“You will not see a more emotionally-engaging Batman movie than ‘LEGENDS OF THE KNIGHT’ in your entire life.” (Kevin Smith)
It is truly my honor to interview the man behind the Legends of the Knight, Filmmaker Brett Culp.
Shadow Quill (SQ): Brett, thank you so much for the interview. When we talked at the San Diego Comic-Con I understood the goal of the movie was to demonstrate the ways in which Batman inspired people and what kind of an influence this superhero has, is that correct?
Brett Culp (BC): Yes. It’s a multi-layered film, I’ll speak to couple of layers, because different people are going to see different things in the film. It started for me as a journey to explore the impact of storytelling on people. In our lives, we are inundated with stories, fictional or real, in television, movies, music, dance, art, and everything else – at the heart of it is always a story, and when we hang out with friends or sit around the dinner table we tell stories about what’s going on in our lives.
As a documentary filmmaker, I’ve spent my life watching that Story change people, in how the see the world or how they see themselves or other people. So I really wanted to explore that. As I was looking for a way to understand how that was working, it felt like geek culture, where people are such fans of the stories, was a great way in. Then I wanted to get even more specific and pick a specific story within our culture and explore that. And Batman was just the perfect way to do it, because the character has been around for nearly 75 years now, so we could interview multiple generations of people who have been exposed to this character. Also, the character has existed in so many different formats and styles, from the silly campiness to the dark seriousness and everything in between. From Frank Miller all the way to Adam West, there is a huge spectrum of Batman.
SQ: At the Comic-Con panel you mentioned that you thought of this project when your son was told that he wouldn’t succeed in life, and you saw him in a cape fighting all these stereotypes and stigmas, can you tell me more about that and what the documentary means to you personally?
BC: I didn’t know it then, but looking back, there was a part of me that wanted to speak on my son’s behalf. That’s another level meaning in the movie: one of the things I love about Batman is that he chooses his own destiny, and, unlike many other superheroes, his own identity. So that popular “I’m Batman” phrase is more than just a good catch-line, it is, from a psychological, emotional perspective, an outward projection of an inward decision to not be a victim – to not allow a circumstance or a challenge or another person or genetics to define who you are.
This wasn’t just because we were in denial – because it turns out we were right and she (son’s teacher) was wrong, but it brought up that Batman-like spirit in me where I wanted to shake my fist at the sky and say, “I will defeat all crime for the rest of my life.” Raising a child is a long term commitment, so for us, there was a Batman-like commitment we made to not be controlled, to not be victims, to not be defined by a spirit of weakness or the judgment of someone else. So I started doing the research on this and started to talk to people who had been influenced by Batman about the influence of this character – Batman doesn’t inspire people to go sit on a mountain and be Zen, he doesn’t inspire people to read more books or get educated, and those are all good things, but he inspires people to bring out that dogged, determined, never-say-die, never surrender, you-can’t-stop-me, I-cannot-be-beaten kind of attitude.
Every story that goes through this film, as I started talking to people who really loved this character and felt he was a big part of their life, that was always what came out, and I think I was very drawn to that because that was going on in me and in my family at that time as well. I think I wanted to engage with those stories.
SQ: When you started working on the film, how did you find the people that you wanted to interview and how did you select the stories you wanted to use and what was your reaction to those stories as you were listening to them?
BC: I started by doing about three months researching using Google and Twitter as my two primary sources, looking for people who had written articles, reaching out to people…some of it started when I read this book called ‘Wisdom from the Batcave’ written by Rabbi Cary Friedman, which is about essentially, ‘everything I need to know in life I learned from reading a Batman comic book’ and he realized as he was in rabbi school a lot of the things he was learning he’d already heard in a Batman comic books or on the Batman TV show. It’s a marvelous book for people of all ages. So when I read that book, it was already connecting with what was in my mind about storytelling and the impact of storytelling. Here was a guy who was inspired to write a whole book about [Batman], and it made me wonder who else was out there.
