Laura Poitras on Her Edward Snowden Documentary: “I Was a Participant As Much As a Documentarian”

TIME Entertainment movies Laura Poitras on Her Edward Snowden Documentary: I Was a Participant As Much As a Documentarian This April 16, 2014 photo shows Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award winner Laura Poitras in New York to promote her documentary film "1971," premiering Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP) Charles SykesCharles Sykes/Invision/AP The Citizenfour documentarian on Edward Snowden and making a film amid breaking news

The revelation of the National Security Administrations surveillance of U.S. citizens phone records was among the biggest news stories of 2013, and won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the journalists at the Washington Post and The Guardian who covered it.

One of those journalists, Laura Poitras, has just released her documentary about the events surrounding the NSA revelations and the contractor who leaked them to her. Citizenfour takes its title from the handle Edward Snowden used to communicate online with Poitras, communications Poitras reads aloud. The film leads to Hong Kong, where Poitras and two other journalists powwow with a vaguely shocked yet clear-headed Snowden, whos decided to walk away from his life entirely; the degree of risk hes undertaken is underlined more strongly by Citizenfour than in any other reporting to date.

Poitras has had a long career of documenting national security initiatives and their implications in documentary form; her last film, The Oath, dealt in part with a Yemeni man held in Guantnamo Bay. But Citizenfour is a uniquely gripping work for how it gets inside one of the biggest news stories of our time. Laura Poitras spoke to TIME this week.

TIME: Was it difficult to make a film that objectively depicted the events surrounding Snowdens disclosures, given how enmeshed you were in the process? How did your roles as filmmaker and as journalist run up against one another?

Laura Poitras: I mean, in the process of working on this film, when I was in Hong Kong, I was wearing my documentary filmmaker hat saying, I am going to document whats happening. This moment in journalism when Im meeting a source for the first time, understanding who this person is its a moment you usually never get to see. Usually a source doesnt want to be identified or will come forward four decades later, like with Deep Throat. I knew thisd be something different. As we were sitting up and working on stories, I was the documentary fillmmmaker.

When I returned to Berlin, I realized it was important I report it out. I think a lot of people, there are a lot of really talented national security reporters who can do great work on documents in the public interest. Doing this was what I wanted to do making a longform film that looked at the story from many angles asking what it says about journalism, whistleblowers, and the government coming down on both in the context of post-9/11 America. Im more interested in those broader issues than I am in breaking news.

It strikes me as difficult to release a documentary after the fact about a major news event thats been widely covered, including by Glenn Greenwald, whos a character in the film.

In the editing room, we realized a couple of things quickly. One was that I was a part of the story and it needed to be told from a subjective point of view. I was the narrator. I was a participant as much as a documentarian. Then we tell the story close to the protagonists. Snowden, Glenn, and [U.S. intelligence official-turned-whistleblower] William Binney. Its through them we get a picture of the wider importance. We had more footage, more archival stuff. Then it becomes a chronicle of the leaks, which is interesting when its happening but not interesting in retrospect. There was a film about the Obama campaign that was interesting when it was happening, but in retrospect

We tried to make sure it was not caught up in breaking news but to say something that would still resonate in five and ten years. Its a broader human story. Yes, its about the NSA, but its also about what would cause a person to risk everything.

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Laura Poitras on Her Edward Snowden Documentary: “I Was a Participant As Much As a Documentarian”