Tina Satter wants you to “understand more who Reality Winner was and is as a person.”
Satter is the director and co-writer (with James Paul Dallas) of the film Reality, now streaming on HBO Max, that is based on a recording of two FBI agents’ questioning of whistleblower Reality Winner. Satter, an award-winning playwright, also adapted a 2019 Broadway play, Is This a Room from the eighty-page verbatim transcript of that interrogation. She first came across this transcript in a 2017 magazine article about Winner.
The film’s opening is quiet. Winner (played by Sydney Sweeney) is shown working in her cubicle; the only ambient noise is the quiet drone of Fox News programming on the televisions mounted to the walls in her office. The notice “twenty-five days later” flashes, and then Winner is shown returning to her car in a parking lot and waiting in traffic. Moments after she pulls up at her small rental house, however, a stern tap on her car window instantly snaps both the viewer and Winner out of the lull.
FBI agents Justin C. Garrick and R. Wallace Taylor were the ones to first interview Winner on June 3, 2017, and they recorded the entire interrogation. In the film, the first voice heard after the starting click of the recorder is that of special agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton), who starts by introducing his partner. “This is my partner . . . Wally Taylor.”
Agents Garrick and Taylor (Marchánt Davis) are both unassuming, dressed in nonthreatening business-casual attire. But, to Satter and her actors’ credit, the tension in the scene is immediately apparent. The talk is mere chat, meant to disarm, but as the men display their credentials and tell Winner why they are there—about the “possible mishandling of classified information”—it becomes increasingly clear that the pleasantries are a cover for more serious business.
U.S. government/Public Domain
Reality Winner in her U.S. Air Force basic training graduation photo, 2010.
In 2017, Winner, an Air Force veteran, was working as a translator for Pluribus International Corporation, a defense and intelligence contractor for the United States government, in Augusta, Georgia. She translated documents about the Iranian aerospace industry from Farsi into English, while being frustrated by the constant drone of Fox News on television screens in her workplace (“I’ve filed formal complaints about them having Fox news on”) and the debate omnipresent in 2016 about whether or not Russian hackers had interfered with that year’s presidential election. When she came across a classified article that detailed Russian cyberattacks on election software companies in the United States, she wondered why such information was not being shared with the American public. Eventually, she made the choice to print the article and mail it (anonymously, or so she thought) to media outlet The Intercept.
For revealing that one document, Winner would be charged under the Espionage Act with sharing a top-secret NSA intelligence report and denied bail. After a lengthy trial, she was sentenced in 2018 to sixty-three months in prison—the longest sentence ever given to an individual in federal court for revealing classified information.
The dialogue in both Satter’s play and movie, as the viewer learns in the first moments of the film, were “taken entirely from the transcript of that [June 3] recording.” In an interview with The Progressive, Satter credits the transcript itself with showing her its dramatic possibilities: “From the first time I read the transcript it felt like a ‘thriller’ to me. . . . I was always so interested in the details of Reality being interrogated unexpectedly in the vulnerability of her own home that I had been excited for the movie because I would get to explore and show the details of her car, her bedroom, her house.”
Reading the transcript is compelling. But there is a stark difference between the interview as text and seeing it play out as an interrogation. From the moment the agents first approach Winner, it is clear who has the power. Garrick and Taylor, menacing in their relentless blandness, are unnerving throughout. But, as they invade Winner’s personal space, they are also joined by numerous agents who don’t speak but are there simply to search her house and car. A large amount of the initial conversation concerns Reality’s pets—Can they safely secure her dog?—but such comforting reminders of her animals are interspersed with requests to give the agents her house and car keys and her cellphone, as well as to describe the location in the house of the three guns she owns.
Reading the transcript is compelling. But there is a stark difference between the interview as text and seeing it play out as an interrogation.
Winner is a woman who can clearly take care of herself: trained in CrossFit, she lives alone in a rental home in a low-income area of Augusta and owns multiple guns. As even more agents appear, inexorably, Garrick and Taylor steer Winner into being interviewed in a room of the home that she has already stated she doesn’t like (“It’s just creepy. It’s just weird.”). There, the questions continue; innocuous ones about her duties at work and her recent trip to Belize, as they press her about any documents Winner might have read or printed out at work. At that point, the momentum is interrupted by a strange interjection on the recording.
“Is this—is this a room? Is that a room?”
The confused phrase is uttered by an agent searching the house who is identified only as “unnamed male” in the transcript. It is also the phrase that Satter used for the title of her play: Is This a Room. When asked why she chose such a random utterance for the play’s title, Satter says that “for a while I wanted to call it 'Reality Winner: Verbatim Transcription' because that is what was stamped on the first page of the actual transcript.”
Is this a room, Satter adds, is “such a weird sentence and is kind of the last totemic strange sentence said before Agent Garrick asks out of the blue, ‘How’d you get it out?’ and she [Winner] finally answers the truth . . . . Also, it connotes that loaded room that Reality didn’t want to speak in but the agents took her to anyway.”
What is most unsettling is how this movie explains the system that indicted and incarcerated Reality Winner.
Satter’s real genius in this movie is not in helping the viewer know or understand Reality Winner, although she achieves that. What is most unsettling is how this movie explains the system that indicted and incarcerated her. Winner was a decorated Air Force veteran and was able to bond with the agents who interrogated her about the firearms she owned, including a pink AR-15. By her own eventual admission, she submitted the voting system cybersecurity attack document to the media because she had seen the question debated back and forth on television and thought, “Why isn’t this getting out there? Why can’t this be public?” She blew the whistle, she believed, in the public interest.
After Winner admits to removing the document from her workplace and mailing it to The Intercept, the interview continues dispiritedly, with the agents refusing to confirm Winner’s solidifying realization that she is going to jail that very night (and therefore needs to call someone to look after her animals). At the interview’s conclusion, Winner is taken into FBI custody. Throughout her trial and her legal team’s preparation for it, she was repeatedly denied bail and would not leave prison again until being released in 2021, after serving four years of her prison term.
The film concludes with news clips from 2017 that illustrate how Winner’s narrative was told by the media. Headlines blared that an “NSA contractor” had been revealed as the source of the information on Russian election interference, and U.S. attorney Bobby Christine celebrated the long sentence she received at a news conference, reading portions of text chats with her sister Brittany as proof that Winner “claimed to hate America” and was the “quintessential example of an insider threat.”
The contentious 2020 election and the events of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have largely subsumed Winner’s continuing story as she has been released from prison (she remains restricted in her movements). Winner’s family, particularly her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, have long advocated for more awareness for her case and for a pardon, and they have been joined by a number of filmmakers and journalists.
What Satter’s film really leaves you wondering, with deep discomfort, is "what would happen if FBI agents showed up at your doorstep?"
Along with Reality, a new documentary, titled Reality Winner, by Sonia Kennebeck—who also directed National Bird and Enemies of the State, plus another 2021 documentary on Winner’s story titled United States vs. Reality Winner—is expected to be released in the fall of 2023.
What Satter’s film really leaves you wondering, with deep discomfort, is what would happen if FBI agents showed up at your doorstep, photographed your books and belongings, and accessed every website, tweet, and text message on your phone?