Donnie Darko turns 25 this year — and heads back to theaters on October 2nd. To mark it, director Richard Kelly sits down with Big Think’s Executive Editor Stephen Johnson for a wide-ranging conversation about the film’s cult afterlife, including the story of the meeting where Francis Ford Coppola circled a single line of dialogue and told him that’s what the movie was really about.
Kelly walks through the true origin of the bunny mask (it started as an Easter costume note and ended up part wolf, part coyote), the $4.5 million shoot that almost fell apart before it started, and why — 25 years later — he’s finally publishing “The Philosophy of Time Travel,” the official sequel novel, out December 15th.
Celebrate 25 years of Richard Kelly’s mind-bending masterpiece in a stunning 4K presentation – https://hubs.la/Q04wnCmM0
Richard Kelly: Anytime I am writing a screenplay, I have to articulate the whole novel in my mind — and then I’m adapting the novel just without having bothered to write it, kind of. I love the idea of big world building. And the irony is, I’m about to publish a gigantic novel in December that’s the official epic sequel to Donnie Darko. There’s enough material in this gigantic book for three movies. The complexity and the ambition, the scale of it — I don’t think there’s any other way to achieve it. The story isn’t finished yet. There’s a lot more to it. I didn’t want to live out the rest of my life and not really have a crack at continuing to tell what I really felt was an unfinished story — that the movie was only the beginning of something much greater.
Stephen Johnson: I’m Stephen Johnson, executive editor at Big Think, and I’m joined today by Richard Kelly, the director and writer behind films like Southland Tales, The Box, and the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko, which is being re-released in theaters on October 2nd. Richard, thank you so much for taking some time to talk to me.
Richard Kelly: Thank you for having me.
Stephen Johnson: Donnie Darko is famously a movie that could be picked apart in various ways — it could be called a Superman story, a love story. I’ve often heard you describe it as a sci-fi film, primarily about time travel. And you seem primarily interested in time, not merely in a physics sense, but also in setting your movies in very specific places in real time. Donnie Darko, released in 2001, is set in 1988, the end of the Reagan era — the first line in the movie is, “I’m voting for Dukakis.” So I was hoping you could talk a little about what setting this film in particular in the year 1988 brought to the story that maybe setting it in other years might not have.
Richard Kelly: Yeah, when I wrote the script, the first draft was written in 1998, actually — literally in the timeframe of the movie, add ten years is when I wrote the first draft. It was written in this fury of anxiety and stress that often accompanies having graduated from a very expensive undergraduate school with a degree, and you’re living in a gigantic city and not having any clear career path moving forward. So I literally took 23 years of life experience and my film degree and all my education, and I just channeled it into writing this script, which was written literally in the month of October in 1998.
So that’s only ten years after the film takes place. And the way time works — you think of ten years from today, September 3rd, 2026, that would be September 3rd, 2016. A lot has changed in ten years, but also a lot of things are the same — we had Zoom, we had iPhones, TVs and cars, and everything looked kind of the same in 2016 as they do now. But there was a big disparity between 1988 and 1998. So I was very specific about wanting to do a period piece from the suburbs that I remembered from being a young teenager. Donnie, the character, is three years older than I am, so it was kind of like modeling after my older brother, in his age and his friend group. I had this very specific idea that I wanted to capture 1988, and I knew the story was supposed to take place around Halloween, because it involved a ghost-like character in a Halloween costume. So it was about really carving out that specific era, right around Halloween, where we had an election coming up.
I wanted to play off all the cultural things I remembered from that timeframe, and honestly, how different it felt from 1998 — so much had changed in those ten years, it just felt like a completely different world. That might’ve also been a product of being really young — literally being 23, where the world drastically changes from the age of 13 to 23. That’s a massive, essential component of any person’s life. So I was really specific about wanting to capture that, because I felt like it hadn’t been captured as a period piece at that point — at the time, no one was really doing period pieces about the late ’80s.
The Line Francis Ford Coppola Circled
Stephen Johnson: So this might tie into the late-’80s thing, it might not. But I was fascinated to read a story you once told about a meeting you had with Francis Ford Coppola, before you made the movie. You were having this meeting, he was looking at the script, and he circled one line of dialogue and said, that’s what your movie is all about. I believe I have the line — it was, “The kids have to figure it out, because the parents, they don’t have a clue.” Do you think that sums up what the movie was, and what do you think he was trying to tell you with that?
Richard Kelly: Well, that was one of the greatest moments of my life, probably — getting to meet Francis Ford Coppola. The meeting was arranged by Jason Schwartzman, who I owe my entire career to, because he was the first actor attached to play Donnie. He ultimately could not play the role because of a scheduling conflict, with respect to Drew Barrymore’s schedule and everything. So this incredible meeting with Francis was at the American Zoetrope offices, over in the Miracle Mile part of L.A. And the fact that he circled that line of dialogue — which, ironically, is delivered by Drew Barrymore’s character, Karen Pomeroy, the English teacher, a character very much inspired by a composite of three or four high school English teachers I had in real life, who taught me a lot of the literature that’s featured in the film — the fact that Francis latched onto that one piece of dialogue, I loved it. I thought it was very amusing and interesting, because there’s so much going on in that script, so many ideas. It’s definitely written by a young person who’s just trying to put all of their ideas into this one thing, which I was.
But the fact that he latched onto that — I think it kind of spoke to this intergenerational conflict that is a tale as old as time. As long as we’ve had parents and children, since the beginning of the human experience, there’s been this intergenerational conflict, where one generation looks at the older generation and says, you just don’t get it, we understand things so much better than you do, or we’re so much more sensitive or articulate, or we’re having to clean up after your mess. It just goes on and on. And we see it now — I’m a younger Gen Xer, but in a way I sort of feel like a millennial, because of this arrested development, I guess — I see it with my nephews and my friends’ kids, this intergenerational conflict that’s just a tale as old as time.
