Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day In September) sat down with Daniel Roher and Bulgarian Christo Grozev, director of and key protagonist within the highly acclaimed Navalny, a documentary about the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the subsequent (and shocking) investigation into the crime.
Battsek kicked off by acknowledging Navalny’s “absolutely brilliant, brilliant producer” Diane Becker to whom “I owe a lot of my success, such as it is.” He then asked director Roher of the origins of the Navalny project, how he “started down the road.”
“Christo and I, and one of the film’s other producers, Odessa Rae, were actually working on a completely different project,” Roher explained. “In October of 2020, we found ourselves in Kyiv. We were working on a film that had to do with corruption in the President’s office in Ukraine. And that film was going nowhere fast. We were hitting a couple of dead ends and we soon found ourselves in Vienna sort of figuring out what we were gonna do next. I was wondering if I was gonna go back to Canada, where I’m from, or if there was a film to make. If we [were to] go back to Ukraine, we didn’t quite know what the situation was. And that’s when Christo walked in one morning. We were having a meeting and he uttered this magic phrase. He said, ‘I think I have a lead in who tried to poison Navalny.’”
“And of all the people in the world who could possibly say that, Christo may be the only one who could say it with any realism.” Roher continued. “This is the guy who solved or cracked the 2018 Skripal case in the UK, exposing the identities of the agents dispatched to go and murder [former Russian double agent] Sergei Skripal.”
“And so when Christo reached out to Navalny, Navalny understood that this guy was serious and offered him a meeting. And it just so happened that Navalny and his staff had also been contemplating or thinking about a documentary project. This is a medium they’d never explored before. So John, it [was] totally the case of ‘right time, right place.’ And a week and a half after we had that first discussion, we were invited to go and sit with Navalny and meet with him, and essentially pitch him on why we should do a film.”
Click here to see the whole conversation between John Battsek Daniel Roher and Christo Grozev.
