Maxance Vincent
Tina Satter’s Reality, which stars Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner, is based on the 2019 play Is This a Room, which in turn is adapted from the FBI interrogation transcript of Winner. Speaking to Awards Radar on Zoom, Satter explained that she discovered the transcript in December 2017 and thought the level of language used was fascinating:
“I’m scrolling through it and know, by then, that she’s in prison, but I’m reading it and wondering when do they get her? How does this happen? It felt like a thrilling and unexpected story unfolding in real life with real language. She was such a compelling person in her voice as I was reading her moving through it. And I felt like this is like my kind of protagonist. The fact that we have this actual document and can be in that room is kind of irresistible to me as someone who thought of it as both the play and a movie. I had made many more plays at that point, and getting a play going faster was easier. So, I immediately started trying to work on that. But I had the movie idea in my brain that was able to come to fruition a few years after.”
In terms of structuring the play and the film, Satter explained that the two are quite different:
“The play was about an hour. There are actually a few cuts to the transcript for the movie, just because it would have been so long. I worked really hard on not wanting to change the story or even the tone. Some of the scenes were just really long, like the scene on the front lawn, where they talked to her about CrossFit. That was about five, six, or seven pages. It was almost double what it was in the movie. I kept everything in order, but some things [were cut from the stage play], for a sense of pacing. You are watching in front of your eyes a live human. We had this incredible actress, Emily Davis, fall apart and fight through that role. It was very different filmically; trying to keep the pace, tension, and true realism, figuring out to what pace of dialogue would be, or what those scenes could feel. There was more work to figure out how every single scene was going to have this really specific flavor to it, pace-wise, and working that out with the actors.”
Satter also talked about how she cast Sydney Sweeney to play Reality in the movie and revealed she didn’t have a first choice for the role:
“I didn’t have a first choice. Once we had the finished script and the producers started talking to people, many people were interested, they were all really exciting. Sydney’s name came a little later in the process, and that became immediately very exciting. I was like, “Oh, wow, Sydney Sweeney!”
It was such an unexpected choice for my brain at first. She read for the role, which was really exciting. Before she read, she and I had a Zoom, and she had read the script and was interested, even if it wouldn’t work out. I went through most of the Zoom not even knowing that she would end up being able to read and do the movie, but she had such smart thoughts and had thoughtfully read the script. She had not known who Reality was at all. In a way, that was like really interesting to me. Sydney is much younger than me and is closer to Reality’s age at the time. They are both these unique young women in very different spheres of the world, and they had a specific American girlhood and coming of age that I think had some resonances as we were speaking. Once I talked to her, I thought it would be really cool if she could do this. When she read it, it was great. Once she was on set, she brought such a special performance that it was clear it could have only been Sydney.”
During our video interview, seen below, we also discussed the process of casting Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as FBI agents, how she approached the mounting tension of the story, and coming up with the visual and aural distortion for the transcript’s redaction.
You can view the full interview below and stream Reality on Max.
[Some of the quotes in the article were edited for length and clarity]
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