Donnie Darko

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a genre-defining cult classic that was underappreciated upon its initial release.

As always, I am Chris Winterbauer.

Lizzie Bassett, my co-host, is enjoying her last week of maternity leave.

So this week we have the next best thing, the man responsible for her maternity leave, our producer, David Bowman, who first introduced me to the film we are discussing today almost exactly 20 years ago.

And that is, of course, Donnie Darko.

David, how are you?

I'm good, man.

Lizzie and I are finally settled down.

It's been a wild few months.

As people people know, we had to leave Pasadena because of the fires and because we had the baby on the way.

And although I would not recommend having to move around the West Coast, well, in the second half of the third trimester of pregnancy,

we're doing really well.

Lizzie is doing amazing as a mom, and she can't wait to get back to you guys soon.

And I am just honored and excited to talk about a movie that is so near and dear to my heart.

Obviously, we watched it together.

It wasn't the first time you'd seen it.

It was the first time I'd seen it back sophomore year of high school.

What were your thoughts upon re-watching it for the podcast?

I think the first time I saw it, I have three older sisters, and I'm guessing that one of them had it and probably was raving about it.

And so I decided to watch it or I watched it with them.

And I surely didn't understand it, even to the extent that people who understand that they don't understand it get the gist of the movie.

But there was something, as you mentioned in that article that you wrote on Patreon, which people definitely should check out if they haven't.

But there's something about the vibe of this movie, and it taps into the visceral feeling of being a teenager, or puts you back into the mindset of being a teenager, even watching it now at 36 years old.

I remember feeling like, you know, I was meant to do something really profound at that age, and I hadn't fully outgrown the idea that I was kind of the center of the universe.

And

any any unseemly or depressing or serious things that happened in my realistically very plush suburban life were kind of the equivalent of Donnie's struggles with mental illness and Frank and all the squares in his community who he thought he knew better than and kind of did.

It kind of played out the fantasy of that normal but odd creative kid who could have this huge impact on the world.

And I think that was the major point of connection for me.

And upon re-watching it, I realized that it's not just Donnie, but his family and his teachers and Gretchen that really drive the movie home.

Those relationships and those characters and the way that they're played create a world where while we're able to live vicariously through Donnie, we're also able to connect with other characters that

see the world.

and are dissatisfied in the same way that Donnie is.

Yeah, I think the fact that it was passed down from an older sibling is a perfect encapsulation of what this movie was for our generation.

So we are smack dab in the middle of the millennial generation.

This movie came out when we were about 12.

And as a result, it was, in my experience, one of the first instances of a movie that was not shared with me by way of

somebody of the next generation, the older generation.

It was within my generation.

It was shared.

So previously, I was exposed to film mostly through my dad, right?

80s, 70s, early 90s action films.

He was my

funnel or gauntlet that I traveled through in order to get to film.

And all of a sudden, Donnie Darka was the first film, not the first, but one of the first that felt like something passed around within our generation, as if it was a secret from our parents in some way, which is obviously thematically resonant.

completely agree the movie totally captivated me at um

age 15 And as a 15-year-old upper-middle-class white boy with very few problems,

it was immensely relatable.

And I think the movie does a good enough job capturing, again, the ennui of high school that hopefully it appeals to a broader audience than just, you know, people who feel they're an exact corollary for Donnie.

But I do think that when you watch it at an older age, as I just did, and it had probably been 10 years since I'd seen it as well.

You definitely, you notice the flaws in the way that you don't when you're younger, and I, and I did.

But like you said, David, the movie captures a feeling so well and so earnestly, and the interpersonal relationships in the movie feel so honest that I was transported back.

I enjoyed it just as much, you know what I mean, as I did when I was younger.

It feels like a time capsule.

And, you know, the other thing I really noticed about Donny Darka, the watching it this time, is how many of the production elements just hold up so incredibly well, from the production design to the costume design, the cinematography, which we will get into a lot of detail about.

And of course, the music.

It all makes it feel so timeless, even though it is so specifically rooted in such a specific moment, both the time period in which the movie was set, but also obviously the time in which it came out.

Yeah.

So as we'll learn, the story of Donny Donny Darko's making in many ways mirrors the journey of its precocious protagonist, a young man with aspirations, if not delusions, of grandeur, the guidance of a few key mentors, and a premature death at the box office.

But first, the details.

Donnie Darko is a 2001 sci-fi psychological thriller coming-of-age film written and directed by Richard Kelly.

It was his debut film.

It was produced by Sean McKittrick, Adam Fields, and Nancy Javonin.

It was produced under Nancy Javonin and Drew Barrymore's Flower Films production company banner.

It was distributed by Newmarket Films.

It stars, of course, Jake Gyllenhal, Jenna Malone, Mary McDonnell, Drew Barrymore, Noah Wiley, Maggie Gyllenhal, Holmes Osborne, Beth Grant, James Duvall, Patrick Swayze, and more.

It's very much an ensemble cast.

The IMDb logline for the film reads, After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.

Which is the plot of the film, although I would argue upon re-watching it, those are actually arguably the least important elements of the movie, as we'll get to.

Yeah, I feel like just a man-sized bunny suit would get me to watch this movie.

Sources for this episode include, but are not limited to, It's a Mad World, The Donny Darko oral History, published by The Ringer in January of 2021, Donny Darko, The Inside Story by The Hollywood Reporter, How We Made Donny Darko, The Guardian, Donny Darko Crafting a Cerebral Classic, American Cinematographer, Richard Kelly's Book on the Making of the Film, and our interviews with cinematographer Steven Poster and steady and camera operator Dave Kamides.

Donnie Darko did not reach a wide audience upon its initial release, but it has become one of the biggest cult classics in the history of cult classics.

It is a seminal and singularly unique encapsulation of teen alienation, or at least, as I mentioned, white upper-class male teen alienation.

It is a film that I would argue, in the end, benefited precisely from the topical issues that plagued its release, as we'll get to.

So, the question remains: how did a 23-year-old no-name writer-director with a script chock full of red flags from teen gun violence to pedophilia, plane crashes, and philosophy, get this indie film made.

To find out, we'll need to wind back the clock, not 28 days, but 28 years.

In the summer of 1997, Virginia-born Richard Kelly was a 22-year-old punk fresh out of USC film school with big ambitions.

and not much else.

And like so many film school grads, he had a terrible job.

He was a client assistant at a post-production house and he made cheese plates for pop stars david one is a huge female maybe the most recognizable female pop star of all time or second most any guesses what year would this have been this would have been in 1997 britney spears madonna

okay yeah and weird al apparently but at night like donnie he broke the rules he used the company's equipment to edit his student short film visceral matter now this movie starred tim duquette and a very young sasha alexander who is an actress that you guys would recognize by face, if not name, from Dawson's Creek and Rosolian Isles, if you've never seen it.

I'm sure you've heard of it.

It was an absurd riff on teleportation.

I have not been able to find this film online.

If any of our listeners have a lead, feel free to share it with us.

Sasha Alexander connected Kelly with Sean McKittrick, an aspiring producer and student at UCLA.

Meanwhile, Sam Bauer, an aspiring editor, was whiling away his hours at that same post-production house as Richard Kelly, looking for something interesting to do.

Bauer caught wind of this weird little movie called Visceral Matter.

He leveraged the fact that the other assistants that Kelly had roped in on the project didn't really seem to get it and basically forced his way into Kelly's inner circle.

So Visceral Matter becomes this project that brings together three important players, Richard Kelly, our writer-director, Sean McKittrick, his contemporary producer, and Sam Bauer, his editor.

And I will say, if anyone here is listening and interested in film school, really the only reason to go to film school is less to make connections in the industry and more to meet talented people in your cohort who you can eventually go and make movies with, like David and I have had the opportunity to do.

Yeah.

I went to USC and David was doing a composing program at UCLA, and we had obviously grown up together, but David started working with a bunch of other USC directors, you know, etc.

So that's the reason to go.

Definitely.

All right.

Student films typically don't go anywhere, and Visceral Matter was no exception.

But Kelly had found the two people who would believe in Donny Darko from the get-go.

If you want to write, you have to write.

And so by October of 1998, Kelly realized he needed to write.

He was still working his assistant job.

He was living with four roommates in Hermosa Beach.