I can’t speak for Francis specifically, but maybe what he was insinuating — he was looking at me as this then 24-year-old trying to direct his first movie, demanding to direct it myself, not wanting anyone else to direct it — that I was one of these younger people who maybe thinks they know better than the older generation. I don’t think he was criticizing the line. I think he was just marking it out, but kind of trying to give me a warning, in a way, about what I was getting myself into with directing a film — that it’s a big responsibility, and that I’m trying to say a lot of things, so make sure you know what you’re saying, make sure you can articulate yourself. So again, I can’t speak to exactly what it was, but that’s my guess. And that line is only in the director’s cut of the movie, because so much footage had to be cut out. But it was an interesting observation that I very much appreciated.
“We Never Truly Escape High School”
Stephen Johnson: Speaking of composite high school teachers — I’ve often heard you say that we never truly escape high school. And by that, I’m assuming you mean that life is reliably cliquey, or perhaps superficial. But I was wondering if you could talk a little about what you mean by that, and how you found it — as you’re getting older, do you still find that to be true?
Richard Kelly: Well, I think high school — there are these four formative years, from age 14 to 18 or thereabouts for most people, and those are incredibly formative years where you go through this gigantic transformation into adulthood. I think everyone carries that experience with them through the rest of their life. You can just apply the dynamics of a high school experience to any business, to politics, to friendships, marriage, child rearing — it’s just this common experience that everyone has. It’s this chapter in everyone’s life. And for a lot of people, it’s a really deeply unpleasant time, because of the pain of adolescence, bullying, the realities of cliques, the difficulties of making good grades and getting into college. It’s a very stressful time. So I guess when people say this is like high school, or that is like high school, everything is like high school, it usually has a negative connotation — probably because if you had to look at high school as a glass half full or a glass half empty, I think maybe the majority of people would say it’s half empty, in the sense that it was probably an anxious time for them.
So you can just apply the social dynamics there, because it’s just a common thing that virtually everyone who’s blessed with getting a proper education, whether public or private, can carry forward. But then again, you see that completely disrupted when you look at something like the pandemic disrupting that four years for a whole generation of people — that’s a social disruption, and also the disruption of smartphones and technology. Now getting into AI — the whole dynamic of going to high school in the ’90s, when I went to high school, is just a completely different world now, but it is still formative.
Learning to See Before Learning to Write
Stephen Johnson: I’d love to talk to you about some comparisons — specifically within the film industry, maybe 2001 compared to the present day. But jumping back to the high school idea — before you started making films, you were a visual artist, an illustrator and a painter, I believe, from a very young age. Can you talk a little about how that background informed or influenced how you approached making a film?
Richard Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I was very blessed. My parents, when I was in kindergarten — I think I was about five years old — they came to pick me up at kindergarten in Norfolk, Virginia, in Hampton, Virginia, where I was born and where we lived at the time. My kindergarten teacher pulled them aside and said, your son, he knows how to draw, he’s really good at drawing, you should push him into continuing to draw. Our next-door neighbor, in Poquoson, Virginia, which is like a suburb of Hampton — my dad worked at NASA — put me in art class, two doors down from where we lived. They sat me down in front of an easel with these little wooden sculptures of a sphere, a cone, a cube, and a lamp next to it with a light source, so it would cast a shadow. They gave me a piece of charcoal to draw the shape, the wooden shape, with the shadow cast behind it. It was teaching me basic geometry — a cone, a cube, a sphere — that you then use to build a three-dimensional object, a face, shoulders, a human body. Just these fundamental building blocks. I think that was hugely influential — I’d recommend any parent give that to their child, the gift of being able to illustrate basic shapes and light sources, because it gave me a sense of spatial geometry, the idea of light sources. It gave me a foundation to build upon as I moved into more detailed drawing, watercolors, oil painting, as I got further in that process.
So I think that informed everything. You have your whole life to learn how to write, and writing is so hard, it takes a long time to develop that skill — I’m still developing it, as I begin my fifth decade on this planet. I’m so sick of writing, to be honest, but it’s been a necessary process to get all these movies made that I want to eventually make and plan to make. So it’s like going back to being able to draw and having that visual skill — that’s why I’m a director first and a writer second. The director part of me will always be at the top of the job-skill food chain, or whatever. That’s because they put me in art class from the beginning. I’m a visual person first and foremost. I apply those visuals into my screenplays, trying to give them a visual dimension on the page. That’s the skill set I carry forward, and I’m still dying to continue to develop it in terms of going back and directing again.
Stephen Johnson: Well, I think that segues into something I wanted to ask you, which is — I think if I walked up to someone on the street and said the words “Donnie Darko,” I’d bet good money that the first image they’d conjure in their mind is the bunny mask. And I was interested to read, or maybe listen to, an interview with you where you said to this day, you’re still not sure where exactly that idea came from. So I’m curious about two things: one, what was the process of bringing the final product — this disturbing, maybe slightly predatory bunny mask — to its final form? Let’s start there. Then I have a deeper question about how you think about writing, as more of an engineering problem, or more of a subconscious, David Lynch kind of thing. But maybe we could start with the story of bringing that mask to its final form.
Richard Kelly: Well — it all started with the mechanics of the story: the jet engine, the missing plane. There needed to be a voice that lured Donnie out of his bedroom to save him from the jet engine, and that had to have a payoff. I knew the payoff was a kid in a Halloween costume, and I had to pick a Halloween costume that was evocative and creepy and thematic. I’m not sure where the imagery came from exactly — I started doing drawings, and you see those drawings in the movie. Those images kind of came from the subconscious. But in terms of the thematic choice to pick a rabbit, beyond it needing to be a Halloween costume, it was Richard Adams’ Watership Down, a novel that was taught to me in eighth grade — by one of the only male teachers who influenced Drew Barrymore’s character, whose name was Ernie Jordan, at Midlothian Middle School.
