World Premiere

Section: US Dramatic Competition

Directed by Antonio Campos

Written by Craig Shilowich

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CONCEPTUALIZING CHRISTINE

With his debut feature Afterschool and the follow-up Simon Killer under his belt, budding auteur Antonio Campos has made a name for himself in the indie film world as a helmer of penetrating, clinical examinations of the more extreme manifestations of the human psyche. One third of the New York-based collective Borderline Films (alongside Sean Durkin and Josh Mond), Campos’s work also indicates a particular interest in video technology, with both Afterschool and Simon Killer concerning, respectively, an accidental death caught on camera and a mode of blackmail that employs cell phone videos.

With that background in place, Campos was a natural fit to direct Christine, a dramatic look – albeit one mixed with dark comedy – at the life of Christine Chubbuck, a Sarasota newscaster who, after struggling with depression, committed suicide on air during a live broadcast in 1974. “When I first read about Christine’s death, something sort of turned on inside of me,” screenwriter and producer Craig Shilowich explained. “I had been writing another project when I first learned of Christine’s story, but I ended up abandoning that and focusing on Christine instead. As I learned more about her, I came to recognize that the suicide was a fact of her life, but not the fact.She was a complicated, talented, funny, tortured personality with a fascinating life story.She lived in a difficult time.She had friends and she was loved.”

After finishing the script, Shilowich approached Campos with the material. “I love Antonio's films and he was always someone I wanted to consider for the project,” Shilowich explained.“Crucially, the dark comedy in the film was always important to me and vital to the telling of Christine's story.When I first met Antonio to discuss making the movie, I was shocked by how funny he was!That was what clinched it for me, realizing not only did he have a sense of humor but that it's actually one of his defining qualities.Through all of the ups and downs in the making of this movie (and there were many) we were always able to make each other laugh and we were always able to work together to bring pockets of light to what is otherwise very, very dark material.”

For Campos, who had been interested in developing a new feature with a female protagonist, the project held immediate appeal due to the nature of Chubbuck’s nuanced characterization. “I understood her psychology and I saw a way into her pretty quickly. There were certain moments that I latched onto, that I immediately knew I wanted to watch an actress portray. For example, there was one scene in the script – it ended up being cut – but there was a beautiful scene where she gives this monologue about feeling like she has a clogged pipe in her brain and needing something to unclog it. So much of this character was explained in that moment.” Campos saw the moment as a lens into a greater depiction of the character’s mind. “She was someone whose biggest challenge was herself. How she filtered external reality through her mindset. She had this idea that it was her against the world.”

For Campos, Christine marks the first feature he directed without having written. Nevertheless, Campos – who developed the script with Shilowich after coming on board – felt a clear resonance linking the film to his previous works. “For me, there is a thread that links from Robert in Afterschool to Simon in Simon Killer, and on to Christine. There's similar struggles there. There's a very different tone at times in Christine. But it felt like a natural next step for me in some way. It's almost like in some way it's an unofficial trilogy of some sort. These three characters are all people who look at themselves. Christine is obsessed with watching herself, Robert was obsessed with watching himself. There’s an obsession with watching other people to try to understand the world.”

Additionally, both Afterschool and Christine feature – as their defining events – deaths that are captured on video. Campos acknowledged the clear linkage. “I don't fully know why I'm obsessed with that sort of thing, but I feel like it's so much a part of my life experience, this sense of what someone looks like on a screen. Part of being a director, for me, is that I'm always aware of the fact that I'm there behind the camera and that there's this crew and that we're shooting something. For some reason, I'm interested in seeing actors doing something in front of the camera that I'm really doing in some shape or form behind the camera. I think in modern culture we have an obsession with filming ourselves, what we look like, watching other people in moments where they don't realize they're being filmed. I think that’s part of being a human in this day and age.”

To cast his central role, Campos reached out to Rebecca Hall, whom he’d admired for some time. “I had seen her in a play on Broadway called Machinal where she gave this incredible performance. I was just blown away by her on stage and I knew that she could do this role.”

For Hall, the desire to work with Campos was fully reciprocated from the moment they met. "Well, I think he has a really distinctive style and I thought that that’s what this piece needed to make sense," Hall explained. "It needed have a style and sensibility that was evocative of the films of the '70s, like Network, but also was its own thing. And Ithought Antonio was really unique and I could tell that about him from the moment I met him. He has a really intuitive understanding of how to tell an emotional story and he's able to bring that to the screen. He's able to create unease and tension on film in a way that I don't know many other film directors are capable of creating, apart from maybesomeone like Michael Haneke. I think he's a seriously great talent of a filmmaker. From the moment I met him I thought, there's no way I'm not doing this."

Hall was immediately struck by the power of the script. “I read it and I was shocked by how brilliantly the story was handled, how it struck me as being about so much more than her suicide,” Hall explained. “You know, there's this woman who's in a state of nervous breakdown and there's also a nation in a state of nervous breakdown. And it felt to me in many ways about America in the mid-70s as much as that one woman. I also think that mental illness and suicide is something we're all a bit frightened of talking about, even though it affects maybe all of us indirectly in some way or another. That to me felt like something worth addressing in a performance, and in the script it was intelligently handled.”

INSIDE CHRISTINE

We meet Christine Chubbuck as an up-and-coming reporter at a local news station in Sarasota. She conducts in-the-field segments as well as in-studio interviews for her own program. Ambitious and principled, seeking to report on hard-hitting news rather than the smaller matters she’s often relegated to, Chubbuck often clashes with her boss Michael (Tracey Letts), and harbors a crush on the station’s lead anchor, George Peter Ryan (Michael C. Hall). When the station’s owner Bob Anderson (John Cullum) comes to town, with news spreading that one or two reporters may be moved to a bigger station Anderson owns in Baltimore, Chubbuck immediately starts attempting to seize on the opportunity.

