You wouldn’t believe the random chance events.
On December 29, 2013, Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste was arrested in Cairo at his hotel. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d taken a shift covering Egyptian politics for a few weeks to help out a colleague who was on holidays. He left his hotel wearing an akubra.
On February 1, 2015, after a series of infuriating trials and 400 days in prison, he was suddenly released.
On February 2, 2015, film producer Carmel Travers was flying home from Brisbane when she bumped into an ABC journalist who was rushing to meet Greste’s plane. “Tell him that I want to tell his story,” she said.
Years later, after Greste released his memoir The First Casualty, Travers optioned the rights to Greste’s story and tapped Peter Duncan (Rake) to adapt it into a screenplay.
In 2021, Travers called director Kriv Stenders (Red Dog) and asked him if he knew anything about Peter Greste. Having both grown up in Brisbane’s Latvian community, Stenders didn’t just know about Greste, he knew him. Their parents were friends, and they’d met when they were kids.
In 2024, filming began on The Correspondent in Sydney, with Logie and AACTA award-winning Richard Roxburgh playing the part of Greste. He borrowed Greste’s akubra to wear on screen.
In 2025, Broadsheet sat down with Greste and Roxburgh. On Greste’s lap was the hat.
Nice to meet you both. Congratulations on the film. Is this the hat?
Peter Greste: This is the hat. It’s not just the hat that made that cameo appearance. It’s actually the hat that I was originally arrested in. This has been a constant companion through most of my career as a correspondent. And I was really, really upset when they took it away from me, really delighted when it came back. I was doubly delighted when the guys were casting around for props to use in the movie and I suggested [the hat], and it made that cameo appearance. I’d like to think it kind of informed the character that sat underneath it.
Richard Roxburgh: Couldn’t have done it without it, mate.
I was very worried about the hat’s fate when watching the film, so I’m glad to see it’s made it this whole way. Something I noted when I was watching the film – aside from the hat – was its sheer Kafkaesque randomness: that you could be picking up a shift from someone and suddenly have your whole life change. Peter, is that something that you’ve been able to reconcile? And did you ever speak to the colleague whose shift you picked up again?
Greste: I did have a very apologetic colleague when I spoke to them. I suppose it was a Kafkaesque nightmare in a way. I struggled for a long time to make sense of what we were going through, and the charges we were facing particularly because of the gap between the reality of what we’d been doing – which was frankly mostly embarrassing and fairly routine journalism – and the really serious charges of terrorism that we were facing. I realised that it wasn’t about what we had done; it was about what we’d come to represent.
If you tried to rationalise it in any sort of conventional legal sense, it wouldn’t make any sense at all. But this was about a government, or at least a group of individuals within the government, who were trying to send a clear message to journalists: “You will not speak to the opposition or cover any story that runs counter to our narratives.” That didn’t make it necessarily easier, but it did make it easy to understand.
And Richard, do you remember watching that on television at the time and what it all felt like from back here?
Roxburgh: I remember closely following the story when Peter was charged, and I remember being shocked that he’d been charged. I’d seen Peter as a foreign correspondent and knew that he was a respected member of that fraternity. So, for that person to be charged with terrorism and then sentenced, I can remember thinking, “How does this happen, and how is this going to end? And can’t somebody get this person out?” In a way, it was a shot across the bow for what’s happened to journalism in general since the early 2000s. There’s been a complete rollback of journalistic freedom.
Peter, I read that you were worried that your story would lose relevance the further away we came from the events [of your arrest]. When I watched the film, I thought it had never felt more relevant or more modern. What do you think the movie says about how we see truth and journalism in 2025?
Greste: As you said, I was worried because [in my memoir] I traced the whole thing back to 9/11 when the War on Terror began. And the War on Terror, when you think about it, is a war on an abstract noun; it’s a war of ideas, of “-isms”. And in that kind of conflict, the place where ideas are transmitted becomes a part of the battlefield. And that means journalists are literally considered as combatants, and that’s not an abstract idea. What happened to us was [that] a government had taken that definition of terrorism and distorted it to include uncomfortable journalism.
But I was worried when I wrote the book and when I started talking to the producers about doing the movie, I thought, “Well, the further we move away from 9/11, the more this is going to feel irrelevant, the less pertinent it’ll feel.” Unfortunately, now we have more journalists in prison than ever before. More journalists have been killed for their work than ever before. We’re seeing assaults on journalism by the President of the United States, the home of the storied First Amendment to the US Constitution. Tragically – usefully for us, I suppose, but tragically for the world – these big themes really do feel more relevant than I ever really would have wanted.
I’m curious, Richard, when you were cast, was this something where you wanted to delve into researching everything and read the book, talk to Peter, or did you want to find your own interpretation of the character?
Roxburgh: No, I mean, you do all that work. I did read the book closely, and I studied a lot of Peter’s interviews and history as much as I could. But then in conversations with the director, it quickly became clear it wasn’t going to be me doing my Peter Greste. It was going to be a very raw telling of what the experience was about. And I loved that, because it lent us a great deal of freedom to just be there and to just try and reach into the kind of peculiar unfolding horrors of that circumstance.
I was really struck by how strong and quiet the film felt, and the fact that we were with Peter every single second. What was that like as an actor, to be so constantly on screen?
Roxburgh: So constantly constant. It was really weird, because I’ve never done a film where I’m in literally every single frame. It’s quite an unusual thing. But from Kriv’s first conversations with me, he said, “I have a vision of this thing where we have to be Peter.” And I said, “What that means is that I’m in every single frame, doesn’t it?” It was a lot.
And of course, you’d already signed on at that point and it was too late. There was no escape. How did you sort of find those moments of reprieve from the rigor of it all?
Roxburgh: I didn’t have a reprieve. There was no reprieve. Normally in a film, you get kind of a scene off, or a couple of days off where you can go and do stuff, sightseeing and whatnot. But in this film, being in literally every single frame, I was running from one thing to another. The good thing about that was that I was absolutely exhausted, emotionally exhausted, mentally exhausted, and physically. So it was perfect, because it felt like I’d done a long stretch.
During your stretch in prison, Peter, it seemed like you got a lot of strength and solace from reading. What books did you read at the time?
Greste: For much of the first period, we were denied books and writing material. Eventually, because of a lot of political and diplomatic pressure, we managed to get some books. I read, bizarrely, an extraordinary book called The Book of Disquiet, by a guy called Fernando Pessoa, a beautiful, extraordinary, wonderful book. I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which was a memoir. More than a memoir, it was an attempt by Frankl, who was one of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, to make sense of what it was that helped the survivors actually make it through the camps. Another remarkable story. Those are two that really stuck with me and still resonate today.
And there was a lot of backgammon?
Greste: There was. Anyone who watches it will recognize that I got my arse hammered by my colleagues. I kind of like to think that over those 400 days, I managed to learn a few backgammon skills. You have to do what you can to fill the time and to fill it productively, because if you don’t fill that empty space within prison creatively, then your brain eats itself up, and that’s a real danger. So the backgammon was as much a survival strategy as it was a way of amusing ourselves.
Roxburgh: An important element in the film is that it’s not a journey into darkness because we’re humans. We find light; we find ways of entertaining ourselves; we find things that are going to make us laugh.
Peter, was there ever a moment during your journey where you thought, “I wish I never became a journalist?”
Greste: No. There are a lot of life choices I’ve questioned over the years, but that has never been one of them. There are things within that career I wished hadn’t happened, and the film covers two of them, but not being a journalist was never really an option.
The Correspondent is in theatres now.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
