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Richard Kelly is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his haunting, hallucinatory Donnie Darko With a new sequel that reopens the mysteries of the story of a troubled young man killed in a plane crash.
The original story took place in 1988 against the backdrop of the Michael Dukakis and George W. Bush presidential elections, as President Ronald Reagan was preparing to leave office. Kelly promises that the new novel will bring Darko’s family ties to people in power closer to the forefront.
It also provides a potential entrance to not one, but many others Donnie Darko movies. Kelly is known to have signed on to direct the original 2001 film about his characters, but he believes positive steps behind the corporate scenes will now allow him to return to the cinematic universe of Darko.
The original film, released 25 years ago today, had an amazing cast, including Jake Gyllenhaal as Don, as well as his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal, plus Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Mary McDowell, Holmes Osborne, Catherine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Beth Grant, Noah Chevland Sivley and
Since then, Swayze, Cleveland and Chase have died Donnie Darko. But Kelly wants the rest of “the whole cast back.”
“I want to bring everyone together and find a way for them to bring these characters to this new dimension of reality,” he says. “If the first movie is 90% a big collective dream, if that’s my interpretation of what the movie is, who are these people when they all wake up from the dream? They’re in Southern California and everyone needs to realize, What did we all go through and why did this young man die?’
Kelly’s new novel, out December 15th from Range Literary Publishing, is called The philosophy of time travel. It shares its title with the book written by Roberta Sparrow (Cleveland), the reticent author of the original film. Kelly says the book will include drawings, maps, Rose and Eddie Darko coping with the loss of their son, and a more grounded narrative.
“I’m building this giant world around the movie and the aftermath of the movie,” Kelly says. “It kept its meaning and its meaning. It all goes back to the original film.”
Kelly created a cult classic when he was only 25 years old. Since then, he has directed only two films. Southland Tales and box. But it’s not a lack of effort, as he explained in our interview about the past and the future Donnie Darko.
Richard Kelly Donnie Darko and The philosophy of time travel
Filmmaker: You were 23 years old when you wrote the first draft Donnie Darkoright?
Richard Kelly: I just graduated from USC with a degree in film. I was confident in my abilities to make films and create pictures, but I had not yet written a feature screenplay. I had the tools, but I was afraid to write a feature screenplay. It was intimidating, but I knew it was my ticket to directorship. So I started working on this story, and it was an intense one-month period in October 1998.
The script was literally written in about a month; In the same time frame where the movie takes place. I started in early October and finished right around Halloween. I’m like, “Okay, it’s movie time. It’s going to culminate on Halloween night.”
Filmmaker: Why were you so confident about launching the kit?
Richard Kelly: I only had that confidence because of being a visual artist. I had my visual vocabulary that I was confident about. I was sure that I had written a good script. So the last thing I needed to conquer was figuring out how to talk to the actors, which was scary because I hadn’t really done it before.
I was confident, but I was also scared, and you must be a little scared. If you’re not a little scared, then maybe you don’t know how hard it is to make a movie. You don’t realize the challenges and risks, maybe because you don’t want to mess it up.
I was surrounded by these incredibly talented people who were younger than me and had more experience than me. Then I got Mary McDonnell as a two-time Oscar nominee, and Patrick Swayze comes in as this crazy character, and Noah Wyle. I was so determined if there would ever be anything more of me in this world Donnie DarkoThat I want the whole cast back.
Filmmaker: When did the sequel start for you? What other ideas made you want to continue the story?
Richard Kelly: It’s been 10 years since I’ve been working on the whole big universe of sequels, that’s many movies, and it comes at a price. It’s not cheap. I have to justify it to a certain level of quality where it justifies its existence because you never want to do something for the wrong reasons. Not all stories need to be continued. Some may just end.
The more I drank with this, I can see that there is much more to it. I started (the sequel) 28 years after the start of the film, again, with a lot of the narrative taking place around 2015, 2016. As I got further along with all of this, I realized that I was referring to all of this happening in the 14 months since Don’s death.
I started writing documents, audio recordings, because Donnie’s father… you never know what Donnie’s parents (McDowell as Rose Darko and Osborne as Eddie Darko) do in the movie. I was able to find out what their job is and make them really great people. Don’s father works for the CIA.
They live in Los Cerritos, a suburb of Long Beach, but it’s just a cover of sorts. This family has basic, basic connections. Rose is a big corporate lawyer who works at this giant law firm in downtown Los Angeles, and her law firm, one of their big clients, is the Reagans. So you have parents who have been given so much power and influence and all of a sudden their child is killed, maybe killed.
I immediately had the idea to tell it from Rose and Eddie’s point of view. You have Rosehead and then Eddie, Rosehead and then Eddie. They both travel in parallel to deal with the aftermath of their son’s sudden and shocking death and try to make sense of it.
Filmmaker: when you finished Donnie DarkoGiven how unique your filmography is, what were your hopes or expectations for your career?
Richard Kelly: I started very young and had to make a film with a lot of bells and whistles. We did Donnie Darko in 2000 for $4.5 million. That’s a lot of money to make your first film. However, at the same time, it wasn’t really enough to do what I wanted. We barely made it to the finish line with what I would have liked to have done, but I’m very happy with what we got.
Sometimes movies hit roadblocks or projects get in the way, and I’ve also turned down a lot of things. I don’t want to spend 18 months of my life on something that I’m not emotionally invested in, or I don’t want to let people down, people who actually care about my work and who like the first three films I made. I don’t want to lose these people. They are my life blood.
I hate to make more movies, but I’m not wasting my time. There’s always a project, and every director has it, where you spend two years on something and it just doesn’t happen for various reasons. But this is Hollywood. Everyone has those stories or lost movies.
Filmmaker: You created a story that remains a mystery 25 years later. How important is it to you to answer lingering questions while maintaining ambiguity?
Richard Kelly: There is a lot of new information that will be presented, but I think it deepens the mystery. What it does is a shock wave. Literally, there is a shockwave of energy that occurs when a jet engine materializes above Donnie’s house and falls gently, surgically landing on it and only it. The novel differs from the film in that it is largely procedural. It is much more grounded in reality, much more in geography, whereas the geography of the film is very dreamlike.
Filmmaker: What upset you about the shockwave of Don’s death?
Richard Kelly: From my perspective, there was real merit and a real sense of excitement and discovery in going through the procedural implications of Don’s death. why did he die Why didn’t he get out of bed? did they cheat Was he manipulated? Did you pass something? Was it strategic? What was going through his mind in those last moments, and why did all these other people intrude on his dream?
So I just thought there was a lot to learn and I needed to write it all down. I had to write all this down because it meant something to me. Well, it’s a novel, and the market can decide whatever happens to it, and the actors can decide what happens to it.
Filmmaker: And if everything goes well?
Richard Kelly: There is enough material in this novel for three animated films, three animated films. To be honest, I didn’t know how to do it The philosophy of time travel as one movie. It’s a gigantic story that takes place over 14 months, and every character, literally every character, has a major arc throughout the whole affair.
We’ll see what happens, but I’m very satisfied. What will be will be. I didn’t want to live my whole life saying I couldn’t see a sequel to this movie when I really felt like there was one.
It’s really big and it’s really epic and that’s it.
The Philosophy of Time Travel is out December 15th from Range Literary Publishing.
Main image: Outside The philosophy of time travelCourtesy of Range Literary Publishing