Midlothian High School is where I went, here in Virginia. But Midlothian Middle School ended up being the influence for the Middlesex Mongrels in the movie — Middlesex became this sort of fictional dream of Virginia, in California, in Southern California, where the story really ultimately takes place in my mind. With the rabbit, it was very much thematically influenced by Watership Down. Then in the design, I started doing sketches where it needed to be frightening, terrifying in a way — to cast a spell on Donnie when he’s sleepwalking, and to cast a spell on the audience.
“I had to pick a Halloween costume that was evocative and creepy and thematic … it needed to be frightening, terrifying — to cast a spell on Donnie when he’s sleepwalking, and to cast a spell on the audience.”
So I started showing my sketches to the producers, and they were like, I’m not sure about this. There were a couple of costume designers who interviewed for the movie, and they brought sketches, and all of their sketches just looked like Easter Bunny costumes — like one of those Easter bunnies you see in the White House, standing next to a president in those photos. Different kind of creepy, still creepy — but I was like, no, no, no. And I showed them the sketches I had done, which were more like a skull — there’s one in the movie where you see Mary McDonnell staring at it in horror, one of the important scenes in the third act, and then the sketches you see on the easel at the end, with James Duval’s character. Those are all my original sketches, which I gave to everyone — this is what the rabbit looks like.
So when we got April Ferry, our wonderful Oscar-nominated costume designer, she was very trusting of me, and she started putting together the suit. We wanted it to be this beautiful suit, monochromatic and silver, that would capture light at night, like moonlight. I wanted to paint the mask silver and the eyes white, so it reflects the moonlight, because Donnie sees the mask at night. We wanted it to pop that way. She hired this incredible sculptor named Dale Brady, who had worked for Stan Winston. We took my sketches and brought them into Photoshop — what Photoshop was in the year 2000, which was still very advanced — and made a little pseudo-3D version of my sketches, then gave it to Dale Brady, knowing we were going to paint it silver. Dale, the sculptor, was like, this is really kind of like a wolf or a coyote, merged with a rabbit and a little bit of a person. So there was a lot of wolf and coyote in there, which is something that stuck with me in a huge way — and the way I’ve further developed what all this is, in my mind.
Stephen Johnson: You just mentioned that a primary influence for the mask was one of the characters in Watership Down. I was rewatching the movie a couple of times earlier this week — the theatrical cut, the director’s cut — and one of the things people probably say most about this movie is that they pick up new things each time. There’s a lot of detail. One of them is just how many references there are to other pieces of work within Donnie Darko. I don’t think I’d ever clocked that Rose Darko, the mother, is reading Stephen King’s It in one of the first scenes. There’s a fancy word for this, intertextuality — basically the process of putting references to other pieces of art within a piece of art. For you, is there a lot of thought behind that process, an intentionality, or is it more like, this feels right, let’s put it in there and see what sparks fly? To what extent is it a subconscious thing versus a planned, intentional thing?
Richard Kelly: Well, with this movie, everything was definitely planned and intentional, but there was also a lot of subconscious stuff going on at the same time. It was literally my very first feature-length screenplay — I’d been terrified all throughout growing up, I’d written short stories, essays, critical essays, made short films, been to USC, had a film degree. But this was my first feature-length screenplay, and I was holding out — I had to save up all my energy and all my ideas and finally let it burst out into a feature-length screenplay. So I was obviously referencing a lot of autobiographical things — Graham Greene’s The Destructors was taught to me by Mrs. Cortopassi in junior high school, Watership Down was taught to me in eighth grade by Mr. Jordan at Midlothian Middle School. These were clear references to my childhood texts, of which there were many that formed my mind, from an educational point of view, that are in the movie. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which you see on Kenneth Monnitoff’s desk, played by Noah Wyle — you see that on the physics test. That was literally part of our curriculum in high school physics class, so I was borrowing from my own high school curriculum as a public high school student in suburban Virginia in the early ’90s.
But the Stephen King novels — It, which you see Rose reading in the introduction of her character, and then you see Eddie reading a hardback of The Tommyknockers in bed in the first act — that’s where my influence came from outside the educational system, because they were not teaching Stephen King as curriculum, as much as I would have loved that, because I was literally devouring every Stephen King novel and short story starting probably in the fifth grade. I think I got the collection Skeleton Crew and started reading all those short stories in like the fifth grade, and I just did not stop reading Stephen King from that point forward. That was the biggest influence on me, separate from the educational curriculum, in terms of pop mainstream storytelling — less so the horror side, because I think his science fiction was just tremendous and thought-provoking. Even the Richard Bachman books — The Running Man, Rage, and The Long Walk, which my friend JT Mollner just made a movie out of, and my friend Edgar Wright has made another version of The Running Man. Stephen King was obviously one of the most influential people of now multiple generations.
Donnie’s Anti-Authoritarian Streak
Stephen Johnson: Beyond the sci-fi and horror stuff you just mentioned — and The Long Walk is maybe a good example of this — there’s some kind of anti-authoritarian tendency within Stephen King’s work, and that’s also a big theme in Donnie Darko. Donnie is frequently getting in trouble, telling teachers to shove BS self-help books up there. Could you talk a little about that? Was that more your natural disposition as an adolescent, or did it come from reading certain authors? That seems like a big theme in the movie, and I’m curious where it comes from.
Richard Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I never mouthed off to my teachers in that way — I wouldn’t have ever dared say those things. But it’s a movie, and Donnie is this heightened sort of antihero-slash-superhero, aggressively — as Francis Ford Coppola sort of pointed out — like the arrogant young teenager who thinks he knows everything and has all the answers. That’s sort of maybe where that attitude comes from. Donnie’s attitude, mouthing off about the curriculum taught by Kitty Farmer, the “love and fear” lifeline, was very clearly drawn from a real curriculum I think we were taught in like tenth grade at my high school — there was a PE teacher who was teaching us the love and fear lifeline. I remember being one of those know-it-all kids who thinks this is so simplistic — and I mean, there is some value in the lifeline, but it’s also very simplistic, reminiscent of a lot of the self-help stuff that came up in the ’80s and into the ’90s and is still with us, where a lot of it is oversimplification, or nonsensical, or platitudes that feel easily digestible to sell books.
