[music]

Brian Lehrer: The crowd is chanting, if you can't make it out, Navalny, Navalny. That's the title of and an excerpt from the documentary about the now-jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Yes, it's that time of year, it's not just Presidents Day, its award season. With the Oscars coming up in a couple of weeks, we are once again starting our annual Oscar Docs series on this show. All week, we'll talk to the makers of the five nominees for the best feature documentary Oscar, starting right now with the film Navalny and its director Daniel Roher.

Maybe you know Navalny's story at least a little bit about how he survived being poisoned. This film focuses on what happened after the thought to be impossible attempt to find out who did it, and his determination to return to Russia from Germany where he was transported for treatment and recuperation. Here's part of the trailer for the film, and of course, it's very timely with Putin in the news again and Biden's surprise visit to Kyiv today. The full trailer starts with a phone call in Russian, and we'll talk about that part later. This will give folks a sense of the storytelling that the director uses news footage, interviews and being in the midst of things with his camera.

Alexei Navalny: Hang up.

Female Reporter 1: Remarkably, Vladimir Putin faces a legitimate opponent, Alexei Navalny.

Alexei: I don't want Putin being president. If I want to be a leader of a country, I have to organize people.

Male Reporter 1: The Kremlin hates Navalny so much that they refused to say his name.

Male Reporter 2: Passengers heard Navalny cry out in agony.

Alexei: Come on, poisoned? Seriously? We are creating a coalition to fight this regime.

Male Reporter 3: If you are killed, what message do you leave behind to the Russian people?

Alexei: It's very simple, never give up.

Brian: All right, and with that, welcome to WNYC Daniel Roher and congratulations on the Oscar nomination. If I'm seeing correctly, I have something else to congratulate you for this morning because you won best documentary at the BAFTAs yesterday. That's like the British Oscars, right?

Daniel Roher: That's right, Brian. Thank you so much for having me on the program. It's been a very exciting 24 hours for my colleagues and I. Most importantly, the BAFTA win yesterday has been a giant boost on our mission to make sure Navalny's name remains in the global consciousness, and conversations like this are vital to achieve that objective. I'm grateful to be here with you.

Brian: Very timely, of course, with the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine this week.

Daniel: Indeed.

Brian: This is not a biopic of Alexei Navalny. I think it's accurate to say the film focuses on the investigation into the 2020 attempt to kill him with poison, and the extent to which that could be traced all the way to Putin. To start, can you remind listeners a little bit who is Alexei Navalny or as Vladimir Putin seems to want to call him, the person you just mentioned, so he doesn't have to ever say Navalny's name?

Daniel: Vladimir Putin will call Alexei Navalny anything other than his name. He does not say his name, and I think that speaks to just how terrified Vladimir Putin and his regime is of Navalny. Alexei Navalny is a Russian politician, many consider to be the leader of the Russian opposition. For the last 10 years, he has been on a crusade to expose corruption in Russia, to expose corruption in the highest ranks of Putin's government.

To try and run for political office when it used to be possible and to advocate for his political positions via a very, very unique use of social media, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, to reach an aspect of the Russian public who are not tuned into politics. He did this to such great effect and he was so effective, that the regime felt that the best way to deal with him and cope with his influence was to murder him.

In August of 2020, Alexei Navalny was flying from a campaign stop in the rural regions of Siberia back to Moscow when he collapsed on the plane. In the video we show in the movie he's making these noises, these groans that sound alien, almost like an animal that's being killed. It's just brutal and awful. We later learned that Navalny was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent called Novichok. Many people consider this to be Putin's signature poison.

Our film picks up just after Navalny wakes up from his coma in a Berlin hospital, as he teams up with an investigative journalist to try and uncover the exact plot to kill him tracking the movements of the kill team. We follow that investigation in real time just before Navalny makes the extraordinary and courageous decision to return back to Russia.

Brian: Can I return to something you just said in the middle of that answer and put brackets around it because it went by so casually? Vladimir Putin has a signature poison?

Daniel: Vladimir Putin has a signature poison because Vladimir Putin, in his heart, is nothing but a KGB thug. Vladimir Putin's worldview is grounded and framed in 1975, Cold War, KGB world. That's how he sees things today. What Christo Grozev, the journalist at the center of our film discovered, is that the Russian government operates a factory in Moscow to manufacture chemical weapons, specifically this poison called Novichok.

They use a kill team, a group of scientists and chemical weapons experts to go around the world and murder both dissidents, and whomever they feel are enemies of the state. These are the same men whom in 2018 tried to poison Sergei Skripal, a former KGB agent in Salisbury, England. They left a trail of destruction in their wake, they were not successful in their mission at all, and it was the same substance that they used to try and poison Navalny. One of the revelations in our film, Brian, is the stunning and absurd fact that they tried to poison Navalny through his underwear.

