SLIFF 2016 Interview: Robert Greene – Director of KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE screens Sunday, Nov. 6 at 1:00pm at .ZACK (3224 Locust Avenue). KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE Director Robert Greene will be in attendance. Ticket information can be found HERE .

A gripping, nonfiction psychological thriller, Robert Greene’s KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil (“House of Cards,” “The Girlfriend Experience,” “Listen Up Philip”) as she prepares for her next role: playing Christine Chubbuck, a Florida newscaster who committed suicide live on-air in 1974. As Kate investigates Chubbuck’s story (long rumored to be the inspiration for the classic Hollywood film “Network”), uncovering new clues and information, she becomes increasingly obsessed with her subject. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE is a cinematic mystery that forces us to question everything we see and everything we’re led to believe. Greene — filmmaker-in-chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism — also offers a free master class in editing on Nov. 5.

Robert Greene took the time to answer questions about his film for We Are Movie Geeks.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 27th, 2016

Tom Stockman: How did you get interested in the subject of Christine Chubbuck?

Robert Greene: I’ve been interested in this story for a long time. I think I first heard about Christine Chubbuck about 12 years ago. I was fascinated and mortified and horrified and all of that. I didn’t think I could make a film about this. I didn’t think I could tell that story or make a documentary about Christine. There’s so little facts out there and I didn’t see myself as someone who would go knock on the doors to find out things you needed to find out that you couldn’t find out otherwise. It just seemed so sensationalistic and gross in a way that I wasn’t comfortable with. That feeling stayed with me for a really long time. My last film was a film called ACTRESS. When you film actors for a documentary, it creates an effect for the viewer that they’re reading between the lines and reading through the images in a different way.  I thought that was the way in, the wait to tell the story. I approached my friend Kate who is an actress who is done some television and independent films, and we decided to tell the story by telling Kate’s story and her ability and inability to play this role and not just tell Christine Chubbuck’s story as a mythology and that was a way to deal with the available facts.

TS: Kate Lyn Sheil is the young actress playing Christine Chubbuck. Where did you find her? Where there are other actresses that you auditioned for this role?

RG: No, I’ve known Kate for over a decade and we’ve worked on some projects together. We’re good friends. There was never anyone else I considered for this. It was always only Kate. She’s one of the smartest and most thoughtful people I know. For the movie to work, you really had to hang it on someone who is as thoughtful as possible and could work through these questions as thoughtfully as she could.

TS: So, Kate is playing an actress preparing to play Christine Chubbuck in a narrative film that was never actually made? It’s an unusual way of telling a story.

RG: It is. It’s a documentary. She’s playing herself but it’s nonfiction. The aspects of her playing versions of herself was not a scripted. She’s being herself, but also acting at the same time. The film-within-a-film is more like a documentary dramatization, a reenactment of documentary scenes. That construct is really about how we wrestle with and re-create, or don’t re-create, The final moments of Christine Chubbuck’s life. In the end, sadly and pathetically, that’s what she’s remembered for. The film wrestles with the fact that someone is remembered for their death and not for their life. And that changes a lot about how your life is seen. We are wrestling with some of the complexities of that. So the question is: what does it mean to re-create that moment?

TS: Do you literally re-create the suicide?

RG: You’ll have to watch the film but the whole thing builds to a climax where that is the essential question.

TS: From what I’ve read there was very little footage of Christine Chubbuck available. How did you research what her life was like? Did you interview her family members?

RG: There’s only one family member still alive. He understandably didn’t want to talk about it. We went down to Sarasota, Florida where it happened and interviewed locals there. Some people had heard of her and others have not. Throughout the film we got closer and closer to that room where she was when she killed herself and we eventually talked to someone who was in the room. The film is mostly about how frustrating it is that so little information is out there and what that does to you in terms of filling in gaps or having other people fill in gaps in regards to what her life was. When we fill in the gaps, we have to ask what sort of social values do we end up putting on this woman who died over 40 years ago. What are the facts? I heard that she had a boyfriend problems. Is that true, or is that just a regurgitation of misogynistic ideas from the mid-1970s about what it was like to be a woman? In the end it’s about the way Christine Chubbuck’s story reverberates today and the way we made assumptions about her life.

Christine Chubbuck

TS: Was this project an emotional experience for Kate?

