Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a franti
Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. “What kind of hurt?” she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.
Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie’s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths – a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths – had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. “When it had become likely that I was going to survive,” says Rushdie drily, “I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.”
One of her first ideas was that it needed to be shot not on a phone but with a proper camera. “I explicitly remember when the box arrived with my camera,” Griffiths says. “I cried because it was reconnecting me to my identity as an artist. The person I used to be, even just 24 hours ago, was being returned to me. It was giving both of us this permission to continue to be artists and tell our stories together.”
The couple are sitting in separate rooms of their New York home to tell their shared story over video link. Griffiths is balmy and animated, as the memories rush out. Rushdie is more reserved and sardonic, smartly turned out, with only a black lens over his right eye to attest to the horrific injuries he suffered.
Both have already published memoirs about the experience: Rushdie’s Knife, in 2024 and Griffiths’ The Flower Bearers earlier this year. Now they are the subjects of an unflinching film, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, which combines Griffiths’ video diary with archive footage from the period following the fateful day in 1989 when a fatwa was issued against Rushdie for the offence allegedly caused to Islam by the supposed blasphemy of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for the execution of the 41-year-old author and his publishers, forcing him into hiding, where he remained, under armed guard, for nine years.
‘It’s a very intimate point of view from love between two people in a novel marriage’ … Griffiths and Rushdie. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
It is difficult to say which time zone of the film is more viscerally shocking: the grisly footage of Rushdie being stitched and stapled back together in 2022, or the murderous hatred that roars out from news headlines in the months and years following the fatwa. In the US, the office of the Riverdale Press newspaper is firebombed after it runs an editorial about the book defending free expression; in Pakistan, six people are killed in riots; in Japan, a translator is stabbed to death; in Italy, another translator is stabbed in his home, while, in London, an effigy of a mutilated Rushdie is paraded through the streets by a furious crowd, some of whom declare on camera that nothing less than hanging will satisfy them.
Incorporating the archive footage was the idea of Alex Gibney, an Oscar-winning documentary maker (his newest film is a four-hour study of Elon Musk) who was invited by Rushdie and Griffiths to direct – or, as he describes it, “curate” – the film. Rushdie was initially opposed to dredging up the past, reasoning that his attacker – known simply as “A” in both his memoir and the film – was “just one crazy kid”. “I don’t see it as being representative of a larger matter,” he insists. “I think I was unfortunate in that this person was motivated by who knows what influences, and at this venue where he came to attack me, there was absolutely no security protection at all.”
The venue he was speaking at was at the heart of an idealistic community at Chautauqua in upstate New York, whose naivety in not having a single security guard in the hall Rushdie now sharply questions. Yet just three years before the attack, at a talk hosted by the Guardian at the Sheldonian in Oxford for his Booker-shortlisted novel Quichotte, he was tetchy to find plainclothes police at the entrances, complaining that only in the UK was such security still deemed necessary. “Well the thing is,” he says now, “in the preceding 20 years, I’d done hundreds of public events all over the world with no trouble, and it didn’t seem necessary to surround the Sheldonian with armed men.”
double quotation markThere was absolutely no security protection at all
As the film reveals, not everyone shared his confidence. The Palestinian-American historian Edward Said predicted that the main threat Rushdie faced would not be soon from a religious fanatic, but at some time in the future from a random individual. The film’s power lies in the connection it forges between the two time frames: it demonstrates that the body in the bed in 2022, with a destroyed eye bulging from its socket, is what happens if the right to free speech is violently and publicly opposed.
‘I wanted to understand this story as a kind of healing film’ … Alex Gibney. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
Griffiths, who is Rushdie’s fifth wife, was an 11-year-old growing up in Delaware when the fatwa was issued. Gibney was “a wayward film-maker in search of a career” who had made a few TV documentaries and was trying to write some scripts. “I was doing a lot of reading because I didn’t get much work, so I was well aware of Salman as a novelist and an essayist,” he says. “But I think we [he and his editor] had forgotten, too, how vast it was. You know, you go through a process, starting by saying, OK, let’s see what kind of clips there are about the fatwa, and we were stunned.”
He concedes that Rushdie would have preferred less of the footage. “Salman doesn’t want to be defined by this. He bristles, and I understand it. You want to be defined by your artistic work, not by the political opportunism of a down-on-his-luck tyrant. But at the same time, I think it was hugely important for the audience to understand just how global it was.”
Gibney’s original idea was to model the film on Dennis Potter’s hit 1980s TV series The Singing Detective, based on Potter’s experience of struggling with the chronic skin disease psoriasis. “The simple story is that he comes in, in terrible shape, and over the course of the series, he recovers physically. But in the meantime, his life passes before his eyes. He thinks about his childhood. He hallucinates … and he imagines bits and pieces of his life through his own detective fiction. Salman was on his own path with Knife, and in some ways, they kind of coalesced. But ultimately, I did the smart thing with a writer of Salman’s stature, which is just to use enormous portions of Knife as the narration for the film.”
