Simon Thompson looks at the rise and disappointing disappearance of filmmaker Richard Kelly…
The paradox of being a talented independent film director is that if your work is deemed to be interesting and unique, eventually mainstream Hollywood will come along and try and co-opt it into being like everyone else’s. Kelly (and his contemporary Shane Carruth to an extent), occupy a strange filmmaking hinterland – too young to be a part of the early independents (Stephen Soderbergh, John Salles, Sam Raimi, the Coens, Spike Lee), nor making their way into Hollywood through music videos in the vein of David Fincher and Jonathon Glazer, or being considered fully a part of the video store generation alongside the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Edgar Wright, and Christopher Nolan.
For a filmmaker as defiantly original, intellectual, and talented as Kelly the fact that he has only been able to make three features in the two decades he’s been a professional director is an absolutely damning indictment of Hollywood. Kelly is still a director with numerous stories to tell, but the most perplexing of them all isn’t an original script but instead the Icarus-like rise and fall narrative that his career has been.
Richard Kelly was born in 1975, in Midlothian Virgina. His mother Lane was a schoolteacher, and father Ellis, was a Nasa technician who worked on the Mars Viking Lander programme in the 1970s (his research helped to create the camera that would take the first pictures on the surface of Mars).
Kelly, an intellectually curious and bright student, dreamt of being either a political cartoonist or a filmmaker. Filmmaking won however, as he was awarded a scholarship to the USC School of Cinema and Television at the age of 18. Influenced by filmmakers and writers as far ranging as Terry Gilliam, Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Robert Aldrich, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler, Phillip K Dick, and Richard Matheson the young Kelly began making short films at USC, graduating at the age of 22 in 1997.
Freshly out of university, Kelly immediately began working on script ideas but one idea above all stuck with him. Kelly, fascinated by the plot point of a jet engine falling onto a house with no one knowing how the engine got there in the first place, decided to build an entire story around it. This simple idea would become the movie which has more or less defined his career, Donnie Darko.
Set in October 1988, Donnie Darko tells the story of Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) a schizophrenic somnambulism suffering teenager living in suburban Virginia. After narrowly surviving the freak occurrence of a jet engine falling on top of his bedroom, Donnie begins to have visions involving a 6 foot tall man in a bunny rabbit costume named Frank (Jim Duval) that only Donnie can see, who warns him that the world will end in precisely 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.
As Donnie begins to find himself even more alienated by the hypocrisy of the adults around him, particularly charlatan life coach Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), he finds solace with a few close friends and a burgeoning romance with transfer student Gretchen (Jena Malone). While also going through the pitfalls of being a teenager, his knowledge and visions of the world’s impending fate becomes more and more stark up until the movie’s climax.
Shopping his script around Hollywood, Kelly insisted that he direct the screenplay himself, leading to two years’ worth of development hell as he tried to find a studio that would pick up Donnie Darko. As Kelly engaged in meeting after meeting, Donnie Darko gained a reputation for being the script everyone in Hollywood wanted to make, but were far too afraid of its offbeat and intellectual nature hindering its commercial potential.
Half The Catcher In The Rye, half Harvey by way of 2001, the script’s combination of both a surreal coming of age drama and hard science fiction made it a tricky proposition for some irritating slick marketing type to sell to the general public.
By 2000 however, after two years of deadlock the movie finally had a budget ($4.5 million dollars), a studio deal with Flower Films, struck because of co-owner Drew Barrymore’s love of Kelly’s script (eventually starring in the film in a supporting role), and a distributor in Newmarket Films, a subsidiary of independent cinema powerhouse New Line, a company unafraid to take on riskier sells that a big studio wouldn’t touch.
With Drew Barrymore signed on, Kelly went about searching for a young star to play the film’s eponymous protagonist. Vince Vaughan mournfully turned down the part due to his age, talks between Kelly and Mark Wahlberg broke down due to Wahlberg’s insistence he portray Donnie with a lisp, but after dozens of hopefuls Kelly finally found his star in Jason Schwartzman who at that time had just had a star making role in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore.
A scheduling conflict preventing Schwartzman from doing the movie would be the biggest blessing in disguise however, as Kelly, through viewing an independent film called October Sky noticed a young actor by the name of Jake Gyllenhaal. Despite being in a movie with both Laura Dern and Chris Cooper, Gyllenhaal’s talent and screen presence completely shone through – even in scenes with two legitimate acting powerhouses – leading Kelly to realise that he had found the perfect actor to portray Donnie.
Ironically, despite completing the movie in only 28 days, and with Kelly only receiving a $9,000 dollar directors fee for his work, Donnie Darko opened in the United States in October 2001 to underwhelming box office due to it receiving a limited marketing campaign as a direct result of the September 11th terrorist attacks which had only just occurred.
