Richard Roxburgh would like to take this opportunity to apologise to audiences about to watch The Correspondent: “There is no escape from my face. For the entire sentence of the movie.”
The audience’s “sentence” lasts just under two hours – but for the film’s subject, Australian war correspondent Peter Greste, his sentence was seven years in an Egyptian jail. In some ways, though, it was really a life sentence: despite walking free in 2015, Greste remains, by decree of a kangaroo court in Cairo, a convicted terrorist. On a recent flight from New York back to Australia via Auckland, immigration officials refused to let him progress to the transit lounge.
“Just Google me,” he suggested. It took calls to Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to get him home.
Wanting to portray Greste’s harrowing, Kafkaesque experience in the Egyptian legal system, the film’s director, Kriv Stenders (Red Dog, Australia Day), put Roxburgh through what the actor describes as feeling like a social experiment; he is in every frame of every scene in the film. The shoot was relentless.
“It was only something like six weeks – but it felt like Peter’s 400 days,” Roxburgh says, referring to what Greste describes as the “suspiciously round number” of days he was incarcerated.
Roxburgh, 62, is more than a decade older than Greste was when he was sent by Al Jazeera to cover the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Egypt in 2013, for what was initially meant to be a two-week assignment.
The age disparity was one of the reasons Roxburgh – whose unforgettable roles include uncanny reincarnations of Bob Hawke (in Hawke in 2010, then The Crown a decade later) and Roger Rogerson (Blue Murder, 1995) – decided not to impersonate Greste.
“Is it weird having me here?” Greste once asked him, during pre-production.
“I’m not trying to embody you,” Roxburgh replied.
“The idea of seeing a character actor of Rox’s calibre trying to be me was kind of scary,” Greste says now. “I was worried that I’d see some kind of weird verbal tick that he picked up, that I had never noticed … so it was hugely liberating when he told me that. It meant I could just let him get on with the business of trying to translate my experience on to the screen.”
Greste’s experience began when military police knocked on his hotel room door four days before Christmas in 2013. This was his harrowing entry into a corrupt and intensely political legal and penal system, where his work as a journalist was condemned in a Cairo court for bringing Egypt’s reputation into international disrepute. The US$1,500 confiscated from his hotel safe (per diems for the assignment) was presented as evidence that he was funding a terrorist organisation outlawed by the Hazem Al Beblawi government eight days prior to his arrest.
Part courtroom drama, part prison drama, The Correspondent takes its audience beyond the nightly news bulletins most Australians became familiar with throughout 2014; the most enduring vision of that time being Greste’s white knuckled fingers clutching the wire of his courtroom cage.
For audiences who have not read Greste’s own account of his 400-day ordeal, Freeing Peter, it is the drama and humour within the prison walls that provides much of the compelling detail beyond the headlines. In the film, relations between Greste and his two Al Jazeera colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy (played by Julian Maroun) and Baher Mohamed (Rahel Romahn) become increasingly fraught as alliances shift and their legal strategies begin to conflict. Who said what about whom during separate interrogation sessions? When does a hunger strike become the ultimate course of action? In the film, comic relief also intersperses the tedium and the trauma: how is it possible for one man (Baher) to win every single backgammon game with the throw of the dice (in a Cairo prison, that’s pumpkin seeds)?
“Fahmy had a very, very different worldview from me, and a very different understanding of what we were going through,” Greste says. “It was important that his view was articulated on screen. I wanted people to recognise him and, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with it, to understand where he was coming from.”
The Australian government and its diplomatic corps are portrayed as somewhat less effective than they may have been in reality, both Greste and Roxburgh concede – although it was the Latvian government’s intervention, with the might of Brussels behind it (Greste is a joint Australian-Latvian citizen) that ultimately saw Greste released in 2015, to serve out the rest of his seven-year sentence on home soil (a sentence the Australian government chose not to impose).
Egyptian-British activist and political prisoner Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s role in Greste’s psychological survival is also portrayed faithfully, he says. Scheduled for release last September, Abd el-Fattah remains incarcerated today, his sentence extended without explanation by Egyptian authorities until January 2027. Both he and his mother are now on hunger strike, action Greste also participated in for 21 days this January as a show of support.
“The hunger strike is the last tool of the powerless,” he says. “If you’ve lost everything else, the one thing you’ve got agency over is your own body.”
The Correspondent is a gripping drama, but the subtext of journalism under assault is never far from the surface of the film. As cofounder of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, Greste’s focus is now on media freedom in the Asia Pacific – but recent developments in the US, where Associated Press was banned from White House briefings and Donald Trump’s recent funding cuts to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, means that the curtailing of press freedom there now dogs the conscience of Greste.
“The assault on press freedom in a place that is the home of a constitution where the first amendment secures that right … I don’t think any of us really anticipated how [Trump’s] rhetoric would translate into a really hard-nosed assault,” he says.
Press freedom in Australia – through defamation laws, media concentration and intensified national security legislation – also remains precarious, Greste warns, pointing to Australia’s slip in the world press freedom rankings from 18th position in 2018 to 36th position today.
“There’s a reason that the only person who has been prosecuted in relation to Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is the guy who blew the whistle,” he says, referring to the prosecution of David McBride, who is now serving a sentence of five years and eight months in an Australian prison, with a non-parole period of two years and three months.
The remaining time of Greste’s seven-year prison sentence is still outstanding in any country which has an extradition treaty with Egypt. That includes all of Africa, from the Cape to Cairo – and Greste was once Al Jazeera’s Africa correspondent.
“That was my life,” he says.
Roxburgh has never been to Egypt. Now, he wonders if even portraying Greste might get him in hot water there.
With Egyptian citizens being arrested for reposting criticisms of the government on social media these days, Greste holds no doubts: “I will rugby tackle Rox if he ever tries to get on that plane.”
The Correspondent opens in Australian cinemas on 17 April
