Domestic Violence: David Christensen’s Six Figures

By Adam Nayman

It would be accurate to say that Six Figures isthe most underrated Canadian feature in recent memory. It would also be understating the case. Largely ignored last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival and rushed into theatrical release in order to qualify for Canada’s Genie awards (it received only one nomination, for best original screenplay), by Calgary-based writer-director David Christensen’s first feature has not received one-tenth of the attention accorded to countryman David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence—a film that isn’t even Canadian.

This disparity isn’t surprising: Cronenberg is Canada’s pre-eminent narrative filmmaker, and A History of Violence is a fine piece of work. But it doesn’t cut particularly deep. When Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall returns home from his killing spree to take his place at the head of the family table, it’s a mordant joke (his daughter presents him with a bloody slab of meatloaf and some Mantle retractor-calibre implements with which to carve it) with no real fear behind it: Daddy’s got a temper, but there’s no reason to expect his brood will ever bear its brunt. The ending of Six Figures also describes the uneasy return of a father figure, but where Tom Stall is quite clearly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Warner (JR Bourne) is another animal altogether: it’s entirely possible that earlier in the film, he attacked his wife Claire (Caroline Cave) with a hammer, putting her into a coma.
Christensen’s debut, adapted from a novel by Fred Leebron, is a whodunit with only one real suspect. Everything we see before the attack suggests that Warner and Claire’s marriage has become strained, and that their decision to buy an expensive house in Calgary despite their foundering finances (she works at a small art gallery) and Warner’s probationary status at work (where he’s been set up as a fall guy) is a dubious one. They give off the signals of a couple in severe distress; meeting with a real estate agent, they fail to present a united front; their rental home has toys on the floor and stains on the carpet; a dinner with the in-laws turns quietly snide; a would-be romantic idyll over glasses of wine devolves into a mutual bitch session.
There is a savage argument at Claire’s gallery—in full view of their two young children—and then we see Warner driving around in an agitated state, the kids asleep in the backseat of the car. In the very next scene—an elegant, backtracking take that works to steadily distance us from the approaching horror—a male figure comes upon Claire, alone on her knees, boxing up paintings behind translucent curtains, strikes her, and departs.
As Claire languishes in the hospital and the police investigation stalls, both sides of the couple’s family enter the fray. Claire’s controlling mother Louise (Deborah Grover) tries to convince anyone who will listen that Warner, whom she has always disapproved of, is guilty. Her in-laws Alan (Frank Adamson) and Ruth (Joyce Gordon) offer only nominal support, nervously tiptoeing around their son even as he strenuously (if coldly) maintains his innocence. Warner’s relationships with his parents are fraught with tension, and the sudden prevalence of these older characters cues us that this is not so much a film about a man who may have assaulted his wife than an examination of inherited behaviour and how intimacy clouds rather than enhances understanding. “Nobody knows anybody,” says one character late in the proceedings, and while this bit of dialogue might seem uncharacteristically declarative in contrast to the rest of Christensen’s beautifully modulated screenplay, it’s as eloquent a summation of the film’s themes as any critic might devise.
Canadian critics are the only ones who’ve seen Six Figures, and they’ve been fairly kind,but if it were a subtitled film—or if it had someone else’s name on it, like, say Atom Egoyan—it might have been properly hailed as a masterpiece. (That it was not officially selected for Canada’s annual Top Ten is a scandal.) Christensen, an estimable short filmmaker and documentarian (his verite-ish 2005 film War Hospital neatly surveys the swarm of activity at a crowded Kenyan field hospital), works in an austere, palpably European style, framing most of the dialogue scenes in long two-shots and often letting scenes drift beyond their obvious endpoint. The compositions are clever without being ostentatious—a few pivotal shots, like Claire applying makeup in a bathroom mirror or Warner frowning behind a car’s windshield, half-obscured by the reflection of bare tree branches, carry the cool tingle of Michael Haneke at his best. The images are so powerfully weighted, in fact, that the film often feels like it’s on the verge of ending, even in the first hour.
Christensen’s style is terrifically assured, and, more importantly, sustained; the film feels suffused with anxiety but never once boils over into melodrama. And the performances are remarkable: Bourne’s got the barely sheathed irritation that passes for professional demeanour down pat (Warner’s forced smiles when dealing with his unctuous boss will prompt shivers of recognition for anyone who’s ever worked anywhere) and his handsomeness has a bland, formless quality (exacerbated by Christensen’s decision to shoot him almost exclusively in medium shots.) Cave, who almost didn’t appear in the film (a stage production in Toronto fell through), downplays Claire’s impending-victim status and makes her bracingly brittle and, at times, completely unsympathetic.
During the course of our correspondence, I suggested to Christensen—an ardent cinephile who worked as a critic and programmer before turning his attention to filmmaking—that an alternate title for his unsettling almost-thriller might well be A History of Violence. He responded that a better choice might actually be Cache, adding“I can only hope that I make a film that approaches either of those two one day.” Funny thing is, he already has. It may sound like an astonishing claim for an unheralded little movie from the prairies, but Six Figures, which is precise and powerful and very nearly flawless, is totally worthy of consideration on the international stage. 