He has his nights and he's got the seed of an idea.

The tiniest little fraction of an idea.

And I'm not going to make you guess, but I'm sure anybody listening could guess what idea precipitates Donny Darko.

And it's from a news story that he read as a child.

A chunk of ice fell from from an airplane's wing and into a young boy's bedroom, which was thankfully empty.

In this story that Kelly tells.

So Kelly spun that out into the opening of the film as he later said, What if it's an actual engine that somehow gets ripped off a plane?

Then I thought, what happened to the plane?

The plane would have crashed.

Then I thought, what if they never found the plane?

There was no plane and they couldn't figure out where the engine came from.

I thought, okay, that's a cool mystery.

So the setting, Middlesex, Virginia, was a loose riff on his hometown of Midlothian, Virginia.

And the time period was roughly analogous to his coming of age.

Donnie's technically a little older than Richard Kelly was, but more or less he said it in his childhood.

As Kelly later said, Grandma Death, the old lady, was a real person, and the self-help lessons were actually taught on my school curriculum.

It was meant to be an amusing and poignant recollection of suburban America in the Reagan era.

There's something deeply familiar about the self-help feeling stuff, even from our childhood, which I'm sure was much more extreme in the 80s because they were kind of just turning out that kind of stuff.

Dare, Dare is somewhat similar.

Dare and like people coming to role play.

I feel like we all had that kind of thing.

Yeah, like having the drama department play dead for a drunk driving instructional that the fire department's giving.

Or like I distinctly remember at our high school, and David and I went to high school together, they brought in this comedian who was very funny and he endeared himself to us.

And then it all pivoted to be about a school shooting and about how the police use the language game over game over when they are subduing a school shooter in a school environment and it was such a 180 it was so drastic yeah i mean i think this is one of the ways that donny connects with the audience and becomes a surrogate for the audience because we all remember the classroom presentations that had something akin to the fear love spectrum or someone coming to class and talking about bullying where we were all or most of us were thinking,

who are they trying to connect with?

How could they possibly think that this is penetrating the minds of us students?

Well, what's funny is it's now that I'm a parent, I can see, of course, the full circle.

You hit adolescence, right?

You become a teenager, and you realize the world is no longer black and white, or maybe for some people, they realize it much earlier than I did.

And all of the sudden, everything that's presented to you as a binary just reeks of bullshit, and you want to scream it to the rafters.

But what, of course, you don't know, and that I now know as a parent, is that the reason you're trying to present it as a binary is because when you're 16, you're too stupid to parse the difference between one shade of gray and the next.

So you have to have things presented to you as a binary.

And so it's a bit of a vicious cycle.

And I can now appreciate everybody's perspective on it.

But yes, the vibe of, you know, Nancy Reagan, paternalistic,

there is good, there is evil, there is fear, there is love, is very relatable, I think.

Right.

And if nothing else, that stuff needs to be mentioned and hammered in just as frequently as possible.

It's like advertising.

Yeah.

So Kelly's writing and he decides the story is going to climax on Halloween.

Makes sense.

He's writing this during October.

He's got Frank in a six-foot bunny suit, and he decides to give the story a literal ticking clock.

28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.

Now, according to Kelly, that's almost exactly how long it took to write the first draft.

So he writes this draft in a month.

I completely buy this because this is so autobiographical.

And

I think a lot lot of first films actually come much more easily to writers than second films, you know, third films.

Yeah.

I can relate to that.

The material's been building for 23 years and then the next one's a little harder.

Kelly takes another pass by himself.

He shares it with Sean McKittrick, his producer, and McKittrick says he was blown away, but the movie needed work.

His concerns were that, one, it was 140 pages long, which is too long.

It's especially long from a runtime perspective.

If you assume a minute per page, that would be a two-hour, 20-minute movie.

It's also long just to get an agent to read it.

They don't have representation.

They don't really have connections in the industry.

They're going to need somebody to take a leap of faith on them just to read this script, and time is precious.

The movie was also confusing, as you might expect.

McKittrick didn't want to explain everything, but he needed to explain enough that the audience was going to continue to read it until the end.

So two to three months later, Kelly's got a 128-page draft.

Now, Sean McKittrick was an assistant at New Line Cinema at this point.

And again, this is where it's important to recognize that connections in Hollywood don't need to necessarily be connections to the top.

So, McKittrick sends this to eight assistants at various agencies.

I can say from experience, this is exactly how I got one of my short films in front of a lot of agents and managers.

It was shared by the kindness of assistants.

Treat assistants well, they are the reason we all get jobs.

Within two weeks, CAA comes calling.

They do a vetting meeting with Dave Ruddy.

He worked for Beth Swofford, a heavy hitter in the Lit department.

Kelly gets a call from four agents at CAA.

They want to sign him.

He takes the meeting and he's got two conditions.

One, I'm directing Donnie Darko, nobody else.

Two, Sean is producing Donnie Darko.

Oh, wow.

So they didn't just want to represent him based on the script.

They actually were saying, we want to make this movie and we want to represent you while we do it.

It's impossible to know.

I think they saw that he was talented.

They saw that the voice was unique.

Whether or not they thought the movie was makeable is debatable.

But I think what they smartly realized was this is an interesting script.

And if we send it to production companies around town, regardless of whether or not they want to make it, they're going to want to meet Richard and that could lead to additional work.

Gotcha.

That's my guess.

Okay.

So CAA does what any good agency does.

They send Kelly and McKittrick out on meetings, meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting.

And the great thing about meetings is you get to meet a lot of really important people in Hollywood.

But the terrible thing about meetings is they don't pay.

In fact, they actually cost you money because you are having to pay for gas to drive around town.

And these are hours when you could be writing or working your day job that you can't do that.

So Kelly and McKittrick found that they'd fallen into this classic Hollywood trap.

They had a script that everybody liked, a script that everybody thought was cool, but it was a script that nobody wanted to make.

It was, according to McKittrick, viewed as a great writing sample, but an unproducible writing sample.

It would get Kelly into the room, but no further.

Now, Kelly was adamant from the start.

The only person who was going to direct Donny Darko was Richard Kelly, but we did read that there were other directors interested in the project.

Now, it's unclear.

Did an agent send it to them and say, hey, this kid's not going to be able to get this made.

So maybe you could.

Who knows?

But the name that did come up that feels like a completely out of left field option was Joel Schumacher,

who, on the one hand, makes zero sense for this.

If you guys have seen Batman and Robin, for example.

But considering he also did the number 23, maybe he would be interested in something somewhat zany conspiratorial.

Schumacher's just so campy and this is so earnest that I just don't see the tones vibing personally.

What year was the number 23?

I thought that was after.

10 years after this.

I'm just saying he was eventually attracted to that material.

So gotcha.

Okay.

Kelly wasn't interested, though.

This was his movie.

It was his vision.

So they needed to beef up the package, right?

So they've got a producer with no credits, a director with no credits, and a script that's a little difficult to understand.

Nobody's going to give them any money to make that.

So they need to attach an actor and they needed to attach a coppola.

So in late 1999 or early 2000, hot off of his debut film Rushmore, Talia Shire's son, Jason Schwartzmann,

read the script.

Jason Schwartzman is, of course, Francis Ford Coppola's nephew, if you guys are unfamiliar.

Wow.

So, like Richard Kelly, Schwartzman was a bit of a bundikind.

He had received rave reviews for his turn in Wes Anderson's sophomore outing.

He was the drummer in an up-and-coming indie band, Phantom Planet, if you're unfamiliar.

Things are starting to play.

Yeah.

They, of course, are responsible for California, the opening song of The Incredible The OC, a series near and dear to my heart.

And, of course, the lead singer of Phantom Planet, who plays the bully, who holds Danya at knife point in the bathroom, was he cast?

Yes.

Because of Schwartzmann?

So, yeah.

So, Seth Nevlin, I think is his name.

I believe he was cast off of Schwartzman's involvement and then obviously continued on the project, even though Schwartzmann was no longer involved.

And then Schwartzmann eventually left Phantom Planet, I believe, by 2003 as well.

Cool.

Yeah.

And obviously you had other actors like Seth Rogan from Freaks and Geeks.

Ashley Tisdale's in this movie for about a split second.