So I was definitely drawing on real human experience in the public education system, but I never, ever got suspended or mouthed off to my teachers the way Donnie does — I would never have done that. I wouldn’t have gotten my scholarship to USC had I told my gym teacher to put a book up somewhere.
Writing Characters You Disagree With
Stephen Johnson: Besides the bunny mask, that fear-and-love spectrum, and Donnie mouthing off to that teacher, is a very memorable part of the film. It also ties into how I see your portrayal of some of the characters — this time around, I noticed more of the political or cultural undertones in the movie. The Darko parents are very much, I guess, prospective Bush voters, Reaganites — they get into clashes, they bicker with their kids, but they’re also very lovable, no one’s too simplistic a character here. I’ve heard you talk in other interviews about, particularly regarding Southland Tales, your desire to portray political ideologues fairly, to be willing to take criticism on your own side. Is that something that’s important to you when you’re rendering these characters, even ones who hold ideas you don’t agree with — to give them a fair shot, to render them in good faith?
Richard Kelly: Yes. When my work is encroaching upon satire — something like Southland Tales, which leans much further into political satire — some of those ideas are clearly present in Donnie Darko, maybe to a lesser extent in The Box, going back to 1976, where you have the backdrop of an election year, where all the stories take place. You have references to the political landscape to some degree, whether it’s just texture in the background or more advanced into the characters in the foreground. My kind of rule is, I’m a science fiction storyteller first and foremost, and I’m trying to tell a suspenseful story that engages an audience — I’m trying to do what Stephen King did for me when I was 15 years old, when I was blown away, just devouring all his books, and I couldn’t stop reading them because he was such a magnificent storyteller, and there was a humanity to all his characters. Stephen King is one of our great humanists — his characters, not the monsters, not the evil characters, which he renders incredibly well, but the heroes in all the Stephen King books have this fundamental sense of decency and kindness, a folksy, small-town decency, a lot of his stories set in these fictional towns in Maine. And I think that influenced me a lot — in all my characters, I want to try to hold on to as much humanity as possible, even if they’re doing despicable things, or become villains, or aren’t the heroes of the story — I’m trying to hold on to a core humanity.
When it comes to portraying a character on either side of the political spectrum, I’m just trying to be careful not to turn those people into complete cartoon characters, or get up on my soapbox and say, look at this idiot. I don’t want to come off as — some people want that.
Stephen Johnson: I was going to say that some audiences arguably want that, or seem to want it. I don’t, personally. So why is it important to you that you’re always checking yourself — checking your own biases, might be the right word — not to render a character in the cartoonish realm, as opposed to more human?
Richard Kelly: Well, if you’re writing a screenplay — even if the screenplay has a first-person narrator, which my second film, Southland Tales, does, narrated by Pilot Abilene, played by Justin Timberlake, an Iraqi war veteran, so that had a subjective narration walking you through the story — but removing that from the equation, for the most part, screenplays are omnisciently written, from the omniscient voice of the creator. If I’m the writer-director, it’s from my omniscient voice, but I’m creating a world — unless it’s an irresponsible or unreliable narrator, someone who’s lying and fabricating things, and then you’re showing the whole movie from that narrator’s subjective or biased point of view. But even then, if you’re trying to replicate a real situation, I think you have to approach it as the omniscient author of the text from a point of view of neutrality. You should try to come at it like a journalist trying to be neutral, quote-unquote “fair and balanced,” trying not to take a side per se in your rendering of the characters — only because I feel like that’s more honest, in the sense of the human experience. But you can still make people act foolishly, or like buffoons — something like Southland Tales, where the characters are acting buffoonish, but you see it on both sides of their poor choices, their greedy choices, their murderous choices — and I hope those are grounded from a place where, as the author, I’m trying to be objective in my rendering of it all.
The Novel That Was Always a Novel
Stephen Johnson: I want to go back to something you said about Stephen King. I was rewatching Donnie Darko earlier this week, and one thing that really struck me was that it seems like there’s a seven-part novel series behind Donnie Darko — like there’s a bigger story lurking behind it, and we’re getting this sliver of it. My analogy might be something like the Dark Tower series condensed into one movie — no shade to any director, maybe it’s just because I love that series that it didn’t quite work out on screen. Donnie Darko works great as a movie, and you’re almost surprised there isn’t a series of novels behind it. So what explains that? Is it a lot of backstory to the characters, thinking really hard about it, doing a lot of extra writing that doesn’t make it into the final screenplay?
Richard Kelly: Well, again, kind of all roads lead back to high school, as we talked about earlier. When I learned how to be a writer — my writing journey started, I guess, maybe in junior high, maybe even elementary school, when I started doing short stories. But really, high school was when I was mentally kind of writing novels in my mind. Anytime I’m writing a screenplay, I’m adapting the novel, I’m just jumping past the part of actually writing it — I usually just want to make movies. So mentally, it’s a novel — I have to articulate the whole novel in my mind, and then I’m adapting the novel just without having bothered to write it, because I love the idea of big world building. And the irony is, I’m about to publish a gigantic novel in December that’s the official epic sequel to Donnie Darko. I needed to embrace the act — I needed to actually take the time to put it together as a novel, because there’s so much story there that it needed to be revealed to the public as a novel, so the marketplace can evaluate it and see how it would be adapted into multiple movies. So for the first time in my career, I haven’t mentally just hopscotched over that part of my process — I’ve actually gone through the laborious and agonizing process of putting together the novel and getting it published.
That was the irony with Donnie, in the sense that the bigger world-building kind of required it — and hopefully, when people finally get to read it, they’ll see what it is and understand why it was a necessary part of the world building. Some people just want it to be its own thing, and they want it to just be about schizophrenia — and that’s not what it is to me. To me, it’s a big science fiction world that delves into a lot of big ideas and themes, with context to that particular era of 1988 going into ’89 and forward, far forward after that.
