Robert Greene discusses his compelling documentary, Kate Plays Christine

“A lot of things struck me about it,” Kate Plays Christine director Robert Greene says of the suicide of Christine Chubbuck, a news anchor who shot herself on air in 1974. “There was the fact that her suicide was so sensationalistic, even though she was protesting sensationalism. Also, she was performing the end of her life in a sense, which was very upsetting and strange. I was also fascinated that there was so little information about her life, and even her death. There was a tape that existed but no-one could see it, so there was this immediate impulse to know. 
“That feeling certainly informed the style of the film. I thought, ‘Well I can’t know, and I’m not allowed to know – so I can’t make this film in a straightforward kind of way.’”
Greene’s uncertainty meant that he took ten years between first hearing about Chubbuck to making Kate Plays Christine. During that time he was forced to repeatedly confront his motivations for exploring the mindset of a woman who killed herself in such a public way. 
“That questioning of motives is deeply embedded in the whole thing,” admits Greene. “Those deep-seated doubts I had about whether this was worthy or okay – if we can turn those feelings into something you see play out onscreen, I think it makes the audience question why we’re watching, and that could be instructive.”
Greene’s desire to be instructive fuels his position as “filmmaker in chief” at the University of Missouri. His department received a grant from Jonathan Murray, the co-creator of MTV’s Real World, credited with launching the modern reality TV genre. Greene’s philosophy, both in the classroom and behind the camera, is that documentary’s unchallenged claim to truth needs to be rethought.
“A camera and editing fictionalises reality,” the director asserts. “When you have a camera on a person, you have a performance. When you have an edit, you have a rupture of whatever was recorded. And all of that is in a frame that is not reality. That’s not real – there is no real. You can have a relationship to the real, and to the truth, and that’s the best we can hope for.”
The frame of Kate Plays Christine is a film within a film; we watch actress Kate Lyn Shiel prepare for a biopic about Chubbuck that never comes to fruition, and becoming increasingly agitated by the process. 
“It’s not a game or a gimmick,” says Greene of the film’s unique structure. “It’s meant to put you in the psychology of a mind that was dealing with the things Christine was dealing with; that disconnect from reality, the alienation, the awareness of society’s voyeurism, particularly when it comes to women. We’re not trying to explain why Christine took her life, because we can’t know that. But it will hopefully evoke some of those feelings, and give a tiny glimpse of what she struggled with. But it’s also about Kate and how she grapples with playing that.”
One of the aspects that makes the film compelling is that the audience is never sure of who has the control; the director, the actress, or both. This ambiguity also emerged during filming. 
“Kate had so much more control than people believe,” laughs Greene. “There was one scene where she’s walking downstairs, and she didn’t want to do it. She thought it was stupid and melodramatic, and she actually started crying and went off into a room upstairs. I felt terrible. I was – as her friend – going up to check on her, and she was getting madder and madder at me. When we finally shot the scene, she fell on the first take and really hurt herself, and I felt like the worst person for making her do it. Months later she says to me, ‘I was crying because I thought you would come up and film me. I thought your instinct as a filmmaker would overcome your instinct as a friend. I just wasted those tears!’ The whole shoot had this all-at-once feeling, everything was connected – our selves, the performance, the capturing of that.”
Greene is aware that the film’s self-reflexivity and constant assertion that it can never “know” anything, will be frustrating to lovers of traditional documentaries.
“I actually think we’re being more documentarian by putting it all out there,” he argues, “and making the questioning of what you’re watching part of the watching experience. The film is eating itself alive as you’re watching, and it’s failing. It’s meant to fail as you’re watching. That was always the intention. So when people get mad and frustrated, I love it! We should be mad, and frustrated.”
Ever the professor, Greene wants audiences to learn from his film.
“If we accept that the only thing that is true about a documentary is that they are a mix of authentic and fabricated, then audiences can’t be exploited anymore. I like to think there’s a chance that you could watch Kate Plays Christine, and not watch the latest Netflix documentary in the same way. Hopefully it will make people active rather than passive viewers.”

Kate Plays Christine is in cinemas from October 14.