I had a conversation with Rabbi Friedman (he’s interviewed in the movie), and he started telling me the kinds of people that had written him letters or emails after reading his book – he’s had police officers and FBI agents write to him, so that inspired me to pursue a story about a police officer who had grown up reading Batman comics and watching the Batman TV show, and it made him want to be a crime fighter, so I did research to find a story of that. Then as I started to get out into the world, build a Twitter account, Facebook account, and share with people what I was doing, people started sending the stories. What I was looking for as I started talking to people was something that would connect with people on a universal level, I didn’t want stories that were so unique and so different that it was difficult to connect with. I wasn’t consciously looking or planning for a range of things, that kind of naturally happened in terms of the age variety, gender variety, religious, ethnic, etc., but I wanted them to be diverse.
The trailer highlights some of the stories that are more emotionally impactful with people overcoming health issues and things like that, but that’s only a small percentage of what’s in the movie. A lot of it is also about volunteerism, people who’ve been inspired by Batman to engage with their community on a deeper level, there are stories about people who have overcome physical issues, whether it’s disease or just being born different, and then there’s people just in general who have been inspired by this character to do something just within their own lives that pushed them beyond what they thought they could do.
My general reaction, I kind of made a joke about it on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, was when I editing the movie I spent most of the days crying. Each one of these stories has a natural emotion to it. In the final edit, the way we put it together, we wanted it to be a very hopeful, inspirational movie, so the final movie I don’t think people are going to cry nearly as much as I did when I was editing it. There was so much in these stories that was very human, very powerful, and this movie is much less about what these comic book characters are about, and much more about what we’re about as human beings, what our spirit is like. This is not a movie just for people who love comic books or love Batman – we’ve launched it within the geek world but I think the final audience for this movie is going to be much bigger and much broader and is going to show a side of Batman that most people are not even aware exists.
SQ: One of the reasons I was so drawn to this is because I study compassion and your documentary speaks to the way Batman inspires compassion in other people and they took upon themselves to go out and do good, like the Batman of Petaluma for example, and how he inspires the message of hope.
BC: You’re hitting on another level that makes this film intriguing for me, in that it is a movie about people that were inspired by Batman, but the hope is that the stories within the movie will inspire the viewers to want to be like the people in this movie. So there’s that level you’re talking about of compassion, of strength, of emotional engagement, that goes from Batman to these other people and then to the viewer. I hope that the final message that the viewer will take away is that ‘I can be that symbol of compassion or hope or inspiration like Batman.’ The most powerful way that compassion and hope work in people and get passed from one person to another is by story, and that’s a central theme of this movie.
SQ: I wanted to talk to you about labels, which we kind of already touched on, but in psychology it’s common to talk about how people be defined by labels and this can be debilitating, it’s how the world see them and eventually how they see themselves, so some therapies, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, try to work with people to get past the labels and define who they really are. This film seems to really speak to that.
BC: One of our production partners is Broadcast Thought, who are a group of forensic psychiatrists, and part of what they do is work with media to help them, particularly in cases of mental illness, create perceptions that are more true, and not sensationalized, exaggerated versions. So one of the reasons they’ve been on board with this project from the beginning is, as we talked about earlier, Batman is a character who defines himself. He has every reason to take the label of hopeless or depressed or whatever and get stuck in that and never go beyond, but he makes a different choice, a very specific choice, about who he’s going to be and he lets that run the show.
The reality is, when you look at it very seriously, no matter how Christopher Nolan and other make it look very realistic that somebody might dress as the Batman and go out and do this, there’s a level of absolute craziness to it. There is a level at which Batman is strange, this whole thing is strange – this guy dressing up like a bat and running around on rooftops at night. But for me, this speaks to the fact that I’m strange or weird or different, but that doesn’t mean that my voice doesn’t matter or that who I am, my visions and my dreams, is not important or valuable. I think, for me, it’s an inspiration that these weird, wacky visions that I have, these weird ideas that I have of making the world better, of making myself better, of making a positive difference and dreaming a big dream, it’s not so crazy.
I think another part of it is that so many of the people that are part of this film are part of that geek culture, like Travis Langley, who talks about growing up in the ‘70’s, when the standard for cool was the Fonz and if you were not the Fonz, the worst thing you could be was a nerd. So he felt very alone and isolated, but geek culture today is much cooler – you can wear a Batman t-shirt today, where you couldn’t 30 years ago, and be cool, so I think our culture has evolved, and the internet has helped significantly in terms of letting people know that they’re not alone. My hope is that in the finished movie there are a myriad of stories presented, so everybody that watches it will find someone in the movie and will say, “I relate to that,” and in the process of relating to that person they will ultimately feel less alone.