If you really look for

at the assembly.

Yep.

So there are, you know, so many talented performers that made it into this movie.

Too many for us to get to ultimately.

And of course, Schwartzman was still only 19 years old, even though he looked like he was 32.

Now, Schwartzmann liked the script, but nobody told Richard Kelly because Schwartzmann's agents were convinced that it was a non-starter.

And they were right.

This was a classic catch-22.

They said, Jason, no one's going to make this movie because Kelly and McKittrick couldn't get anyone to attach to be in the movie.

And so they were stuck.

Kelly and McKittrick insist that eventually they caught wind of Schwartzmann's interest.

They called his agent and they convinced them that if Schwartzmann attached to the movie, it would get made.

But there's a different version recounted by producer Adam Fields.

now fields came onto the project after reading it as a writing sample he said that it reminded him of a john hughes movie

i guess kind of a sci-fi john hughes fields claims that they had given up on getting the movie made and he was the one who thought to attach jason schwartzman Then he says that he planted an article in the trades that announced Donnie Darko would begin production in seven months with Schwartzman as the lead.

Wow.

And then his phone blew up.

Quote, hey, why didn't I know about this movie?

I just got dressed down at the staff meeting for not covering this movie.

Why didn't you tell me?

And I said, you never called me back.

The movie was suddenly real.

So it started gaining momentum.

If it's in the trade papers, it must be real.

Oh, shit.

There's jobs here.

We need to cast this movie.

We need to put our clients in it.

End quote.

Wow.

First of all, that is a crazy, ballsy,

high-risk thing to do.

But maybe you didn't get in trouble for stuff the same way that you do now.

Also, it sounds like luck was on his side, so I'm glad it panned out for him.

And as far as Schwartzman goes, I mean, I could see Schwartzman in it if it was like a John Hughes movie in the sense that you have this kind of loser kid and it's much more about like his place in the high school and there's more social dynamics and stuff going on.

But he's not the same kind of looker as Jyllen Hall.

And just like anytime you consider a different director or cast member, it just completely changes it.

I mean, would it have been more different with Schumacher directing and Jyllenhall playing the lead or with Kelly directing and Schwartzmann playing the lead?

It just totally changes the game.

Schwartzman, especially at this point in his career, he does have a great hangdog look, which lends itself to this, but he was so confident.

in the way that he played his characters.

I mean, the whole joke of Rushmore is, you know, he's brilliant.

And that carried through a lot of his early roles.

He was the boy genius.

That doesn't speak or that doesn't really feel like the tortured genius of Donny Darko.

But what I find interesting is that in a weird way, Schwartzmann's aged into more of like, if you've seen more, some of his more recent work, a Darko-esque feel, whereas Jyllenhall has become the more glamorous, you know what I mean, sort of movie star.

More popcorn.

Popcorn movie star of the two.

So it is interesting.

But I think, again, who knows?

He's a great actor.

Might have totally worked.

He is a great actor.

It's hard to imagine anyone else, and it's hard to imagine him specifically after Rushmore in this role for me.

Right.

Wherever you go,

whatever they get into.

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Regardless of how Schwartzman got attached, I could not figure it out if it was, you know, because Kelly and McKittrick called his agent or Adam Fields planted this article.

It is agreed that he got the ball rolling in a big way, and Jenna Malone was the second domino to fall.

So Schwartzmann attaches, and then they reach out to Jenna Malone.

She was already a name.

She had just done Bastard Out of Carolina.

She had done Contact.

If you guys haven't seen it, she plays young Jodie Foster, stepmom.

Now, Kelly's concern with casting this role was that the actresses who auditioned seemed too young relative to Donnie or Schwartzman at that point.

And again, Schwartzman, he had like a five o'clock shadow by 9 a.m.

So they needed someone who felt like high school but could stand up to him from a maturity perspective.

Did you say how old Schwartzman was at this point?

He was 19.

Okay.

Yeah.

So he was appropriate.

You know, he just looked a little older.

Yeah.

Now, I agree with this.

Malone, they say, presented as wise beyond her years.

And I think you can feel that.

She does not feel four years younger than Jake Jillenhall in this this movie to me.

If anything, she seems more mature than he does, which I think works really well.

So despite only being 15, she was perfect.

And part of the reason for this might have been the fact that, as unfortunate as it is, she was actually engaged in or about to be engaged in a lawsuit against her mother, seeking legal emancipation, alleging that her mother had misspent a large portion of her earnings thus far.

Wow.

Yeah, so Jenna Malone was already having to grow up much more quickly than a number of her contemporaries.

Yeah, I mean, that definitely speaks to that kind of reserved confidence that her character has.

Yeah.

Now, Kelly's gotten one big break, obviously, Jason Schwartzman, but he would need a much bigger one to get this movie made.

And that came by way of a very, I would say, at face value, unexpected champion.

And that is, of course, Drew Barrymore, who...

is arguably as, if not more, responsible for this film than anybody else outside of Sean McKittrick and Richard Kelly.

That's wild.

Now, in the late 90s and early 2000s, Barrymore was more known for rom-coms and comedic actioners, like the film she was actually filming at that very moment, Charlie's Angels, with Lucy Lou, Cameron Diaz, Sam Rockwell, anyone watching The White Lotus.

But she'd started a production company with producer Nancy Javonin called Flower Films.

I will say, Nancy Drew was right there as a production company name.

Nancy Dijvonin, Drew Barrymore.

Come on.

However.

Hey, maybe they're still open to suggestions.

So they were looking for buzzy titles with Buzzy stars to produce.

And of course, they were very keen, like everybody at the time, on Jason Schwartzmann.

So Schwartzmann's agent sends the script to Javonin.

She loves it.

She then, quote, accosted Kelly and McKittrick's agent.

And the next day, Kelly and McKittrick, who again are like 23, 24, fresh out of film school, step onto the set of Charlie's Angels to go meet Drew Barrymore.

And they are awed by like Barrymore, Diaz, and Lucy Lou.

They had a couple of slightly boyish remarks you can read in interviews about what that was like.

Kelly asked Drew Barrymore, would you be interested in being in the movie?

Specifically, would you be interested in playing Karen Pomeroy, the English teacher?

Barrymore turned around and said, can I produce it?

And now they were in business.

Now, Drew Barrymore was a bit of an odd fit fit for both of these roles, for the role of Karen Pomeroy and the role of producing this movie.

Why?

Karen Pomeroy was originally written as a much older character, probably closer in age to Donnie's mother and his therapist than Barrymore's probably 30, you know, 28 to 30 years of age at that point.

As Fields later said, she was an older teacher who was about to get tenure and retire.

Her dilemma was, if I support this, I could lose my tenure.

Now, can you guys, I actually feel like you can tell a little bit.

Like when she says, sit next to the boy that you think is the cutest.

If there was like a 65-year-old woman saying that, it actually strikes me as less inappropriate than Drew Barrymore's character.

I was going to say the exact opposite.

I was going to say, I wonder if they rewrote her to play more.

It's entirely possible.

Just because she feels, I mean, I would argue that it suggests that she has more of a connection with the students.

That's fair.

Due to proximity to age.

Who knows?

I do think the final version works.

When I read that,

a couple things clicked and made a little more sense to me personally.

Now, it seems that Barrymore's kind of bright and poppy personality is at odds with Kelly's brooding bookishness.

But don't forget, Drew Barrymore's breakout films, E.T.

the Extraterrestrial, Firestarter, they were coming-of-age science fiction films.

And this was a coming-of-age science fiction film.

So it kind of makes a lot of sense for her to return to this.

And there are some amblin' qualities to it, I would argue.

Yeah.

Now, they had a budget, a real budget.

Schwartzmann's attachment got them into the $2 million range.

And when Barrymore came on with Flower Films, that got them to about $4.5 million.

They also had a shooting schedule, and it was a very specific shooting schedule because

Drew Barrymore was only available to film for one week in the summer of 2000 in between Charlie's Angels and Riding in Cars with Boys.

So Barrymore Moore could only shoot between July 24th and August 1st.

And so they need to shoot this film with a four-week schedule where that week slots in somewhere in the schedule.

They were also worried because Schwartzman was kind of aging out of the role by the day.

As McKittrick said, he had a five o'clock shadow at 11 a.m.

already.

