Writer/director Richard Kelly: “Southland Tales was like throwing the greatest dinner party possible”

Twenty years ago, writer/director Richard Kelly struck gold with Donnie Darko, a remarkable debut that boldly marked the arrival of a singular new filmmaker. Five years later, Kelly returned with Southland Tales, a much grander and more ambitious follow-up that set a Philip K. Dick-style paranoid sci-fi thriller within the rage-filled onset of the Bush Jr. years, the war on terror, and the big brother mechanics of the recently introduced Patriot Act. The film also starred a parade of unconventional leading actors and musicians playing against type, including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Geller, Seann William Scott, and Jon Lovitz.

The film was accepted into the prestigious Cannes Film Festival while Kelly was still working through a final cut of the film, which sat at an imposing 160-minutes. The Cannes crowd is renowned for voicing their displeasure if a film doesn’t meet their standards, and the disastrous premiere of Southland Tales was no exception — the film was greeted with resounding boos and most critics tore the film apart. Southland Tales was effectively dead in the water even before it eventually opened in theatres later that year, with little marketing push from the studio, and with 20-minutes cut from its running time.

15 years later, Southland Tales has amassed a sizeable fan base online, and the film does play better today, especially given the insanity of the past four years of Trump’s presidency. With Russia interfering with the U.S. election, a deluge of fake news proliferating through social media on a daily basis, the unconscionable return of Nazis operating in plain sight, and the bewildering and large-scale belief in the insane QAnon conspiracy, Kelly’s tale of an amnesia-struck actor named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) being used as a pawn by neo-Marxists, a German company trying to solve the water crisis that accidentally tears a hole in the fabric of space and time, and a psychic porn star filming a reality TV show in the aftermath of a twin nuclear attack on Texas that has sent the U.S. into a state of anarchy doesn’t seem so far-fetched any longer.

On January 26, Arrow Video is set to release a new special-edition Blu-ray of Southland Tales, including the 160-minute infamous Cannes Cut (available for the first time), the 140-minute Theatrical Cut, along with a slew of extras, including a Richard Kelly commentary track and an extensive making-of feature. We caught up with an animated and extremely open Richard Kelly to discuss what it was like revisiting Southland Tales after so long, his hopes to expand the story, what that Cannes screening was like, how Christoper Nolan essentially saved Donnie Darko from obscurity, and much more.

The Arrow Video special edition Blu-ray of Southland Tales is out on January 26.

Bad Feeling Magazine: Let’s go back to the very beginning of Southland Tales — when did this idea first come to you?

Richard Kelly: It came to me almost 20 years ago. We had just premiered Donnie Darko at Sundance, 2001. And it was a really dark five to six months after the premiere because no one wanted to distribute the film. We couldn’t sell it, they thought it was impossible to market. It didn’t fit into a specific genre. All the major distributors had passed. It was going to go straight to home video. I was going to have to cut all the ‘80s music out of the movie and replace it with catalog stock. I was going to have to cut 20 minutes out of it. It was grim.

Then, Aaron Ryder, the executive producer of Memento, had just self-distributed Memento with a company called Newmarket Films. Bob Burney at IFC, he screened the movie, invited Christopher Nolan and his wife Emma to the screening, and they convinced Newmarket to buy Donnie Darko and give it a chance. So there was a light at the end of the tunnel!

But I had written this caper script — I’d written two scripts — I’d written a script called Bessie about an upright walking genetically-engineered cow. That script has made the rounds over the years. It’s like a Michael Crichton satire. Maybe it’ll get made one day, it’d be an expensive film.[Laughs] Then I wrote the first draft of Southland Tales, which was a kind of a Big Lebowski-type caper, which has the architecture of the story in place — it was an acting troupe in Venice Beach, who are desperate and angry. They staged this elaborate extortion plot against a movie star who is researching a role to play a cop and is planning a ride along and they’re going to stage a murder and have him film it and then demand money as an extortion plot. And then it all goes to shit and people start getting killed. And then it ends with a blimp exploding over downtown Los Angeles like the Hindenburg. That was the basic story that is still in the movie, but it was just a caper, you know, and it was sort of like me just ranting and being angry but putting together kind of a clever plot and some comedic characters, and then for whatever reason, the Hindenburg, I think was me thinking, “Well, that’s my career.” Donnie Darko is the Hindenburg and the distributors shot it down with a rocket launcher at Sundance.

And so as the years went by, I was going direct this project called Knowing with Fox Searchlight. It fell apart over budget and other legal issues, and it was too expensive to be made for $15 million and it went on to get made, Alex Proyas directed it with Nicolas Cage. I was going to direct the $15 million Fox Searchlight version of that movie. It never happened. And then so when that fell apart, Donnie was getting some real second wind. So, I revisited my script for Southland Tales. And I thought, “Okay, there’s something here.” You know, now it was post 9/11, and Bush was heading towards re-election and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were raging. And I just thought, “I’m going to inject this with a whole new layer of science fiction and politics and religion. And I’m going to make this a real Philip K. Dick odyssey.” And it just got bigger and more ambitious and had more layers, more characters, more subplots, graphic novel prequels. [Laughs] And then I just became obsessed with it, and I just fell in love with the world, and getting all these fun, amazing, hilarious actors involved. And it just became like, this wonderful therapeutic kind of dream project. And I just kept running with it. And it just caught momentum. And sure enough, we were off to the races and filming the movie in summer of 2005.

