Laura
Poitras’s Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR premiered at the New York Film
Festival to extraordinary applause, reflecting not only the grip its subject
matter exerts on the public but also the efficacy of the filmmaking. FILM
COMMENT sat down with Poitras after a public screening for a conversation that
ranged from what revelations still surprise her, to the role of narrative in
documentary and journalism, to how she knew she was being followed in Hong
Kong. CITIZENFOUR opens theatrically this Friday.
1.
This film is not just a guy in a hotel room,
like a subpoena deposition. I really like the image you start out with, for
example: a ribbon of light through the darkness. What is that exactly?
2.
That’s a tunnel emerging into Hong Kong. At the
beginning, you don’t see where it’s going, and then when we arrive in Hong
Kong, you get the skyline. It’s also psychological—it feels like I’ve been in a
tunnel for the past year.
3.
As if the last movie you did, The Oath [10],
wasn’t high-tension enough.
4.
Definitely. I’ve been more stressed working on
this film than being in Iraq during the occupation.
5.
Just in terms of what the movie discloses, what
does it reveal that has not been disclosed already?
6.
I could answer that in a couple ways. For one thing we wanted to make a film that
wasn’t about breaking news, but was about a story that would have resonance now
and in five years or 10 years. But there are things that are new in it. The
fact that Lindsay Mills has moved to Moscow to be with him hadn’t been
disclosed before Friday night at the premiere. There are [also] some things in
the final scene. Some things have been published—the watch-list documents have
been published—but the role of the Ramstein air-force base is in the film.
We’re working on it, and there have been other whistle-blowers who have talked
about Ramstein as being key for the U.S. drone program. There’s that, and then
there’s the President being the person who decides who gets killed in the drone
program. That’s also been reported in other ways, but we’re doing different
reporting. Then there was a section called “Into the Archive” called Core
Secrets, which is looking at some of the highest level of classification in the
U.S. government. You see it when Snowden leaves the hotel room, and there’s this
cut to the archive called “Core Secrets,” and you see some of what’s being
initiated. That’s something we published on The Intercept on Friday,
simultaneous with the film. There’s a story by me and Peter Maass which looks
at these Core Secrets, which involves things like having people who work for
the U.S. government deployed in the technology industry to build in backdoors,
through encryption and stuff. We intended to have [CITIZENFOUR] work as a
narrative that’s not going to have a wave of headlines, and then all of a
sudden be old news. So we wanted to make it a story.
7.
That’s sometimes a challenge for documentaries.
When documentaries come out, people often treat what they say as if it’s news
and nobody ever said it before. I always wonder how much documentary filmmakers
grapple with that.
8.
I mean, we are definitely doing long-form
journalism. It’s great if there’s something new in there, and it can get
attention. But it has to go further and go deeper to have any depth.
9.
There’s something especially striking about the
nature of what CITIZENFOUR reveals, though. It’s not as though the government
is spying too much—it sounds like it’s just spying all. It’s shocking, and not
just the first time you hear it. It’s almost as if you need to be told certain
things more than once—and need to be told it in a particularly effective
narrative—in order to absorb it.
10.
Obviously I choose to do visual storytelling—if
you connect emotionally, then maybe you can shift consciousness in a certain
way. There’s lots of information that we know about. We know that the U.S. has
a drone program, or we know that we torture people. But if you can actually
communicate those things in a way that hits people in a different way, then I
think it’s fundamentally different. It’s not about news or not news—it’s about
whether it has any emotional resonance. And therefore it’s about whether people
care, or don’t care. The work I do tries to ground it, so it’s about
communicating on the level of emotions, or empathy, as much as it is about information.
There’s information that’s not revealed—that we know about—but the fact that we
can see why he did it, and what he sees as the danger of it, changes how we
interpret that information. If he’s willing to risk his life for this, perhaps
it’s important that we pay some attention rather than brush it off.
11.
The film’s structure—having the hour or so in
the hotel room frame bookended by the outside world—is very effective. The way
you set it up, it’s almost as if the room was the theory—and as soon as you leave
that room you’ll be encountered with reality, with the world.
12.
That’s really interesting. What do you mean when
you say “theory”?
13.
You have all this stuff he’s telling you. And
you have no particular reason to doubt it, but it’s still just stuff he’s telling
you. But then you have the news reports, and then it’s happening, and it’s real
in a way that it wasn’t real before.
14.
Yeah, I mean that does mirror, like, time
stopping. And then all of a sudden psh!—something exploding beyond the hotel
room.
15.
It’s also like a cat-and-mouse game—until he
comes out. What made you linger on those shots him getting ready to leave?
Picking things up, milling about. These moments feel like they last a long
time, after the very dense scenes of him talking.
16.