SQ: That sounds a lot like the principle of ‘common humanity’ in psychology, where we recognize that others are just like us.
BC: Right, exactly. Something else that has occurred to me recently in the final analysis, and it is one of the other important aspects of the film to me, is the power of heroes and the power of heroic stories working in our lives, not just any stories, but the stories of heroes. We live in a culture where hero after hero has gotten demolished in real life – our sports figures aren’t heroes, our politicians aren’t heroes, our celebrities aren’t heroes, we’re just waiting for the next person to be exposed as a fraud, a sex addict, a thief, a liar, whatever. I really feel like that has hurt society in a lot of ways, and I think it’s one of the things, in terms of the growth of the geek culture, that has pushed us toward these stories, because we are looking for heroes and when we can’t find them in real life, we’ll look for them in fiction. I think that’s why these characters are more popular than they ever have been, but I think the reality of these shifts of the characters from being the stark black and white, good and bad, hero and villain to the more gray type characters is a reflection of the fact that we’re not seeing that type of hero in the world anymore.
The Batman that’s in this film is the Batman that might exist in the mind of a 5 or 6 year old. A lot of interviewers ask me which Batman this is about – is it Frank Miller’s, Adam West’s, Christopher Nolan’s, Tim Burton’s – which Batman is this? And the reality is that it’s not any of those Batman, it’s a Batman that you can’t put your finger on because it only exists in a place that cannot be explored in the known universe, it exists in the mind of children who perceive Batman, and I think if there is a goal to this movie it is for people to remember what it was like to have a hero like that, a hero who is that true ‘white knight’ and not the gray hero that we see around us all the time. It doesn’t mean that anybody’s going to be perfect, it doesn’t mean we’re going to be great, but I feel like my children, like our world need a society where there are more people striving for that, and not only have that, but to be it.
So one of my goals for the film is to inspire people to believe that that kind of hero can not only exist in the world still, but that it can exist in them still, and that that model, that goodness has not disappeared from the planet. I hope that people will see that Batman in the film. When I’ve said that, people have asked why I didn’t use Superman instead and the answer is because Superman has the powers, and so he’s got an excuse, a reason why he can be super, but to see it in a human character who has no powers is an example to us that we could be that.
SQ: Speaking of that, how do you think having that hero to look up to could help someone with a trauma history – I know more and more people are using comic books and games to help veterans and service members with PTSD, and Batman himself has an extensive trauma history, so how do you think Batman might inspire people with trauma history?
BC: Yeah, here’s a character who, at whichever age, watched his parents die in front of him, that’s pretty high on the list of traumas. The final word of the film, the final statement of it, is a statement of hope and faith that the terrible traumatic things we go through can ultimately be turned and used for something that blesses the world. I think that is one of the primary statements of Batman and why we’re drawn to it – we look at our own brokenness, we look at all the difficult things we’ve gone through in our lives, and we want to raise our fist at God and say, ‘why did you do this to me?’ I’m not going to get into why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people, that’s not what it’s about. I’m much less about the why did it happen, and much more about “the what” are we going to do about it, and I think Batman is too.
There are stories where Batman gets bogged down in the, ‘WHYYYYY?!?!’ but most of the time, the way he deals with the why is to move to the what, and to say, ‘well this has happened, now what will we do with this pain? What will we do with this problem?’ He finds this very strange, unique way to take his brokenness and his pain and bless the world with it. I think that is a core message of this film and some of the stories that are in it – Batman and his triumphs in life, in spite of his pain. It doesn’t always make the pain go away, but there is a fulfilled-ness in knowing that he’s made a difference and used his pain to bless the world, and I think that is, in many ways, the essence of hope.
SQ: It’s such a moving and inspiring message. Thank you so much for putting together this documentary, I can see that it’s going to touch a lot of lives and not only those in the geek culture. Thank you so much, I really appreciate this interview and best of luck to you!
BC: Thank you very much!
