While covering the news desk in Cairo for a colleague over the Christmas holidays, Australian journalist Peter Greste was arrested and accused of terrorism. He became a pawn in the middle of a deadly game full of corrupt officials and ancient rivalries. The subject of his own worldwide news story, where only his wits and unlikely allies kept him alive, Greste’s very survival meant staring down a brutal regime. The Correspondent is a gripping thriller and a compelling true story about the relentless defence of the truth and triumph of the human spirit, starring Richard Roxburgh as Greste, and directed by Kriv Stenders.
As the film arrives in Australian theatres this week, Stenders spoke with our Peter Gray about the importance of its subject and the conversations it’s been generating, the collaborative process between himself, Roxburgh and Greste, and balancing the political landscape with a filmic narrative.
With this film, it portrays the precarious position of journalists working in politically volatile environments. As a director and storyteller, how did you find the balance of needing to depict the harsh realities of Peter Greste’s experience with the responsibility of representing the situation with sensitivity?
Peter Greste was very open and generous with his insights. And he also vetted the script. I knew what was ever in the script, because Peter has okayed it, I had the permission to go there. So, for me, it all came from the script. And the fact that Peter Greste and Peter Duncan have worked closely on the screenplay, I sort of knew that I had the creative passport to do and go where I needed to.
I wanted to really give audiences as close, or as accurate, a sense of what would it be like to have been in a hotel room and have men knock on your door and drag you away and throw you in a police van and then throw you in a cell and be dragged into a courtroom and then sentenced for seven years. I really wanted to make the film that experience and give the audience that kind of very similar, immersive quality. So it was really just about being, like any story, as true as you could within the confines of the story.
There was an odd calmness to some of the prison sequences, like when he’s playing games, getting his haircut, and the banter with other prisoners. Was there anything that surprised you about his experience in prison?
You know, we’ve seen prison movies before. There’s so many of them. And it’s either people being tortured, or trying to escape, or they have escaped. What I thought was really interesting, and Peter Duncan and I talked about it a lot, he says that we don’t have that where you get released or escape. And we wanted to use that to our advantage. Peter Greste talked a lot about something that happened very early on in his imprisonment, he met a guy called Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who basically told him, “Listen, if you think you’re here for some kind of karmic reason, you’re going to go insane.”
Peter Greste talked very much about finding a meditative state that he could just accept it, and he could exist. Once that was written into the film, (and) I think we had this idea that the film wasn’t going to be about escapes or torture, it was more the horror and the insanity of his situation. That’s the horror. And the challenge is, how do you remain sane in that horror? Once we worked out that that’s our palette, dramatically it became really interesting to tell that story. The thing is, even though he didn’t pay with his life, he did pay a price for it. You know, he has to wear the guilt and the horror and the trauma of what he’s gone through for the rest of his life. And that’s what a lot of journalists have to do and live with.
Do you feel, for the uninitiated, you have to include sufficient context regarding the political landscape without overwhelming the personal narrative that you’re trying to tell?
Yeah, it was sort of tricky, even in the script, there was a lot more expositional stuff about the brotherhood. Pretty quickly, in the edit, you work out that you can’t explain the entire Arab Spring in a few minutes, you know? You can’t explain the political history of Egypt in any kind of compelling way. All you can do is basically set the scene and we locked onto the idea of using the actual news reports and coverage of the time. It’s just a way to paint a very, very basic thumbnail idea of what we’re entering. It’s kind of like a visual version of the Star Wars crawl (laughs).
Even if we didn’t understand the minutiae of that these (men) are labeled as terrorists, you get a sense of what you’re going into and I think we’ve all grown up seeing these sort of images on our screens. We interpret. We know, more or less, what the environment is. And it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t going to be a historic film about Egyptian political history. It was more about the moment and what Peter was entering into. And, in a way, not knowing too much about it also kind of helped, because it created this sense of confusion and befuddlement and “What the fuck?” of what Peter was going through.
One of the main takeaways of the film, I think, is around journalistic freedom and the danger of suppression. Have you had conversations, or have you heard of conversations, generated from the film?
The Q&A (screenings) are fantastic. What’s been great about them and having Peter there, is that the audiences really love the fact that Peter’s there and they can talk to him. He’s been very articulate, very eloquent when he talks about this subject. And what’s gratifying for me is that we’ve made a film that, I think, don’t get made. Especially Australian films. These sort of films don’t get financed. They don’t get made. They don’t get distributed. But yet, here we are.
We’ve made one, and we’ve got big, really healthy audiences coming along and they’re engaging, which I find very reassuring, because (it’s showing) Australian audiences do want to engage with these sort of important subjects. They do want to be told these important stories. And they do want to watch them. Because if we’re talking about this stuff, it means that it’s not going to be forgotten. I really believe that we’re in a very dangerous point of time now where these sort of things – things that I call foundation pillars of democracy – are being eroded. We’ve even got people questioning the idea of universities, which is insane to me. It’s like, what the fuck is going on here? And if the film makes us think for a moment, it’s done it’s job.
Having worked in a multitude of genres as a filmmaker, was there anything from previous film experiences that informed your approach here? Or was there anything that challenged you the most?
Yeah, well, I kind of consider myself a chef, and I’m becoming a better chef than I was maybe 10 years ago. I’ve tried a few different cuisines, and this was, probably, a dish that I’d made before in the form of my early films, like Boxing Day or Blacktown. You know, that kind of social realist sort of film. I felt like I knew the toolkit that I would have to use, or the recipe that I needed to kind of create to make this film. But the good thing about being a filmmaker over time is that you learn, and you’re always learning. Your experience and your instincts become sharper. I felt like I was able to use a lot of the instinctual skill set in this.
And even though we shot in Sydney, it was a challenge to make it really feel like we shot in Egypt. It was a challenge to make something that didn’t feel like it was television or a poor man’s version of a foreign film. It was more about what we chose not to show, or not to do.
Given how collaborative it was with Peter, was he involved in the conversations regarding casting Richard? And then what was the collaborative process like between them and getting the right characterisation on screen?
The thing about directing is that it’s not a dark art, you know? Directing is a very simple job. Directing is really casting. Once you cast a character, once you cast an actor to play a character, that’s kind of the biggest directorial decision you’re going to make. I’m a big believer that the actor who’s playing the character should know, must know, more about the character than me. I’m just there to listen and watch and to make that it sounds and looks right. With Richard, the biggest conversation we had was just reassuring that I didn’t want an impersonation of Peter Greste. It’s not like he’s Barack Obama or Bob Hawke, you know? He’s not an iconic character. He’s an everyman. He’s just a journalist. I wanted Richard to make Peter Greste who he really should be. Once we had that conversation it kind of liberated us, and we were able to just look into the script and channel into the musicality of Richard.
When reading the script, was there anything that you weren’t sure was going to translate as well as it did?
The biggest challenge for me, or the scariest thing, was the Arabian language and the courtroom scenes, because I felt like this could really turn into pedestrian television. The scariest thing was maintaining the authenticity. But I was very lucky in that in Sydney there’s a huge Middle Eastern diaspora. It’s very, very, very wide. I was actually robbed for choice for these casting roles. So I was really able to cherry pick the extraordinary cast of Middle Eastern actors who all brought their own life experience, their own cultural and historic experiences to the film. And, to me, that was very important, because I felt like if we had convincing performance after convincing performance, then I’d be able to breathe through that barrier of all that threshold of mediocrity.
The Correspondent is screening in Australian theatres from April 17th, 2025.