I stole his joke from earlier.

So they dive into casting.

According to Adam Fields, Catherine Ross, who plays Lillian Thurman, Noah Wiley, who plays Professor Kenneth Monatoff, came next.

And Kelly says that Javonin was instrumental in getting Noah Wiley.

Now, Catherine Ross, David, do you recognize Catherine Ross, who plays his therapist?

She's a very famous, wonderful actress who had not done much for about a decade up until this film.

No, I mean, I associate her singularly with Danny Darken.

Well, I'm sure you actually do know her because she is, of course, an icon of the late 60s and early 70s.

Standout roles include include Elaine Robinson in 1967's The Graduate.

Whoa.

Etta Place in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

And of course, Joanna in the Stepford Wives from the early 70s.

Wow.

That's kind of blown my mind.

She was an icon of the 60s and 70s, really a unique beauty.

I think she has a...

heinously amazing haircut in this film that is perfect for the 80s, but she's still incredibly beautiful and she's a great actress.

And I think she's really good in this movie.

And they did not think that she was going to do it.

So Kelly and McKittrick go to her house.

She is a two-time Golden Globe winner, a BAFTA winner, an Academy Award nominee.

And they're effectively saying, Will you play in three scenes as Donnie's therapist?

And in one of them, he's going to start masturbating in front of you.

And you're going to talk about Frank.

They drive up to her home in Malibu in one of their dinky little cars.

They're terrified.

They knock on the door and her husband answers.

And I'm not going to make you guess who her husband was at the time.

It's Sam Elliott.

And so Sam Elliott answers the door.

We're all of you guys here for chaos.

They go in, they sit with her.

And before they can pitch her about doing the film, she's pitching them about why they should hire her to do the movie.

Wow.

So she-that's incredible.

I mean, that's so cool that someone with that amount of stature, even though I didn't recognize her, is just like that passionate about what she does and that interested in doing an indie project.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it was by choice or not.

I did read that she had transitioned to more stage work in the 70s and 80s, but she'd effectively only had one, you know, role in the decade or so prior to Donnie Darko.

Got it.

Now, of course, Mary McDonnell was another big actress coming onto the film.

She plays Rose Darko, Donnie's mother.

She's my favorite character.

She was perhaps best known for Dances with wolves.

And again, like her agent pushed her forward and they said, wait, will she do this?

And they said, yeah.

And they're like, amazing.

Great.

We have our Rose Darko.

Holmes Osborne, Eddie Darko, Donnie's dad, was cast off auditions.

I mean, they just saw him and thought, that's Donnie's dad.

And some of the casts were auditioning for the first time, like Jolene Purdy, who plays Charita Chen.

She had never been on camera before.

And then, of course, you have James Duvall for Frank, which was actually a very unusual choice because the character was written as a six-foot-tall blonde guy.

And James Duvall is 5'9.

He's got dark brown hair.

And he auditioned anyway, being a huge fan of Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone.

And he was a decently well-known actor at this point.

He, you know, is famously as he's Randy Quaid's son in Independence Day, if you guys remember.

He didn't get much to do in the audition.

It was just the scene after

he addresses Donnie after running over.

Gretchen.

But at the end of the audition, he wanted to make something very clear.

They're like, do you have any questions?

And he says, no, I absolutely get it.

Just to make sure that they knew he understood the script, even though I don't know if he fully did.

Absolutely not.

Now, of course, there's one role, David, that we haven't discussed, and it was probably the most difficult to cast.

Yeah.

Is there a character that you might guess would be hard to cast based on what's revealed of him by the end of the film?

Yeah.

I'm guessing it's good old pillar of the community slash child porn

fan.

Yeah,

traitor in child sexual assault material, Jim Cunningham.

Yes.

This was a charismatic, religiously tinged self-help guru who is revealed through Donnie's arson to have a, as they refer to it in the film, Kitty Porn Dungeon, child sexual assault material.

They met with David Hasselhoff, who referred to himself in the third person the entire time about the role.

That's shockingly not surprising for some reason.

Yeah.

David Hasselhoff said that David Hasselhoff would never do this, so he passed.

And Flower Films had a better idea.

Patrick Swayze.

Now, they were nearly a decade removed from the highs of Dirty Dancing, Ghost, and Point Break, all films that mostly we have covered on this podcast.

And in the interim years, there had been quite a few duds in Mr.

Swayze's career.

He'd shown an interest in risky parts, though.

To Wong Fu, thanks for everything.

Julie Neymar comes to mind.

Javonin was Swayze's champion.

She convinces the team to go for it.

And lucky for them, Swayze was looking to mix things up.

And so he joins in to the film and he brings an unexpected bright spot with him.

One of my favorite performances in the movie is Beth Grant as Kitty Farmer.

Yes.

The Jim Kenningham acolyte and dance mom of sparkle motion who takes what could have been such a tossaway character and imbues her with such infuriating piety, arrogance, and surety that's balanced by just enough obvious love for her daughter that you can't help but love to hate her.

Yeah.

And I think she's absolutely fantastic in this movie.

He asked me to forcibly insert the lifeline exercise card into my anus.

Now, she and Patrick Swayze were actually really good friends from an acting class.

And Grant earlier had been struggling to come to terms with the fact that she was a supporting or character actress and not a lead actress.

And Swayze had been the person that really helped her come to terms with that fact.

And so, according to Grant, quote, they told me that Patrick Swayze was going to be playing basically Kitty's hero in the movie, and we were friends.

When I found out he was playing my hero, I said, you've got to get me this part, which I swear I've never begged for a part in my life.

So, again, people were just asking to be in this movie.

That is amazing.

She is an incredible part of this movie, and she's one of the few characters that brings that level of absurdity to this movie that is there in so many ways in the way that they shoot it with the camera moves and stuff.

But, but there aren't a ton of characters who are that off the wall.

But she is

so funny, and I love her so much.

Some of the most memorable lines and deliveries of lines in the movie.

And also, this is a total tangent, but if we get to the end of this episode and you haven't told me who the fat man is, the guy smoking the cigarette when they almost kiss and standing outside of the house party.

Oh, I know who he is.

What is that about?

He's an FAA agent.

Oh.

Yeah.

They're just watching the family because they can't figure out what happened.

That is, how, how do you know that?

Richard Kelly said it in an interview.

Okay.

Well, thank you for clarifying.

I know there are all these theories like, it's Donnie when he's older.

I'm sure I thought that in high school.

Probably.

All right.

So at some point in this process, Schwartzman cashes in on his Nepo baby status to line up a meeting with Uncle Francie, as he calls him.

And of course, that's Francis Ford Coppola for those outside the family.

Now, Coppola had made a deal to make low-budget films for United Artists, and maybe he could help them out on Donny Darko.

So according to Fields, he and Kelly accompanied Schwartzman to meet the legend, and in comes Coppola in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops.

And Schwartzmann introduces Francis Ford Coppola as Uncle Francie.

I want you to meet Adam Fields and Richard Kelly.

And Fields says, Mr.

Coppola, I've always dreamed of meeting you, but he didn't think he'd be introduced as Uncle Francie.

Now, everybody's recollections of this meeting differ slightly, but the gist of it seems to boil down to one fact.

Coppola tried to either impart some advice upon Kelly or kind of reveal the thesis of his film to him.

And basically, he said, this is what your movie's about.

And he pointed to one line in the script.

And again, accounts differ as to which line it was, but the gist of it was the parents don't have the answers, so the kids need to figure it out themselves.

Which is the theme that obviously Coppola has dealt with.

Think back to the misfits.

And again, it doesn't seem like he was being condescending.

It seems like he was trying to maybe communicate to Kelly, you have a really big opportunity here.

Make sure your movie's focused, make sure it's about one thing.

Whatever happened in that meeting, it did not lead to Francis Ford Coppola endorsing their film or helping them make it.

And in fact, the movie nearly falls apart.

Whoa.

A day or two later, Jason Schwartzman drops out of the project.

Wow.

So there are conflicting reasons as to why he dropped out.

On the one hand, Sean McKittrick insists that Schwartzman had been attached to or was just attaching to another movie that had competing dates, forcing him to withdraw.

But it seems like the movie that McKittrick is referencing is CQ,

Roman Coppola's featured debut as a director.

