Equally fascinating and frightening, Reality chronicles real-life events that took place on 3 June 2017.
That afternoon, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old translator with the US' National Security Agency, was stopped by FBI agents as she pulled into her driveway in Augusta, Georgia.
The film uses the actual transcript from Winner's questioning and takes place largely in one empty room. The tension is unbearable.
Reality marks the feature debut of writer-director Tina Satter, on whose award-winning play Is This A Room the film is based.
Below, Satter discusses making the jump from stage to screen and the response to her film.
Harry Guerin: When I was watching Reality, I remembered the saying that it's very easy to get into trouble and then very hard to get back out of it. Did that have any resonance for you in deciding to do the play in the first place - was that one of the hooks for you with it or what was the thing that made you say, 'I want to do a play on this'?
Tina Satter: I think that quote applies to her story but was not necessarily the hook for me explicitly. I stumbled upon the transcript, like, six months after it happened, and it just was so fascinating to me. It felt like this pre-made thriller, sort of, a very specific one.
That's what was super compelling to me - that we had this ability to go inside this actual moment because we had the actual dialogue from it. And that there was this young woman at the centre of it, who of course had gotten into trouble at that point, and you're watching her go head-to-head with these men and essentially the state to try to extricate herself from that trouble.
I couldn't look away from that content and I was so intrigued to see if there was more to be done to try to visualise it and to show Reality speaking. Almost immediately, I just got taken with that and started trying to work on it.
Was it always in your head that it could be a film or was that something that came to light during the play's success when you saw it in its finished form?
I had not made a full-length feature before, but I'd always been curious about making something like that.
This content felt like a movie to me on the first read, that idea of it as a thriller. The language of it made me feel clear it could work as a play, but what it was [also] made me feel like, 'This could actually be a movie'. And one that somehow I'm like, 'I could direct this' - even though I hadn't directed something of that scope at all. I really was intrigued with it as both ideas from the first read.
How did Sydney Sweeney, who plays Reality Winner, and her co-stars Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis, who play the FBI agents, come into focus for those roles? I thought the three of them were brilliant.
We were trying to cast for Reality first, of course. There were a number of actresses [interested in the role], but once I had a Zoom conversation with Sydney and then she actually read... She put herself 'on tape' for it.
The conversation with her was what really sealed it. She seemed to have a very smart and strong connection to who Reality was and that was very meaningful to me, that someone would 'get her', that we would have common language, that me and that actor would have a common language of who Reality was, you know what I mean?
If you had seen Syd in Euphoria or White Lotus, although they're wildly different characters, she does this emotional trajectory that was going to be required from Reality. She just has these micro beats she can play. I mean, she's extraordinary. That was really exciting.
Marchánt Davis, who played Agent Taylor, we had offered him to play that role on Broadway when the play moved to Broadway and it couldn't work with his schedule. So he actually had been in my mind.
Josh Hamilton... I don't know if you've seen the movie Eighth Grade? I love that movie! And so, again, you're sort of looking at actors in a sort of age range and type. And when Josh was on that list, I was like, 'God, Eighth Grade - I love him'. Of course, that father is so different than Agent Garrick, but I really thought Josh was an exceptional actor. He had seen the play in New York, which I didn't know, and was really into it.
Was there anything that became apparent when you talked to Reality Winner and her family that wasn't obvious to you beforehand? What did you learn or what were the eye-openers when you had that personal contact?
A couple of things. Sydney had her own conversations with Reality, which was really cool. But Sydney did tell me something that Reality told her: Reality really had no idea why they (the FBI agents) were there that day when they first pulled up. That's something I hadn't known.
And then there are mostly more superficial things that were sort of fascinating. I wanted to talk to her about how many cars pulled up! Literally for logistics, we wanted to understand what it was like when the other men arrived.
And then she told me that almost all of those men were wearing these bright-colour golf shirts, like polo shirts - that was such a shocking detail at first!
We planned to dress them more conservatively, the other men, and once we knew that, talking with the costume designer Enver Chakartash, it was fun to pop in some colour there. She was like, 'They look like they've just come from the golf course!', which was a surprising detail and added great texture. So much of it was so evident from the transcript always.
The film is an amazing insight into the process of law enforcement officials actually questioning someone. They're performers in their own right and can read a performance. I think that brilliantly comes across in the film.
Totally. They know what they are doing. They get there and it's just a matter of time. But what's so fascinating is that she sort of goes head-to-head and pulls her own performance for so long under the circumstances. That's something we talked about a lot with the actors.
It's this meta thing: they're all performing that day. That's the job of the FBI. We did have a consult on the project and she said, 'Oh yeah, 100% you're acting in those things', which is so fascinating, right? And then Reality, totally - she was second by second trying to choose how to perform that herself.
What are your hopes for the film now that it has received so much acclaim? It's a long way out from awards season, but Reality deserves to be in the reckoning.
When you make a movie - I've talked to other people who've made many - getting it into the world at all feels like a huge win! And then to have the response we've had to it with this content, and for the attention to come to Reality Winner's story herself, is truly incredible.
It's very, very moving that the movie is being so well received. I think any attention it gets that brings attention to Reality and people getting noted for hard, good work - and I think movies are important - is awesome. The rest you cannot control or worry about or think about. It's already exceeded so many expectations, being so widely seen and discussed now is exciting.
Reality is in cinemas now.