RG: It was extremely emotional for all of us.  The film-within-a-film was meant to be bad from the beginning so you’re watching something that is actually failing. That was something Kate and I agreed to when we were thinking about the movie. We thought it would be interesting to watch these reenactments fail at the job of creating a narrative out of Christina Chubbuck’s life. Once the cameras were rolling, the responsibility Kate felt towards the story took over and she resisted and fought against the badness of what we were making. So that’s what you’re really watching, a documentary about an actor who is responding to the research that she is doing and getting closer and closer to the story while being asked to play a certain kind of role that she’s not comfortable with doing. That was very hard. There were many moments when we felt we were almost too close to it. Mental health-wise, we had to back up. Kate was very much in control, she kept ways of keeping herself in control, but it was still very emotional for her.

TS: So Christina Chubbuck’s actual suicide was filmed, or videotaped, or whatever they were doing in the mid-70s. That footage is locked up I understand. No one has seen it? 

RG: Right, no one has seen it for 40 years. Part of the movie is a search for that tape, and whether that tape actually exist and what is rumor and what is true about the tape. The bitter and awful irony is that Christine Chubbuck asked to have that day’s TV show recorded. That was on purpose because she wanted the tape to be seen.  Sadly, the station made the decision to never let it be seen. Unfortunately, it’s known as the holy grail of death on tape. That’s morbid and awful but there’s something about the irony of her wanting it to be seen and it never being seen. We try to wrestle with that irony is well.

TS: There was another movie made this past year about Christine Chubbuck called CHRISTINE with Rebecca Hall playing her. Have you seen that?

RG: Yes, both of our films premiered at Sundance and have played it a few festivals together and were released within a couple of months of each other.

Rebecca Hall in CHRISTINE

TS: Do you think they would make a good double feature?

RG: Yes, there have been many pieces written about how the two films complement each other. Our film was questioning about whether you could even do a film about Christine Chubbuck and CHRISTINE is actually a film about Christine Chubbuck. Some people look at our film and think you can’t make a film about her, but then when they see CHRISTINE they think you can. And I think about Rebecca Hall’s process because I watched Kate go through that process. Some people think that the two films criticize each other, so the two films have been in a lot of conversations.

TS: Have all of the films that you’ve made been documentaries?

RG: Yes, I have edited some fiction films but I have directed five documentaries.

TS: Would you like to move into narratives yourself or do you want to stay with documentaries?

RG: Documentaries can very much be narratives, but I’ve made films that absolutely push the boundaries of documentaries into fiction and back again. That’s exciting to me. I’ve edited several fiction films and that’s fun too but I’d like to continue working in the nonfiction area because I think it’s more elastic, more interesting and I can do more different kinds of storytelling in that form.

TS: What documentarians have you admired or been influenced by?

RG: It’s a long list. One of my favorite documentarians is Frederick Wiseman. I love Peter Watkins.

TS: Oh yes, I remember seeing his WAR GAME in my junior high classroom many years ago.

RG: It’s an amazing film. It won an Academy award for best documentary though it was entirely staged. Watkins is a real inspiration. I also love the classics, the Maisel brothers.  I’m pretty steeped in all of that stuff. I’m proud to be in a group of filmmaker working today like Josh Oppenheimer and people like that who I admire greatly.

TS: You’re teaching now at the University of Missouri. Where are you from?

RG: I’m originally from North Carolina but I lived in New York for many years so I consider myself a New Yorker. I’ve lived in Columbia now for a couple of years.

TS: Tell me about this master class in editing that you are going to be teaching at SLIFF on November 5? 

RG: I have a philosophy about what it takes to make documentaries that are relevant in today’s work world where we have one million Snapchats a day and people doing Instagram performances all the time and what it takes to create something in the nonfiction world that is interesting. I’ll go through clips of my own movies, and possibly clips of other movie, and dissect editing strategies that let you make more elastic, more transparent nonfiction.

TS: What’s your next project?

RG: My next project is going to be a weird, western musical reenactment but I’m exhausted thinking about it too much. If I can raise the money, I will be shooting next summer but I’m not letting out too much information about it yet.

TS: Well good luck with your film and your class here and we’lll see you in St. Louis in a couple of weeks.

RG: I’m looking forward to it