And Roman is, of course, Francis Ford Coppola's son.

And CQ was produced by Francis under that United Artist deal that Schwartzmann thought Franny Darko could fit into.

So Kelly has also stated that he thought that Schwartzmann did leave due to a scheduling conflict, but he also thinks that Schwartzmann was having second thoughts about the role.

So we can never know.

Did he leave because he was going to honor his commitment to Uncle Francis' son?

You know, did he leave leave because Uncle Francie gave him some advice, you know, not to do it?

Did he leave because he just felt deep down it wasn't the right fit and he'd been feeling that for a while?

Nobody knows.

My simplest guess would be he, he'd already had kind of cold feet.

The dates conflicted and he had an easy excuse, you know what I mean?

He could just pick one film over another, basically.

Yeah.

What's really interesting is that in a sort of Donny Darko-esque way, even though he wasn't involved, he is responsible for the film being made.

He is, exactly.

Yeah.

So, Schwartzmann's out, but Barry Moore and Javonin remain committed to the movie.

So, according to McKittrick, they got him and Kelly meetings with every up-and-coming young actor in town over the following two weeks.

A few of the notable names we came across were Patrick Fugit from Almost Famous, you guys remember, Lucas Black, who had just done Slingblade, and he would obviously go on to do Friday Night Lights, perhaps most notably.

Rumored names we could not verify include Mark Wahlberg, which would make sense timing-wise, and Vince Vaughan, which makes no sense to me.

But who knows?

Maybe they took the meeting.

Yeah.

It would have been shortly after Swingers, but I still think he was a little old and very tall.

Now, Kelly and McKetrick needed another Nepo baby, it turns out, albeit a less obvious one.

Enter Jake Gyllenhal.

The wide-eyed and handsome...

but slightly hunched son of director and poet Stephen Gyllenhal and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhall.

As McKittrick said, it was like Holden Caulfield walked in.

Richard gave me this look like, oh, this is fucking him.

Kelly said that Gyllenhall was going through an emo stage, and he came to the meeting with a chain metal belt and spiked hair.

They took a few more meetings out of politeness, but they knew they had their Donnie.

Now, Gyllenhall was a newcomer, but he wasn't a no-name.

He had proven just the year prior that he could carry a drama with an excellent film, in my opinion, 1999's October Sky.

Oh, yeah.

Great movie.

An underrated period piece by director Joe Johnston.

So Gyllenhall, for his part, says that he loved the script and that he even had to pull over to finish it.

To which I say, why were you reading the script while you were driving, good sir?

Anyway.

He did later say, this is what my adolescence felt like, although I don't speak and have never spoken to rabbits.

Now, Gyllenhall, of course, came with another bit of brilliance in casting.

That is his older sister, Maggie Gyllenhall.

She had mostly done theater and TV movies.

She and Jake were going through a competitive phase, and it played out perfectly in the on-screen dynamic.

She met with Richard Kelly.

She tried to talk him out of casting her, which of course made him want to cast her in the movie.

And she had the part.

So, they have a cast in place, and Kelly hones the script.

He met with each actor to refine their dialogue.

They cut 10 pages.

It's down to 108.

And this is huge because the schedule is tight.

And given how inexperienced Richard Kelly is, they need some help.

Not only was this an indie film helmed by a first-timer, it was a period piece.

Something I really didn't realize for the first 20 minutes or so, the first time I watched it.

It's set in the recent past.

It takes place 12 years earlier, 13 than the year it came out.

Something only the wedding singer had done in being a movie made in the 90s, about the 80s.

Who?

Also, Drew Barrymore.

It had sci-fi elements, and of course, Kelly was going to learn why sometimes adults do know what's best.

Now, Adam Fields had just worked on director Jonathan Kaplan's Broke Down Palace, which is like a female-driven Thailand-based riff on Midnight Express.

I only mention it because if you've enjoyed The White Lotus, this is kind of like the darker, gringier version of that.

Okay.

He pulled crew, including veteran costume designer April Ferry, who, of course, has just done an incredible number of films from U571 to Flubber, Maverick, Free Willie, Child's Play, many more.

Cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel, who's perhaps best known for his collaborations with another USC grad, Brian Singer, starting with the usual suspects.

Now, Brian Singer's X-Men reboot, more on that another day, pulled Siegel away from the project.

And it's important to note the DP director relationship is probably the most significant.

of a crew member's relationship to the director on a film.

So, some of Kelly's desires for the the film's look were already being questioned by the line producer.

For example, Kelly insisted on shooting anamorphic.

Now, if you guys are unfamiliar with the term, anamorphic refers to a lens type that squeezes the light that's captured onto a frame of film, allowing a wider field of view to be captured than just your standard 16 by 9, 3x2.

It has to then be projected back through an anamorphic lens to de-squeeze it or stretch it across a widescreen surface.

So it's used to create widescreen images on a non-widescreen format.

Of course, flat lenses, spherical lenses were much more popular in the 90s and earlier 2000s.

And anamorphic is expensive.

It's heavy.

It requires more light.

They're not as sharp.

This is an interesting choice for a first-time director, basically.

These are more difficult to manage.

And his only reason he could give is that he didn't want this to be the one movie in his career he didn't shoot anamorphic.

So the producers hoped an experienced DP would start to talk Kelly out of some of these ideas, basically.

And cinematographer Steven Poster was experienced.

Poster had shot additional photography on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner.

He'd helmed dozens of feature films, and it was actually Thomas Newton Siegel who had recommended him to the production.

After a brief dalliance with a music video DP deemed too green by the producers, Kelly and McKittrick turned to Poster, but they wondered, again, would this guy want to do our weird little movie?

But Steven Poster takes the meeting.

Kelly and McKittrick invite him over to the place that Kelly's renting in Venice, which Stephen Poster described as looking like a dorm room.

And they sit down, and Kelly just stands up and starts pacing nervously.

Now, unbeknownst to Kelly, Stephen Poster was actually looking for something fresh and weird and new.

He'd taken a bit of a hiatus from American films, shot a movie in France.

He's looking to get back into features, but he was tired of working the way that he'd been doing it before, and he wanted to do a project from an intuitive place.

He wanted to prioritize the feel of things over technical considerations, and he loved the script.

So finally, he's tired of Kelly's moving about, and Poster tells him, Richard, before we get started, let's calm down and think about this.

At this point, there's no difference in our age.

There was.

Poster was 20 years older than him.

No difference in anything.

There was.

He'd shot dozens of movies.

Kelly never had.

And I am here to be your director of photography.

You are the director.

All of my experience is on the line for you.

And Kelly relaxed.

And what he didn't realize was that I wanted to be his age.

Kelly was 25.

Poster was 54.

Now, David and I had the opportunity to speak with Steven Poster, and we're going to be posting our interview with him independent of this episode and playing a couple of clips from it.

And what you really can sense is that Poster loved this script.

He believed in it, and he believed in Kelly's vision for the movie.

And all he wanted was to help him realize that vision in a way that could help him avoid the pitfalls that perhaps he'd seen other directors fall into throughout his career.

So, Poster's got one condition.

He wants four days of Kelly's time, four days where the two of them can sit down and map out the entire look of the film.

They agree, and Kelly signs on one of his most unexpected champions.

So, the first test of this loyalty, Poster 100% backs up Kelly's desire to shoot Anamorphic.

Let's hear Steven Poster explain how he defended Richard Kelly's decision with a little bit of BS that Donny Darko himself would have been proud of.

Richard wanted to shoot anamorphic widescreen with anamorphic lenses, and I thought that was a great idea.

I thought stylistically it would really work.

The producer, the executive producer, called me up and said, you got to tell him he can't use anamorphic lenses, that they're much more expensive and it takes a lot more light.

Tell him you can't do it.

I said, well, wait a minute.

Hang on a second.

Kodak

has a new film stock that is almost twice as fast as anything that they've ever hit.

If we use that film stock, that would eat up the light deficit.

Furthermore, we're in a practical location, and with anamorphic, I won't see the ceilings, and we can light from there.

That will save me a lot of time on the setups, and so it will save us money.

And he said, okay, all right.

First of all, I mean, that was total bullshit about the lenses.

I had never seen this film stock before.