“Right from the start, I wanted to show a certain ambition in Christine,” Campos explained. “I always wanted to show Christine obsessing over how to become a better journalist. The film’s story could have taken a very different turn. It could have been a story of an odd quirky girl who makes it in the rough-and-tumble world of broadcast journalism. I wanted to come into it with that kind of playfulness. So the Bob Andersen sequence is about capturing the manic turn that she takes, into ambition. I wanted to make the audience forget that it’s a story about a woman who kills herself. She doesn’t know she’s going to kill herself. So it was important to me that the beginning of the film had a different kind of energy.”

For Hall, capturing that spirit of Chubbuck’s ambition so that the audience might sympathize with her was a crucial starting point to her performance. “The most important thing for me was creating a portrait of Christine as someone you could root for, because if it’s just a portrayal of someone who’s depressed, that’s not enough. To see someone who's desperately trying to survive but who doesn’t fit into any molds, who's trying very, very hard and is hopeful, but then doesn’t make it in the end, I think that’s powerful.”

As the film progresses, a comprehensive portrait of Chubbuck’s mannerisms, hobbies and behaviors is revealed – she lives with her mother, Peg (J. Smith-Cameron), has trouble dating, and performs puppet shows for children at a local hospital. For Hall, the wide breadth of the script with respect to Chubbuck’s life enabled her to dial her performance into much nuance. “I was really dead-set on was creating someone who was a fully developed person, a difficult person. She didn’t behave as people expected women to behave. She didn’t speak as women were expected to speak and she didn’t want things the way people were expected to want things. She was immensely likable and immensely funny, not always on purpose. I wanted to lean into her humor, because she’s kind of a goofball at times, and I thought that sort of humanized her. I didn’t want her to be self-pitying. At the same time, she think’s she’s constantly failing at everything so she's constantly doing a performance of normality for the rest of the world. It was a challenge, to show her performance while simultaneously showing the truth behind her performance.”

As Christine begins trying to win the reporting spot at the Baltimore station, she finds herself butting heads with Michael, who urges her to engage in the kind of lighter journalism that Christine finds to be trivial and cloying. Ultimately, she begins to relent for the sake of winning the big job, but at the expense of her self-respect. “I really liked the idea that she's someone who had convictions and passions about a certain kind of journalism and then tries to play the game, and in that process loses sight of what she was trying to do to begin with,” Campos explained. “You know, whatever artistic endeavor you're in, there's always the conflict of staying true to your beliefs against trying to play the game, and if you do try to play the game, knowing how to play it without losing sight of what it was that you wanted to do to begin with. That’s what happens to Christine ultimately, and I think that’s when she starts to lose hope.”

As Christine’s anxieties about her job situation increase, her social awkwardness becomes increasingly pronounced. In one scene, she notices a happy couple at a restaurant, and – after sitting at the bar, alone, for some time – approaches them, inquiring as to how they met and what their relationship is like, ostensibly under the auspices of doing a story about relationships for the TV station, when in actuality her motivation for the conversation appears to be more driven by loneliness. In another sequence, she wades through Bob Anderson’s house at a July 4th party, looking lost in a sea of socializing. “For me, shooting that scene was almost like going for a Hitchcock effect,” Campos explained. “I wanted to break down her walking from one side of the room to the other and milk it, her social awkwardness in that environment. I wanted to make the audience feel the room the way she feels the room. I like communicating disorientation by cutting people out of frames, by using whatever stylistic tools I can to make the things feel dreamy and disorienting for the audience.”

Christine’s ongoing crush on George, her coworker, is another constant source of anxiety for her, one that seems to be lessened when George appears to ask her out on a dinner date. It’s a moment of high validation for Christine, one Hall wanted to fully utilize. “When we were trying to determine the wardrobe for that scene, I said that I thought she should be wearing something that shows a lot of skin,” she explained. “Usually she's not in control of her sexuality, but maybe for once, for one night, she decides to be sexy and perform femininity and be gorgeous and daring.” Hall found Michael C. Hall’s performance to be deeply helpful as she attempted to convey Christine’s emotions on the date. “Michael went through all the hair and makeup and the wardrobe and everything, and he came out the other end looking so brilliantly of the period. He looked like Ryan O’Neal. I kept looking at him and I kept imagining that Christine would actually have a poster of someone like Ryan O'Neal. She probably loved those blond, perfect-looking guys of that period. George is that, but Michael also brought a sort of faded glamour to the role. He struck a perfect balance. Through Christine’s eyes, he's the most perfect man in the world.”

Ultimately, the date with George ends up going terribly awry. George reveals to Christine that he, in fact, has been chosen to get the job at the Baltimore station – and what’s more, he recommended to Anderson that the attractive sports reporter go with him. On top of that, George ends up taking Christine to a local gymnasium, where a group that lies somewhere between a self-help organization and a cult is having a meeting. George is a member of the group, and he tells Christine he’s brought her because he believes the group might help her with her anxieties. Crucially for Campos, Christine initially attempts to go along with the group’s session. “Well, it was important that she is trying, that the situation’s not totally hopeless for her. At that point in the narrative, she still believes that the guy that she has a crush on is bringing her into something that’s for her, that he's doing this for her. She ends up talking to a stranger, being asked very intimate questions by a stranger, and I think she feels safer opening up in that scenario. She does open herself up in a way that we haven't seen and we hear a lot of things about her that we've never known before. At the same time, the exercise fails for her, and that begins to plant the idea for her that there is no other option for her once the things that she wants don't come to fruition. So I wanted to plant the seeds that explain why she does what she does later on.”