Tina Satter’s verbatim film about the FBI’s interrogation of US intelligence leaker Reality Winner, played by The White Lotus’s Sydney Sweeney, is a stranger-than-fiction reflection of our precarious times
Legal transcripts have long provided rich source material for authentically gripping movies. Last year, the Tribeca festival showcased The Courtroom, a well-received deportation drama featuring “dialogue taken directly from court transcripts”. But it’s not just courtrooms that provide such inspiration. Think back to the “verbatim theatre” of Clio Barnard’s 2010 feature debut The Arbor, in which actors lip-synced recorded interviews about the troubled life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. In the 2013 TV show Nixon’s the One, Harry Shearer reimagined Tricky Dicky’s secret audio tapes as video recordings, creating an absurdist black comedy from word-for-word Oval Office transcripts. More recently, James Spinney and Peter Middleton’s documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin (2021) added dramatised visuals to archived audio to bring the controversial cinema pioneer’s legend to life.
In 2019, playwright Tina Satter used the FBI transcript of an interview with NSA-contracted translator and US Air Force veteran Reality Leigh Winner as the basis of her verbatim play Is This a Room. On 3 June 2017, Winner had been accosted by two FBI agents, Justin C Garrick and R Wallace Taylor, outside her home in Augusta, Georgia. The agents, who recorded the encounter, told Winner they had a warrant to search her home arising from “the possible mishandling of classified information” – a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. That same act would later be cited in an August 2022 warrant for Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of the former president for whom Russian military intelligence (according to a report leaked by Winner) had attempted to secure election victory in 2016. Yet while Teflon Don’s own classified documents scandal is still ongoing, it’s inconceivable that Trump will face anything like the harsh sanctions handed down to Winner in 2018.
