According to [Rodchenkov], at least in regards to Russia, over their four decades of steroids and performance enhancing, they found that some sports were not good to dope the athletes. They tried to do that and realized it wasn't better. I was told specifically figure skating. They realized that figure skating for the women was like ballet and that they didn't want to get the women too juiced up for figure skating. Any sport where it was endurance, strength, true fitness — biathalon, bobsled, skeleton, nordic skiing, alpine skiing — and then all the summer sports, according to Grigory and the two different findings of the investigations, those athletes were doped. 

Of course it's not limited to Russia. I think the difference is, what you see in "Icarus" is a state-sponsored system. You can certainly make that analogy, say, to Lance Armstrong. Even though all of his teammates were doing it, everyone else was doing it, ultimately it was an individual choice. The government was not mandating this. In the case of Russia, the athletes are actually employees of the government. If they win an Olympic medal they get a bonus somewhere along the lines of a million, maybe even $2 million. 

Of course there's a direct relation and that relation is incredibly clear. What you see in "Icarus" is that Russia is willing to go to all costs to win. And when they go to all costs, there is no moral compass involved as to the extent of which they are willing to go to win.  So if you were willing to go to these elaborate extents for 40 years to win gold medals in sport, is there any question that you would go into other lengths to meddle into other affairs?



What we're seeing in the Mueller investigation and these charges is, no matter what is brought against them, there is a complete and utter denial of anything that happened. I didn't want to bring the election into the film. But what I wanted people to take away was realizing that if you could go to these extents and this level of deniability, what lengths are [they] willing to go to to meddle in foreign affairs? It's changing the course of current politics and we, as Americans, are living with the results of this action every single day. 

As you see in the film, there's this period of seven days from the breaking of this World Anti-Doping investigation — alleging that there's a state-sponsored system even though there's no evidence — to Grigory fleeing Russia in fear of his life. When we had that phone call on Skype, and he tells me, They're going to kill me and you have to get me [an airplane] ticket, at that moment I said, My life is going to change, this is incredibly serious. And when he arrived [in the U.S.] within about a week, I truly understood the magnitude of what this was. He was the only man alive that had this evidence, knowing that he was going to be hunted.

Through [this eight-month period] we changed our editing offices four times. Everybody on my team [used] burner phones. We took our edit completely offline so everybody had to be working on independent drives. We moved Grigory's safe house four times. And then everyday, as we're hearing essentially threats from Russia and we're hearing the media in Russia, [producer] Dan Cogan and I are on daily crisis management, figuring out how we're going to get [Grigory] a lawyer, how we're going to get him immigration help, how we're going to bring this story forward and ultimately to the New York Times so we can save Grigory's life, get this public. But also for ourselves—we knew that we were in danger ourselves.