. You for specifying.
Speaker 3: I was in Vienna with Christo and Odessa.
Speaker 4: We were working on another project and in that former
Speaker 4: Soviet state, it wasn't going well and I my wife
Speaker 4: was spiraling, I was bugging out. I didn't know if
Speaker 4: i'd go back to Canada, if I'd stick around for
Speaker 4: a little bit longer. And then he walks in and
Speaker 4: magnificently says what about navalne And a week later we
Speaker 4: were sitting across from Alexa and his chief chief investigator.
Speaker 4: I'm Maria Pevcik, and my job was to convince them
Speaker 4: why we needed to make a documentary, why we had
Speaker 4: to start right now. Chris, So what was your perspective
Speaker 4: on that first meeting.
Speaker 2: He wasn't buying it. He was like looking at this
Speaker 2: kid much younger. He didn't believe it, but he allowed
Speaker 2: to give him a chance. And the way we agreed
Speaker 2: with him is let's start rolling. And then we decided
Speaker 2: later because otherwise you missing every moment every day not
Speaker 2: being recorded, and that's what sold the whole project of Navoni.
Speaker 2: And then a week later they were like best of
Speaker 2: friends and it was on Google.
Speaker 1: Wasn't going on?
Speaker 4: I would say best if I have to as a filmmaker,
Speaker 4: I have to just maintain that. You know, Alexey is
Speaker 4: an easy guy to hang out with. We bonded over
Speaker 4: our wonkish love of politics and all of this, but
Speaker 4: it's still important that I maintain a critical eye. This
Speaker 4: is a guy who is controversial in his own way,
Speaker 4: who's a complicated and compelling figure, and his complications make
Speaker 4: him compelling. But he and I hit it off and
Speaker 4: we enjoyed spending time together, and I think that's part
Speaker 4: of the reason why we were able to mesh ourselves
Speaker 4: in his cohort so naturally, so quickly.
Speaker 1: Documentary filmmaker Daniel Rohor and Belling Cat journalist Krysto Grotzev.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be
Speaker 1: sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Speaker 1: Daniel Rhor and Krystal growth sp recount the dramatic final
Speaker 1: moments with Navalni and his family before his heroic return
Speaker 1: to Russia. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing. I asked Daniel Rohr and Krystal Grotcev to
Speaker 1: speculate on what is next for Putin amidst the rumors
Speaker 1: of his ailing health.
Speaker 2: The important thing is that people at the top belief
Speaker 2: that he has cancer, and that makes him vulnerable, and
Speaker 2: that makes them unlikely to follow any order that he
Speaker 2: gives them that endangers their own longevity political longevity. So
Speaker 2: this is why Putin is not the sort of all
Speaker 2: powerful dictator that he was a year ago.
Speaker 1: Vulnerable.
Speaker 2: Everybody knows that he may have cancer. And this is
Speaker 2: what matters.
Speaker 1: What do the people inside Russia think? Who's his likely successor?
Speaker 1: Is someone teed up Becau's what the Russians is often
Speaker 1: a likely successor?
Speaker 2: You know what has been the strongest sort of strategic
Speaker 2: talking point of the Kremlin. There's no successor if not
Speaker 2: put In them who this is a phrase said phrase,
Speaker 2: There's a vacuum there, It's a vacuum. That's why people
Speaker 2: have actually not looked for a success and have sort
Speaker 2: of embraced his willingness to be the president or that's
Speaker 2: are forever. I don't think the people, the regular people
Speaker 2: in the near future will decide who the success or is.
Speaker 2: It's going to be still the oligarchs and the elite
Speaker 2: and the generals. And I wonder if at some point,
Speaker 2: because of this war, this egregious war, Navale doesn't become
Speaker 2: a more acceptable alternative to the oligarchs because at least
Speaker 2: with him, they know that he's going to tax them
Speaker 2: thirty percent of their wealth, but they're going to preserve
Speaker 2: their lifestyle. And we put In. They've lost everything. They
Speaker 2: are not invited to any party in London or in
Speaker 2: New York anymore. They can't travel. And this will change
Speaker 2: if Navaldi comes to part well, comes.