Opening to a box office gross of just $110,494 and to a muted critical reception, however, the film would find a champion in the shape of Andrew Johnston, who in US Weekly praised Kelly’s debut as being one of the most outstanding films shown at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Johnston was a dissenting voice amongst the vast majority of American critics who refused to take the film upon its merits. However, in a complete twist that Kelly probably didn’t expect at all Donnie Darko began to attract a huge cult following thanks to word of mouth.
With the combination of an intelligent internet marketing campaign, the movie’s European distribution run in October 2002, where it drew rave reviews from audiences and critics in countries such as the UK and the Netherlands, and the film entering the midnight movie circuit back in the States, Donnie Darko suddenly became one of the most talked about and lauded independent movies to come along since at least the mid-90s when the likes of Linklater, Tarantino, the Wachowskis, and PTA were all starting out.
After its release on DVD and VHS in 2002 Donnie Darko became one of the highest selling titles in the home video market, grossing over $10 million dollars in sales and rentals. Kelly had taken the long way round but at the age of just 27 had become one of the most talked about young directors in Hollywood and was being heralded as the next David Lynch. In six short years Kelly had gone from fresh out of university to having movie buffs everywhere on tenterhooks about what his follow up to such a fascinating and singular debut would be.
In September 2001, shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Kelly began work on another original script as production for Donnie Darko was wrapping up, entitled Southland Tales. Originally envisioned as a cynical Nathanel West/Michael Tolkin style satire of Hollywood, after the tragedy of 9/11 Kelly reworked the script as a blackly comedic satire of the war on terror, the oil industry, increased government surveillance, celebrity culture and the public’s obsession therewith, together with the threat of constantly eroding American civil liberties post 9/11, starting with the Bush administration’s signing of the Patriot Act.
With the clout now afforded to him due to his debut, Kelly wanted Southland Tales to be his next directorial project, with an established studio in the shape of Universal being more than happy to take him on and give him a $17 million budget ($27 million as of 2025) to realise his vision. Kelly wanted Southland Tales to be a multi genre affair, aspiring to combine crime films such as Kiss Me Deadly and Pulp Fiction (two movies which feature sprawling narratives underpinned by a MacGuffin), with the despondent sharp cynicism of Dr Strangelove and the dreamlike nature of Brazil.
On top of this Kelly wanted to add extended musical numbers which he wanted “Incorporated into the story in very logical scenarios as well as [in] fantasy dream environments.” calling the overall story and tone a strange hybrid of the sensibilities of both Andy Warhol and Phillip K Dick.
The casting process would prove to be just as strange as Kelly’s script, with the director aiming to assemble an ensemble of actors who he felt were unfairly pigeonholed into specific roles and were not being given a chance to show off their “undiscovered talents”. Recruiting a lineup featuring the likes of Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Miranda Richardson, Justin Timberlake, Wallace Shawn, Jon Lovitz, Amy Poehler, Wood Harris, Cheri Oteri, and Christopher Lambert all either in leading or supporting parts showed that Kelly wanted to go for an Altman-esque ensemble piece that Altman himself would have cast had he been on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Trying to explain the plot of Southland Tales is akin to attempting to drink coffee with a fork, but here is my best attempt. In an alternate version of 2005 the twin cities of El Paso and Abeline, Texas, were destroyed in a nuclear attack, forcing the United States government and the world at large into a third global conflict, with America reintroducing conscription.
Under the umbrella of various counter terrorism legislation passed by the American government, a shadowy corporation named US-Ident and its leader Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson) create an Orwellian surveillance network keeping tabs on every citizen and censoring vast sections of the internet. Thanks to a global fuel shortage brought about by World War 3, a German company named Treer uses the opportunity to create a perpetual motion source of energy as an alternative to oil. The boss of Treer (Wallace Shawn) and the company’s shareholders are hiding the after effects of their technology slowing the ocean’s currents, which in turn has forced the earth to slow its rotation – with the transportation of their technology to portable receivers creating ripples in the fabric of space time via the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
The narrative then picks up in alternative 2008, when an amnesiac action star (Dwayne Johnson), comes into contact with both an ambitious porn actress (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and a troubled police officer (Seann William Scott) who holds information relating to the enormous conspiracy at the heart of the narrative.
All of this is underpinned by a constant narration from Justin Timberlake’s Iraq war veteran character, whose narration and the overall structure of the film itself both take cues from Robert Frost’s poems The Road Not Taken and Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening and the Book of Revelation (with the latter being directly quoted).
The problem with Kelly’s ambition is that the world he tried to create is so vast and is lumbered with far too many characters for an audience to keep track of, so that it becomes exhausting watching it, let alone analysing it. Kelly’s original intention was for Southland Tales to be an interactive experience, with Kelly writing six comic issues during production that give an audience background into his universe, and, like he did with Donnie Darko a few years earlier, he wanted to set up a specific interactive website to dovetail with both the comics and the movie itself.
Debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, Southland Tales was one of three American entries for the Palme d’Or (with the other two being Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation). At Cannes, the film was savaged by the attending critics with the ferocity of a starving Rottweiler eating a steak panini. Roger Ebert called the screening “the most disastrous since The Brown Bunny” and British critic Jason Solomons, writing for The Observer described the film as being “so bad it made me wonder if [Richard Kelly] had ever met a human being” and further describing it as a “sprawling, plotless, post-apocalyptic farrago”.
Southland Tales did have some critics at Cannes pivoting away from the negative consensus, however, as James Lewis Hoberman praised Kelly’s effort, describing it as a “visionary film about the end of times” and favourably compared its ambition and themes to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Like Donnie Darko before it, Southland Tales received a limited theatrical release and grossed only $374,743 of its $17 million budget back. Unlike Donnie Darko, however, the negative word of mouth from the majority of critics and audiences who had no idea what to make of it at all sadly prevented the movie gaining a second lease of life via DVD sales.
So this begs the question of whether Southland Tales is as bad as many of its detractors say that it is? The answer, like most things in life, is much greyer and more complex than it being a simple case of good and bad. Southland Tales is one of the most commendably passionate and principled American movies of the last 20 years, however it suffers from throwing far too many ideas at the wall at once, stockpiling sub plots that in the case of most other movies would be their entire three act structures.
Its greatest sin is that for every interesting idea presented, the pacing is baggier than Lil Wayne’s wardrobe circa 2005. Kelly constantly throws characters that are important to the plot in at random points, which hurts the pacing because time spent developing the principal characters is now afforded to newly introduced members of the supporting cast.
That being said, however, this movie was a decade ahead of its time in terms of predicting America’s socio-political climate, with individual scenes and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s porn star character in particular (her comedic highlight coming in a Britney Spears style parody number titled Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime) being very well observed and funny.
When you contrast the bagginess of Southland Tales’ narrative with how tight and focused Donnie Darko was, of course it doesn’t measure up but if you go into Southland Tales with an open mind (and maybe a Corona or four) and are willing to take it on its own merits, there is both enjoyment and debate to be gained – which given how much unambitious cookie cutter identikit slop is puked out onto our screens today, is a virtue.
Because of Kelly’s foresight, Southland Tales in the years since its initial release has developed a strong cult following, and in an age of people being raised on random access humour and memes its comedic virtues have gone on to be recognised by a new generation of audiences. Sadly, back in 2007, Kelly had the stigmatising distinction of being the director of a dud, in just five short years he had gone from being the young director every studio executive wanted to have lunch with to a social leper.
To avoid being fully exiled to filmmaking Siberia never to return a la Josh Trank, Kelly used whatever credibility he still had left and agreed a deal with Warner Bros. to take on an original script called The Box, an adaptation of a short story entitled Button, Button by Richard Matheson, one of Kelly’s artistic heroes. Even after the critical drubbing that Southland Tales received, Kelly still had Hollywood bigshots that wanted to work with him, as shown by Cameron Diaz signing on to play the lead, Frank Langella and James Marsden accepting supporting roles, and Warner Bros. giving him $30 million to play with ($44,858,695.70 as of 2025).
After taking on a project as unwieldy as Southland Tales, The Box represented an intelligent pivot back to a more structured narrative which is what had worked so well in his debut. To Kelly his aim was simple, he wanted to ; “make a film that is incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining my artistic sensibility.”
Filming on location in both Boston and NASA’S Langley Search Centre in Virginia where his father had worked, The Box was to be Kelly’s most personal film to date. Both Diaz and Marsden as husband and wife were given traits in common with both of Kelly’s parents. Diaz’s character Norma is a schoolteacher just as Kelly’s mother was, and she suffered from a severe foot injury due to an X-ray mishap just as Diaz’s character does. Marsden’s character of Arthur both works for NASA as Kelly’s father did, and helps to invent a camera similar to the one that Kelly’s real life father designed.
Aiming for absolute period accuracy for the film’s 1970s setting, Kelly sought extras who had decade accurate cars and wanted the film’s cinematography to have a similar look to David Fincher’s Zodiac, in that despite being set in the 1970s the movie is shot completely on digital instead of on film.
The plot of The Box focuses on a married couple named Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) living with their son Walter (Sam Oz Stone) in suburban Virgina. Both Arthur and Norma are struggling financially due to huge sweeping changes in both of their respective occupations that prevent them from being promoted and earning bigger salaries. Their lives are turned completely upside down through coming into contact with a mysterious stranger by the name of Arlington Stewart (Frank Langella), who presents them with a wooden box.
