Pro tips: Snowden and Greenwald in the hotel room. Image: TwC/Radius
Greenwald's expression is somewhere between befuddlement and doom—of information overload, of the momentousness of the story, of confusion over a young man who SEEMS TO BE condemning himself to a life of pain.
A still from Poitras's "O'Say Can You See" (2011)
Getting to that moment took careful planning and some argument. Given the government's recent scrutiny of reporters like James Rosen and James Risen in leak cases, Poitras consulted with lawyers in New York before traveling to Hong Kong. In April, her anonymous source surprised her by saying that eventually, he did not want to remain anonymous: once the disclosures happened, he would be unmasked by the government anyway. "My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back," Snowden told Poitras in an early email that appears in the film. Instead of letting the government identify him or feed speculation that his actions were sinister, Snowden insists on "immediately nailing me to the cross instead of protecting me as a source." On the idea of leaking anonymously, Snowden says at one point, "Fuck that."After he made his decision, Poitras proposed that he appear on camera. Snowden was skeptical."There were two reasons," she said. "One was that he didn't want to become the story. But also, he was worried about us being in the same place at the same time. If they"—government agents—"had come in and they shut us down, how to make sure that the risks he had taken to reveal information didn't end there?"Poitras, who was already more than a year into her surveillance documentary, pushed back. "I said that 'really, it's important for you to articulate your motivations and for me to understand your motivation. It's important because people are going to speculate.'" Snowden, she added, "had taken every risk there was to be taken." A video camera "added risk, but added risk to what? He risked pretty much everything. So I made an argument of why it would be of importance to have a record. It's not every day that somebody risks so much."Snowden was skeptical. 'So I made an argument of why it would be of importance to have a record. It's not every day that somebody risks so much.'
Laura Poitras and some of the "Citizenfour" cast, along with the Snowden family, at the New York Film Festival. Image: Alex Pasternack
Edward Snowden and his girlfriend Lindsey Mills in Russia. Image: "Citizenfour"