Is it true that you sought out actors primarily because you wanted to subvert the audience’s preconceptions of them?

Yes, well, I say that as a compliment and a testament to all of these actors, and I believe in all of them. It’s something that’s always bothered me. When you are casting a film, or you’re trying to get the right person for the right role, and someone’s name will come up, and then a producer or a financier, or a foreign sales executive will look down their nose at you and say, “Oh, that person is worthless, that person has no value, that person will never be taken seriously.”

The way that actors get put into these categories, and they’re not allowed out of them, you know, they get pigeonholed, or they get boxed into only doing certain kinds of movies. And I just always thought that’s not fair to anyone, the system should not be that way. And I’ve always admired directors who take risks and cast people against type. Or they’ve kind of pushed them into a new direction, you know, Tarantino has done it many times, kind of resurrecting someone from the past who was a star in the ‘70s, or the ‘60s, and bringing them back to resurgence. I think that’s wonderful.

Going back to hearing stories of, was it Cher, her debut film was Silkwood, the Mike Nichols film, I remember hearing stories of when her name came up in the credits, people were laughing and thinking, “Oh, you know, Cher, she can’t act,” people are skeptical of a musician or a comedian or someone trying to do something different, trying to go into new territory, it’s always bothered me when people push back against that. And to me, that’s counterintuitive to art. It’s counterintuitive to progress and to risk-taking, and so my philosophy on Southland Tales, the theme on casting it was I wanted to find all these wonderful people, these talented people who have a background in comedy, or they’re very popular for one particular thing or remembered from an ‘80s film or there was some sort of like pop energy surrounding them. I thought, “That’s a gift, and we’re going to put them all together, and we’re going to have them played serious in this big, complex story.” And it just it kind of felt like this grand experiment and I wanted to lean into it and embrace it. Maybe it was Mike Nichols who said this, or maybe it was Nora Ephron, but they said when casting a movie, it should be like throwing a great dinner party. Who do you want at your dinner party?

Southland Tales was like throwing the greatest dinner party possible, and having all these people roll through and what a fun group of people, I mean, some of the funniest, most interesting actors I can think of. That was the philosophy, you know, but each one of them, I wanted them all to do something that’s slightly new that they’d never done before. And everyone was taking a bit of a risk, you know, whether it’s asking Jon Lovitz to dye his hair blonde, or Larroquette was like, “Richard, I’m gonna do a New Orleans accent, I’ve never done one, but I can do it.” Everyone was taking some kind of risk, and I wanted to hold their hand and be like, “It’s okay, we’re all going to take this risk together.” You know, it’s scary to take risks. It’s frightening, for sure. But I’d rather do that than just tread water and just phone something in.

You had this infamous Cannes screening for the film — what were you feeling going into that screening? Were you excited? Were you apprehensive because you hadn’t had the chance to finish the film yet at that point?

It was both. It was a mix of absolute elation … I was so proud that we got the film into Cannes because I didn’t know if any festival would accept it. I was scared that everyone was going to turn us down, and that we would be orphaned and abandoned, you know, because I’d been through the experience with Donnie. We got into Sundance, but then we were abandoned. And it was scary, so I was frightened that we would not get into any festival. And I was so overwhelmed with joy that Cannes invited us because it was like it was a validation. It was my second film, I’m 30 years old. And it was me and Sofia Coppola and Richard Linklater in competition. Southland Tales, [Sofia Coppola’s] Marie Antoinette, and [Richard Linklater’s] Fast Food Nation, and we all got our asses kicked. [Laughs] In different ways, but I think it stung for me the hardest, because, you know, Sophia already had an Oscar and Linklater had a much larger body of work behind him, and I was there with my sophomore effort, and that’s when you’re most vulnerable is your sophomore film. That’s when you live or die on the second round. If you survived the first round, you’ve got to then make it through the second.

And so it was it like a bipolar experience, I guess. Because it was so exhilarating, but then I was really devastated by the response to the film, and in hindsight, I probably was way too sensitive, because I was, again, 30-years-old, and never had been to Cannes in my whole life. Everyone around me, everyone associated with the film, had never been to Cannes before, except for maybe a couple of the financiers or something. And so we didn’t understand that that’s kind of the way things go over there. You know, if you’re invited into that club, it’s such an exclusive club. And it’s such an honor, that they’re going to kick the shit out of you, [laughs] it’s the way that it goes. You need to go into that festival with a thick skin and the bummer is that if your movie gets a very poor reception over there — in the internet age and the social media age, which we were on the cusp of back in 2006 in terms of social media, but the internet was certainly thriving at that point —  the commercial prospects for a film that gets kind of demolished are almost immediately extinguished because of the internet and the sort of the viral nature of the negative response to a film. And it’s almost like if that happens to you, there is no chance at recovery. It’s like you’re been burned to ashes, and there’s really no resurrection.