I'd never exposed any of it before.

That film stock worked out great for me.

It was the only film ever shot entirely on that film stock.

It's very tricky if you don't know how to shoot high-speed films.

It can get very grainy.

It can get very contrasty.

but it was right up my alley, so I was okay with it.

But total bullshit.

As we mentioned at the top of the episode, we had the honor of interviewing both Steven Poster, the cinematographer of Donny Darko, and Dave Camides, the Steadicam and camera operator for the movie.

We are going to post those interviews at the end of this week for you guys to listen to on our main feed.

So if you want even more stories from the set, as well as Mr.

Poster's incredible career up until Donny Darko, please check those out.

All right, back to our story.

It wasn't just Steven Poster who was really starting to believe in Donnie Darko and Richard Kelly.

Kelly had solicited designs for Frank's rabbit suit from others involved in the project, but he stuck by his original weirdo drawing, which of course is what you see in the film.

Most of the drawings that you see on Donnie's walls are Richard Kelly's drawings.

No one knew what to make of it.

They were like, what the fuck is this rabbit thing?

Until the mask maker sent in the version based on Kelly's drawings.

They threw it on top of April Fairy's oversized suit and gloves, and all of a sudden you had this terrifyingly compelling image of teen mental illness.

And people started to realize maybe there was a method to Kelly's madness.

Absolutely.

I can totally understand how anyone who might be skeptical of Kelly at this point would be really reassured by seeing that he's able to express himself creatively by other means beyond just the script, that he's actually a really skilled artist in other ways, and how even though the script is wild and unconventional, he just might know exactly what he's making.

I agree.

And of course, as Stephen Poster mentioned in our interview, if you would like to see the original mask and suit, they're on display at the Academy Museum of Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

I should also mention they brought on production designer Alec Hammond.

He would go on to production design dozens of major films and is still very active today, including some really fun work that I liked on the Lost in Space TV reboot.

He would create the world of Middlesex in Los Angeles.

And I'd also just love to mention property master Mark Anderson and his entire team who made such wonderful in-world props from the philosophy of time travel to the weird little placards of fear and love for Jim Cunningham's company.

Some really fun stuff in this movie.

And that really helped, I think, too, is that Kelly had a sense of humor.

The movie's not just serious.

And so about a week before Principal Photography began, they shot the Jim Cunningham motivational video at Patrick Swayze's ranch.

So if you guys remember, this is Cunning Visions, the I'm not afraid anymore.

I stared into my ego reflection.

Just nonsense guru talk.

Yeah.

So, Patrick Swayze's wife, Lisa Nimi, basically acted as a one-woman wardrobe department.

She hung up his real clothes from the 80s on racks outside.

She's the one who suggested the white eyes odd and pleated pants that he wears when he walks into frame after the horse nays.

Speaking of costumes, April Fairey suggested that the kids wear school uniforms to save money and illustrate the theme of conformity.

Many of the other clothing items came from her garage, and there were even items that she repurposed from other projects, including a costume Glenn Close had worn in the big chill for Mary McDonald.

Oh, wow.

So Kelly and Sam Bauer, his editor, cut together the motivational video, and they showed it to the production team at a party at Drew Barrymore's house right before shooting started.

And it really got people excited for the movie.

They were like, oh, this is going to be good.

This is funny.

We're not as nervous about working with this first-time director.

It's July of 2000 and principal photography is upon them.

And McKittrick says production is just crazy.

Just constant work, 20-hour days.

So the first shot of the movie is also the first shot of principal photography.

Donnie waking up on the road next to his bike.

Obviously, this is out in the Angeles National Forest on, I believe, the two highway or off of it.

Apparently, the footage was too shaky.

Not exactly the way you want to start off your movie, but Steven Poster assured Comides and Kelly that they could reshoot it with insurance money.

And the camera wasn't the only thing with some jitters.

As McKittrick later said, Richard will probably murder me for saying this, but the first shot in the forest where Donnie's riding his bike, Richard goes, action.

We shoot it.

And everybody looks to him for cut, and he goes, hand action.

That's great.

Now, despite this, it seems like everybody really did have a lot of faith in Kelly.

And it seemed like they had convinced people that they knew the movie through and through before they even got to set.

But they weren't the only first timers on the set.

On her first or second day of shooting, Jolene Purdy, who as I mentioned, plays Torita Chen, and this was her first film, remembers almost quitting.

Quote, second day on set was where he comes up and holds my face and is talking to me.

And I remember looking at the script and being like, I don't think I can do this.

Up until that point, I had never even been kissed.

And so I just kept telling my mom, I can't do this.

I give up.

I'm done.

And she was like, sure, you can be done, but you've signed a contract.

So you're going to have to give in and do this one.

And of course, she finished the film.

And I think Julian Purdy's performance is fantastic in this movie.

And I actually think that Sharita Chen has a very beautiful arc in the face of some pretty ugly, very casual racism as it's presented in the film.

I agree that her arc is really beautiful.

in that that dancing at the talent show is one of the really memorable scenes from the film.

I also think that her role as a character is a really critical one.

That's where it really occurs to you that, okay, this guy's got a bigger heart than his douchebag friends.

Sure.

A couple of things that made this a challenging shoot that are very normal.

They were, of course, shooting it out of order.

It's very rare that you can shoot something linearly, which was very difficult because of the emotional trajectory of Donnie's character.

And of course, Gyllenha is this 19-year-old actor.

And so apparently he wasn't a smoker, but he smoked in between takes to calm his nerves.

So like he's taking, it's a fucking cigarette, you know, he's actually doing that.

He does remember coming up with Donny Darko's voice and mannerisms when speaking to Frank as making it a choice of kind of becoming a child speaking to his security blanket.

So when he kind of dips his chin down and he looks forward and he starts talking like this, it's very much like a little kid almost sleepwalking at that point.

You can see that he, you know, he falls back in age about 10 years.

And that was a very conscious choice.

Right.

Oh, that's cool.

That makes sense.

So the schedule is starting to present some problems, like needing to shoot out Drew Barrymore's scenes.

Now, a lot of her scenes are very simple, relatively speaking, you know, dialogue in the classroom, cutaways of her watching the talent show, but she's an integral part of one of the most complicated sequences in the film.

Donnie and his friends arriving at school for the first time.

This section is set to head over heels by Tears for Fears.

You guys know it.

The sequence wordlessly introduces Gretchen, Kitty Farmer, the teachers, the principal, the bullies, Sparkle Motion.

This is a very risky sequence because it's a music video with no dialogue set to a song that they didn't own the rights to yet.

Yeah, that's risky.

There's also the wrinkle that Richard Kelly insisted that the entire sequence be one shot.

So colloquially, a wonner, an uninterrupted

long take with complicated camera movements, has been a dream of directors.

You can go all the way back to something like Hitchcock's Rope, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Scorsese's Goodfellows and the Copa shot, Birdman 1917.

These shots are technically virtuosic.

Sometimes I would argue you struggle to justify their narrative necessity.

They can be a show-off shot, you know.

Yeah, and Wonders are having a heyday right now.

There was an episode of Monsters, the Menendez story, which I think kind of kicked it off, as far as I'm aware.

And then the second episode of The Studio with Seth Rogan was called the wonner and is a woner and then the entire show adolescence which was recently very popular each episode is a winner absolutely and there are of course instances where it makes sense now the production team was worried that the shot wasn't financially feasible they could blow their schedule trying to make it happen right with the wonner especially before the advent of digital editing and kind of more streamlined vfx work with painting things out it could be very hard to get all of the elements to work on a single take without being able to cut So they turned to the cinematographer, Steven Poster, to say, Hey, tell the director this is stupid.

But Poster is a savvy vet and he knows how to communicate with his director, so he takes a different approach to segmenting the shot.

Let's listen to Poster describe how he got Richard Kelly to realize that perhaps breaking the shot up would be for the best.

He wanted to do from the bus into the school, around the back, and back into the school, all in one shot, a winner.

And

I knew that we didn't have the resources to do that.

But the producer, again, challenged me.

He said, You've got to tell him no.

My job as a DP is not to tell the director no, it's to tell them how or why.

So I said to the producer, All right, let's have a rehearsal at the school on a Saturday.

Let's bring the camera operator, David,

and let's go and let Richard and I work it out.

