“There’s a choice you can make early in your career,” says Richard Kelly. “You can be a doormat, or you can fight. Either way can get you screwed.” If Kelly’s career arc appears impossibly smooth (he entered the coolest film school, University of Southern California, without ever having held a camera, directed his first, self-penned movie at 25, and now, aged 29, is releasing a “director ‘s cut”), the delivery of the cult classic Donnie Darko was in truth a bruising affair.
After graduation, loading tampon machines and fetching J-Lo and Puffy’s waffles at a music video post-production house drove Kelly to shut himself away for six weeks to generate “the most ambitious, challenging thing I knew how to write”. He crafted a wry recreation of the conservative, upper-middle-class East Coast community that had formed him in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1980s, lacing it with medicated teens, time-travel theorising, ghoulish, grinning authority figures, oh, and a grotesque 6ft (1.8m) rabbit.
Its deus ex machina is straight out of local folklore, too. “A piece of ice falling from the wing of a plane and smashing through a house in my neighbourhood was an urban legend when I was growing up. In my mind, the ice became a jet engine, then a kind of Bermuda-triangle- in-the-sky dimension opened up.”
If the metaphysical, sci-fi subplot looked like showing off, it only reflected daily life in the Kelly house, where Mom taught in school, and Pop was a Nasa engineer whose designs enabled the first pictures from Mars during the Viking Lander era in the 1970s. “Science was always present in our household. We had a computer going back to the earliest days of Apple.”
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While the script caused Kelly to be signed to CAA, Hollywood’s hippest talent farm, Donnie Darko was seen as a dazzling, but unfilmable writing sample, and his insistence on directing it caused him to be all but laughed out of town for four years. Then Drew Barrymore caught it. Signing on as executive producer, and taking the small role of the English teacher Karen Pomeroy, she turned raising the $4.5 million budget into a Hollywood party game. “It’s funny,” Kelly says, “but once she said ‘I believe in you’, so did everyone else.”
At Sundance 2001, a screening of a rough cut marked him out as the find of the festival, but back in Tinseltown, Kelly walked into a fight with his bosses over the running time of two hours thirteen minutes. “‘Cut, cut, cut!’ they said. We lost so much, but I’m still proud of that cut. We hung on to the story somehow, though I always wished that one day I’d cut a longer version.
‘The film got beaten down, rejected by Hollywood as inaccessible – an interesting experiment that just didn’t work. I was depressed; the film was barely going to get any distribution at all. Then another wrench got thrown in.”
Occurring six weeks before its October 2001 release, September 11 all but finished off Donnie Darko. A satire on privileged America, with added chunks of tumbling aircraft, was no one’s idea of entertainment.
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“Any time that there’s a big cataclysm, the conservative community in this country finds art very dangerous. Censorship occurs. There are things we mustn’t talk about — certainly, no one was going to feel comfortable giving Donnie Darko a big marketing push in such a climate. Some found the film cathartic, but, mostly, people weren’t in the mood to take that kind of trip.”
Yet slowly, Kelly’s troubled meta-teen twitched back into life, sustained by the passion of those who had embraced the film for its multilayered, elliptical style.
“I wanted no greetings card solutions,” says Kelly. “The first time I saw each of my favourite films, they ran me over like a bulldozer and, after going out and getting my bearings, I’d go back for a second look. Mulholland Drive (Kelly has seen it more than 30 times), Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys, that kind of rollercoaster ride is the greatest, and I always hoped to make a film that needed to be experienced several times.”
The movie’s success in the UK on its 2002 release was another boost, and though he missed “that whole Mad World afterlife that took off” Kelly says he felt the effects. “I have been overwhelmed by the second life this film took on. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
With more than a million DVDs sold, Donnie Darko has become the biggest independent film in movie history. The director’s cut is, he says, all the result of fans’ support, which he also credits with finally enabling him to secure the $20 million he needs to make his next opus, Southland Tales, a “musical sci-fi comedy thriller hybrid — I don’t want to give too much away” — starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott and some actors with only two names.
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Donnie Darko’s website (www.donniedarko.com) is already an object of reverence for the worldwide army of webheads that Kelly knows is an important part of his slow-burn success, and whom he had in mind while he chose one change in particular that would make Donnie Darko truly his once more.
“I monitored how people responded to the film on the internet, and one of the biggest talking points were the pages on the website from Roberta Sparrow’s The Philosophy of Time Travel (a fictional book with which Donnie seeks to navigate his increasingly bizarre experiences), which years ago I wanted to incorporate into the film. People were obsessed, debating the theories, pasting them into this weblog, that site. Which was very gratifying, but at the same time gave me a pretty big chuckle. Because, you know, I’d made it up.”
Donnie Darko — The Director’s Cut is on selected cinema release and out to buy on DVD on Oct 4