Laura Poitras talks ‘CITIZENFOUR’ and why Edward Snowden is in Moscow

Theres a scene in Laura Poitras documentary, CITIZENFOUR, where 29-year-old American intelligence employeeEdward Snowden is hunkered down in a Hong Kong hotel room with London Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald andEwen MacAskill when the fire alarm goes off. Snowden, who was surreptitiously meeting with Poitras and the reporters in May2013 to expose the massiveintelligence capability of the U.S. government, freezespractically terrified. Hed just unplugged the rooms phone andwarned his new friends that intelligence agencies can easily use them as microphones, and you can tell that hes not one who believes in coincidences. Maybe they got mad that they couldnt listen in to us via the phone any more, he says, while Greenwald looks at him to see if hes joking.

Snowden isnt joking.

After the Snowden revelations broke, shocking the world with American secrets of comprehensive and invasive global surveillance thatwounded American prestige and diplomacy, Snowdens caution suddenly didnt seem so far-fetched.

Poitras, who narrates CITIZENFOUR, so called because thats how Snowden signed his initialanonymous emails to her, had already directed two acclaimed documentaries about post-9/11 America, My Country, My Country and The Oath. Her films may have irritated some powerfulpeople; she was added to a U.S. government watch list that caused her to be detained frequently when she traveled. By the time she beganworking on a third film about global security issues, she had moved to Germany, mostly to guarantee that her sources identity and information wouldnt be compromised by recurring American travel interrogations. She was already editing footage in Berlin when she received the email that would change everything.

Amazingly, Poitras camera is there at the moment when Snowden explains why he decided to go public, to be a heroic whistleblower on a still-unquantifiable abuse of poweror, depending on your perspective, a traitor who stole and gave awayinvaluable American spy secrets.

CITIZENFOUR, which is already playing in theaters, was recentlynamed to the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary, and is considered a leading candidate to take home the prize. Poitras, in New York to accept the Best Documentary prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Gotham Awards, spoke to EW about being a witness to history.

EW: Take me back to January 2013, when the first CITIZENFOUR email arrives. You had been swimming in these watersinvestigating government surveillance, landing on government watch listsand this almost too-good-to-be-true anonymous source seeks you out. There had to be a certain amount of skepticism, that this might be entrapment, in some way.LAURA POITRAS: I had all those concerns. For sure. Partly because Im a filmmaker and a visual journalist, and usually, the way that I work is that Im the one who seeks out people. I dont get anonymous emails and tips. Its not the kind of work that I do, so it was completely out of the blue. And it just raised questions like, Why would I be the person to be contacted? I was very aware of the case of the Anonymous hacker Sabu, who flipped and became an FBI agent and was trying to entrap people in exactly those kind of ways. So I was on the lookout for anything that was a tell, any inappropriate asks. I laid out all my skepticisms, and [Snowden]came back with, You know that Im not going to entrap you because Im never going to ask anything of you.I was completely on the lookout for it, but there were never any asks. It took me a while to sort of wrap my head around it, but it makes sense to me now, in retrospect. I had published a piece about William Binny in The New York Times, where I did talk about being on the watch list, so I think that combinationknowing that I was interested in the topic and that I was also targetedwere the two things that somehow registered when he was thinking about who to contact.

You end up on this journey with journalist Glenn Greenwald to meet Snowdenin Hong Kong and the details are just lovely: Hes going to be playing a Rubiks Cube when you arrive in the hotel lobby, and youre going to have a scripted exchange that will cue you both in that you are who youre supposed to be. Even though its just a character in a movie, Hal Holbrooks Deep Throat in All the Presidents Men is what Im envisioning. Perhaps when youre emailing, youre thinking its some 55 year-old guysomeone more like William Binnysomeone whos been through the wars. But instead, you get a 29-year old kid. In a T-shirt.

Was that an uh-oh moment? Your mind-set was exactly like what mine was. I totally expected I was going to meet somebody older, that he had been through a lot, seen a lot. Probably not as old as Binny, because it was clear that he was also really, really technically computer savvy. But 40s, late 40s or something. I had completely burned into my head an idea of this person that was not the person that I met. I was actually profoundly shocked. So there was definitely a readjustment period.

Do you think he sensed that? At some point after we started the interview, he got up to use the restroom, and Glenn and I turned to each other and went, What the fk? We were shocked. And then he came back and we sort of laughed about it. But it made sense, once we sort of wrapped our heads around itthis is someone who really grew up with the Internet and what he saw he felt was so not right was because of his relationship to the promise of the Internet.

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Laura Poitras talks ‘CITIZENFOUR’ and why Edward Snowden is in Moscow