“Some people just want it to be its own thing, and they want it to just be about schizophrenia — and that’s not what it is to me. To me, it’s a big science fiction world.”
Stephen Johnson: That’s one thing I’d love to ask you about, because the movie came out 25 years ago — it’s kind of a strange thing, for such a beloved movie, to wait that long for a sequel. I imagine that’s been frustrating for you, and I know it’s been frustrating for the intense fan base that loves this movie. During those 25 years, you’ve had a lot of time to think about how this universe might expand and evolve, and I imagine the fan base has too — they have theories, suggestions, maybe fan fiction. I’m curious: zooming out, how has the Donnie Darko universe expanded and evolved in your mind over the years, and has the fan base played any role in shaping how you think about it? Or is it, at the end of the day, just you in the lab, tinkering on this world-building project that’s been 25-plus years in the making?
Richard Kelly: Yeah, it’s me in the laboratory. The only way the fan base has influenced my desire to stay in that laboratory — and continue toiling away in it, as difficult and isolating as it can feel — is that the fans keep having questions. That’s the only way they’ve actually influenced it: by certain questions they just don’t understand. Like, why didn’t Donnie get out of bed at the end of the movie if he knew the jet engine was coming? Why was he laughing hysterically in bed? What does this line of dialogue mean, that doesn’t seem to explain anything? What is this painting, this illustration in Donnie’s physics class — what does that mean? These little Easter eggs — without making a cute reference about it — people had questions, and I was like, all right, these were Easter eggs I left behind for myself decades ago. And knowing that all the little puzzle pieces I had put together back then — not all of them were completely put into place, the puzzle wasn’t completely formed, but those puzzle pieces are just still sitting there. Like when you look at a jigsaw puzzle that’s 70 percent complete — you’ve got all the extra pieces floating around, and they fit in somewhere, but you haven’t quite figured out where. So it was filling in those puzzle pieces I’d left behind for myself. That’s been really rewarding, and it’s felt like part of the greater story.
Within the movie, you have this time travel book that I wrote part of when we were editing the movie, even right around Sundance. That went on the website we built for the movie, and then I started putting that material further into the director’s cut, just to let people know, hey, there’s a lot more going on here — the story isn’t finished yet, there’s a lot more to it. I didn’t want to live out the rest of my life without really having a crack at continuing to tell what I felt was an unfinished story — that the movie was only the beginning of something much greater. And it turned out that writing a novel was the best way forward.
Stephen Johnson: So when you’re talking about those scattered puzzle pieces, or Easter eggs left behind — were those details where you had some idea of where that path was going, or was it more like, this fits in well enough, this feels right, I’ll figure it out later and make it make sense?
Richard Kelly: There were little things — I don’t want to give too much away, because there are surprises people will get to when they read the book, which comes out December 15th. The Philosophy of Time Travel is the name of Roberta Sparrow’s book within the movie, which is all part of my imagination — but the sequel takes upon that name, because it includes almost everything you don’t know about that book, and what it means to all the characters.
Stephen Johnson: And this starts back in 1988, right after the death of Donnie Darko — is that right?
Richard Kelly: It literally starts on October 4th — less than 48 hours after Donnie dies, in the early morning of October 2nd. But it also describes things that happened before October 2nd, with the characters reconvening, figuring out what the hell happened — why did this kid die, what does it mean, what does his death mean. It’s a big, gigantic procedural murder mystery, in a way — was Donnie murdered, did he take his own life, what are the circumstances of what happened to him. That mystery takes place over a time frame of 14 months. So the story starts, I guess, October 2nd, and goes 14 months forward over a gigantic story — enough material for three movies, honestly, three animated movies, out of this gigantic novel.
Stephen Johnson: You’d want these to be animated movies, after the novel comes out — if it’s possible to get made, you’d want to do three animated movies?
Richard Kelly: There’s enough material in this gigantic book for three movies. If I were told I had to adapt the entire novel into just one movie, I don’t know how I’d do it — it’s big. I think it’s sort of like a trilogy of animated movies, and it has to be animated if you want to reunite the original cast to play themselves 25 years later — the complexity, the ambition, the scale of it, I don’t think there’s any other way to achieve it. I think it lends itself to animation in the way a story can start there — a sequel can start in the animated realm, and then there’s a huge time jump of 28 years, and it can become live action, with the characters playing themselves as they look and sound now. I already know so much of what happens after the time jump — it became so apparent to me that the 14 months after Donnie dies is so important, so much stuff happens, there’s a huge investigation, and all the characters come together and you learn about who they really are, in Southern California.
And it’s so much important information that when I was writing the scripts that take place 28 years later, I was referencing all this stuff — I knew it happened, and I was having to refer to it, but it was confusing, or just too much story. It became clear that I needed to flesh out this immediate aftermath of Donnie’s death, because it’s like the aftermath of an unresolved, mysterious death of a teenager that’s very traumatizing, with all these unexplained clues and repercussions. It delves into the government, the greater community of Los Angeles — it spans from the Oval Office to the Mojave Desert, a gigantic scale to it. So it became clear to me that if there was ever going to be a real, big sequel to this, I had to tell this section of the story, for everyone to understand what it all means and to start the journey with me. I couldn’t just hold this big part of the journey internally in my mind and not bring the fans up to speed on how the sequel really begins. It’s been an enormous amount of work, a huge undertaking and challenge, but I didn’t want to live out the rest of my life saying I gave up on it, or that I didn’t see it through to the end. It became clear that publishing a book was the best way — here it is, take it or leave it, have your way with it, let the marketplace dictate what happens with it.
If there are animated movies, if it’s just a book and then we try to make live-action movies — I’ve got to let the marketplace dictate what happens to it. I love all my cast, all my actors, and we’ll see what happens. Technology is now in a place with animation where we can do things we couldn’t do 25 years ago — there are things we couldn’t do even five years ago.
