TITLE: Winner
Section: Premieres
Director: Susanna Fogel
Screenwriters: Susanna Fogel, Kerry Howley
Logline: Reality Winner (Emilia Jones) is a brilliant young misfit from a Texas border town who finds her morals challenged while serving as an NSA contractor. A sarcastic, gun-lovin’ vegan yogi and CrossFit fanatic, Reality is an unconventional whistleblower who ends up being prosecuted for exposing Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election.
Sales Agent: UTA
Panelists: Susanna Fogel, Emilia Jones, Zach Galifianakis, Kathryn Newton and Danny Ramirez
First screening: January 20
Key quotes: Fogel shared of her real-world contact with Reality Winner ahead of the shoot, “When I first sort of met her, she was in prison, and the way we communicated was that I heard she liked reading humor books…So, I polled a group of friends and asked them what the funniest books were that they had liked, and I just sent her a stack… I had written a book about my family…and I sent her that book too, and said, ‘This is so revealing of my psyche that maybe you’ll learn about all my issues, and then you can maybe trust me with some of your issues,’ which hopefully worked. Then, when she was out on house arrest, I went down and visited her in Texas. I’ve just seen her at different stages, from being incarcerated to now, and she still has some probationary rules around where she can go, but she’s become a friend.”
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On takeaways from the project, she said: “I think we want people to watch [the movie] and ask what they would do. What do they think of what she did? Do they see moments in their own lives where they could either act or not act? Do they wish they acted more? Do they want to act less? I think we just want people to think, really. We don’t need to tell them what to think, but we do want them to think…For people watching it, it’s not like they’re all going to have the access that [Reality] had to the most important secrets, but we all see things that we choose to speak up about or not all the time, and what are we going to make into our life-defining moments? Each person has their own answer to that.”
The Deadline Studio at Sundance ran from January 19-23 at Montgomery-Lee Fine Art on Main Street, when the cast and creatives behind the best and buzziest titles in this year’s lineup sat down with Deadline’s festival team to discuss their movies and the paths they took to get to Park City.
Thank you to our sponsors McGee & Co., Final Draft, Portrait Creative Network, and Courser.