Richard Kelly on how the UK saved Donnie Darko
Donnie Darko, that irresistible tale of teen depression and time travel from 2001, is back in UK cinemas to mark its 15th anniversary. Writer-director Richard Kelly looks back at the making of this wildly inventive film
In the autumn of 2002, just before Halloween, a curious little indie film named Donnie Darko arrived in UK cinemas. There was no fanfare to meet its release, no massive ad campaign; it’s name wasn’t emblazoned on city centre buses. And its star wattage was low: Drew Barrymore had a small role, as did Patrick Swayze and ER’s Noah Wyle, but in the title role and carrying the film was a promising 19-year-old with a difficult-to-pronounce surname. It was hardly the ingredients for box-office gold, but something strange happened: people came in droves to see it. After a few weeks the film expanded from a handful of London cinemas to the whole of the UK, and by the end of its run British takings dwarfed its US box-office. Although admittedly, that wasn’t too difficult.
“A lot of people don’t remember, but Donnie Darko was a failure,” says the film’s writer-director, Richard Kelly, down the phone from LA on the eve of Donnie Darko's rerelease in the UK to mark its 15th anniversary. “It was horribly received at Sundance. It took six months to get a distribution deal. It flopped in the US. So Donnie Darko was not a success out of the gate. I always want to remind people of that.”
It’s easy to understand why audiences and critics were initially baffled. The film begins with a young man waking up in the middle of a mountain road in his pajamas before he blissfully cycles back down to his home in a white picket-fence suburb, and it only gets stranger from there. Our hero is Donnie, a somnambulistic teen with serious authority issues, charmingly played by a glassy-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal.
On Donnie’s next night time wander he meets a 6ft rabbit named Frank, who tells him the world will end in 28 days, and that same night a plane engine crashes through his bedroom – the plane the engine was attached to is never identified. As well as Donnie’s psychological angst, the film is also concerned with fate, faith, time-travel, politics and smurf genitalia. It’s no wonder critics were bewildered.
Kelly says the film, which he wrote in his final year of film school, “was really just the culmination of 23 years of life experience and the movies I’d watched.” Made in 2000, before every aspiring filmmaker had a movie camera in his/her pocket, Kelly had to seek substantial financing to get his vision on screen, and that proved difficult. “There were a lot of people who just thought it was a writing sample,” says Kelly, “they thought it was unproducible, they thought it was impossible to realise.”
This attitude, however, just made the young filmmaker more determined. “I wanted to prove them wrong. I had a vision and I knew it could be realised. I just needed the resources and I needed the support.” Drew Barrymore, who adored the script, helped in this regards: “Once Drew signed on, we got the money.” A cool $4.5m.
After the tepid Sundance response, Donnie Darko was eventually released in the US in October 2001, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. In the aftermath of the twin towers attacks, nobody in America felt like seeing an existential teen movie about the coming apocalypse. "Just getting it distributed had been a struggle, so I knew the typical industry executive felt it would never connect with anyone,” Kelly told the Guardian in 2004. “And at that point it felt like they'd been right. But looking at it now, the fact that it came out in the middle of this chaos had a definite role in that."
Twelve months later, when Donnie Darko was released in the UK, it was a different story. Can Kelly account for the ardour British audiences had for his strange little movie? “The UK has always been a place where artistic breakthroughs happen, especially in music,” says Kelly. “But it has always been curious to me that Donnie Darko really resonates in the United Kingdom, because it’s such an American story.”
Maybe Kelly is on to something when he mentions music.The jukebox pop soundtrack is a pretty irresistible mix of tracks by post punk and new wave acts, many of whom come from these shores (think Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Duran Duran and Tears for Fears). We loved the soundtrack so much that Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cover of Tears for Fears' Mad World was Christmas number one single off the back of the film’s UK release.
Watching Donnie Darko back today, it’s still a beguiling experience, rich with ideas and mysteries still to uncover. What’s depressing, however, is how few films made today push the envelope in this way. Kelly suggests that the digital revolution, which has put filmmaking tools at practically everybody’s disposal, might be the reason for the dearth of innovation in indie cinema. “Digital filmmaking has made things much more accessible,” says Kelly, “but I don’t know if that’s made filmmakers more complacent in a way, where they don’t feel the need to take as many risks because they’ve all these tools at their disposal.”
As John Paterson notes in his recent look back at Donnie Darko in the Guardian, “One got the impression [Kelly] had shoved an entire lifetime’s worth of movies, sci-fi novels, stoner ideas and college philosophy classes into his debut, as if he was afraid if he didn’t squeeze it all in he’d never get another chance to say it all.” Kelly says as much himself when we speak to him. “This film was made at a time when it was still a huge challenge to even get access to a 35mm camera,” he says. “Now people can make feature films with their iPhone, right? We didn’t have iPhones in the year 2000, so it was this huge luxury. We almost needed to take risks because we only had this one chance.”
Kelly did get other chances to make feature films: five years later there was Southland Tales and in 2009 he made The Box. The former, another audacious and hilarious take on a coming apocalypse, starring The Rock and Michelle Gellar, was booed out of Cannes and only made back a fraction of its 17 million budget, the latter, a curious little morality tale come paranoid thriller, didn’t do much better.
“None of my films have been successful straight away,” admits Kelly, “so that’s maybe why it takes me a long time to get movies made. But I’m just grateful that after many years people continue to discover them, they somehow gain an appreciation over the years. For some reason my films tend to take time, they take many years to marinate.”
Southland Tales in particular feels ripe for achieving the cult status a film this ambitious, nightmarish and seriously strange deserves. And given the state of US politics, its vision of America as a chaotic police state looks positively prophetic. “We made that film ten years ago at the height of George W Bush and his presidency and it was a reaction to the political climate of that time,” explains Kelly. “I think we’re just seeing with Trump an evolution from that point. It’s very troubling and it’s very frightening to see what has transpired.”
If his sprawling epic can bring some relief, Kelly is delighted: “For me, Southland Tales is about reflection and catharsis. I wanted audiences to try and process the narrative as a mechanism for change and discussion and engagement and positive thought. Hopefully now it can still be an agent for change and for dialogue and for people to come together.”
In today’s political climate, this is exactly what audiences need. And who knows, maybe in another 15 years time we’ll be celebrating a reappraised Southland Tale’s return to the big screen. Until then, however, we have Donnie.
Donnie Darko is rereleased nationwide 23 Dec by Arrow and BFI
Donnie Darko is also released on DVD by Arrow