So we got there, and it was Loyola School east of Hollywood.

And I was sitting there waiting outside, sort of leaning up against my car.

And

Richard got there and said, okay, let's go in.

And I said, no, Richard, do me a favor.

You go in with Dave and start working out the shot.

And I'll come in in a little while.

I said, but I and as I did that, I handed him a stopwatch.

20 minutes later, he came out and said,

okay, five shots.

Now, Poster had succeeded in breaking the shot up, but it was still incredibly difficult.

And let's hear it from the horse's mouth.

Here is again, camera operator Dave Comides talking about the insane difficulty of whip panning while ramping the speed of the film from fast to slow and back again.

as he moved through the school hallway.

The way that that works, we're shooting films.

So nowadays you would shoot it on digital, right and then you would just shoot a pass on digital you do all the moves and whatever and then they take it into post and they would like perfectly go okay we want to ramp at this point one ramp at this point but back then with film you were actually physically ramping it was and and for anybody who doesn't know when we say ramping you're going from 24 frames per second which is which is normal speed to i think it went to 48 frames per second which is which is you know twice as slow because there's more film going through and it pays but plays back at 24 frames per second.

So, Norman, my assistant, and to this day, I don't know how someone does this, but he's pulling focus with one hand.

And then in his other hand, he has a box with a little button.

And it has a huge cable going to the steady cam, which has its own problems because I'm not only trying to do moves, but I'm trying to do whips.

And the steady cam doesn't want to be encumbered by something.

It has to be perfectly balanced.

And I'm completely encumbered by something.

So that was its own thing.

So it takes a split second for the speed to change because when he pushes that button, two things are happening.

One is the speed is changing from 24 to 48 or at times from 48 back to 24.

But because it's going faster and or slower, depending on which way you're going, the light.

needs to change coming into the lens, the amount of light coming in the lens.

So it's actually connected to a motor back then that literally changed the aperture at the same speed that the film speed is changing.

And it's really quite incredible because you don't see any effect other than the slow motion.

So that was how they came up with it.

What's happening is as I'm I'm about to whip, I would go ramp and Norman would hit the button and then I would do the next part and I would go ramp.

But he also has to physically be very close and I'm turning my body usually 180 degrees or something like that.

And he would have to stay physically close to me because otherwise the cable would pull me.

And he's pulling focus and he's ramping and everything.

And you know, you do it a bunch, but the reality is you don't know if it worked because I'm saying ramp at exactly the moment that I want it to happen, which may be right or maybe not, because I'm thinking about 12 other things.

He's hopefully hitting it at the same point, but invariably there's some flex in there.

So the thing about it was you didn't know until the next day when Daly showed up whether it worked or not.

And I would also point out, as you pointed out so well, there's no music with it, which I'm sure when we saw it, we were probably like,

but then suddenly you put the music on it, and it's like, oh, this is kind of brilliant.

Now, obviously, they pulled off those shots.

Production was rounding out its 28-day schedule with its two biggest special effects shots yet to be shot, beginning with the jet engine killing Donnie.

Now, Steven Poster later said, People told Richard, you can't have an engine fall off a plane.

It just doesn't happen.

And in the middle of production, an airplane engine falls off the plane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

And obviously, in recent months, we've seen at least an influx of news stories about planes just seemingly falling out of the sky.

So it continues to remain part of our world.

Now, the jet engine scene was part of the last day of shooting.

Production designer Alec Hammond built a bedroom set.

Robbie Knott, special effects coordinator, brought in the engine, which had to be stripped of its guts to make it lighter the night before.

And as was confirmed by Steven Poster, Dave Kamides, and various other sources, they could not fit the damn jet engine into the sound stage.

When it was up on the crane, it was just a little too tall to get inside.

So everything had to shut down and they couldn't shoot anything.

So they actually went and got a shot of a plane landing behind a motel.

And that's an interstitial shot that you see before you cut to Donnie and his family at the motel the night after.

the plane crashes.

So a little bit of fortuitous bad luck in this instance.

Now, they did eventually, of course, they were able to roll the thing into the sound stage.

They lift it over the bedroom set.

They run multiple cameras because they're only going to be able to do this once.

They shoot the scene.

They, in fact, actually apparently shot additional footage of Donnie being impaled, which was not used in the film.

Whoa.

You actually don't even see him in the finished shot at all.

Yeah.

Now, the very last scene that they shot was around 4 a.m., and it was Donnie Darko torching Jim Cunningham's house.

Now, this interior was actually Dr.

Thurman's therapy office set, redressed as the interior of Patrick Swayze's living room, where you, of course, see the incredible oil painting of him on the wall.

They light it.

It gets so hot, they pull the camera back.

Firefighters come in to extinguish the flames.

And on that last day, Jyllen Hall approaches Richard Kelly and reveals the inspiration for his performance, Richard Kelly.

Jill and Hall had apparently just been doing an impression of the Nevis Young director for the entire production.

Wow.

And you can actually see some photos of them on set.

They look about the same age.

Kelly looks so young unbelievably young now Jylenhal's part of the process was done but Kelly and his team were just getting started editing Donnie Darko was like many films perhaps more difficult than shooting it as McKittrick said to cut a very complex script it's like an old sweater if you pull one little thread the whole thing can fall apart editorial was very difficult Producer Nancy Javonin supported Sam Bauer as Kelly's choice to edit the film.

As we mentioned, Sam Bauer had been with Kelly from the beginning, but the Bond company fought her, which may be why there are two credited editors on this film, Sam Bauer and Eric Strand.

I have not been able to figure out Mr.

Strand's exact role.

I don't know if he was brought in to supervise.

I don't know if he came in for additional editing.

I don't know if they co-edited.

If anybody out there knows, please feel free to share.

It was a bit of a blind spot in our research.

Now, Kelly wasn't alone in Post.

People were committed to helping him get this movie done.

Steven Poster, cinematographer, even carried cans of developed film from the lab to the Telecinni for the intermediate stage before color correction because he was so in love with the movie and he wanted to make sure it was completed properly.

And the film had some decently sophisticated VFX moments too, including the liquid spheres that Kelly admittedly ripped off from James Cameron's The Abyss.

You've got that kind of dream shot of the lockers in the nebulous water space before it gets flooded.

And then, of course, the jet engine at the end of the film that goes through the portal or wormhole.

And that was a shot that Kelly was never really satisfied with.

He said he wanted to do a whole big miniature of the plane getting ripped up, going through the interior of the plane.

A big Nolan practical shot, and he just couldn't make it work.

Yeah.

What's so funny about it, though, is that, like, it's...

I can see why he would have the desire to do it, but it's so insignificant.

Exactly.

There are so many more important things going on than the special effects shots in this movie.

I have heard rumors that this wasn't the only thing that Kelly wasn't able to do.

There have long been whispers on message boards of the original ending of Donnie Darko, in which the character pays off the assertion earlier in the film that he could be a superhero.

Donnie Darko?

What kind of name is that?

It's like some sort of superhero or something.

What makes you think I'm not?

I read online that Donnie originally drives his station wagon off the cliff after Gretchen dies, generating enough speed to then enter the portal, flying into the airplane, dislodging the engine from the wing, and thereby causing his own death.

One crew member that we spoke to could not exactly confirm this ending, but he did remember a version in which Donnie more directly causes the jet engine to decouple and something about him flying.

That being said, cinematographer Steven Poster stated in our interview that they shot the scripted ending, and that is more or less what ends up ending the final film.

So, the mystery is not yet solved, guys.

But if anyone can find the original shooting script, let us know.

Now, while getting the film cut to size was a gargantuan task, they had some lucky breaks on music.

And this movie has a fantastic score and a fantastic soundtrack.

David, any standouts for you?

You're a composer, you're a musician?

Yeah,

I think that the Gretchen Ross cue is about as a formative

piece of music as there is for me in terms of what I find compelling and what kind of informed a lot of the music that I write for piano.

I mean, it's just this beautiful little piece and it makes you fall in love when you hear it.

So that's the one that stands out.

But there's a lot in the use of synth in this score is

so cool and feels so analog and so right for this movie.

It can be hard to do something sci-fi without sounding sci-fi or to to be distractingly sci-fi.

