An interview with CHRISTINE star Rebecca Hall and director Antonio Campos!!!

Hey everyone. Capone here. One of the truly great films out right now that you might have to search for if you want to see it is director Antonio Campos’ remarkable CHRISTINE, starring Rebecca Hall. The film premiered way back in January at Sundance, where I had a little coverage help from one Mr. Matt Hoffman, who picked up a few reviews and interviews that my schedule didn’t allow me to get. Matt talked to Campos and Hall about the film, and I’ll let him take it away. Please enjoy…


The respective works of both director Antonio Campos and actress Rebecca Hall have been well know among a certain filmgoing community for the past few years, but if you aren’t familiar with their work, you will soon. The indie-director has united with the actress for his most controversial film yet, the spine-tingling CHRISTINE. Based on a true story, the 1970s-set film chronicles a period in the career of Sarasota news reporter Christine Chubbuck (Hall). Christine is desperate to be taken seriously at her station, but it continually tasked with reporting on frivolous local matters. Until she can find a story “that bleeds,” Christine’s boss (Tracy Letts) relegates her to under-fascinating matters. When she is finally fed up with being dismissed by those around her, Christine decides to take action.

Many viewers may have seen Hall in Woody Allen’s VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA or IRON MAN 3, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll recognize her in CHRISTINE. Donning a wig, fake eyebrows, and one hell of a weird accent, Hall jumps off the screen in what is undoubtedly the strongest performance of her career. Following the Sundance premiere, I spoke with Hall and Campos about the film and it’s difficult subject matter, the challenges in bringing Christine’s life to the screen, the film’s unavoidably shocking ending [look for the SPOILER WARNING], and more.





Matt Hoffman: How do you prepare to create Christine Chubbuck when there is so little material for you to draw from?

Rebecca Hall: It's genuinely a difficult thing to talk about. I firmly believe that acting is a creative process. I think there are roles where a lot of it is—it’s always all me because it's my choices, but I find it interesting to try and work out what my unconscious and my conscious creates imaginatively to create another person. For me, it's always like that. At the end of the process, I probably end up learning something about myself or about that person that I didn't understand in the first place. That's why I love doing what I do.

So this was a more extreme version of that. I had a jumping off point; I had 15 minutes worth of TV footage of her doing the “Suncoast Digest” segment that she had. Taking 15 minutes of someone presenting on television out of context and doing an impersonation of that doesn't make any sense because it's not going to be indicative of how they behave across the board. So I'd stare at that and think about it and listen to it and walk around with it. Then I'd let my motivation work and the rest sort of happened. A lot of it is instinctive and a lot of it is learning to love a character and trying to frame your imagination with someone that you can love and empathize and embody.



Antonio Campos: In some ways, it's actually liberating. It's like trying to adapt an obscure novella versus trying to adapt a very famous book. There's less of a public idea of her that you have to deal with. People don't know her, and we didn't know her. We could find people that knew her, but it wasn't her. We knew what we knew, and a lot of it is just making assumptions based on that. Our job was to tell a story and make a film; it wasn't a documentary.

At the end of the day if we felt like we were being true to the essence of this character and this person, then we were doing our jobs right. If we took some creative license here of there, it was all in service of trying to get to some truth about her and what she went through. If there were tons and tons of footage of her, I don't know what that process would have been like. It might have been harder in some way because you'd feel more of an obligation. The reality is that Rebecca was playing a character named Christine Chubbuck.

RH: I was playing the character written in the script. I couldn't go beyond that. I mean, you could make a film of someone's life exactly, but it wouldn't necessarily…

AC: It wouldn't be truthful.

Matt Hoffman: Why do you think the general public does not know about Christine?

AC: I think that people do, but it's a different time. This thing happened, it sent some shockwaves through the nation. People talked about it, but there was no footage; the footage did not ever get out. If it happened today, the footage would have been all over the internet and everybody would have known about it and everybody would have written about it. It was a small story in a lot of ways. It resonated with people who were paying attention, like Paddy Chayefsky obviously. It was a major turning point for him in writing NETWORK, but I think that people don’t' know it because there is no footage. It's almost more like it's an urban legend than it is a piece of history.

[SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THE REMAINDER OF THE INTERVIEW]

Matt Hoffman: Well Chayefsky claims that Christine's suicide inspired him to make changes to his script for NETWORK, yet the protagonist of that film Howard Beale is a man. Do you think Christine being a woman had anything to do with the response at the time, or perhaps why hers is not a better-known story?