Brian: I guess there's a question of stupidity or ineptitude of the people trying to kill him that comes up quite spectacularly. They have a phrase for it, Moscow Four. Do I have that right?

Daniel: You do, you have that right. Moscow Four is the catch-all in the world of our film for the ineptitude of the Russian security services and Vladimir Putin's spies. Moscow Four, the origins of the phrase comes from Christo Grozev, one of the subjects of our film for whom uses digital sabotage and hacking to try and get information and assist in his investigations. He's a very unique journalist in that sense. Christo tells a story of having hacked into the email of a very high-ranking FSB deputy.

This guy's password was Moscow One. Eventually, it was discovered that the email was hacked, he changed his password to Moscow Two. Then once again they realized that that password was cracked, so he changed it to Moscow Three, and we repeat until we get Moscow Four which becomes the catch-all phrase for the ineptitude, stupidity of the Russian security services.

Brian: Let's talk a little about the investigation that you document and the role of the organization Bellingcat. We talked to a Bellingcat investigator about the group's work in Ukraine last May on the show. They work with social media and data to get behind official pronouncements, and they took this case up.

Daniel: That's right. Bellingcat is this extraordinary investigative journalist-- outfit as you just alluded to. Specifically, Christo Grozev who in our film Navalny lovingly refers to as a Bulgarian nerd with a laptop is their point man on anything Russia. More specifically, Russian state poisoning that is his very unique niche. What Christo is successfully able to do is to leverage Russian corruption against itself. What I mean by that is that in Russia corruption controls everything.

In that country, for a fee, you can actually acquire any piece of private data you might need to seek. For example, you can buy the phone records of any individual in the country. You can buy medical records, you can buy the train passenger logs, you can buy a flight manifesto. If you're Christo and you start identifying who the chemical weapons experts, who the scientists are that our manufacturing is poisoned.

You can actually buy the phone records of these guys. You can look at these phone numbers and you can see who they'd been calling around a specific period of interest in this case, August 20th when Navalny was poisoned. What Christo was able to do by purchasing, it's very important thought that he buys this information using his own money off of the dark web.

He is able to put together almost a moment-by-moment litigation of the movements of this kill team. This speaks to two important facts. One, the corruption in Russia is this necrotic cancer that has made everything rotten. Two, Putin spies are as incompetent as I alluded to earlier. These guys are total morons and some guy sitting in the Vienna with a computer and Wi-Fi was able to pick apart this entire scheme to murder Alexei Navalny.

Brian: Yes, and Navalny is adept with visual storytelling in his resistance work, especially Tik Tok and YouTube. At one point he has to show his teenage daughter how to edit for Tik Tok, her role reversal among the generations. There's an incredible sequence in the film, I'll tell everybody, and maybe astonishing would be a better choice of word.

Where Navalny is on the phone with one of the would-be assassins and gets him to cop to all of it. They had released all of this back when it happened. Once they've identified there would be assassins, they're trying to call them a deadly serious prank call, you might say. Here's one more clip from this Oscar-nominated and now BAFTA-winning documentary, Navalny. Here's one in Russian this phone call but let's hear a little to get a sense.

[phone ringing]

Male Speaker 1: [foreign language].

Male Speaker 2: [foreign language].

Male Speaker 1: [foreign language]

Male Speaker 2: [foreign language]

Male Speaker 1: [foreign language]

Brian: The translation is, greetings, my name is Alexei Navalny and I'm calling to ask why you wanted to kill me? Maybe not surprisingly, the man who called on hang up. Can you talk about that scene?

Daniel: Absolutely. Navalny, when we were shooting the movie, had this plan, I thought that it was just another one of his schemes, he come up with these ideas for YouTube videos, or Tik Toks, these sort of political ideas in these videos. He wanted to call up the men who were on the kill team. We had all of their phone numbers because of Christos's data, and he wanted to confront them over the phone.

I was thinking to myself, well, this seems like a fool's errand of certainly these Russian spies, whose job it is to murder dissidents, won't just pick up the phone and talk to anybody. We started with the phone calls. First Navalny thought that he would just try and frighten them and say as we heard in the clip, hi, this is Navalny, why did you try and poison me?

What we heard there was an audible heavy breathing before the line hangs up, whoever was on the phone hang up. Then Navalny had the idea to switch his tactic, and he had the idea to try prank call, to try and assume the identity of a high-ranking FSB assistants or something like this. Try and fool these guys into divulging information. It seems stunning just to say it out loud.

He switches to this technique and I realized that the third call, he's calling a scientist named Konstantin Kudryavtsev. It's going longer than any of the previous calls. Then I see Maria Pevchikh, this is Navalny's chief investigator, the woman responsible for running all of his corruption investigations. I watch as her jaw unhinges and hits the floor. Up until this point, Maria's emotional range to me and the crew has been mildly annoyed to very annoyed. Here she is in total shock.