Stephen Johnson: What are you referring to, in particular?
Richard Kelly: I’m thinking of motion capture technology, in the sense that you can tell a more adult, R-rated animated feature, and it doesn’t necessarily need to cost like $100 million. You look at some of these animated movies with an enormous price tag, and a lot of that has to do with machine learning technology — and obviously there’s a big, nuanced discussion to have about all of that, because you want to make sure human beings are involved in everything, that my fingerprints as an artist are on everything. I would never want to allow a machine, an algorithm, or an artificial intelligence to make any final rendering decision that ends up in the final product of a movie.
Stephen Johnson: Do you see any place for generative AI in the filmmaking process — maybe just in general, and then in your films?
Richard Kelly: I mean, that’s a terrifying question, because you want to give a nuanced answer to a really complicated question. Obviously, AI scares the crap out of me as an artist, or just as a human being — it’s terrifying. But at the same time, there is machine learning that’s been around since the beginning of computer systems. Even going through the fact-checking, the grammar and syntax on my novel with my editors right now, we were just talking about spell check — how long has spell check been around in a word processor? You can kind of see how spell check feels like an early machine learning program, like it has the early gestation of AI in it, in a certain way. But yeah, the AI question is terrifying — I know that every filmmaker is going to be confronted with it moving forward, every human being is going to be confronted with it. I always just want to be an artist where literally my fingerprints, my brain, has had eyes and ears and blood, sweat, and tears on every frame, making sure it looks a certain way and sounds a certain way, and that it’s performed by a human being.
“AI scares the crap out of me as an artist, or just as a human being — it’s terrifying.”
Stephen Johnson: This kind of goes back to, or is at least on a similar thread — let’s say we could travel in time, forward to today, when Richard Kelly is a 20-something who just wrote Donnie Darko and is trying to get it made. How do you think that process would differ from back in 2001, or a couple of years before, when you were trying to get it made? Do you think you’d end up with a YouTube series? The equipment would be much cheaper — would you make an independent movie? What do you think that would look like?
Richard Kelly: Well, if I were 25 years old today with the script for Donnie Darko, trying to get it made, I would lean into animation, honestly — storyboard animation, rendering of conceptual images, sort of stylistic animated storyboards. It’s actually a lot of what I’m doing right now — I put myself through kind of a Photoshop bootcamp over the past few years, during COVID, and then through the writer’s strike, I got really into Photoshop, going back to animation roots and fundamental building blocks. I think it might have been one of the great Spielberg quotes — there are so many — but he was talking about how every filmmaker should study animation. I don’t care what kind of filmmaker you are — if you’re making Cassavetes-style films, or Dogma 95-type films with all natural light, it doesn’t matter, you should study animation, because it can only develop your brain, your visual language, your understanding of layers and the photographic process, the image creation process. We’re just beholden to these devices and computers now, in a way that’s kind of inextricable. We can shoot on film if we can afford to, and film is incredible — I still want to try to shoot on film if the project allows it. But everything is going to go through a computer at some point — even before it goes into a theater, and there’s only a select few theaters that can project film, but even then, it’s going to go through a computer at some point. So as much as you can teach yourself about the channels of image processing, it’s just going to make you a better storyteller.
I don’t know if I answered your question, but I’d also probably try to just shoot — I would befriend some actors, make friends with a bunch of actors. The thing about Donnie Darko is, it’s a bunch of young actors, and it was so great that we got to make the movie in L.A. at the time, because there was a commercial strike — commercials and music videos went dark in the summer of 2000, and all these crews were available, and equipment was really cheap to get because no one was making any of those commercials. So we were able to afford to shoot in L.A. because of the equipment rentals and the crew availability — it brought the price tag down to where we didn’t have to go to Toronto to make it. That was such a blessing, because we got access to all the cool young L.A. actors — we got Seth Rogen and all these incredible, cool L.A. kids who were living there at the time. It became this very Los Angeles movie.
Stephen Johnson: As I was rewatching the movie, I noticed Seth Rogen has a handful of lines, maybe three lines in the whole movie, unless I’m forgetting some — but they’re all very Seth Rogen-y. I don’t know if he’d done Freaks and Geeks by then, but they’re all just pure Seth Rogen, maybe just in the way he says them. One of the things I was asking about, in terms of doing this today, is — my mind goes to, I think his name is, the young guy who just made Backrooms.
Richard Kelly: Kane Parsons.
Stephen Johnson: Kane Parsons, excuse me. His thing started as a YouTube series — some pretty elaborate world building that all led to making a movie, still on a pretty small budget. I imagine it’s analogous to the budget of Donnie Darko — it was like $4.5 million, or am I getting that wrong?
Richard Kelly: It was $4.5 million in the year 2000. I don’t have an inflation calculator in front of me, but maybe seven now.
Stephen Johnson: But back then, that was still fairly small, right?
Making Donnie Darko for $4.5 Million
Richard Kelly: Yeah, small in the sense for a first-time director, absolutely. But it was also the ambition of the movie — even back then, there were a lot of people telling us, this is crazy, you cannot do this for $4.5 million, it’s not enough money, you need $10 million, you need even more. People working on the movie, the first week of production, were saying, this is insane, we’re not going to make our schedule, you’ve got to cut this, you’ve got to cut this, you’ve got to cut this.
Stephen Johnson: Was it the CGI stuff pushing it over the top, or was it other things?
Richard Kelly: It was the CGI — the time portal at the end, we had a big stunt with a car accident at the end, we had music video sequences I was demanding, like the Steadicam sequence through the hallway. None of the ’80s music was cleared or even paid for out of the budget. There was so much that people were saying, this is too much, this is too crazy. At the time, everything about it was considered a huge risk — it’s impossible to market, you’ve got a teenager shooting a gun, which no one wanted to touch at the time.
