Tina Satter on why her NSA whistleblower film Reality is stranger than fiction

On June 3 2017, 25-year-old National Security Agency translator Reality Winner finished her grocery shopping and returned to her modest home in a suburb of Augusta, Georgia, to prepare to teach a yoga class. Just another mundane day of errands, with one key difference: the FBI was waiting for her.

Over the next couple of hours, an intense interrogation unfolded that circled the crime she was suspected of — the mishandling of classified information. But the conversation also took odd, near-comic detours. Winner was quizzed about her pets, a recent holiday, her CrossFit exercise routine and her preferred gun (a pink-and-black AR-15). It culminated with her arrest on suspicion of releasing classified documents that detailed suspected Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election to online news outlet The Intercept. In August 2018, Winner was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed for unauthorised release of government information to the media: five years and three months.

That pivotal day in Winner’s life has now been dramatised twice, in both instances written and directed by playwright-turned-filmmaker Tina Satter. In both cases, the dialogue was taken verbatim from FBI transcripts of the interview. The first incarnation was as a successful stage play titled Is This a Room; now the events are revisited in Reality, a superb new film which stars Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney in the central role.

Like many other Americans, Satter was only vaguely aware of the case of Reality Winner. “I had heard the name and maybe seen the mugshot in the paper, but I couldn’t even tell you what that person had done,” she says. That changed in December 2017, when she happened on an in-depth article in New York Magazine, bearing the intriguing title “The world’s biggest terrorist has a Pikachu bedspread”.

The article, says Satter over Zoom, was “fascinating”, and the accompanying pictures of the young-looking Winner also caught her attention. Then she clicked on a hyperlink at the end of the piece to a complete transcript of the FBI’s interactions with Winner. Satter was hooked. “It listed participants as if it was a play, like characters, and it said ‘verbatim transcription’ at the top in big letters, like it was a title. I was clicking through it like it was a page-turner.”

Satter became fascinated with the story of a patriot and US Air Force veteran who was driven to act in what she believed were the best interests of the American people, but then found herself labelled an enemy of the country she had pledged to serve. The playwright immediately thought it could become either a play or a movie. Her extensive experience in theatre, and the fact that she had already been commissioned to write a new play, encouraged her to take the stage route initially. It was, she says, “a really stark set: four actors step on to the stage and just do that whole conversation.” Is This a Room became an off-Broadway hit and eventually transferred to Broadway.

What interested Satter further was what she calls the “ephemera” of Winner’s world. “What was in her car that day. They’re in her house, which is just such a crazy personal thing for a young woman. I thought: if I ever got to do this as a film, that’s where I can return to some of those details, and put a more subjective spin on this.” Covid-19 lockdowns provided the time for Satter to revisit the project, and she wrote the screenplay in 2020.

The result is gripping. The film takes an urgent and immediate approach that contrasts with the more conventional procedural storytelling of other whistleblower pictures such as The Fifth Estate, Snowden and The Insider. Unexpectedly, given its theatrical roots and the use of verbatim transcripts, it is a boldly cinematic and daringly experimental work. It also reflects Satter’s political sensibility. This is evident in the opening shot of Winner at work. Fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, learnt during six years in the Air Force, she is seen working as a translator in a government office. On the walls are two huge TV screens, both blaring Fox News. Winner’s desk is situated where the barrage from the two screens meets. The continual onslaught of Fox News, the film suggests, is a contributory factor in Winner’s decision to become a whistleblower.

“It was wild living in the US [at that time],” says Satter. “From 2015 onwards, there was clearly a shift happening, what with the lead-up to the presidential election. The way that Fox was so codified by then — the deep, deep partisanship. We all felt bombarded. But, to me, it was really a metaphor for the reality, no pun intended, of that hyper-news moment we’d all been living in.”

Sweeney is mesmerising as the mentally agile Winner, repeatedly parrying and evading the snares of the FBI interrogators. As well as a consuming intellectual thriller, Reality is the study of a woman backed into a corner. But what’s most daring in Satter’s approach is her use of audacious devices that repeatedly disrupt the flow of the storytelling.

Redacted words in the transcript are acknowledged with glitchy moments of visual distortion and shots that temporarily erase characters from the frame. Elsewhere, Satter drops archive material — photographs of the real Winner, excerpts from the transcript — into the film as a kind of punctuation. She describes it as “a delicate endeavour . . . It was written into the screenplay, this idea of original photos coming up. We were unsure when we first got into the edit — does that still hold as an idea? Does it just take you out of it? But to me, it was always important to include those reminders: she was real, this really happened.”

Winner’s incarceration meant that Satter was unable to talk to her during the development of the play, though she did have contact with Winner’s mother and her sister. It wasn’t until June 2021, when the screenplay was written and the film was at a fairly advanced stage of development, that Winner was granted an early release from prison (her lawyer cited “good behaviour”) and Satter was finally able to talk to her.

So how was it to encounter the actual woman whose life she had dramatised? “It was really fascinating and kind of intense,” says Satter. “There’s definitely an overlap, but I think she’s also very different from who we made. She’s a whole living human, and we had taken just one day from her life.” But talking to Winner confirmed what had instinctively attracted Satter to her in the first place: “her spirit, her humour”.

Perhaps understandably, Winner has not yet felt ready to watch the film and revisit her interrogation. Still under court-ordered supervision until November 2024, she is living in Texas, continuing with CrossFit and working to rehabilitate rescue horses. “She’s trying, I think, to work out what she can do next,” Satter says. “And I have a hunch she’ll continue to do some pretty amazing things.”

‘Reality’ is in US cinemas from May 29 and UK cinemas from June 2