Cinema Scope: Let’s start with the opening credit sequence of Six Figures. The titles and the score seem indebted to Hitchcock and his frequent collaborators: Saul Bass, certainly, and maybe even a little Bernard Herrmann in the score. It’s like a hint that this will, in fact, be a thriller, even though it isn’t really.

David Christensen: I was thinking a lot about Hitchcock before I made Six Figures, but that mostly had to do with his use of sound rather than his visuals. I think that Vertigo (1958) has one of the best sound designs this side of Bresson and I watched that film a lot (and sometimes just listened to it) before starting on the production of my film. I remember at one point broaching the idea of creating the soundtrack for Six Figures in mono and getting a whole bunch of strange looks. Anyway, it’s certainly possible that Saul Bass’ credit sequences from Hitchcock’s films unconsciously seeped into the thinking about Six Figures’ credits. But it wasn’t anything overt.
            Because Six Figures is mostly interiors, I really wanted to establish the city where the film took place in the credit sequence. So Trevor Smith, my production designer, and I went out and took a whole bunch of photos of Calgary and used them for the credit sequence. And since there’s this motif of opacity and frames that run through the film—characters are placed behind frosted glass and the like—we incorporated that and other motifs into the credit sequence. 
            I agree with you about the hint with these credits that the film might be a thriller, when it isn’t. Right from the start, I was adamant that Six Figures wasn’t a thriller and it was a tough slog working against script notes from funders who wanted to see more of the investigation or have Warner take matters into his own hands and track down the person who tried to brain Claire. Yuck. I wasn’t interested in any of this, of course. I’d seen all of that before and I thought most people had too. 

Scope: Did the idea of letting dialogue scenes play out in longer takes and two-shots—as opposed to the usual shot-reverse shot patterns—derive from your experience in documentary filmmaking?

Christensen: I don’t know that it did derive from my documentary work. I know that it was something I explored in making the documentaries, but I think even then I was actually influenced by fiction filmmaking when I was thinking about it there. So many of the touchstone films for me are ones that experiment with longs takes and wide frames. I certainly knew going in that this was the way I wanted to shoot Six Figures. I thought that by letting scenes play out in as few takes as possible I get more interesting performances from the actors. Instead of chopping up their performance, I was interested in letting them just run with the character in the scene. It was fun and exciting—since if a scene didn’t work out, I had no way of cutting around it.
            Paradoxically, I think that by limiting my methods and my tools while shooting—like not cutting into scenes, using the same lens, keeping the camera at the same height and repeating camera set-ups rather than varying them—the film is actually more expressive than if I had indulged in all sorts of choices. That’s a direct rip-off of Bresson, as you probably know, but then who better to learn from? Plus, to be perfectly honest, I knew that I could make the film this way and I wasn’t sure I could with all sorts of camera set-ups. Not that I couldn’t do multiple set-ups as a director, but given that we only had 20 days to shoot this picture, I wasn’t sure I could do it as a producer.  With all sorts of time spent on various camera set-ups, we wouldn’t have been able to stick to our schedule. Lest you get the wrong impression, however, the aesthetic came first and then came the logistics of the production. The two just happened to gibe. 

Scope: You’ve talked about Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000) as being a big influence.

Christensen: I remember the day that my cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin and I went to a coffee shop to meet with Trevor Smith, who had been suggested to us as a production designer. I’d never met Trevor before and so I had no idea about what sort of thoughts he had about the script. Patrick and I sat down and pretty much the first thing that Trevor says is “your script really reminds me of Edward Yang’s films.” It made us smile, since Patrick and I talked about Edward Yang’s films at great length. We’d watch A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi and discuss his long takes and his wide framing. We’d look at how he used mirrors and reflections and how he shot through windows. He’ll often repeat the same set-up, taking you back to a particular place with the same camera angle—but now the emotion of the place has changed based on what’s come before and so you end up seeing the location anew. Both of us liked the fact that he saved his close-ups for when he really needed them and didn’t gratuitously dole them out. Objects and props work on multiple levels in his films and a lot of what characters think remains unspoken. We’d soak in those films. In fact, we joked at one point about taping a small note to the side of the camera: "What would EY do?" 