With everything in my relationship with Snowden,
it was always: “Here’s the next step.” He didn’t say when we first started
corresponding: “Oh, I will go to Hong Kong at some point, and then we’ll meet
there.” It’d be like, “I need the key, let’s exchange email addresses,” and
then, “You should go here and we’ll wait for the next thing.” I only knew one
step ahead, and I didn’t know he was leaving the country until he’d already
left and then went to Hong Kong. But I kind of thought he had the next step
planned after the hotel room. When he’s packing and leaving, you realize that
his planning actually stopped—right there. It was important to show that—that
it’s clear he didn’t have an exit strategy in that moment, and the kind of
emotion that goes with that.
17.
Once he’s left, it’s surprising that he ended up
taking a flight that would go through Russia. Were you surprised by that?
18.
Whatever his choice was for Hong Kong, it seemed
that when the U.S. issued an extradition warrant it wasn’t safe for him to be
there anymore. Then it does create a problem of what airspace, how do you get
out of there, in a way that the U.S. is not going to intervene. As we saw
later, when the U.S. downed the airplane of the Bolivian president, the U.S.
was really after him. But I actually thought he had a strategy with regard to
Hong Kong. After that—this has been widely reported—he was in transit in Moscow
and was trying to get to Latin America.
19.
Could you talk about when you decided to film?
20.
After he, Glenn [Greenwald, journalist], and I
met, we went back to his room, and I did take out my camera really quickly.
Partly because I know Glenn pretty well, and I knew he was going to want to
jump right in, and I didn’t want to miss that. So I took out my camera right
away—which was probably a bit awkward, and he was probably also a bit nervous.
Then I started filming, and on this first day, I filmed—and Glenn did—a really
lengthy debrief of who he was, his biography.
21.
The “you” story. I love that phrase.
22.
[Laughs] Yeah, it was the “you” story. And it
went on for hours. Glenn was incredibly on point to try to understand who he
was, why he was making this decision, and where he came from. That was the
first day, and the second day Ewen [MacAskill, defence and intelligence
correspondent for The Guardian] was brought in. And he did a separate kind of
vetting which we see in the film. Then they progressed, and so the first
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were a lot of who are you, why are you doing this,
and a lot of technical talk. He’s describing programs, and telling us about
whatever, about XKeyscore, about Tumult, all these different things.
23.
I like that you kept all that in.
24.
Right, it becomes about journalism. And we’re
all like, what the fuck are these things? Of course, now these things are all
more in our vocabulary. Then Glenn starts publishing, and there’s a change.
Because that’s when the NSA visit Snowden’s home where his girlfriend is
living, and that’s when you realize there’s a bit of a race, or a clock
ticking. The government clearly knows that he’s gone, and they probably know
he’s the source. But they’re not ready to do a press conference or anything.
And we’re publishing, and I think because Snowden had already made the decision
that he wouldn’t remain anonymous, we felt it was important for him to articulate
why he did what he did. So there was a bit of time pressure.
25.
Were you filming every time you were there with
him in the room?
26.
Not every time but a lot.
27.
How long were the sessions?
28.
Each day was different. I’d say I filmed four
hours a day, but each day was different.
29.
You can see him changing also in that time, on
his face.
30.
It’s beautiful. First you have these strangers
meeting, and a sort of awkward encounter, and then slowly getting to know each
other, and then you realize the stakes for him get higher and higher. Then you
realize the world outside is paying attention. From a filmmaking perspective,
there was a lot of drama.
31.
By the third or fourth day it’s clear he hasn’t
been sleeping. But I suppose you might not have been sleeping that well either.
32.
I was not sleeping, no. I was very concerned
that at any moment the door would get kicked in. I felt more afraid while
making this film than any other film I’ve made. Because these are really
powerful forces that we were angering and we knew we were doing it.
33.
At a certain point, you said you realized you
were being followed. What were you seeing?
34.
I wanted to stay in Hong Kong and film, and
after he left the hotel room, and he went underground, I actually wanted to
film where he was. I was talking to his lawyer and asked if that was possible,
and we tried to make a plan where I could be taken out of the hotel room and
put someplace and maybe meet up. And then, yeah, it was just clear…
35.
What literally did you see? Was it a person
walking behind you or a car?
36.
Yeah. A car, a person. Different things.
37.
It’s funny, I can sit here and have my little
paranoid flights of imagination—and then you just confirm them.
38.
I mean, it wasn’t surprising, that after that,
people would follow me as a way to lead to him. That’s ultimately why I left. I
said, it’s too risky. I was eager to keep filming if that was possible. But it
just seemed risky for him, and also risky for me. And at that point, everyone
else had left. Glenn had left, Ewen had left, the Guardian had left, so I was
the only person there.
39.
I remember seeing some cheesy movie in the late
Nineties, Enemy of the State—
40.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that a few times.
41.
