Yesterday Republicans voted to roll back an Obama-era gun control rule on background checks for people with severe mental illnesses. The internet has been quick to point out the hypocrisy of citing the San Bernardino shooting as justification for Trump’s Muslim ban while failing to acknowledge the shootings carried out by white men: including Columbine, Charleston, and the 2012 Aurora movie massacre that sent the gun control debate into overdrive.
Director Tim Sutton started filming The Dark Night long before last November, but his gorgeous, chilling revisitation of the Aurora shooting — like Gus Van Sant’s controversial Elephant — feels very pertinent in 2017. The pseudo-documentary follows six people throughout the course of one day that culminates in a multiplex movie screening of The Dark Knight Rises. The film is shot in Sarasota, Florida, but the drab mall parking lots and neon-lit shooting ranges the strangers exist in are eerily nonspecific. The cast are all non-actors, and could all be the shooter — including a military vet struggling to connect with his family, a video game geek with an overbearing mother, and a skate rat who dyes his hair the same neon orange immortalized in James Holmes’ haunting mugshot. As Sutton says, they could all be people you know.
The Dark Night is out in select cinemas today, but Sutton wishes it had gotten a nation-wide multiplex release — not because of money, but because of the inevitable, theatrical ending. “When you watch it in a movie theater, the last eight minutes are so harrowing, because the screen disappears,” he tells me. “You could look to your left and see the same characters who are on the screen. We’re all in the same movie.” Here he talks about casting his shooter at a suburban traffic stop, culture’s celebration of destruction, and why art can effect change.

Your previous films include a Willis Earl Beal musical [Memphis] and a dreamy coming-of-age tale [Pavilion]. How much is this film a departure from anything you’ve done before?
What all my films share is an ethereal, dreamlike observational style. The difference is that those two films feel in their own world. Pavilion is modern-day, but it’s a timeless observation about youth. Memphis is specifically in its own world, where you don’t know if it’s 1950 or 1970 or the present time. For The Dark Night, I really wanted to make a movie about today — about right now. I thought the best way of doing that was approaching it through a specific social issue. With that being the goal, the film is like Elephant or Fruitvale Station in that it’s tied to specific events, but acts as a document that dreams on that event for a bigger purpose. It feels like a daydream and also feels like a nightmare.
You don’t typically work with actors or anyone with acting experience. How did you cast these people?
My casting director, Eleanore Hendricks — she also works with the Safdie brothers, she did the street casting for Beasts of the Southern Wild — you put her in a car in a certain city for a few weeks and let her explore. She goes to bars, she goes to high schools, she goes to beaches, she goes to laundromats. We found [the shooter] Jumper while she and my producer were following this cool old Mercedes. They pulled up next to the driver and looked over at him and asked him to pull over at the next stop, because his eyes were just out of control. In a place like L.A., you’d think these people were crazy and keep driving. But in a place like Sarasota, you don’t get stopped by a casting director all the time. People are interested. We do more traditional casting calls as well, but I still don’t want anyone with acting experience. I’d much rather work with people who can live authentically in front of a lens.
To what extent did you invent characters for these non-actors? The pseudo-documentary style is really interesting. One kid is being interviewed on the couch with his mom, like he is playing himself, but some of the other scenes are more like traditional movies.
I wrote a very specific story with very specific characters. I wanted a troubled teenager who had a smothering mother. I wanted a U.S. veteran home from the war. I wanted a psychopath who shouldn’t have access to guns. I wanted the skate punk who dyes his hair orange. So all that is scripted, but what they say in the script vs what they say in the film is different. For example, the vet: I didn’t want to work with an actor playing a vet, I wanted to work with a real U.S. veteran. So we auditioned numerous veterans, and I settled on Eddie. He looks very strong but is obviously hurting inside. The guy couldn’t act at all, so I said, “You don’t have to talk.” All of a sudden he became more comfortable because he didn’t have to take any risks. Jumper, the shooter — his character is all about wanting to be a superstar, so I treated him like one. I would have an assistant bring him to set so he got into that mindset of being special.

The characters all seem to share elements of the killer. One even dyes his hair orange. What was the reason behind this decision?
In this country, we’re all less than six degrees of separation from daily violence. If you’re walking through an empty parking lot and hear a loud crash, your mind immediately jumps to violence because of the climate in this country. I wanted to create a feeling of constant tension. Something is going to happen. Just going into this movie, you know what happens, and that’s key. It’s important part to have the audience bring their own thoughts and their own prejudices. Some people will see the kid dye his hair orange and think, “Oh God, he’s the shooter.” But in reality he’s just a punk, just a skate rat. Another person will see the troubled military guy who’s obsessed with his guns and can’t relate to his family — he must be the killer. Then you have the troubled teenager who’s under his mother’s thumb and lives in a fantasy world of video games. But we’ve all been troubled teenagers at some point, and had dark thoughts and confused feelings.
The shooter is also shown to be human, just as the victims are. What do you think about the Hollywood stereotype of killers as being cold and un-human?
I actually lost two possible financiers to this project because they demanded that I make the shooter character more typically evil — more Hollywood movie evil. I can’t say I understand what evil is, and I’m not saying that any of these shooters are evil or not evil. What I do know is that many of them are troubled. Many of them are isolated. Many of them have problems with communication. Many of them are depressed. I’m not making excuses for them, but I do believe that all these shooters are just as human as the bystanders, and need to be treated like that on screen.

A lot of scenes are viewed through layered screens, like Google Maps street view or first-person shooter video games. Why this blurring of fiction and real life?
Many people say that first-person shooter video games don’t make people violent. I don’t have any proof otherwise, but I think they are absolutely connected. Our culture celebrates games where the object is to go and kill people. That’s how you win. Or in Hollywood, vigilante superheroes destroy entire cities to beat the villain. Destruction is celebrated. Of course that’s going to affect people in real life. With the screens and Google Maps, I think we’re in a world where people are immersed in two things at once, and we’re all losing track. The selfie girl in the movie — that’s based on me. I’m not a selfie person, but I live a lot of my life on Instagram. Is an experience real if I don’t Instagram it? We can see anything, we can go anywhere, we can track anything now. There’s almost too much access to a cold space that is not reality.
The film is seeped with a strong sense of suburban malaise and monotony. Could you have made a similar film in a metropolitan city like New York?
I think it would be a very different movie. I wanted to make this film in a more vague or generic American city. It’s shot in Florida, and I didn’t pretend that it wasn’t shot in Florida, but it could have been shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Minneapolis, Minnesota. My original idea was to shoot the whole thing in a series of parking lots, so you’d be walking in one parking lot, enter a building, and come out in a different parking lot. At the same time, I wanted to show the manmade landscape taking over the natural landscape. It’s all very sterile and monotonous. I’m not knocking suburban culture, but I do think that whether you go to Dallas or Ohio, the strip malls are exactly the same, and there’s something been lost in that.
How do you hope art like this can affect people who do live in suburbia and have different political views to you and me?
My politics are very left wing. I don’t believe guns should exist at all. But it was important to put my politics aside and not judge but just observe that this is what it’s like. It’s important that artists and filmmakers continue to have art be a voice. I think Gus van Sant made a direct cinematic response to Columbine with Elephant. Before him, Alan Clarke made a direct cinematic response to the troubles in Ireland with his Elephant. This film is a direct cinematic response to the violence that unfortunately becomes more relevant every day. I hope some young filmmaker in two years from now makes The Dark Night 2, or makes Elephant 2. That’s all we can do as artists — continue the dialogue, and continue to make images that stimulate people to talk and to feel.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Images courtesy of Cinelicious