INTERVIEW: Director Tim Sutton addresses gun violence in ‘Dark Night’ elegy

Tim Sutton, director of the new drama Dark Night, understands that his film will spark controversy. The elegiac movie is a deep meditation on violence in the United States and loosely based on the tragic massacre in Aurora, Colorado, at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. That 2012 incident is not the only source material for Sutton’s commentary on gun violence; he was also influenced by two similarly titled films, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and Alan Clarke’s Elephant.

“When Aurora happened, I remember like everyone in the country, I was horrified for the violence,” Sutton said recently in a phone interview. “I was horrified for the people in the theater and their families, and yet also as a filmmaker and as a moviegoer, I felt like something had really been corrupted in this place where everybody for a long time goes to dream and goes to be in the safety of those dreams. Collectively sitting there in a dark theater, kind of dreaming up there on the screen, has now been forever corrupted.”

At first, Sutton didn’t think about forming his ideas into a movie. That idea came later, only after one of his students decided to suggest Van Sant’s Elephant, which depicts a school shooting.

“I was teaching a class on hybrid filmmaking, the kind of gray area between documentary and fiction filmmaking, and I asked students to bring in a movie that I forgot to put on the syllabus,” he said. “A young woman brought in Elephant, and I had seen it many times. And I’m an admirer of Gus Van Sant. Actually Last Days is my favorite one of those films, but I realized just by watching that for the few minutes in class with my students that it was really important to continue that conversation, of realizing Gus Van Sant’s Elephant was kind of influenced by Alan Clarke’s Elephant about the Troubles in Ireland in a similar fashion. I thought it was important to continue that conversation, a direct cinematic response to violence.”

Before setting out to write the script, Sutton gave himself some ground rules. These guidelines are due to the obvious sensitivity of making a film so soon after a tragedy of this magnitude.

When viewers take in a screening of Dark Night, for example, they will realize that Sutton and his team refuse to showcase any violence. Unlike his cinematic inspirations for the project, the director decides to focus on the events leading up to the violent incident, but the actual attack is not on the screen. He feared audiences would think he was sensationalizing the content or romanticizing violence.

“I didn’t want it to be an entertainment,” he said. “It’s a much, much harder thing to experience without catharsis and having the catharsis of a traditional movie ending, and then I also decided to not make the movie about death. I wanted to make the movie about life, about how people live their lives, no matter how boring, no matter how mundane, no matter how isolated or strained or fun or goofy or whatever. I wanted that morning, noon, sunset, night to be about people and, in retrospect, about the fragility of those lives.”

With these ideas in mind, Sutton wrote the script for Dark Night in three weeks. In the film, a quick scene shows news footage from the actual Aurora massacre, which technically places the timing of Sutton’s fictional world after the movie-theater violence.

“Listen, it’s a strange world that I’ve put forth,” he said. “It’s an ethereal version of the real world, but it was very important. First of all, I was not adapting the events of Aurora into a movie. I was taking the idea that Aurora has happened, could happen again and will happen again because while I was making this movie, three mass executions happened. There was San Bernardino. There was the train wreck massacre in Lafayette, Louisiana, and there was, on the eve of its premiere, Orlando. So the idea was to include Aurora as part of the storytelling because I wanted it to feel like a living document. The film was being made in real time, in our time, not as a document of something past, but as a document of something that’s happening now.”

The actors in Dark Night are non-professionals, and that’s thanks to casting director Eleonore Hendricks, who worked on Sutton’s previous film, Memphis. The director said that Hendricks’ specialty is utilizing time and freedom in the real world to meet people who could work in the roles. During the casting process, she was following a vintage white Mercedes, and she pulled up next to the vehicle and was struck by the driver’s ice-blue eyes. She asked him to pull over, and they talked about the prospects of joining the film project.

“What you do is you go out, and you find real people who have a real kind of glow and a real kind of ability to live in front of the camera,” Sutton said. “Since I’m a filmmaker who’s not interested in necessarily people hitting marks or doing perfect amounts of dialogue, it’s better to have these real people, these non-actors in your movie because the audience will identify with them more. If you have Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, no matter how good they are, you’re still seeing a movie. Whereas if you’re in Dark Night, at times you’re seeing your neighbor or you’re seeing your daughter or you’re seeing the guy down the street that bothers you. You’re seeing yourself up on the screen, and so the non-acting device makes the movie more immersive for the audience and makes it more authentic.”

Throughout the film’s first 40 minutes, it’s difficult for the audience to figure out who the attacker might be. Eventually someone emerges who, as Sutton put it, is “demented” and “has a gun.” The reason the director keeps the audience guessing is because he wanted viewers to be conscious of their own views and prejudices.

“We all kind of bring our own ideas of what we’re scared of or what we are prejudiced of, our take on things,” he said. “So it’s complex, and it doesn’t make for a clear film-going experience. It’s much denser and much murkier, but those are the kind of films that immerse you more. So if you’re in it, you walk away from that film deeply, deeply feeling something, whether it’s complex feelings, or whether it’s sadness, or whether it’s the need to talk about the film rather than something that’s more straightforward. It might be easier to digest, but this one is harder to shake. And I think in a movie like this, it’s important that it sticks in people’s heads.”

The film has been positively received at film festivals, including Sundance and Venice. In fact, Dark Night picked up the coveted Lanterna Magica Award at the Venice Film Festival. Not all critics have recommended the film, and Sutton doesn’t believe every audience member will buy into his thesis. After all, the subject matter is a difficult challenge for many, many people.

“I think that it’s important that this film gets played in American cities where people can have a variety of views on it, that it won’t be universally lauded, that people will find it challenging,” he said. “People will find the need to talk about it. Some people will find it irresponsible. Some people will find it maddening. Some people will find it boring. Some people will like it. I’m very excited for any reaction that comes its way, and also the film will play in Denver. I will be at that screening, and we’ve been in touch with survivors’ groups of Aurora. And there’s some very upset people that the film exists, and I’m sensitive to that. I never meant to hurt anybody’s feelings in any way, but I also think the film is an elegy. The film is about our culture. I think it’s a challenging thing to make but a worthwhile thing to make and to view as well.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Dark Night is currently playing in New York City and opens in Los Angeles Feb. 9. Click here for the trailer.