By Peter T. Chattaway

Director David Cunningham on the set of The Seeker.

The title may sound kind of spiritual, in some circles at least, but the film is actually based on an award-winning children’s fantasy novel by Susan Cooper called The Dark is Rising – and that used to be the movie’s title, until the studio changed it just a few months before release.

Cunningham, speaking on a cell phone from Hawaii after dropping one of his daughters off at school, says the original title wasn’t working with test audiences. “Everybody was interpreting that as a horror film or something that wouldn’t be appropriate for families,” he says, “and so it was changed to The Seeker – which is really the theme of the show.”

The movie concerns an American boy living in England who discovers, after his 14th birthday, that he is destined to take part in a cosmic battle between Light and Dark. The boy, Will Stanton (played by Vancouver native Alexander Ludwig), has to travel through time and ‘seek the signs’ which will help him to defeat a villain known only as The Rider (Christopher Eccleston).

Cunningham knows a thing or two about living in foreign environments. His parents, Loren and Darlene Cunningham, co-founded Youth With A Mission in 1960 and the University of the Nations in 1978 – and the younger Cunningham, who was born in Switzerland in 1971, has been to more than 130 countries.

Cunningham made a handful of short films and documentaries before turning to feature films. The first, Beyond Paradise (1998), featured a cast of unknowns and took place in his home state of Hawaii; but his second, To End All Wars (2001), starred Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle in a true story about Allied prisoners in a Japanese camp during World War II.

To End All Wars dealt with matters of faith and belief, but it also sparked some discussion in Christian circles because it had a fair bit of profanity, too. However, Cunningham says the language and the violence, which earned the film an R rating in the United States, were essential to the story he was trying to tell.

“I make movies that I’m passionate about, and whatever that particular subject may be, I try to be honest to it and to the spirit of what that is,” he says. “And in the case of To End All Wars, the subject was suffering and forgiveness in the context of suffering, in the middle of an awful situation – terrible, terrible circumstances – and how they chose on a daily basis to forgive their enemies, and the transformation that took place. And so it was important to show the reality of that aspect, and for the film to be as intense as it was for that message to get across.”

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Some of Cunningham’s next few projects – including the mini-series Little House on the Prairie (2004) and the Moscow-set thriller After . . .  (2006) (the latter of which was written by Abbotsford resident and occasional BCCN contributor Kevin Miller – passed without incident. But controversy dogged his steps again when he directed The Path to 9/11 (2006), an Emmy-nominated mini-series which was criticized by some for its portrayal of the Clinton administration.

Cunningham says he tried to show the “unvarnished truth” of what both the Clinton and Bush administrations did, or didn’t do, prior to the September 11 attacks – but the film has never been released on DVD, partly out of concern that it would harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“A lot of people want to see the film,” says Cunningham, “and it’s too bad that people are being influenced by politics and not letting people think for themselves.”

The controversy over that series led some people to accuse Cunningham and his parents of trying to smuggle a right wing agenda into Hollywood. There were even death threats.

“People went to my bios on the internet, and changed them to make it look like I was some radical nut and my parents were snake handlers, and it got out of control,” says Cunningham.

For his next project, he turned to something lighter: The Seeker, a young-adult fantasy which had been developed by Walden Media, the firm created by Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz to produce movies based on popular children’s stories such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Bridge to Terabithia.

“I wanted to make this one because I have three kids now,” says Cunningham. “I wanted to have something that my kids could go and see. But it also has a good message. It’s a fun fantasy adventure movie, but it also says something about making good choices. When you do make a choice, whether it’s right or wrong, the implications of that choice go well beyond you.”

The film, distributed by 20th Century Fox, opened to mixed reviews and lower-than-expected box office returns October 4 – a fact Cunningham chalks up to the unexpected success of another family film, The Game Plan, which opened just one week before. “That really took a lot of the market,” he says. “It was also a tough weekend all the way around. But this is a difficult, tricky and flaky business, and you never know what’s going to happen.”

But Cunningham says he will continue to “mix it up,” producing films in a variety of genres and working in both mainstream film and independent cinema. “I’m not going to rule anything out,” he says. “At this point I’m just hanging out with the family. I’ve had four or five pretty intense years of back-to-back movies, so I’m just getting my batteries charged right now.”

November 2007