Though Rushdie wryly complains that he is the only one of the trio to receive no production credits, apart from “based on the book by …” (Griffiths has two, as cinematographer and executive producer), it gives full range to his “free-associating” mind, flitting from literary citation to animation and movie excerpts.
‘The film becomes a third perspective’ … Rushdie. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
In one scene, he recalls a notable image from Georges Méliès’ classic tiny of 1902, Le Voyage dans La Lune, of a spacecraft crashing into the eye of the moon. “This is the literary device known as foreshadowing,” he wrote in the memoir. The night before the attack, joyful because he was in love and had just signed off the proofs for his next novel (2023’s Victory City), he sent Griffiths a photograph of the moon seen from his hotel balcony. “Here’s a man in the dark, ignorant of the danger that’s already very close … the future rushes at him while he sleeps … Except strangely it’s really the past returning, my own past rushing at me … a masked man with a knife seeking to carry out a death order from three decades ago.”
Seeing the image reproduced for reference in a printed text is nothing like experiencing it on the huge screen, juxtaposed with Griffiths’ unstinting footage of what Rushdie described as “my bulging boiled-egg eye [hanging] out of my face, the iris improbably perched on the swollen white …”
Why did Griffiths – and by extension the film – put so much emphasis on the horror of Rushdie’s damaged eye? “I think for me, the camera is part of how unbearable it was, and the shock for anyone to see their loved one being so wounded, so damaged, so violently attacked by another human being,” she replies. “And so I feel that, though the camera could be a sort of screen, also it was so open and you can’t look away.”
She continues: “It’s a very intimate point of view from love between two people in a new marriage, and this is where we’re at. It was just I’m moved to pick up the camera, or I can’t believe we’re in this situation. The camera is real, and I’m not. This can’t be happening to us. But then I’m like: ‘Well, it’s real because I can see it in the camera.’”
In the early days, when Griffiths was filming by day and camping out in Rushdie’s hospital room by night, she knew she could not show him what he looked like, any more than she could reveal her own fear and distress, which spill out in a tearful selfie monologue. It was only after he was finally allowed home that she asked if he’d like to see it. “I hadn’t really sat by myself and looked at much of it either,” she says. “When we finally did look at it, we did it together, and then it kind of became: ‘Oh, this is bigger than us, and maybe other people need to see it.’”
For Rushdie, the viewing was a rollercoaster. “First of all, I thought I looked really much worse than I thought I looked – the damage was much worse than I had imagined it to be. And then I felt quite pleased because I thought I don’t look like that any more. I look like this. So it actually dramatised the recovery.”
‘I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this’ … Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie. Photograph: Altitude Film
The final minutes of the film show the couple revisiting the scene of the attack, and laying to rest some of the misrememberings. Early on, Rushdie berates himself for submitting to his attacker. “I ask myself: why didn’t I do anything? Why did I just stand there? Well, in the film, you see that I didn’t just stand there. I tried to get away from him. So memory and reality are sometimes at odds with each other, and the film becomes a third perspective.”
Gibney tried, and failed, to get an interview in jail with “A”, the destroyer, who was wrestled to the floor and whose motives remain a mystery. “I wanted to understand this story as a kind of healing film, which I think we all of us need, and also about their investment in their love for each other,” he says. “So while it’s gruesome in parts and difficult and deals with the dark places of the human psyche, nevertheless, it finds a way out to a really good place.”
Rushdie and Griffiths had been together for five years when the attack happened, having met at the opening night of a festival that he had co-founded and chaired for the writers’ charity PEN. Though they didn’t hide their relationship, they did not flaunt it either, so that at the time of the attack, few people beyond their immediate friends and family knew they were married. “Being private is part of my personality,” says Griffiths. While the attack shoved Rushdie back into the spotlight, it forced her into it for the first time. She recalls looking out on this novel reality as the plane carrying her to her husband’s bedside landed on an airstrip packed with law enforcement troops and realising she was just going to have to deal with it, “which is another part of my personality”. In an epigraph to his memoir, Rushdie quoted Samuel Beckett: “We are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” How much do they feel they have been changed by what’s happened? “Well,” he says, “I’m better than maybe I have any business to be. And Eliza, too.”
He still travels back and forth to see his sons and grandchildren in the UK, and the couple will be with them for the film’s London premiere. Has the attack ever tempted them to leave Trump’s US, where the forces against free speech and human rights seem ever more entrenched and threatening? “What, for Farage’s Britain?” scoffs Rushdie. I take it that’s a no, then.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is released in the UK on 30 September. It was released in the US on 17 September