Stephen Johnson: The aftermath of Columbine.
Richard Kelly: Yeah. So it just required a leap of faith, and I had some guardian angels — Jason Schwartzman, obviously Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen, and other people who held me along the way, helped protect this thing and shepherd it. You can’t make a movie by yourself — it requires a team of people, and a lot of faith, almost a religious conviction, to make something that doesn’t fit into a particular formula or algorithm. It requires a leap of faith from the people paying for it, and from the people who agree to put their name on it, whether it’s a first AD, a grip, or a Steadicam operator — everyone has to feel like they’re not jumping onto a sinking ship, so to speak.
Stephen Johnson: That ties back to something I wanted to ask you about — I know you said you think of Donnie Darko, first and foremost, as a science fiction story. One of the themes in the movie is mental health. When you were first making this movie, you were basically still a young kid — I imagine it took a decent amount of moxie to write the script, get it sold, get the job. I imagine it was a fairly nerve-wracking process being a first-time director, working with a really experienced cast, being trusted with a decent amount of money. Was there a decent amount of anxiety there? Was there any kind of imposter syndrome you felt at the time? What was that like?
Richard Kelly: A lot of anxiety. If you look at the behind-the-scenes footage of the movie, this really grainy DV camcorder footage, you can see the weight dripping off my body — I look like this little skeletal child, walking around, kind of trying to keep it all together. But I knew — I definitely knew what I wanted visually, I knew how to get through the day, to try to make our day, I knew how important that was. I had wonderful partners — Steven Poster, my cinematographer, Alec Hammond, my production designer, April Ferry, my costume designer — I had the most incredible crew, an L.A. crew, the best B-camera operators, people coming in for just a day to be B-camera operator on the engine smashing through and stuff. I had a wonderful support system. The one part where I felt most unprepared was talking to the actors, which is honestly, for some directors, the hardest part of the job — some directors are super visual, it’s all about the camera and the technical. That’s how I started off, so for me, what was most terrifying was talking to the actors.
But I had written the script — that was my end road with the actors, because I had written it, and it was based on my childhood, my experience growing up in Midlothian, Virginia. So I had all the information, where they sometimes had to coax it out of me — Jena Malone, or Jake, obviously, were younger than me, but they had so much more experience, they grew up on movie sets. Jake had already done movies, done October Sky, a big Disney movie, so his parents celebrated filmmakers. Jena Malone had been in a Robert Zemeckis film, she’d worked with Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster. So I had these younger actors who were able to say, OK, Richard, don’t give me a line reading, that’s not what I need, I need you to describe the meaning of what you’re trying to do — and I’d say, OK, I’ll do that better. So they were kind of helping me through that process, but it had to be that way, because I wrote the script and I was the only one who had all the answers floating around up here. They were the ones who helped walk me through the part of the process I found most intimidating.
Advice for Anyone Starting Something Ambitious
Stephen Johnson: So I imagine most people aren’t going to find themselves with a multimillion-dollar budget as a first-time director. But do you have any advice for maybe a young person, or really anyone, who finds themselves embarking on a new, ambitious project — one that requires a lot of collaboration? Is there anything you really had to learn, or get better at, some insight that, after that 28-day shoot, you really came out glad to have learned?
Richard Kelly: Well, I did have a film degree — I went to USC, took all the most important classes there, the camera class, the sound class, the critical studies classes. I went through that entire curriculum, so I had a really strong education in the foundational elements of filmmaking. This was all pre-iPhone — in order to make a film that looked professional, you had to have a film camera. Any of the video cameras back then, even a really high-end one, just looked really digital, like a soap opera. You had to shoot on film, and it was a very exclusive thing to even get access to Super 16, but especially 35 millimeter — it was so expensive, a very elite, exclusive club to be a member of, or to have that opportunity. Nowadays, literally, you have studio films shot on an iPhone, a prosumer apparatus attached to an iPhone. It’s a completely different world, a completely different methodology to get there — whether it’s YouTube, or you and your friends doing a short on YouTube. You’ve seen that pay off in extraordinary ways in the past couple of years, with something like Backrooms, or Obsession — a very low-budget film.
Even with my novel, The Philosophy of Time Travel, if I can plug it here and be crafty — it started off on a website in the year 2001, when we were marketing Donnie Darko. I had all these extra materials prepared, and we put them on this really beautiful website, built by a company in London called Hi-ReS!, who had done the website for Requiem for a Dream, the Darren Aronofsky film that had come out a year prior.
The Website That Started It All
Richard Kelly: They worked with me, and we designed this beautiful website, which kind of started the narrative of The Philosophy of Time Travel and how essential it is to the world building of Donnie Darko — and ultimately became what this section of the sequel is. If we actually get a Donnie Darko 2, we’ll see — we certainly can get there if the audience wants to go there. But this philosophy of time travel is sort of like a procedural place we need to experience in order to get further, to take that time jump. So, yeah, we’ll see what happens.
Theaters, Streamers, and Where the Story Goes Next
Stephen Johnson: So The Philosophy of Time Travel is the book that comes out in December. Let’s say we’re able to get those three animated movies — what’s the ideal destination or home for them? Would you want those to go to theaters, or to be on a streaming service? Where do you imagine those going, if you get to make them?
Richard Kelly: Well, everything is going to end up on a streaming service — even our consciousness, one day, maybe, I don’t know if that will ever happen. But I love the theatrical experience — I would love for anything in the world of Donnie Darko to take a route through theaters, because the first movie is such a theatrical experience, and people love to re-experience it in that place, in a theater. So I kind of want to keep this whole endeavor on the path through theaters. If you’re talking about making three animated movies, there’s always going to be the discussion of, well, should it just be nine episodes for a streamer? I’m not paying for any of this — someone else has to pay for it and green-light it. So my preference is to keep these things in the cinematic language of a feature film, or multiple feature films, that take a route through theaters. But there are just so many ways of distributing things now.
