June 29, 2007 - Cameron Diaz has been cast in one of the lead roles in Richard Kelly's The Box, a supernatural thriller based on the short story Button, Button by Richard Matheson. Media Rights Capital announced the casting of Diaz in The Box and revealed production on the film should begin this fall with Kelly at the helm.
According to Variety, the budget on the PG-13 thriller has been set at $30 million. Kelly wrote the screenplay, will direct the film and will serve as a producer along with his producing partner Sean McKittrick.
In a statement announcing the casting Kelly was quoted as saying, "My hope is to make a film that is incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining my artistic sensibility. I am especially excited to be working with Cameron Diaz, an actress I have always admired."
Donnie Darko writer/director Kelly has been working on The Box for years, at times collaborating on the screenplay with Cabin Fever/Hostel filmmaker Eli Roth. At one point in the production Roth and Kelly were writing the script together, with Roth penciled in as director. Now with the project ready to move forward in just a few months, it's been confirmed Kelly will helm the film and Roth appears to be mostly out of the picture.
Kelly's Southland Tales received less than enthusiastic reviews after a screening of the film's first cut at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Since that screening, Kelly's been busy re-cutting and tightening up Southland Tales while simultaneously preparing for production on The Box.
Over the course of the last few years, I've spoken to both Kelly and Roth about progress on The Box. Way back in May 2004 Kelly told me he was busy collaborating on the screenplay with Roth. "I’ve been struggling to get Eli the pages," said Kelly. "It’s coming soon. Eli’s been really patient with me while I’ve been finishing the Director’s Cut [of Donnie Darko]. We’re actually sitting down [soon] to hopefully get the final stages of the screenplay right. We want to get it right, really out of respect for Richard Matheson and also because we really want the collaboration to be something really special and worthwhile. It’s coming – it’s coming."
Roth said 45 pages of the script were done at that point, with Roth still attached as director. Kelly explained how the process was working: "I’ve never co-written a screenplay with anyone before. It’s been sort of an interesting collaboration for me. I honestly don’t think I could do it unless I was working with the director. I’m working with Tony Scott and I’m working with Jonathan Mostow on projects, and you know, I can communicate very clearly with another director and I can collaborate on a writing level. I just don’t know how well I can collaborate with a screenwriter who isn’t the director. I’m sure that at some point, as I get more lazy with old age, that I will bring in a screenwriter and work with them, and have them write a screenplay for me because I don’t have time or, like I said, I’m too lazy. It’s been great working with Eli."
Catching up with Eli Roth at the premiere of New York Minute in May 2004, Roth provided a little insight into the plot of The Box. "It’s about a couple and they get this mysterious box, and when you push a button, it brings you money but someone you don’t know dies. And it very quickly spirals out of control very fast. It’s really about greed and sort of losing one’s soul and crazy, dark, horrible, strange things happening."
In another interview with Kelly in early 2005 the filmmaker talked about the original story and his adaptation. "It is based on a very obscure Richard Matheson story that was never published but was ultimately made into a Twilight Zone episode," explained Kelly. "In the early 80’s when a new version of The Twilight Zone aired on CBS, the producers went back to a lot of the original writers like Matheson, Arthur C. Clarke [and] a lot of other big writers. Even Harlan Ellison, I think, wrote an episode. It was a really interesting kind of revival of the show, with new material. I optioned one of the episodes that Matheson wrote. The episode was called Button, Button and the screenplay that I’m working on with Eli, we’ve retitled it The Box. It’s basically a story that I’ve been obsessed with since I saw it when I was probably 11 years old or something."
Kelly added, "It’s taking the root inspiration of the story and expanding it into a much more elaborate narrative. Matheson is one of my favorite writers and I’m grateful to be able to have access to his source material."
Sometime after mid-2005 Kelly opted to direct the film and go forward on the screenplay by himself. The Box will mark Kelly's third directorial effort and is tentatively scheduled to hit theaters in 2008. Southland Tales may also appear in theaters in 2008.