Joel Shumacher, the man who famously put nipples on the Dark Knight’s costume in “Batman Forever,” isn’t known as a lion of the independent cinema. Still the director of “The Client” and “A Time to Kill” insists that he’s always had a penchant for mixing in low-budget personal projects like “Tigerland” with more mainstream fare.

“Twelve,” the story of a high-school dropout (“Gossip Girl”s’ Chace Crawford) who peddles designer drugs to spoiled Upper East Side teens is very much a passion project. Based on a novel by Nick McDonell, penned when he was just 17, it also involves a brutal murder, a false arrest and a lot of strung-out kids.

The movie, which stars newcomers like Crawford and more established actors like Kiefer Sutherland and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, has been tapped to be the closing night film at this year’s festival.

Schumacher, a Park City newbie, talked with TheWrap about branching into independent cinema at an age when many of his contemporaries are thinking about retirement.

How did you become interested in “Twelve”?
I was in the Taorimina Film Festival getting ready to premiere “Phone Booth,” when my agent at CAA sent me the galleys to Nick’s book. I tried to get the rights, but someone had already bought them and they didn’t want me for the project. So it came out, was a huge sensation and bestseller and time passes.

Nobody, though was able to get it made until [producer] Charlie Corwin got his hands on it and offered me the job. Can’t say it came back to me, because I never had it to begin with, but I always wanted it. Through various incarnations it strayed very, very far from the book. We threw that all out and just pasted Nick’s novel back in.

Is this your first time at Sundance?
Yes, I’ve never been here before. I’m the oldest living student filmmaker. I’ve made some low-budget films before like “Tigerland” and “Phone Booth,” but they were always backed by studios. I started off as a $200 a week costume designer and worked my way up into directing. So I really came through the studio system.

It’s really a thrill for me to be at Sundance at this point in my career. It feels like I’m expanding and not shrinking. I’m not just sitting around Hollywood trying to make a buck.

Has the independent filmmaking been a big adjustment?
There’s always been a misconception about my career, because I’ve been fortunate enough to have some really successful films. I think when “Car Wash” and “St. Elmo’s Fire” hit the zeitgeist there was this tendency to think of them as huge Hollywood films. That’s not true. I’m not a maverick independent director, but we made those movies on the outer edges of the system. The studios didn’t know what we were doing.

People see the [John] Grisham movies and the Batman movies and they think I only do blockbusters, but I made “Phone Booth” in 12 days with an unknown Irish actor — Colin Farrell — so I had pretty good preparation for doing a movie like “Twelve” when we only had 23 days to shoot the whole thing.
Read more here!

And check out this clip from the movie!