[Laughs] A few times? It’s no longer cheesy, in
a way.
42.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s actually right.
43.
Being in the thick of it, you must no longer be
surprised by things.
44.
I still do get surprised by things. For
instance, I was surprised that the CIA spied on the Senate committee to
investigate torture. I thought that was surprising! I was like, really, you’d
think that they wouldn’t go there. Specifically because you have people in
those committees who have supported the torture programs—you’d think that they
wouldn’t spy on Congress. But, no, they do. So you think you’re not going to be
surprised, and then things happen. And there was also some stuff in Germany
where the CIA had a double agent, who was spying on the German inquiry into the
NSA. And you just think, come on guys! That’s just going too far.
45.
What about the second half of the film, is there
a second film that could come out of that?
46.
It’s too soon to know.
47.
One aspect related to some of this is the role
of business in surveillance. Is that ever something you’d like to explore?
48.
I do think that money and capital is going to
have a big impact in terms of how the surveillance debate plays out, because
what we’ve seen is that there are big U.S. companies that want to have a market
internationally. These revelations make foreign citizens rightfully concerned
about handing their information over to the U.S. government—which then opens up
a marketplace for other people to step forward that aren’t cooperating so much
with U.S. internet companies and telecoms. I think that there will be economic
pressures that will have hopefully a role in creating technologies that are
privacy-preserving as opposed to privacy-destroying. People—both U.S. citizens,
and internationally—will expect that. Right now we’re in the era of handing
over everything, the data. We haven’t really gotten the blowback from that yet,
but I think there is going to be blowback. There’s going to be a generation of
people who grow up and have their photograph—you know, their parents put their
photographs there—and then there are these facial-recognition technologies...
Et cetera. And there are going to be people who grow up and say: “I don’t want
to live like that. I don’t want to live where there’s a digital trail that
collects everything I’ve said, every friend I’ve had.” I think there is both a
right and a human desire for privacy. And we haven’t really seen how that’s going
to play out, both in terms of what governments do, and also what companies and
commercial entities do.
49.
So your view is that at some point people will
react to the blowback.
50.
I think so. I think there will be a blowback,
and people will demand it. And parents will say: “I don’t want my kids, all the
details about my kids, in the hands of a company or government.” That the right
to privacy is a fundamental right and it’s a fundamental human need. And if you
look at any repressive regime, you can see that that’s what happens: this kind
of information can be used against populations. Right now, we’re in sort of a
naïve state of mind thinking that it’s all innocent. I mean, Google’s email
services—you can search things, you can find things, super convenient, et cetera—we
all naïvely think that this is never going to be used in ways that could work
against people.
51.
It’s a challenge talking about the film because
there are so many intersecting issues. But I wanted to ask about feeling part
of cinema verité, as a filmmaker, and it’s funny because so much of the cinema
verité people know from the Sixties and later is about famous people.
52.
[Laughs] Not everything! You’ve got Salesman.
It’s so brilliant.
53.
I love Salesman! Or Frederick Wiseman.
54.
Yeah, any of Wiseman.
55.
But what I really appreciate about CITIZENFOUR
is how it’s merged with journalism in a way. At the Q&A, you called
yourself a documentary filmmaker, but you also then used the term
“videojournalist.” Is it all together for you?
56.
Clearly I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I do
think I do visual journalism, and that’s different than print journalism. And I
would also say that I’m an artist. So I think that those things cross. So, a
long form of film is not just about journalism. It’s about narratives and stuff
like that. I think they’re both.
57.
You’ve done installation work in the past. What
are you planning next in that regard?
58.
The Whitney asked me to do a show in 2016, so
that’s probably my next big project. But I still have documentaries and shorts
that I want to do.
59.
And how do you balance, how do you reconcile the
artistic imperatives with the duty you’ve spoken of in doing journalism?
60.
It’s hard. It’s hard, because there’s still a
lot of reporting that needs to be done. And I feel an obligation that it needs
to happen. It’s a challenge because the reporting takes time, and it takes time
to find partnerships that don’t make mistakes that could cause harm. All those
kinds of things take time to navigate. But ultimately, I think what I can
contribute, or what’s maybe more unique, is what I can do with the camera
instead of what I can do in print. There are plenty of great print journalists
that can report on the NSA stuff. But I think that my skills are maybe better
used in other ways. We did a piece [Chokepoint] about a German company that was
targeted by the GSHQ [British intelligence]. What the NSA and GSHQ are doing,
which is really pernicious, is they target engineers at telecoms, personally,
so they can get their passwords and get into their networks, and get their customer
data. So they target this German company that provides Internet to Africa and
the Middle East. They actually have names of employees and these documents. We
published about it, which is a big deal, because it’s the U.K. targeting
another European Union country. But then we did a video on it, which shows
these engineers learning that their names are in this list.
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