On June 25th, Tim Sutton screened his poignant new film called “Dark Knight” at the closing night of BAMcinemaFest, which is it in its 8th consecutive year.
“Dark Knight” was inspired by the Aurora movie theater shooting during the opening weekend of “The Dark Knight Rises” in 2012. Below, we have an exclusive interview with the director, Tim Sutton, who has had his movies premiere at BAMcinemaFest twice before.
The Knockturnal: Tell me about what inspired this movie.
Tim Sutton: Well, the Aurora cineplex massacre that happened in 2012…When that happened, as a regular person, I was just horrified for the people in the theater, and horrified for their families. As an American, I was horrified by this epidemic that’s happening with gun violence. But as a filmmaker, the movie theater itself had become unsafe and that a place where people had gone to dream had become really corrupted. And so…I didn’t write it right away, but then years later, it came to me again, and I thought, “Wow, nobody’s going to make this movie and somebody should make this movie.” So I went out, and I didn’t make a movie about violence, and I didn’t make a movie about death, I made a movie about how people live their lives. Because I think that’s getting lost in the process.
TK: How did you decide what specific stories to tell?
Tim Sutton: I wanted it to feel like America. I didn’t want it to feel like Brooklyn America, or LA America. I wanted it to feel like America and in America I think there’s a lot of vets home from Iraq. And I think there are a lot of people taking selfies and trying to get known, and I think there are a lot of teenagers who don’t know what to do with their lives. I wanted to create archetypes, not stereotypes. Archetypes of people that I think we all know. And if we don’t know them, we know of someone who knows them. Including the shooter. Who’s just another person who just happens to be way too troubled to have access to a gun.
TK: Did you come by any difficulties while shooting this movie, or trying to put it together?
Tim Sutton: Trying to put it together, yeah, it’s really hard trying to finance a film like this. I think it’s a lot easier to finance a film if you promise a lot violence and a lot of action and a lot of stars, and this film has none of that. This film is a contemplative movie about where we are in the threat of violence. For financiers, they were like, “Ah, it all sounds good, but…” and “If you could get Joaquin Phoenix in here, then we’d go for it.” Things like that. So the challenge in financing was very real. So we had to push it up the hill ourselves. The actual shooting and editing the film was seamless, easy, awesome. That’s the fun part.
TK: Was it important to you not to have stars, like Joaquin Phoenix, so it could be representative?
Tim Sutton: Absolutely. You can’t have Joaquin Phoenix in a movie, because you know Joaquin Phoenix is, you know, “the bad guy.” Right? So the point is to put a movie together who we all know but are still anonymous. David Lynch said something interesting…he said, “You don’t go into my kind of world while Charlton Heston.” Because Charlton Heston, everyone has things like, “Oh, I know what this movie’s about.” But if you put people in who you kind of know but aren’t stars, anything can happen. And that’s this kind of movie.