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