Speaker 1: To power, I mean if Putin. I mean to take
Speaker 1: me through this, because I'm yearning to hear your take
Speaker 1: on this, which is that, if let's say theoretically Putin
Speaker 1: dropped dead tomorrow, there's no chance in Navalni would become
Speaker 1: the president. They're not going to hold an election, are they.
Speaker 2: Well, it's going to be chaos and there will be
Speaker 2: somebody who comes in as an interim power guy.
Speaker 1: So what is Navalne's path to the presidency? Even post put.
Speaker 2: What's going to happen is a fight, internal domestic fight,
Speaker 2: strife among the different groups of the power elite. Putin
Speaker 2: has made the only claim to fame that he has.
Speaker 2: He has been able to manage these different interests within
Speaker 2: the generals and within the FSB, and once he's gone,
Speaker 2: it will be a fight everybody against everyone else. And
Speaker 2: this is what has happened in every Western, normal country,
Speaker 2: that is the normal path to actual democracy, which just
Speaker 2: hasn't happened in Russia yet. So I think we're going
Speaker 2: to see a couple of years of terrible dictatorship by
Speaker 2: somebody else that will gradually go into a real election
Speaker 2: at some point.
Speaker 1: Why is poison the weapon of choice in these assassinations?
Speaker 2: So the first answer is that if it works, it is,
Speaker 2: and it's deniable, you don't discover it. Now in this case,
Speaker 2: they discovered it, but it was not meant to be discovered,
Speaker 2: So it's just a heart attack, right. And the second
Speaker 2: answer is if it doesn't work, then it's so scary
Speaker 2: that it actually discourages the cent and it's good. It's
Speaker 2: the worst way to die. You hear the shrieks, the
Speaker 2: yells of yeah that you don't.
Speaker 1: Want to die like that, So we want them to suffer.
Speaker 2: They want yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So this is the chemical equivalent of dumb dumb bullets exactly.
Speaker 2: But it's not new. It's not something that put An
Speaker 2: invented it. He inherited it from the KGB. They love
Speaker 2: this thing.
Speaker 1: You may remember sometimes it's untraceable, meaning someone's dead, and
Speaker 1: you say, oh, it's a heart.
Speaker 2: Attack, right, exactly. There was this Bulgarian journalist who was
Speaker 2: killed with a poisoned umbrella. Remember in the seventies, in London.
Speaker 2: That's what the KGP did. They prepared this umbrella with
Speaker 2: a little pellet that had something like novich Chok and
Speaker 2: he died.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite documentaries is Assassins. We were talking
Speaker 1: about this before, where the two women believe are coached
Speaker 1: because they think they're on a game show and they
Speaker 1: killed Kim Jhalon's brother by rubbing the poison in his
Speaker 1: eyes at the airport while they're presenting him with some
Speaker 1: game show surprise. Anyway, that film Assassins was just absolutely numbing.
Speaker 1: But you think, but obviously poison is better than spattering
Speaker 1: somebody's head against the wall in a hotel. Well, if
Speaker 1: you spattered even with a silencer.
Speaker 4: But the reality is, if you spatter someone's head against
Speaker 4: the wall in a hotel, then you have, as as
Speaker 4: one of the characters in the film says, a body
Speaker 4: with a hole in it, that you have to explain.
Speaker 4: If Alexe died on that plane, as the Russian government intended,
Speaker 4: an autopsy would have been carried out by the criminalistics Institute.
Speaker 2: The same guys for poison him.
Speaker 3: So it's really the perfect crime.
Speaker 1: Are either of you, are you worried about your own
Speaker 1: safety or were you ever worried about your own safety
Speaker 1: during the production of this film.
Speaker 3: Absolutely not.
Speaker 4: When you're sitting next to a standing next to alexeing
Speaker 4: of only who's the bravest man on the planet, and
Speaker 4: his staff who are actually in danger, you know you
Speaker 4: can't help but feel inspired by their courage and bravery.
Speaker 3: I think the Russians.
