Kitty Green
“Casting JonBenet”
Australian filmmaker Green had only a few directing credits to her name when her latest feature film “Casting JonBenet” was picked up by Netflix before its world premiere at Sundance. The film continued the audition tape framework laid out by her 2015 short, “The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul,” which won a jury prize at Sundance and combined narrative and documentary filmmaking.
“Because I studied narrative filmmaking, I like having a certain amount of control over the frame and production design,” Green says. “I like those sort of elements that you get control over in fiction, and I want to continue to somehow incorporate those elements into my films if I can.”
“Casting JonBenet” took a little under two years to complete. “We had the original treatment, and the final film is remarkably similar to that,” she says. “It was quite well-structured and it was about slotting in the human story from the authentic material to a preconceived structure.”
Although Green remembers being fascinated by JonBenet Ramsey’s 1996 murder case as a child, she chose the story to fit the casting conceit, since she felt that for the framework to function, the film would need a central mystery. “Casting JonBenet” is not so much about the case itself, however, as the community of Boulder, Colo., and why people continue to obsess over Ramsey’s case. “My interest in JonBenet stemmed out of the way that Patsy Ramsey, her mother, was treated by the media and how the public viewed her and almost made a villain out of her straight away,” Green says.
– Erin Nyren
