Director Tina Satter on Telling Whistleblower Reality Winner’s Story in Berlinale’s ‘Reality,’ Starring Sydney Sweeney
variety.comShayeza Walid Acclaimed New York-based theater director Tina Satter has worked on productions on and off Broadway for more than a decade.
Now, in her first ever venture into film, Satter makes her directorial debut with “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney, based on Satter’s play “Is This a Room.” The film premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival with Variety critic Jessica Kiang calling it a “clever, gripping docudrama.” For Satter, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas, making this movie was always in the books.
The film, based on the real-life FBI interrogation transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner, is one Satter could envision the first time she came across the documents of the conversation between Winner and the Federal Bureau. “Truly, when I first stumbled upon the transcript for the interrogation just through reading it I was like, oh my god, this is like a movie thriller.
I really felt that,” recalled Satter. Drawing on her decision to make a play on the transcript first, later transitioning onto developing a screenplay in the early parts of the pandemic, Satter explained: “There was something in me where I thought I think this is a play because of the language, but if this could be a film, with all the great details I was learning at the time that Reality held – her ephemera, her airforce fatigue, her background stuff – it would allow us to see her world a little more, and that just felt very filmic to me.” In “Reality,” the real-life events of Winner, a former U.S.
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