Even though I don't speak a word of Russian, Brian, I understand exactly what's happening, I understand that they are finally getting this confession that whoever's on the other end of the phone has made this gigantic error in judgment, and he's speaking to Navalny candidly. In that moment, I feel a bolt of lightning run up and down my spine and I look through the viewfinder of the camera.

I make sure we have enough battery, and I make sure there's enough room on the hard drive, and I just keep shooting what would become what many things are the most extraordinary scene in this movie. Navalny calling one of the men on the poison team, and getting him to admit every single detail with the most stunning revelation being that the poison was planted in the codpiece of Navalny's blue underwear.

Brian: We just have a few minutes left. I want to ask you a couple of last things, more about the context in which the film exists in the world and in your body of work, than about Navalny himself or Putin himself. Because I think you're best known-- and my guest is director Daniel Roher-- for your 2019 documentary, Once We Were Brothers, Robbie Robertson and the Band about that iconic rock band that played with Bob Dylan and on its own. How do you go from a rock and roll movie to Putin in his nemesis?

Daniel: Often making documentaries is the art of being at the right place at the right time. The transition from making a music film to making this one is-- we'd need more time for me to tell you the whole incredible story. I was at an event a few days ago in Los Angeles and I bumped into one of the music films executive producers, the great film director Ron Howard. Ron was like, "How the hell did you go from Robbie Robertson to making this Navalny film?" It's a story that I will save if we can ever do this again with more time. It's been an extraordinary journey, Brian, to say the least, and it's one that I always have to remind people is incredibly bittersweet for me.

Brian: Do you feel like your-

Daniel: As a result-

Brian: Go ahead, you want to finish the thought? Go ahead.

Daniel: Yes, I would like to. As a result of this film, my life has expanded and blown up in ways that I never could have dreamt of. As a result of this film, I met my wife, as a result of this film like my career opportunities have expanded and it's just been blessing after blessing.

Brian: Do you think as a result of this film that your own safety is at risk?

Daniel: I just want to finish the thought real quickly, Brian. As a result of all of this, this personal success for me, and it's predicated on Alexei Navalny being in this very small prison cell. Right now Alexei Navalny is in a gulag six and a half hours outside of Moscow. I'll answer your question about the security in a second, but I really, really want your listeners to know that today, Navalny is in a gulag.

He's the only Russian prisoner in solitary confinement, he's in a very tiny cell, and the Russian prison authorities are doing everything they can to make his life miserable. He is in torturous conditions. He is in unimaginable conditions, and for all of us that's very, very difficult. It's a very sad context and I cope with that by doing everything I can to keep his name in the global consciousness.

Brian: That was going to be the last question that I wanted to ask you anyway, which is, given everything you documented in the film with the poisoning of Navalny and everything else. Why did he choose to go back to Russia? He must have had a pretty good inkling that he was likely to wind up in prison at the hands of Vladimir Putin. When you started making this film, Russia had not yet invaded Ukraine. How have the events of the last year affected the fate of Alexei Navalny?

Daniel: We premiered this film, Brian, three weeks before the war in Ukraine started. It was sickening and horrifying on that very first day of the invasion. I think it thrusted our film into an even greater level of relevance. What we were particularly concerned with was the possibility that the regime would just rip the band-aid off, they would invade Ukraine and at the same time, why not just murder the political dissidents whom are in their prisons, that's Alexei Navalny and many of his lesser-known colleagues. We did everything we could to get this film out into the world as quickly as possible.

For me, one of the most heartening experiences of showing this film to the world is traveling around particularly in Europe, in cities like Tel Aviv, or Berlin, or London. After screenings evidently dozens of Russians would approach me, young men and women who have either newly been exiled from their country or left years ago, whom for the last year particularly have been deeply, deeply ashamed of their Russianis of their nationality. In their film, and in Navalny specifically, they see for the first time in a long time, a little flicker of light, a little glimmer of hope.

A personality and courage that for just a brief moment makes them feel a flicker of pride in their country and for what the future of Russia could be. I think that's the most meaningful part about this experience, is remembering that one day, hopefully, sooner than later, Vladimir Putin will be gone. It is my hope that Alexei Navalny's impact on the future of Russian politics remains unfulfilled, and he has a chance to run in a democratic election for the President of the Russian Federation. Right now it seems like a dream, but I'm sure that's a dream that keeps Navalny's spirits high as he is languishing in that very, very dark prison cell.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that is Episode One of our annual Oscar Docs series in which we talk to the makers of the five nominees for the best feature-length documentary Oscar. Episode One was with Daniel Roher, who made the film Navalny, which also won the BAFTA Documentary Award last night, that's the British Oscars. Once, again, Daniel, congratulations on that, and thank you for spending some time with us on the very morning after, and good luck at the Oscars.

Daniel: Thank you so much, Brian. It's been a pleasure.

Brian: More to come in this slot the rest of the week.

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