Speaker 4: Will continue to make efforts to discredit the film by
Speaker 4: coming after me. That's why I take it so seriously
Speaker 4: when we joke about this CIA recruitment stuff, because they
Speaker 4: will literally take this and they will put it on
Speaker 4: Channel one and they will say, oh, look, here's the evidence.
Speaker 4: He's admitting it. He is from this agency or that agency,
Speaker 4: which is nonsense. So I'm more concerned about character assassination,
Speaker 4: you know, them finding someone I've never met who said
Speaker 4: that makes horrible accusations about me, something like that.
Speaker 3: That's my concern. What do you think, Christo, No, I
Speaker 3: totally agree with you.
Speaker 2: They will just go after your character. They'll probably send
Speaker 2: some nice girls to sleep with you.
Speaker 1: What are you going to work on next? You're going
Speaker 1: to do in a documentary about Abba somebody?
Speaker 4: I want to do something that is completely tonally different.
Speaker 4: I have a few things in development that I'm apprehensive.
Speaker 4: I don't want to jink, so I'm apprehensive to talk about.
Speaker 1: But most documentarians I know have a bunch of pots
Speaker 1: on the stone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to, you have to.
Speaker 4: But this one was so all consuming and it's this
Speaker 4: is a daunting one to follow up, as I'm sure
Speaker 4: you can imagine. But I want to make something very soon,
Speaker 4: and I want it to be totally, totally different. But
Speaker 4: I love making documentaries, so I hope I get to
Speaker 4: make another one now.
Speaker 1: Navalney, what was the last time you were in his presence?
Speaker 1: When did you last see.
Speaker 3: I can tell you exactly.
Speaker 4: It was January seventeenth in Berlin, Germany, at about one
Speaker 4: thirty in the afternoon of this year of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: twelve last year he got in. I filmed, I was shooting.
Speaker 4: He went to prison when filming on January seventeenth was
Speaker 4: the first day he was incarcerat of last year of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one, and I filmed him saying that you
Speaker 4: see it in the film. He says goodbye to his colleagues,
Speaker 4: and then we walked downstairs to the car park where
Speaker 4: there are are cars, protective vehicles waiting for him. He
Speaker 4: gets in the car, and I didn't. I was working.
Speaker 4: I was shooting, so it's not like I could go
Speaker 4: say thank you for so nice to meet you, goodbye.
Speaker 4: He understood a line and you have to keep it
Speaker 4: absolutely and he understood that, and I understood that. And
Speaker 4: as he was driving off, I gave him a nod
Speaker 4: and he gave me a nod back, and.
Speaker 1: He was off and you never spoke to him again. No, nothing, nothing. Well,
Speaker 1: you've done this amazing job, because you have. Certainly, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying this to be kind, and I know I'm
Speaker 1: in a long line of people that are saying to you,
Speaker 1: what a remarkable and what a talented filmmaker you are.
Speaker 1: You's done a remarkable job with this film showing the
Speaker 1: world who Navalny is, at least who we want to
Speaker 1: believe he is. I'm disappointed that he chose to go
Speaker 1: to prison, and although I understand the victor in Casablanca
Speaker 1: kind of code, but your film is going to be
Speaker 1: for many people in this country their introduction and their
Speaker 1: first chance and an up close look at Navalney.
Speaker 4: And that's something that we take very seriously and it's
Speaker 4: very important to all of us. As many people in
Speaker 4: the world see this film as possible. The reality is
Speaker 4: Alec that Alexey is in peril. He is in a
Speaker 4: very bad spot right now. And the way that you
Speaker 4: keep him alive is by keeping his name in the
Speaker 4: global consciousness.
Speaker 1: So is he allowed to have visitors in prison.
Speaker 4: He can see his wife and his daughter once every
Speaker 4: three months for an hour. This film is going to
Speaker 4: be widely available and everyone in the world needs to
Speaker 4: see it, and they need to tell their friends to
Speaker 4: see it. Alexei's life depends on it.
Speaker 1: Thank you both, Thank you director Daniel Rohrer and journalist
Speaker 1: Kristo Grotzev. Navalny is currently in theaters around the world
Speaker 1: and will premiere on CNNTV in North America on April
Speaker 1: twenty fourth. This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice,
Speaker 1: and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperio. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.