Two nights before he was scheduled to speak at an event in the small town of Chautauqua, New York, renowned author Salman Rushdie awoke from a dream that he said felt like a premonition.
In the dream, Rushdie said he was being pursued in an amphitheater by a man with a spear. When he woke up, the dream made such an impression on him that he told his wife that maybe he shouldn’t go to the event in Chautauqua. He would be speaking in a theater, and he said “it all felt a bit close” to what he’d experienced in the dream.
“And then I thought, Well, you know, you don’t change your plans because you had a bad dream,” Rushdie, author of the acclaimed novels “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses,” said during a panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City on Sunday. He decided to go ahead and attend the event, but, he told the Sundance audience, “maybe I should have paid attention to the dream.”
Rushdie was in Park City to promote the new documentary “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. Premiering at Sundance this week, the film tells the full story of what happened to him at that event in Chautauqua — and the aftermath.
While preparing to speak at the event in 2022, Rushdie was brutally attacked on stage by a man wielding a knife. He was stabbed 15 times and was left blind in one eye by the attack, leading to months of challenging recovery, which the documentary chronicles through intimate footage taken by Rushdie’s wife, the poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
But although the documentary is centered on the attack, it also explores much deeper themes of identity, forgiveness and freedom of speech. And it’s anchored by his relationship with Griffiths, showing how the strength of their relationship helped pull him through the ordeal, leading Rushdie himself to say on Sunday that “Knife” is actually, in a way, “a love story.”
Decades of threats
Rushdie was no stranger to attempts on his life. The Indian-born author has lived under death threats for nearly four decades, ever since the publication of his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.”
The documentary chronicles the violent backlash that Rushdie received to the novel, which was perceived by some Muslims as blasphemous. It was banned in 20 (predominantly Muslim) countries, and there were book burnings and riots around the globe, including in London and New York. But it all came to a head when then-Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for the death of Rushdie and anyone involved in the book’s publication.
“Knife” leaps backward and forward in time, showing the effect of the fatwa on Rushdie — who was born into a Muslim family in Mumbai and has lived most of his life in London and New York City — throughout the last 30-plus years of his life.
“We felt we had to revisit that story (in the documentary),” Rushdie said at the panel. “Otherwise people wouldn’t understand what happened now if they didn’t know what happened then.”
As a result of the fatwa, Rushdie was forced to live in hiding for many years. He talks in the documentary about how the possibility of an assassination attempt loomed in the back of his mind as he began to live more publicly. But it also inspired him to become a proponent of free speech, particularly when it comes to religion, speaking up on behalf of the rights of authors and artists around the world.
Gibney, who won an Oscar in 2008 for his Afghanistan War documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” told the Deseret News that he wanted to “tell everybody something about who Salman is, where he came from, what kind of writer was he, what kind of man he was. You know, how long he suffered under the threat of political violence. And how strong he’s fought for the right for free speech.”
But those themes were an undercurrent in the documentary, Gibney said, to a much simpler story: “Let’s see if he makes it.”
Healing — and filming
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Rushdie was going to make it in the immediate aftermath of the attack. He was rushed to a hospital in nearby Erie, Pennsylvania, where he underwent surgeries and was placed on a ventilator for several days. He was later transferred to a rehabilitation center, where he spent several weeks recovering.
The documentary depicts in brutal detail the extent of Rushdie’s injuries, including the loss of his eye. This is thanks to footage taken by Rushdie’s wife, Griffiths, who began taking photos and videos of him about five days after he arrived at the hospital.
Her footage unflinchingly shows his bloody wounds and deep bruising, his many stitches, and the damage to his eye. But it also shows the deep bond between the two of them — a “date night” while Rushdie lies in a hospital bed, Griffiths cheering him on as he takes his first steps after the attack, and frequent “I love yous” shared by them both.
“I always thought that this is a story about conflict between hatred and love, between violence and love, between ignorance and love.”
— Salman Rushdie
Although Griffiths is constantly upbeat and encouraging in her videos with Rushdie, one of the most moving parts of the film comes when she turns the camera on herself while she’s alone. Without Rushdie present, she emotionally shares how the attack has impacted her and her worries for her husband.
At first, they weren’t sure they would do anything with the footage that Griffiths captured, Rushdie told the Deseret News. But as they began to look back on what she had filmed, they began to think there was a story there that was worth telling.
That largely came down to Griffiths’ talents as a photographer and cinematographer, Rushdie said.
“It was very, very well shot,” Rushdie told the Deseret News. “And actually, when Alex saw it, he was also very impressed by the quality of the filmmaking. And I think without that, there would be no film.”
Rushdie and Griffiths originally considered making the film themselves, but ultimately decided to approach Gibney about the project.
“They have this extraordinary footage that Eliza had shot of his recovery, starting in about Day 5, after, you know, once they knew he would survive,” Gibney said. “And for a while, they considered doing the film themselves, and then I think they decided they were too close to it. So they were looking for a filmmaker who had a vision of how to put the footage at the center, but to do something else with it.”
