Richard Kelly set the bar high with his rookie film, Donnie Darko. Now Kelly’s following up that critically acclaimed movie, which has already earned cult status, with Southland Tales, an even more complex drama that forces audiences to engage their brains.
With Donnie Darko Kelly signaled his arrival as a different kind of filmmaker. And even though his second feature film as both writer and director wasn’t warmly received at Cannes, that didn’t stop him from continuing to passionately work on honing the story in preparation for a theatrical release. Picked up for distribution by Samuel Goldwyn Films, Southland Tales begins its theatrical run on November 14, 2007 which means on November 15th there will be a new wave of people asking what it all means.
Asked at the Los Angeles press junket why people have such trouble understanding his work, Kelly replied, “I don't know. I certainly know that it's very, very complicated stuff and I definitely understand how on first viewing it can kind of rush over you. I guess the hope is that if people give it another chance on a second or third viewing, it will all start to fit together. There's a real design to it all and everything's essential.”
As for his obsession with time travel and Armageddon, Kelly believes he’s finally gotten it out of his system. “I can move on to other topics, I guess. I felt like for me, everyone thinks about how the world would end. It's obviously embedded in, I guess, everyone's DNA. Everyone thinks about their own mortality and they think about the mortality of the planet, I guess, as well. There's obviously a lot of discussion about the planet's mortality with global warming and Iraq. There's obviously a lot of talk of that right now.”
“I think for me, I think of a way I guess in which the world could end immediately, and there's obviously the theory of the second coming, the Christian theory of revelation,” explained Kelly. “I think of something on a science-fiction level - well it has to be the collapse of the fourth dimension. I mean, come on. When Dwayne says that to Bai Ling and he kisses her, like Ralph Meeker, and throws her against the bar, it's sort of like I came back to that idea of a rift in the space time continuum I guess. I was excited by the idea from the first film. I felt like I wanted to explore it on a bigger level with this one. My producing partner has officially banned me from any more time portal discussion in any future films. He says, ‘All right, we need to move on.’"
Kelly began work on this story before 9/11, right after the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. “The original inspiration I think was the T.S. Elliott poem, The Hollow Man. The last words of that, ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’ And I thought, ‘Let's flip that and let's do a big LA comedy with a bunch of crazy LA eccentric characters,’ and then it was like the Hindenburg over downtown LA. I had that image. It ends up with a big blimp and the riots. It was like the city self-destructing, a big comedy about the city self-destructing.
In the original draft, the architecture was all there, the movie star and the twin, the cop and his brother was an actor who's impersonating him, and there was a porn star and there was a scandal. The neo-Marxists were more of an acting troupe. They weren't political and it was just a blackmail attempt to try to humiliate a movie star. So that architecture was always there. And then after 9/11, I was like, ‘Okay, I've got this apocalyptic comedy which ends with rioting and the city on fire and everything with all these crazy characters.’ I thought, ‘Okay, if it's really about the end of the world, let's try to take it to the next level and make it about something much more than just making fun of LA, trying to blow up LA.’ And I had all these ideas about Homeland Security and alternative fuel. I just made it more of a science fiction futurist kind of satire, near future satire.”
Southland Tales features performances by Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Bai Ling, etc, etc. etc. Even Kelly has a hard time remembering every actor who worked on Southland Tales. “There are so many actors in this movie I forget,” joked Kelly. “I try to list them all and I always forget someone, there are so many. But I wanted it to be that way because some of my favorite LA movies, even going back to Kiss Me Deadly, which is obviously a big reference for this film, even The Big Lebowski or Heat or LA Confidential, it feels like in a lot of the film noir, there's a large tapestry of characters embedded in the city. Eccentric type people that appear mysteriously and just have a few lines, but they're memorable. In Kiss Me Deadly, there are so many, even the doctor who shows up at the end, the guy who has the box is this great eccentric kind of cameo almost. So I figured I wanted to cast the film with a lot of my favorite comedic actors, and actors from different parts of pop culture sort of emerged from the creases of the city in a way.”
Speaking of influences, Philip K Dick had a major influence on Kelly. “He has been a real, real influence on so many writers I think in the sense that he really created some of the best concepts for science fiction I think, more than anyone. There was a film noir quality to his work. There was a very LA quality to a lot of his work. I feel like he was always pushing the envelope in terms of political discussion as well, in terms of where our country might be headed and how things could get really bad, go from bad to worse very quickly.”