The box, however, comes with a horrifying ethical dilemma. If either of them pushes the button on top of it they will receive a million dollars, but at the same time someone that the couple do not know will die. Although this premise seems simple enough, Kelly gets the absolute maximum out of it, expertly putting you into the shoes of its main characters and their predicament in a style comparable to a classic Twilight Zone episode. In keeping with the sensibilities of the story’s original author Richard Matheson, but also other great American science fiction writers from roughly the same period such as Raymond Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Phillip K Dick, Kelly isn’t afraid to show the best and worst of human nature in an ethical quandary.
Diaz, Marsden, and Langella’s performances are all excellent ,with the former being completely believable as a married couple and the latter getting to display why I consider him to be America’s answer to Christopher Lee. By contrasting the mundane suburbia at the start with when Langella’s character first appears like a Saville Row Mephistopheles, Kelly showed that he hadn’t forgotten any of the skill at building up atmosphere that he had displayed in Donnie Darko almost a decade previously.
Sadly, despite how neat and tidy a thriller The Box is, it’s overall gross of $33,000,000 from a $30,000,000 budget was disappointing, as was the pretty mixed critical reception from both audiences, who, according to test screenings, hated the film’s ending, and from professional critics, where the consensus was that the narrative felt cobbled together and a secondary player to Kelly’s greater ideas. There was some dissent in the critical ranks however, with Roger Ebert giving the movie a 3 out of 4 rating and praising it for keeping him involved and intrigued throughout. Keith Uhlich writing for Time Out named it his 9th best film of the year, calling The Box “a defiantly personal project that solidifies writer-director Richard Kelly’s talent, even as it surely pushes him further toward the filmmaking fringe.”
Strangely enough, Uhlich’s take has aged like a fine Bordeaux. While The Box fared slightly better with critics than Southland Tales, the problem was that The Box was meant to be Kelly’s you-can-be-trusted- with-the-car-keys-again redemption project amongst the major Hollywood studios. As the film barely made back its budget it became clear to studio executives and money men that Kelly was not going to produce safe sure fire financial bets and that his defiant individualism as an auteur could only serve to hurt their bottom line.
In the nearly two decades following The Box, Kelly hasn’t directed or written a single feature. Aside from a small handful of producer credits that have dried up since 2010, Kelly has been the victim of a constant cycle of development hell whenever he’s tried to get a new feature off the ground. Of the rumoured abandoned projects that are public knowledge, Kelly tried to direct an untitled sci-fi thriller set in a futuristic Manhattan, a Southern Gothic infused horror movie set in Texas entitled Corpus Christi, with Eli Roth attached as a producer, which was scrapped due to casting and budgetary issues, and a true crime thriller entitled Amicus, set to star James Gandolfini, whose tragic death in 2013 at the age of 51 left Kelly unable to continue with the endeavour. Talk of an official sequel to Donnie Darko has also been raised (S.Darko doesn’t count) but Kelly has consistently described it as being up in the air.
In a 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter one of Kelly’s contemporaries, Kevin Smith, stated that: “He is insanely creative and is not unlike Christopher Nolan. But Nolan wound up in the Warner Bros. system where he got special handling, and he got a lot of money to make huge art films like Inception. Richard can be one of our greatest filmmakers. He is right now, but just a lot of people don’t realize it. He’s still a kid, and someone needs to Nolan that kid.”
In that quote, Smith is bang on the money, as, like Shane Carruth slightly after him, Kelly is a director whose originality and quirks have been shunned instead of embraced. If he had been given a Nolan at Warner Bros. or a Tarantino at Miramax style playground with a producer at least 75% on board with any of his ideas, his career would be totally different. Ironically enough he’s ended up in a similar position to that of his hero Terry Gilliam, who, since directing an expensive flop in the shape of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, has found himself flitting in and out of the fringes of Hollywood.
Unlike Gilliam, however, Kelly has refused to do any directing for hire style work to sneak his way back into prominence, and nor should he have to. Kelly’s shunning and exile is a living testament to Hollywood’s strident anti-intellectualism and rejection of experimentation in favour of recycling the same superhero movies and endless reboots of once great franchises.
This story does however have a potentially happy ending. Both Southland Tales and The Box have gained a huge critical reappraisal from a new generation of fans, and to dovetail neatly with this change in public opinion it’s recently come out that Kelly is due to direct an untitled project with a shooting schedule set to begin in the autumn of this year. For the good of intelligent American filmmaking I’d be willing to send Kelly my energy so he can make a spirit bomb to throw right back into the commercial film industry’s face. Even if Kelly’s upcoming movie isn’t a masterpiece, the fact that he’s making one again at all is a beautiful reminder that he hasn’t let his time in enforced filmmaking exile drag him down. If that isn’t a truly admirable quality, then I don’t know what is.
Simon Thompson
