Tina Satter on NSA whistleblower thriller Reality

“It wasn’t a big story at the time. Certainly nothing compared to Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning,” explains playwright-turned-filmmaker Tina Satter when asked about the first time she heard of Reality Winner, the subject of her gripping docudrama Reality. “Obviously her name stood out, but if you’d asked me what she’d done, I couldn’t have told you.” 

On 3 June, 2017, Winner, a 26-year-old former USAF Airman who was working as a translator for an NSA contractor, returned home from grocery shopping to discover the FBI waiting for her. After a lengthy interrogation at her home in Augusta, Georgia, she was eventually arrested for leaking a secret government document concerning potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. “I was reading the New York Magazine online and stumbled across this article about her,” Satter tells us over a Zoom call. “It included a hyperlink to the website Politico where there was a transcript of the interview. I was like; ‘What is this!’”

A curious mix of real-time thriller and avant-garde experiment, Satter’s tense and unnerving film – which features Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney in the lead role – is based on the events of that day, and scripted verbatim from the FBI transcript. “It listed all the participants as if they were characters in a play,” Satter tells us. “It read just like a script except there were all these odd conversations about Reality’s cat or her CrossFit routine.”

The decision to use the raw and unedited dialogue from the FBI’s interrogation – including every “um” and stutter – creates a surreal atmosphere that not only conveys the psychological strangeness of Winner’s situation, but also forces the viewer to question the reliability of narrative truth. It’s a bracingly original approach, and one that flies in the face of cinematic representations of reality, but Satter believed it would work the moment she read the transcript. “It was an instinctual thing,” she explains. “I just felt this constraint could create something really interesting and give the film this fascinating integrity.”

Reality. Source: Vertigo Releasing

One reason Satter was so confident this approach would work is because she’s done it before; when she first dramatised Reality’s story in the hugely successful stage play Is This a Room. However, adapting the transcript for the big screen came with its own challenges. “When we did the play we treated the transcript like it was canonical literature, and gave it the same respect we would Shakespeare,” Satter says. “However, for the movie, we had to remove some sections to stop it turning into this sprawling 120-minute film. I never manipulated lines or moved their order, but some sections, like the conversation on the lawn, were just too long! They just kept asking her about her neighbourhood and her CrossFit routine. The challenge was working out which of those lines to cut, while still maintaining that sickening sense that this isn't just chit-chat. We’re just waiting for the hammer to drop.”

Another challenge Satter faced while making the film was what to do with the sections of the transcript that were redacted by the FBI. “Those were weirdly exciting,” Satter tells us when asked how she decided to acknowledge these omissions with brief moments of visual distortion. “We did a fair amount of experimenting in post-production before deciding we’d make whoever was speaking disappear from the shot. When you encounter those black bars on the transcript it's so shocking. You’re literally seeing power being connoted on the page.”

Due to her incarceration, Satter wasn’t able to meet Winner during the development of the play, but they have since spoken on Zoom. What was it like for Winner to revisit such a traumatic moment of her past? “Reality still hasn’t seen the film,” Satter tells us. “But she feels it's important her story is told; mainly because this kind of thing happens a lot, especially to people who aren't white and don't have the same support network she had.”

Satter speaks about Winner with real warmth and admiration, but throughout the film she’s nearly impossible to read. “When I first read the transcript, and she mentioned that she had three guns in the house, it totally threw me!” Satter explains. “She’s this young American woman who worked in the Air Force and owned automatic weapons, but who also teaches yoga, and bakes vegan brownies. She did this huge thing that affected geopolitics because she believed we shouldn’t be lied to, and she did it wearing jean shorts, a top knot and yellow Converse. I’ve become a very cynical person, who’s often humiliated to be from the United States, but when I encountered Reality I was like, ‘Oh; this person really believes we could be better.’”

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Reality is released 2 Jun by Vertigo