‘Reality’ Star Sydney Sweeney & Writer-Director Tina Satter Give Voice To Unsettling Case Of Reality Winner – Deadline FYC House + HBO Max
deadline.comEditor’s note: The following interviews were done outside of the FYC event series, as there was no panel or screening. Between the time when playwright-director Tina Satter’s revelatory and innovative account of real-life whistleblower Reality Winner went from a Broadway stage to the screen, the title changed from the vaguely surreal Is This a Room to the more documentary-like — though no less evocative — Reality.
The title change was just one of the topics discussed when Deadline spoke recently with Satter and Reality star Sydney Sweeney as part of the Deadline FYC House + HBO Max event series.
The change, in a way, is telling. The HBO film Reality, which debuted on May 29, uses the exact same words as the play — and both use the exact same words of the actual Reality Winner: The dialogue for the screenplay, co-written by Satter and James Paul Dallas also is taken directly from the transcript of the first conversation-slash-interrogation between FBI agents and an unsuspecting, at least initially, Winner.
What begins as an almost casual encounter on the afternoon of June 3, 2017 — an encounter marked by determinedly friendly if awkward chitchat — Winner arrives at her small Georgia home to find FBI agents waiting, for what she’s not quite sure.
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