In all my work, I'm interested in trying to understand the human consequences of government policies.

That's a question you'd have to present to people in the White House.

I was in correspondence with an anonymous source for about five months and in the process of developing a dialogue you build ideas, of course, about who that person might be. My idea was that he was in his late forties, early fifties. I figured he must be Internet generation because he was super tech-savvy, but I thought that, given the level of access and information he was able to discuss, he had to be older.

I don't speak Arabic - I know a little to get by, but that's all.

I think it's radical to censor information because the government asks you to. That's radical.

I think one of the most shocking things is how little our elected officials knew about what the NSA was doing. Congress is learning from the reporting and that's staggering. Snowden and [former NSA employee] William Binney, who's also in the film as a whistleblower from a different generation, are technical people who understand the dangers.

When the most important decisions are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control.