Why Salman Rushdie and Wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths Turned His 2022 Stabbing into a Documentary (Exclusive)

In 2022, Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage during a literary festival in Chautauqua, N.Y. He sustained 18 wounds in total; as a result of the attack, Rushdie was blinded in his right eye and left unable to fully use his right hand.

The incident was the inspiration for Rushdie’s 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, as well as its documentary adaptation Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, directed by Alex Gibney.

The writer, 78, and his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, spoke with PEOPLE at the documentary’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Jan. 25. Though both Rushdie and Griffiths have written about the attack (Griffiths in her 2026 memoir, The Flower Bearers), the film allowed to them to portray the attack and healing process in a new way, Rushdie said.

“I just think there are some things that you have to see for it to affect you visually,” the author explained. “There’s stuff in this movie that is hardcore. I think it’s not easy to watch, but however good a writer you are, you can’t have that impact on the page because to see the effect of a terrorist attack, you have to see it. That’s one of the things we thought: let’s show people what this is like.”

Griffiths, 47, is also a cinematographer on the film. She shot footage in Rushdie’s hospital room after the attack.

“For me, it was kind of letting go of the material,” she said of making the film. “You want to kind of hold all of it tightly because we’ve both been so private, but then there was no way we could be private anymore. So with the documentary, meeting Alex felt like a good signal to us to put the story out and trust his vision. And so I think we made the right decision.”

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“I think certainly we are proud of it and we are very interested to see what people make of it,” Rushdie added.

Rushdie also spoke about the assassination attempt in a Jan. 16 profile with The Hollywood Reporter. He said that he doesn’t consider himself to be a “symbol,” despite the international attention he received in the aftermath of the stabbing.

The author is no stranger to controversy: he first became the target of extreme backlash and violence after the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, deemed blasphemous by some due to its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammed. Rushdie was forced into hiding for a decade after Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him, calling for his death.

“I know there are parts of the world in which Other Me has been turned into a kind of bogeyman. And I know there are parts of the world in which that Other Me is thought of more positively,” Rushdie told the outlet. “Both of them feel okay. But to me, I’m just this guy in a room thinking of something to write.” 

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The 2026 Sundance Film Festival runs from Jan. 22 to Feb. 1 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s the last iteration of the festival to be held there ahead of a move to Boulder, Colo. in 2027, and the first to be held after the passing of its founder Robert Redford.