You know, in the past, there had been other films, in looking at the history, that have been booed or vilified at the festival that turned things around. I was told that Moulin Rouge got booed at Cannes, and then it turned around and became a smash hit. But it seems to be more from an earlier era before the viral nature of the internet makes damage amplified by an exponential factor, you know? So, it was clear that we were in real trouble. Right after that Sunday press screening, and then going into the premiere that night, it was just like, an out of body experience, just feeling like we were like the laughing back of the whole festival.  But we were so proud to be there. But we knew that everyone was sort of pointing and laughing at us behind our back. And we just tried to keep our chin up and get through the night. And then do all the press, which was a lot, to defend the movie and Dwayne [Johnson] was there, god bless him. He was such a trooper, so supportive and so positive.

What was it like going back to the movie and taking a look at both versions for the upcoming Arrow Video release? Was it a cathartic experience? Did any of the film’s themes or ideas resonate with you differently now?

Yes, it was very cathartic. It made me excited. I mean, it’s difficult for me to watch. I love so many things about the movie. My problems with the movie are what is still unrealized and unfinished about it. Unfinished visual effects or things that I still want to build into the movie, you know, unfinished graphic novel backstory, you know, the screenplay within the film, all the layers that I see in the bigger picture of it and what I wanted to do. But it was very therapeutic.

And it was good, I’m glad that the Cannes version is getting out there officially, not because it’s finished, because it is not finished at all. It’s very work in progress, which is okay. To look at it as an unfinished thing … to look at the Cannes version is like a work in progress document that’s going to be kind of preserved from the year 2006. And, hopefully, people can see the potential for the future, you know, because we’re in a whole new world now of streaming and long form, and we have all this new technology, and we have animation technologies, and we have just so many more tools to work with, you know, stuff I just never had access to back then. And so yeah, it’s been therapeutic. And the Arrow guys have always been great, kind of giving me a platform, you know, not only just do a catalogue re-release, but also the platform for my films that could potentially have a bigger kind of life ahead of them. These things are complicated, and there’s a lot of moving parts and caveats and stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely a therapeutic thing. And I’m excited and happy to talk about it with it with anyone, and I’m grateful that people are interested in covering it.

Did you have any plans to re-release The Box with Arrow as well?

The Box, that’s a big Warner Brothers movie. There is probably 45 minutes of deleted scenes from that movie, I’d say 15, maybe 20 minutes of the scenes could be very exciting to incorporate back into the movie. There’s more visual effects work … there’s some big, big sequences that got cut out of the middle and the third act of the film, kind of all throughout. It’s much more of a bigger science fiction, very cerebral film. But I think that that’s another sort of bigger project where it’s not just like a subtle rehash. A new version of Southland Tales has a certain price tag and it requires more resources, studios and investors and producers, and it’s a bigger deal.

With something like The Box, there’s additional score elements that Arcade Fire recorded for some sequences that we knew were going to cut, they recorded the score anyway, they’re like, “We’ll just give this to you just so you have it.” Win Butler of Arcade Fire, he actually was very protective of me with the score edit, because I think at the time, the fear about that movie was it was so confusing or baffling to a lot of audience members that the mandate was like, “Just cut it shorter. Just cut it shorter. People won’t be as confused if it’s just shorter.” That’s sort of what happened with Southland Tales too.

That’s backwards logic in some ways, but sure.

Yeah, it really is. But I think with investors and studio people, they’re trying to reach a wide audience, they just get scared. And it’s not the right solution, but it’s the solution that they feel they have to push on the filmmaker. Just cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it down, and it’s [sighs] excruciating, but when you’re praying that they’re going to put your movie in 2,600 theaters, you know, it’s just finding that balance. So, with The Box, there’s not a massive amount of visual effects work, but to do it properly, it would require the studio or the original financiers of the film to pay for whatever that costs, you know, there’s a dollar amount associated with doing extended versions of films.

With Southland Tales, we’re talking about expanding it into potentially a six-hour double feature, [laughs] who knows if that will ever happen. But that’s the dream that I have that I’ve been preparing to try, and talking to everyone and trying to convince everyone to do, but yeah, we’ll see. Listen, crazier things have happened. So, I’m just grateful that people are, you know, discovering my movies and appreciating them and I’m forging ahead, and there’s a lot, a lot of other stuff that I’ve been writing, so much stuff. I have a war chest of things. And I think once the first one finally goes, it’ll hopefully be a flood of projects that I’m directing for a long time, I hope.

I’ve been working. I’ve been writing non-stop throughout this entire pandemic. It’s the only thing that’s kept me sane. I’m just hopeful for the new year. And I think, hopefully, we’ll see some new, exciting art to come out of this whole horrific experience and I’m just trying to remain hopeful. And I hope that everyone can see the light at the end of the tunnel, because I think I see it, and I hope everyone else can too.

The Arrow Video special edition Blu-ray of Southland Tales is out on January 26.