RH: That's an interesting question. I think it's possible that...I mean I don't know. I think she had mental health problems. I don't know what the real Christine was suffering from because it wasn't diagnosed, but I could diagnose our Christine by reading the script. I could look at it with a modern eye and say that she had a borderline personality. I think that's a very difficult thing to diagnose; it often goes misdiagnosed every day. A lot of women suffer from it, and tragically it's often sidelined as "you're a difficult person" and ever more so, "you're a difficult woman.” I think in the ’70s if you were emotional and complicated and had disproportionate reactions to things, you would quickly be called a difficult woman, and people would pay less attention. I guess there might be some truth in what you're saying.

Matt Hoffman: I definitely think there's a through-line between Christine and your last two films SIMON KILLER and AFTERSCHOOL. These three films have an impending sense of doom from the moment they start, where it feels as if something terrible is going to happen. Since you didn't write the film, was that sense of doom what attracted you to it? Were you looking for something like that to complete this trilogy of sorts?

AC: There was a trajectory that I understood in it. The script did change when we started working together. I think it always started with Richard Nixon. I know that there were certain things that we added and that the end was always something we were working on. There was a trajectory that I recognized and I understood. The other question is, do I just impose that sense of doom on things that I do? It's hard for me to tell. I wonder that if you had no idea that she was going to kill herself if you would feel that way.



RH: I just spoke to a journalist who didn't know, she had no idea.

AC: What was her experience?

RH: She was profoundly shocked.

AC: That's what I figured. If you don't have any idea what you're walking into, then you don't know that she's going to kill herself. I think that if you didn't know about the story and you see the gun that you think there's a possibility that she's going to kill somebody else.

RH: It works both ways though. If you do know and then you're still rooting for her and then you desperately want her not to, that has merit in itself because it shows that we're invoking a compassionate response. That's the point of it, to empathize with someone who's very hard to empathize with.

Matt Hoffman: Going into the film, I was familiar with what Christine said before she killed herself, so when she began her short speech I looked around the theatre at the rest of the audience. Many people has there hands covering their eyes, obviously knowing what was coming, yet half the theatre gasped after she shot herself. Does it change how you make the film when you have to question whether your audience will know what will happen?

AC: It's something that we think about. The only thing we could do was to make every scene engaging and to feel a sense of hope that the character was trying, in some way, to overcome. So much of the film is her trying and failing. That's what's driving the film forward. When we get to where we get to, having had experienced everything, there's a shock but there's also an understanding. Even having watched it over and over again, there is always this part of me that hopes she won't do it. I know it's coming, and it pain's me to know that she's going to do it. Sometimes also when there are really good things that happen, like the date scene for example, when I'm sitting there watching it—this happens occasionally because I know the film so well—when I remember, "Oh, she's going to die,” then I get really sad.

RH: Well it's a tragedy. The film doesn't glorify what she does as some brave political act. The tragedy of it is that she gets to a point in our film where she looks at society and says, "So you want me play by your rules? Well I don't get to survive by your rules. I get to do it like this, because I don't have the tools to survive the way you want me to play it." There's not so much anger as there is defeat. It's a tragic thing; she shouldn't have done it.

AC: I think what we did nicely in the film is that we never explicitly say that. You can read into the conversation between the two puppets as a conversation between her Id and her Ego. There's this dialogue happening inside her head.

Matt Hoffman: Did you ever think about not showing the suicide?



AC: Yeah. We talked about it; we tried it. It wasn't right. It felt too much like a decision by a filmmaker as opposed to just the way the film was, which is just presenting everything the way it happened or the way that we thought it happened.

RH: The choice to cut to the TV monitor before she fires was very respectful. You have to see it to understand how horrible it is. You don't want to throw that away. You can't shy away from that.

AC: The idea of showing the TV was to try and make you feel like you could be watching it today on TV. Even the idea of framing it in 16:9, which is 2:35:1, was because I was framing it for a 16:9 television. When you watch it on a television it fills the frame; that's what I wanted. When you see that shot of the final TV it fills the frame in the way that you would see it on TV today.

That other thing about showing/not showing was that it goes by so fast, we don't dwell on it. For me, the more shocking thing is the fall after it with the realization that this isn't some big prank. Also that we never show it again, but you hear it and the character who's been pushing the idea of sensationalizing the news looks away while someone watches on. For us, it was like, “We'll show it, but there's going to be a progression of how we experience it.”

-- Matt Hoffman
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