In the immediate hours after the Columbine High School massacre, people needed to know – demanded to know – why? If only to ever hope to sleep peaceably again. It was just the start of 24 years of asking unanswerable questions.

Another turned to the mother. “What kind of a monster could have raised that monster?”

Problem was, Sue Klebold is no monster. She is a woman with a master’s degree who spent years helping disabled and other vulnerable community-college students gain access to the social market economy. Whose son, along with Eric Harris, killed 13 people and wounded 24 others at their suburban Denver school in 1999.

That she didn’t fit the narrative only made what was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history all the more discombobulating – and unfinished.

“I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born,” Klebold has since said. “But I believe it would not have been better for me.”

And that’s a gut-wrenching thing for Michael Shannon to hear.

“I can totally empathize with what Sue is saying,” said Shannon, the acclaimed actor who is making his directorial debut with “Eric LaRue” and will attend a sold-out screening at the Denver Film Festival on Monday. It’s a response to Columbine that follows the mother of a fictional 17-year-old boy who has shot and killed three of his classmates in school. And while the invented character of Janice, played by actor Judy Greer, is not based on Klebold – the two surely grapple with the same paradox.

“I think that’s something that Janice is thinking about throughout the entire film,” Shannon told the Denver Gazette. “She comes to the conclusion that what Eric did is a part of her, and she cannot exorcize it from herself. It will forever be a part of her. The pain of that is her pain forever – and there’s not an elixir that’s going to make it go away.”

As the father of daughters ages 15 and 11, Shannon finds it horrific to even imagine the idea of a child never having been born – for the betterment of the world.

In a year when there have been more mass shootings than days, Shannon and playwright/screenwriter Brett Neveu believe it is imperative that we not dismiss these mothers, but instead focus on them and try to learn from them.

“It’s important to try and understand the mothers, because that’s where (these killers) came from,” Shannon said. “I’m fairly certain that not every mother of every Nazi S.S. officer was a terrible human being. But the larger question, I think, is, how do we track the evolution of this impulse in our culture (to kill)? I don’t think it can all be pinned down to faulty parenting.”

Eleven years before Columbine, Shannon’s high school north of Chicago was put on alert when a 30-year-old woman strode into a second-grade classroom nearby and opened fire, killing an 8-year-old boy and wounding five other children. Neveu first wrote “Eric LaRue” as a 2002 play in response to Columbine for a Chicago theater co-founded by Shannon. After the 2018 Parkland massacre, they decided to adapt the play into a film.

They felt the need, as we all do, to wrestle with the irreconcilable.

“It’s a healthy desire to ask ‘why’ – and a lot of good has come from that impulse in us,” Shannon said. “It’s a natural desire to want to improve society. I think a lot of it boils down to trying to control the things that you have control over and examining your own personal responsibility within society. Because the tendency is to want to sequester yourself from such dark and dangerous and difficult subjects, and to try and put them at arm’s length.

“I mean, look at the deeply unfortunate recent occurrence in Lewiston (Maine). It just seems to be the result of so much avoidance. After something like that, your instinct is to go inside and lock the door and just hope that it doesn’t find its way to your doorstep. But that ultimately doesn’t solve anything. I always find that what brings me peace of mind is trying to have understanding and empathy for people who are different from me. And I feel like if everybody approached life that way, there might be a more desirable result.”

Shannon to receive award Monday

Shannon will receive Denver Film’s Breakthrough Director Award at Monday’s screening. Why “Eric LaRue” demanded to be his first directorial film is a bit of a mystery – even to him.

“I wasn’t planning on directing a film,” he said. “I wasn’t sure that I could handle it, frankly. It’s an all-consuming enterprise that requires many different sets of skills. But when I read Brett’s script, I just felt it very deeply inside of me. I felt it in my bones. I could see It. I could hear it. I knew what I wanted it to look like and what I wanted it to feel like. It just really resonated for me.”

But Shannon felt no desire to make a political statement on one of the most incendiary issues in our nation’s history. Instead, he chose to lean into the bewilderment.

“As a person who lives in this country, I used to have some pretty harsh political points of view, and I used to get very frustrated and angry about certain things when they happened,” he said. “But as I’ve gotten a little older and relaxed a little bit, it’s really turned into more of a confusion as to why our society is so deeply dysfunctional and misguided. It almost seems set up to confuse people and make it difficult to make correct choices. And I thought that this movie really illustrated that in a way that I found cathartic. So I thought, ‘Why not? Give it a shot.’”

The movie, he said, “is very much the product of Brett’s imagination and creativity.” But at the heart of it is Judy Greer’s career-redefining turn as Janice. Greer (“13 Going on 30”) is a versatile actor with a natural comic style who is becoming increasingly known for playing against type. Greer’s celebrated turn in “Eric LaRue” is further evidence that it’s comic actors who often turn around and deliver the most devastating dramatic turns, rather than the other way around. Greer has a long history working with Shannon, including “Pottersville,” “Room 104” and the upcoming film “Dead Guy.”

“When I was thinking about casting this film, I wanted somebody who didn’t typically get an opportunity like this,” he said. “I wanted someone who maybe even felt like they were in over their head a little bit – because I think that’s how Janice feels in the story. She’s dealing with something that she was completely unequipped to deal with, and a situation that she didn’t see coming.”

Her character moves through life as if in a haze, unable to seek solace in her faith or to let go of her anger and frustration.

“I didn’t want somebody who was too comfortable just showing up and turning on the waterworks,” Shannon said. “I think what Judy captures that is so important is just the sense of bewilderment that this woman must be encountering. She’s really going moment to moment, trying to figure out what to do, what to feel, what to think, where to turn. She is experiencing an extreme sense of disorientation.”

Alongside Greer is a dream team of an ensemble that includes Alexander Skarsgård, Tracy Letts, Paul Sparks and Alison Pill. One reviewer has said, “You can tell this film is directed by someone who really knows and appreciates acting.” For his part, Shannon says, “I really didn’t have to do much with them. They showed up ready to rumble.”

When “Eric LaRue” was a play in Chicago, Shannon found himself coming back to see it again and again, mostly to re-experience the final scene, when Janice finally goes to visit her son in prison.

“It’s just one of the most overwhelmingly complex and thoughtful considerations of this dilemma that I’ve ever seen – at least in a piece of fiction,” Shannon said. “It almost has a Dostoevskian feel to it, like “The Brothers Karamazov.”

“Every time that scene just really, really gutted me. It never lost its power to move me. It is really focused on the relationship of Janice to Eric. And it’s viewed with so much humanity and complexity. I just think what Brett has written is a tremendously valuable artifact of this whole scenario.”

Which is not to say the film will bring any resolution to the many real-life families who have been forever impacted by Columbine or any other school shooting.

“I would never say that this film is going to solve the problem, because it definitely won’t,” Shannon said. “But it’s at least looking at the problem, which is more than not looking at it or wishing it wasn’t here.”

And while Shannon knows he’s bringing to Colorado a film that is necessarily going to land harder here, and that there will be people in the audience who have been directly impacted by gun violence, that was all the more reason to accept the Denver Film Festival’s invitation to come here.

“When the possibility of coming to Denver arose, I didn’t have to think about it for a second. I knew that bringing the movie there was completely the right thing to do,” he said. “I can understand people’s reluctance if this is something that has impacted them in a deeply personal way. I don’t think this film has the power to heal such deep wounds. It’s simply an examination of something that I think is desperately important to examine.

“But for what it’s worth, I do think the film has a tremendous amount of empathy in it – and it asks a lot of questions that perhaps haven’t been asked in other films about this subject.”