The line between television and film was getting really blurry, but I feel like it’s not as blurry as it was five or ten years ago — I feel like TV is kind of going back to being, you know, CBS-like, going back to commercials, not doing as much of this eight-hour auteur stuff anymore. You’re going to have commercials, it’s going to be more like CBS, which is fine — I love a lot of those shows, I love so much TV. But my gut instinct is to keep all of this in cinematic form. Even with something like Southland Tales, if I do get to finish it, it would still be two big movies, with new stuff added to the existing movie — it would still be two big movies. But then, can it go to a streamer really fast, or be financed by a streamer, could the streamer be the big revenue-generating component to it? Certainly. It’s just a question of whether it exists in the movie category, as opposed to the TV category.
How Do You Know When It’s Finished
Stephen Johnson: Well, I know I’ve kept you quite a bit, so I just have a couple more questions. We used the analogy earlier of tinkering away in the lab with the story, building the world. I guess the question I have for you, after thinking so much about how to expand the Donnie Darko universe, how to change or expand Southland Tales — how do you know when a creative project is finished? How do you know when it’s reached its final form? Or is it something you’ll endlessly tinker with, always finding a little way to make it better, new ideas? How do you think about that?
Richard Kelly: Yeah, I mean, listen — that’s something you have to be mindful of as an artist. I guess probably any artist can relate to this, maybe some more than others — it never feels finished, they just take it away from you, kind of. But at some point, you’ve got to send your kid off to college and say, go out into the world. At the same time, if you feel like there’s more story to tell, you’ve got graphic novels, or a time travel book, these intertextual texts within the text — that can be the sequel, or you have literal graphic novel prequels that also include sequel material. Like the prequel graphic novels for Southland Tales — you’ve got Boxer and Krista’s screenplay, which they’re writing within the movie, that takes place like 20 years after the movie. So there’s actually sequel stuff going on there, in a way. There’s a lot going on in some of these stories, and I think I wouldn’t go back and spend a bunch of time, or bang the drum trying to revisit these things, unless I felt there was a real, worthwhile narrative to explore.
I would love more than anything to make a movie — and I hope to make many more of them — where I feel, when it’s delivered, when we hit send at the sound mix stage on the last day, and it’s off to the studio, sent into the distribution apparatus, I would love more than anything to feel like there’s nothing I would change, not one frame I would change, I am so satisfied. Do you think that day will come? No — but I hope so, I’m not going to give up hope. Has that ever happened? Maybe, I don’t know. You want to be as satisfied as you can, and I would love to get as close to that point as possible, where I feel like I got to do everything I wanted to do. You never really get to do everything — that’s part of the limitations you have to make yourself better with. But I don’t know — I also, in my youth, was just always way too ambitious. I was trying to do too much, cram too much in there. My third film has like 45 minutes of deleted scenes — should they all go back in? Absolutely not. Would ten minutes go back in? Yeah, I think so.
It’s something that’s just part of the process. But I think you just want to get more efficient as you get older — you don’t want to be shooting way too much stuff that’s never going to end up in the movie, unless one day there’s a chance to do a longer version. And if you’ve got the time, and you’re on set, and you’re not wasting everyone’s time or flushing money down the toilet — if you’re shooting digitally, you can do a couple of extra things, and twenty years later, you’ll be glad you did. Or you could be like, why did I waste all that time shooting all that stuff?
Parting Thoughts: Ari Aster and Time Travel Stories
Stephen Johnson: Well, it’s been great talking to you, Richard. Donnie Darko is being re-released in theaters on October 2nd, The Philosophy of Time Travel, the book, comes out in December. Before you go, I’m curious — is there anyone, a novelist, director, or otherwise, whose work you find really interesting these days, who you’re following, recent movies you’ve seen that you really liked?
Richard Kelly: God, there are so many. I should mention someone from the younger generation — maybe ten years younger than me, or more. But I really love Ari Aster’s work — I love what he’s doing, I got to meet him a few times and become friends with him. I think anyone who’s forging their own path as a writer-director, and trying to stay on that path, not changing who they are — and I love the support that someone like Ari Aster is getting from A24. I would have loved to have had A24 around when we were trying to sell this movie, but that’s just the way things are.
Stephen Johnson: I don’t want to put you on the spot again, but Donnie Darko, one of the most beloved time travel movies, I’d say — do you have a list, be it movies or novels, of time travel stories you especially love?
Richard Kelly: You know, because it’s such a big part of my first movie, I’ve stayed away from a lot of other things recently, just because I don’t want to cloud my mind. Time travel is — when you introduce that element into any story, things get really complicated, things get really stressful.
Stephen Johnson: Might end up like Primer.
Richard Kelly: It magnifies your anxiety as a writer, and writers have too much anxiety as it is — so I’d say be very careful about ever introducing time travel into your story, because you’re opening a can of worms. But there’s this Stephen King short story called “The Jaunt,” which is about teleportation, not time travel, but the two are very related. And the irony — well, I don’t want to give away too much, but The Philosophy of Time Travel really has a lot to do with teleportation. I don’t want to spoil too much, but you’ll all find out on December 15th, when the book is available at your local Barnes & Noble.
Stephen Johnson: Well, thank you so much for taking some time — it was a super interesting conversation. I’m looking forward to reading the book in December, man.
Richard Kelly: Thank you so much — and thank you for giving me the platform here, I guess, on YouTube, where everything is going to end up eventually. When the world ends, there’ll still be YouTube floating out there in the cosmos.
Stephen Johnson: Consciousness will be uploaded here.
Richard Kelly: Yeah, with commercial breaks.
Stephen Johnson: With commercial breaks, exactly. Thanks, Richard.
Richard Kelly: Thank you so much. Have a good one, take care.
Stephen Johnson: You too.
One video is just the beginning
Members go deeper — they get unlimited classes, early releases, zero ads, and our quarterly print issue.
Become a Member
Already a member? Click to sign in