Rushdie says that Gibney’s vision was critical to creating the film.
“I didn’t know exactly what I wanted it to be,” Rushdie said during the panel. “I knew that the footage that Eliza had made would be very central to whatever the film ended up being. But beyond that, I didn’t really have a picture in my head. And that’s, actually, that’s why we needed a really brilliant filmmaker to say, ‘OK, we’ve got this stuff, and what’s the film?’ And that’s what Alex brought to it.”
Revisiting the attack
At the same time that work was happening on the film, Rushdie was also telling the story of the attack through a memoir, titled “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” which quickly hit bestseller lists after it was published in 2024.
But the task of revisiting the attack — both in writing and in watching the footage for the documentary — was not an easy one.
Rushdie was hesitant to write about the experience, but eventually felt compelled to do so.
“It just became clear to me that it was not really going to be possible for me to write anything else until I dealt with this,” he said. “The only way to get past it is to go through it.”
As for the documentary, he watched an early cut of the film but then told Gibney he didn’t want to see it again until it was finished, Rushdie told the Deseret News. When he watched the film in its entirety, 10 days before the Sundance premiere, he said there were things in it he had never seen before — including the actual footage of the attack itself.
The footage had been captured by cameras set up by the Chautauqua Institute, where Rushdie was scheduled to speak, to film the event. However, it was claimed as evidence in the trial of Rushdie’s attacker, then-24-year-old Hadi Matar, who has since been sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of attempted murder and who likely will be tried in federal court later this year on terrorism-related charges. Because the footage was being used as evidence, it hasn’t been shared publicly — until now.
The video is harrowing, clearly depicting a black-clothed figure that moves almost calmly up the aisle until he rushes the stage. There is a clear view of the attack, including the audience members and others on stage who immediately rush forward to attempt to help. It was members of the audience who were able to restrain Matar and give aid to Rushdie until authorities arrived.
“It just became clear to me that it was not really going to be possible for me to write anything else until I dealt with this. ... The only way to get past it is to go through it.”
— Salman Rushdie
Although Matar is central to the story, he remains a relatively small figure in the documentary (in his memoir, Rushdie never refers to him by name, instead designating him simply “the A”). In both the book and the movie, Rushdie expresses great interest in understanding Matar’s motives — but the closest he gets is an interview Matar gave to the New York Post while he was still in jail, in which he said that he believed Rushdie had “attacked Islam” and also admitted that he had only read “like two pages” of “The Satanic Verses.”
Matar declined to ever speak to Rushdie, however, leading the author to create fictionalized versions of how that conversation might have gone in both the documentary and the memoir, in his attempt to both understand and accept what had happened to him.
But Rushdie was in the same room with him when he testified in the trial against Matar in February of last year. He told the Sundance panel that he thought Matar looked “very unimpressive.”
“I thought, You’re just some little jerk,” Rushdie said. “That was when I really thought about him, and that part two of that thought was, yeah, but some little jerk could kill you. Which he almost did.”
Seeing the ‘worst’ and ‘best’ of humanity
Although in some ways “Knife” is a difficult watch, the movie is a hopeful one, portraying Rushdie’s healing and his relationship with Griffiths as a triumph of love over hate. Gibney also believes that it’s arrived at a time when it’s especially relevant.
The film premiered on Sunday, one day after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, but political violence has been a hot topic in the U.S. for some time — spurred on by recent events like the shooting of Charlie Kirk, assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, and the murders of Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband.
In the wake of the unrest and deaths in Minneapolis, Gibney said that we are in “a moment of tremendous violence,” but that Rushdie provides an important example.
“It’s important, I think, to look at the portrait of a man who’s had to endure the threat of that violence for many, many years, and how he hasn’t either lost his principles or his basic human decency,” Gibney said. “Because in moments like this that are fraught, you have to be prepared to speak out, to fight back, but we also cannot lose our humanity, our sense of love, our sense of what it is to be human.”
Even in the midst of the horrific knife attack, Rushdie said that he experienced the “worst” but also the “best” of humanity.
“The first thing that saved my life was the audience,” he said at the Sundance panel. “Many members of the audience just rushed onto the stage and prevented him from continuing his work. Otherwise, he wasn’t stopping. So the first thing that I saw, or understood, was, you know, human beings willing to rush and put themselves in danger.
“So you see the best of humanity and the worst of humanity in the same event, you know? And I’ve always remembered that.”
When it comes to the way his story is told in the documentary, Rushdie says he sees it as also being a “love story.”
“I just thought there’s something nice about having a film which people come to thinking it’s gonna be some kind of true crime story, and it turns into a love story, as a surprise,” Rushdie said. “But I think even when I was writing the book, I always thought that this is a story about conflict between hatred and love, between violence and love, between ignorance and love. And I thought, because, I guess, because I survived, you could say that the good guys won.”