Scope: There’s a similar integration of style and meaning in your film. Did you think in pictures while writing the screenplay, or were a lot of the key images (like the moment where Claire’s face is bisected in the bathroom’s mirror) in Fred Leebron’s novel? 

Christensen: I like the scene of Claire in the bathroom a lot (come to think of it, there are a lot of bathroom scenes in this film for some reason), but it isn’t in the book. Yes, I thought in pictures all throughout writing the script and right up into pre-production. Fred’s book wasn’t particularly visual and I knew I needed to find stylistic ways to communicate the meaning behind the dialogue—since very often a character says one thing and yet thinks or desires something else. 
            I didn’t storyboard—well, I did try it for one small section of the script and found that it asphyxiated the scene. It’s better to carry the scene around with you in your head—that way it doesn’t become ossified. But I had a pretty good idea early on in the scripting process about how I was going to shoot each scene. My cinematographer and I would just sit and talk about the script—we’d figure out ways to visually show meaning and emotion, and since I didn’t want to have any throwaway shots in the film we were quite precise in what we discussed. I wanted every shot to count for something, to mean something. It wasn’t good enough to second-guess the audience and say, “Okay, they’re probably getting bored of this shot; let’s cut to another angle.” Not a good enough reason. From the acting on down, I tried to plan for everything, but once I got on set, I also tried to forget about everything I prepared. But you need a structure, and knowing how each scene will be shot in advance is one way of providing that structure.

Scope: One thing that no one has really talked about yet is the script’s implicit critique of materialism. Not only the “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” nature of Warner and Claire’s predicament, but the running joke that their tantrum-prone daughter can only be mollified by going to the mall.

Christensen: And she is always in the bathroom too...

Scope: I’m also thinking of the exchanges between Claire and her boss at the art gallery—about the plan to relocate to an aesthetically inferior location to increase walk-through traffic and, thus, profits.

Christensen: The film takes place in Calgary and Calgary is, for me, all about making profits at the expense of most everything else. I generalize, of course, and yet there are certain characteristics about a place that provide a broad overview of its mental make-up. For instance, Calgary’s rush hour starts at about 6 in the morning—the arteries leading into downtown are crammed with cars as people rush to be into the office for 7am. The city tears down interesting buildings and replaces them with large, desperately nostalgic-looking edifices that are parking garages. Mall culture is huge here. And everything is very oil business-orientated, like the art gallery in the film. 
            So, yes, the film is a comment on materialism, but perhaps the reason that no one has really talked about it is because I don’t think it overwhelms the story itself. I didn’t want to have the obvious shots of big cars, big houses, fancy dinners, or large purchases. I got a lot of suggestions at the script stage that basically said that we needed to see Warner’s car alongside an expensive SUV, or Claire bringing home an expensive dress. Those suggestions are usually for the benefit of people who can’t imagine a film without everything spelled out on the page. I always argued that by simply salting in elements here or there—like the house they want to buy, or the car that’s on its last legs—that audiences would get the point. 

Scope: Claire’s mother declares that “nobody really knows anybody,” but each of the major characters (even Claire’s late father) are extremely well developed. That’s why I started thinking about the title as referring to something other than Warner’s preferred income. There are five important, major characters—Warner and his parents and Claire and her mother—plus one unknown “figure.”

Christensen: In the book, the story was told from six different perspectives. I didn’t do that with the script since I felt I needed to make Warner and Claire the characters through which most of the film was told. But yes, you’re right—the sixth figure is the person who hits Claire and puts her in the hospital. And, of course, I’m always asked who that figure is.  Pardon me if I don’t tell you what I think. I like films where the audience has to meet them halfway and my aesthetic invites that participation. When you watch a wide shot, a part of you wants to get in closer than you are. And if I deny that, then you go around me and imaginatively work your way in closer. You step into the scene, as it were, in your own mind, and in doing that you bring all sorts of personal experiences to bear upon the scene. In the same way, if I hide something from you, you will try and find a way to see it. If someone’s back is turned or if they are hidden behind a wall, you imagine what they look like. You might even try and lean to one side to see around the corner, like the famous Polanski anecdote when he filmed Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). It’s a far more interactive way of watching a movie than if I simply gave you everything all the time, like so many films do today. So when I conceal the person who hit Claire, you as a viewer bring all sorts of personal experiences to the fore when you decide who did it. I like to say that your decision about who hit Claire says more about you than it does about the movie.

Six Figures

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