Bryan Fogel on turning Jamal Khashoggi’s murder into a film

Bryan Fogel seems to have done it all. It’s hard to think of a showbiz figure with a more varied career. He began as a stand-up and moved to play-writing and then to directing movies. In 2013, he reinvented himself as the producer of hard-hitting documentaries that focus on international scandals and cover-ups.

He talks to me via Zoom from Los Angeles about his latest movie, The Dissident.

‘I was seeking what my next film was going to be – something that spoke to human rights and freedom of expression. It checked all those boxes’.

The subject is the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident journalist who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018.

‘He’d left his country to be able to speak freely. His story was one I wanted to tell,’ says Fogel. ‘I became very emotionally connected to the subject matter.’

Khashoggi had once been close to the Saudi ruling family but he fell out of favour when he began using his column in the Washington Post to criticise the regime.