2023 Telluride Film Festival – ‘Reality’ Review and Interview

In 2017 Air Force veteran and intelligence contractor Reality Winner had a couple of interesting days. On the first, she decided to take classified documents out of the high-security building where she worked and send them in an envelope to a whistleblower website. The second interesting day was when the FBI showed up at her home and asked her about it. One of these two days’ events happened to be recorded in audio for posterity. The story was headline news during a highly volatile political time in the United States. And while the story fell below a lot of people’s radar Telluride Film Festival Director Julie Huntsinger admitted that she, “was obsessed with the Reality story. I remember following it moment to moment.”

By her own admission, playwright Tina Satter was one of those only vaguely aware of Reality Winner’s story. It was during what she likes to call a “free reading” session of New York Magazine that she encountered Winner’s story again. Enjoying what Satter expected to be a cool 15-minute read she got to a reprint of the actual FBI transcript of the day the FBI came to Winner’s house and confronted her with what she did. For Satter, it read like a thriller. “I felt like it was such amazing, raw, dramatic material.” She could understand the mind of this person. She could see it as a play. And also, she considered that this was a story that could be a film that she could make.

The approach Satter took was to use only the text of the transcript as the dialog for the work. Her first incarnation was the stage play Is This a Room? taken from an odd statement in the transcript. The play was mounted and ran successfully, eventually making it to Broadway. During that early pre-Broadway run editor Jennifer Vecchiarello saw the play and was intrigued with its impact on the theater audience. Though Vecchiarello and Satter didn’t know each other at the time, that impression would greatly impact their decisions as to the final form the film would take.

The producer, Brad Becker-Parton, had known of Satter as an artist but hadn’t seen the play. He was brought on board the film discussion by his producing partners Noah Stahl and Riva Marker who were already working with Satter on the film prep. Becker-Parton was stoked to work on the project but felt his knowledge of the subject of the film was lacking. He quickly did research to try to find on what side of the political side of the story he could feel aligned with. He found this impossible to do because of the complexity Reality brought to the story.

A transcript with only three main speaking roles and a single location readily lends itself to staging in a play. The actors have to bring life to the words and something has to be done to the parts of the transcript that are redacted or garbled, but, simple solutions can be acceptable to a theatre audience. They can imagine what’s missing. Transition that confining dialog into realistic depictions that would be believable in a film and it requires a different approach. The minutia of Reality’s life has to fill her home. The home itself has to exist in environs that are realistic on screen. The dog and cat have to be a real dog and cat on set. Becker-Parton gave Satter options for each dilemma. They could have built a set on a stage or shot in real locations. Each choice had advantages and disadvantages. These complications, Satter reveled in solving.

Shooting on several real locations, set dressing with artwork inspired by or replicated from Reality’s real home life, many of the problems found workable solutions. But how to handle the redacted parts? A simple lighting trick that worked on stage wouldn’t hold up. Here’s where Vecchiarello and Satter put their heads together. It was the editor that had the notion that a redaction in a transcript made the words disappear. Why not do the same thing to the characters in the space? They quickly settled on removing the actors from the space during the missing parts, replacing them with glitches in space. But how to effectuate that? They tried static, pink noise, and other technical effects, but, most seemed like a problem with the technology and didn’t deliver the right feel. They wanted it to feel like suddenly her soul was gone.

They arrived at removing the image of the actor by constructing a clean plate of the background. Further refinement found a subtle glitchy treatment of a few frames in transition worked well. Then the production designer Tommy Love shared that in art college he created highly processed video images from real news reports. These massively distorted imageries could use the actual footage of the things being talked about through the redactions as the almost molecular visual for the redacted effect. It ended up being a secret easter egg in the production process.

Eventually, all the potential film problems have solutions, but, with only a 16-day shoot a lot rode on the casting to pull off a believable and emotionally impactive story. Luckily they found the perfect lead to play Reality, Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney “got” Reality, she understood the internal driving forces, be they confusion, frustration, boredom, or patriotism. Reality is smart, driven, and a bit of an oddball. Satter quickly saw that Sweeney could fill the voids in the transcript with living, breathing believability. The other main cast were equally fitting. Josh Hamilton as the talkative, homespun but more intelligent than he’d let on Agent Garrick. And Marchánt Davis as Agent Taylor the terse second in command, following the book to the letter. Even the dog, cat, and the unknown male voice on the transcript (Benny Elledge) were believable in their roles as distractions or comic relief.

Julie Huntsinger was enthusiastically behind bringing the film to Telluride. When the picture was picked up by HBO it became clear to the producers that their early release schedule for Emmy qualification would mean the film would be out in the world before the Telluride Festival dates. But Huntsinger assured that the film deserved to have a festival showing regardless.

Relieved, Becker-Parton recounted, “This really will be the first time the movie is screened for a public audience in North America. It's really special to get to show the movie in the U.S. to an audience on a big screen, which this festival is THE thing that's giving it to us.”

And so the filmmakers have retained all the deserved facets of a celebration of a first feature film festival debut. And, as it happens dear reader, you can share in a little bit of that experience. I already told you you can stream the film on Max. And if you want to experience a bit of what a Q&A after the film showing would be like, you can read the interview I conducted in preparing this article with the filmmakers. And, fitting with the film’s theme, I’ve embedded the transcript of that interview.

Happy festivalling!