How to write a doc­u­men­tary, with the direc­tor of Kate Plays Christine

Kate Plays Chris­tine is a doc­u­men­tary about the mak­ing of a fic­tion­al fea­ture film. It revolves around the real life instance of Florid­i­an news­read­er, Chris­tine Chub­buck, who shot her­self in the head while live on air in 1974. The film looks at the moral and eth­i­cal ques­tions that arise from the cre­ation of a fic­tion­alised ver­sion of this trag­ic fig­ure, as actress Kate Lynn Shiel pon­ders how it’s pos­si­ble to bring some sem­blance of sen­si­tiv­i­ty to such an act. Here, direc­tor Robert Greene explains how he was able to con­ceive this intri­cate project.

“I have no tal­ent for con­ceiv­ing of sit­u­a­tions, because I am an edi­tor at heart. I am all about col­lect­ing and putting togeth­er and not con­ceiv­ing. Some­one like Alex Ross Per­ry can write dia­logue. I can write a lit­tle bit, and I like to write – obvi­ous­ly I write essays and things like that. But I don’t like to invent char­ac­ters. It’s just not some­thing I find plea­sur­able. I find it miserable.

“But writ­ing is some­thing that you should do when you’re try­ing to make a doc­u­men­tary. It’s just about being able to put ideas on paper so you have some­thing to cling to in the mid­dle of the chaos. Most of those ideas get com­plete­ly trans­formed or thrown out of the win­dow, but that’s like any art or any act of creation.

“I won an award at Sun­dance, which was Writ­ing for Doc­u­men­tary – it was very strange because the film was so unwrit­ten, and that was real­ly what we were doing. By mak­ing the film, me made it specif­i­cal­ly not to write the film. That award rep­re­sents an old school idea of what mak­ing films is. It’s very Hol­ly­wood in the indus­try sense. Basi­cal­ly, you for­mu­late the blue­print in the writ­ing room and you build the film from that. The impli­ca­tion was that, obvi­ous­ly, there was a blue­print made for this film.

“In Kate Plays Chris­tine, we did some writ­ing. We went to Chris­tine Chubbuck’s house and it’s a cru­cial scene in the movie. Months before we filmed we found where the house was, and I wrote down five ideas of what we could do there. Like, what if Kate was hav­ing tea with the own­er, hav­ing a very civilised con­ver­sa­tion about Chris­tine Chub­buck? What if she knew some­thing? It was these dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios about what could hap­pen if what I imag­ined was real. And then, when we got there, what hap­pened in the movie hap­pened, and it was com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. But it real­ly helped to have gone through the process of con­ceiv­ing it. We still leaned on the back of those ideas, and the only way to make a film like this where there’s a series of predica­ments, is that you have to set those predica­ments up.

“It’s not a case of try­ing to reach a place where you can make a movie with no writ­ing. My ear­li­er films are more intu­itive. I like ideas and I like con­ceiv­ing frame­works for how some­thing can be. I want to make movies that are like Peter Watkins’ movies. Peter Watkins didn’t make films by just feel­ing out the sit­u­a­tion, it was a very sim­i­lar thing, he was a con­cep­tu­al film­mak­er. Chan­tal Ack­er­man, same thing. These are my heroes, so I want to make more films like that.

“Yet I do find myself fan­ta­sis­ing about mak­ing a more straight-for­ward, obser­va­tion­al thing again, but I don’t want to do that yet. I’ll do that lat­er. So it’s actu­al­ly the oppo­site. I feel more com­fort­able liv­ing in the space of ideas and liv­ing in the space of provo­ca­tion and try­ing to find how to con­nect with audi­ences in dif­fer­ent ways. There seems to be an audi­ence there, so I may as well talk to them.

“Judg­ing mate­r­i­al is what you real­ly do in doc­u­men­taries. You’re con­stant­ly eval­u­at­ing mate­r­i­al and say­ing, ​‘Okay maybe we need to go a lit­tle bit here, a lit­tle bit there, a lit­tle bit this way’. I real­ly think the way it works, as a col­lec­tor of footage, is if you get, like, twelve moments when you’re like, ​‘Woah, I can’t believe that just hap­pened in front of my cam­era!’ If that hap­pens, you might have a movie. It’s like some num­ber, I don’t know what the num­ber is, it’s some amount of great things that need to hap­pen. That’s one of the rea­sons why some doc­u­men­taries can take years to make. Just because you haven’t got those twelve things. In Kate Plays Chris­tine, we had three weeks to do it. We always thought we could film more lat­er, but we didn’t with­out mean­ing to.

“When you say some­thing is a hor­ror film, then it has four or five ele­ments that make it a hor­ror film. Doc­u­men­tary can be any­thing. And yeah, there’s a ton of trends that I think are not inter­est­ing. But I think non-fic­tion films are best when they are stag­ing areas for oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions, where the act of mak­ing the film is just the start of some­thing that’s more inter­est­ing than what­ev­er the sub­ject is. The sub­ject has to be just a start­ing place to me. And so films that are try­ing to exist in the space between real­i­ty and fic­tion, if that’s all they’re doing, there’s noth­ing inter­est­ing to them. And if a film is try­ing to be a prop for an issue or a cause, there’s noth­ing inter­est­ing about that. I think the word doc­u­men­tary is only a start­ing point for a conversation.”

Kate Plays Chris­tine is released 14 October.