And I think this movie executes it just right.

Well, it's good.

I'm glad that you mentioned that because that was very intentional.

Michael Andrews knew they were going to be using a lot of period-appropriate 1980s music.

And so he wanted to integrate some of those synth sounds into his score, even though the score was going to be largely built on piano and vocals.

And so I think you nailed it.

That's exactly what he was going for.

Now, the great thing about licensing songs from the 80s in the early 2000s is that they were in this gray area of licensing.

Those Those songs weren't hip anymore, but they also weren't nostalgic yet.

So translation, they were more affordable.

Oh.

So with the help of music supervisors Tom Wolf and Manish Raval, they were able to snag a lot of the tracks that Kelly had envisioned, but not all of them.

And there were some unexpected reasons for that.

Now, according to McKittrick, they had a deal with NXS, which stated that they could not pay more for any other song than they paid for their songs, which unexpectedly bit them in the ass when it came to the Sparkle Motion talent show performance, which, of course, is

Duran Duran's notorious.

The scene works, it's obviously the correct BPM, but it's not what the song was choreographed and shot to.

Oh, wow.

Which was West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys.

And David, I would love to play this scene for you really quickly with the quote proper

sound to it.

That's really interesting.

It plays way more like you're in the auditorium watching as an audience member, and it feels much smaller.

And it puts a totally different spin on the scene.

When you come in so strong with that, no, no, notorious, it just feels epic and huge.

And you feel like you're watching a music video.

You feel like you're part of a music video.

And in contrast, The Pet Shop Boys song feels very contained and very diegetic, meaning very in the room and not sensational.

Ultimately, it just sounds like, you know, these are some middle schoolers dancing.

Exactly, right?

So I think Notorious weirdly makes them seem better than they are, or at least the filmmakers are trying to communicate that what they're doing is epic, as you mentioned.

Whereas with the Pet Shot Boys track, West End Girls, it feels like you're more making fun of them.

Yeah, exactly.

People listening, I would definitely encourage you to check out this alternate version because I think it's a great example of how much of an impact different music makes because my eyes are always drawn to Maggie Jillenhall and her reaction when she's watching them.

And with Notorious, I always think, wow, she's really blown away by that.

Yeah, she thinks they're good.

Yes.

And when I watch this version, I'm like, she's like kind of laughing at how silly it is, but also appreciating it.

It really changes every aspect of the scene.

Well, it wouldn't be the only

song that they can't get that changes the tone of the scene.

More on that in a second.

Pet Shop Boys wanted $100,000 for the track, which was more than they could afford.

And it was more than they'd paid in excess.

So they ended up going with Duran Duran's Notorious.

Now, for the school montage, Drew Barrymore put in a personal request to Tears for Fears for Head Over Heels, and it wouldn't be the last Tears song to grace the soundtrack.

Composer Michael Andrews was brought onto the film.

He was almost as green as Richard Kelly.

He just scored the soon-to-be short-lived Freaks and Geeks.

He was recommended by Nancy Javonin's brother.

They asked him to write the heart of the film.

They said they wanted the core of the the movie to be the love story between Donnie and Gretchen.

And of course, that's where you get so many of the wonderful piano tracks from Gretchen's kind of ballad to Liquid Sphere Waltz.

And there really is a waltz-y quality, the doo-doo-doo,

you know, the one-two-three that's behind the music in this film that gives it, I think, a really wonderfully circular quality that matches, obviously, the circular nature of the movie.

So Andrew sat down at the piano in San Diego.

He recorded music for three or four scenes.

He sends them to editorial.

And the way they worked is apparently the editorial team just started splicing these tracks in throughout the movie wherever they seemed to kind of fit.

Oh, wow.

So they started to just temp it with Andrew's rough scratch tracks.

Composer's dream.

Well, I think that's why the music feels so organic to the movie is because the movie's pacing was in large part built around these cues and they kind of gave it some breathing room.

And I think they do a lot of wonderful work in spacing out some of the scenes that aren't really connected by much in terms of plot.

We jump across time and space multiple times, locations without any causal link between two scenes, just the music to get us there.

And I think it's really a testament to, you know, Andrews's writing, obviously, but also the editorial team's willingness to just go with that from the beginning.

Yeah,

it's such a good score.

I completely agree with you.

When you have the opportunity to work in that manner, That is opposite of obviously how films normally go, where a composer is scoring to picture, strictly scoring to picture without the ability to manipulate edit.

There is a freedom there that can allow things to flow more naturally.

Now, David, you mentioned it's an iconic score, and there is one song on the soundtrack that is better known than any other song on this soundtrack.

That is, of course, Michael Andrews and Gary Jules' cover of Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears, it plays over the haunting montage of all of the characters touched by Donnie that roughly concludes the film.

Now, the song feels completely,

completely of a piece with Donnie Darko, as does Donny Darko with the song.

I could not imagine a different track.

And yet, Richard Kelly had pushed for MLK by YouTube.

to be the concluding song that plays over that montage.

If you've not heard the song before, I recommend you go listen to it.

It's very beautiful.

You can see why he would like it.

It's very ethereal.

The lyrics, sleep, you know, sleep, sleep tonight, me,

may feel appropriate at a surface level until you remember this is an elegy to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

being played over the death of a fictional, emotionally disturbed upper-middle-class white kid from Virginia with delusions of grandeur.

Maybe not the best look

to layer this song over that scene.

Yeah.

So I mean,

there are a lot of reasons why it feels retrospectively like it wasn't the right choice.

Musically speaking, it is fairly arrhythmic and very consonant and smooth and waves washing over you.

And I think it feels a little too zen, whereas Mad World has that tension and the dissonance and that angstiness.

Well, I think you actually, as you mentioned, it's a rhythmic.

You need actually the kind of driving piano of Mad World, I think, to propel you through those pans at the end of the film.

I completely agree.

Luckily for Richard Kelly, the song was simply too expensive.

So Michael Andrews pitched his own stripped-down piano arrangement of Mad World by Tears for Fears,

which he had been covering with his high school band for a decade.

So this is again the product of a high school mind.

Now, if you've never heard the original version of Tears for Fear's Mad World, I recommend you play it now.

It is strikingly different,

much more rhythmic.

Andrew's approach took the haunting lyrics of the original, reset them inside an equally haunting piano arrangement, Lent Life by his friend and former bandmate, singer-songwriter Gary Jules.

They recorded the song in 15 minutes, and then they pitched it to Javonin, and she was sold.

In fact, they say that she started crying when she watched the scene to it.

Now,

unfortunately, Richard Kelly's run of good luck was coming to an end.

He had landed Jason Schwartzman against all odds, Drew Barrymore.

He'd lost Schwartzman, but then gained two Gyllenhaus, Steven Poster.

So many supporters, a great soundtrack and score, and it seems like he had just snagged the best possible premiere for his film.

The lineup for the 2001 Sundance Film Festival is announced, and Donnie Darko is given the premiere slot and the top heat rating by the Hollywood Trades.

This is the movie that everyone wants to see.

And according to many involved in the film, this put a bullseye on their backs.

As producer Adam Fields later said, Donnie Darko got accepted at Sundance as the opening premiere movie, which I thought was actually a terrible mistake for us to accept.

Back then, you never wanted to go first unless you were so darn sure about your film.

So I was very familiar about how things tended to work there.

But when they're being offered the world premiere as the opening film of the festival, it's hard to turn that down.

The team accepts, and the movie premieres in Park City, Utah on January 19th, 2001, to

mixed reactions.

Now, the movie was very divisive.

According to many there, half of the audience seemed to love it, and the other half seemed to hate it for precisely the same reasons.

One half said, I don't know what the hell this is about, and the narrative's really confusing.

And the other half said, I don't know what the hell this is about.

And the narrative's really confusing.

Yeah.

Now, the narrative had shifted around the film as well.

It used to be considered this indie film that could, right?

This was the movie that could never get made.

And then they made it for only four and a half million.

But it actually looked too good.

Nobody believed that they'd only made it for four and a half million dollars.

Maybe it was because they saw Drew Barrymore's name associated with it, and she was obviously associated with very big films at this point in time.

Maybe it's because of what they'd achieved on screen.

Regardless, the association was hard to shake.

This was not viewed as a Sundance film.

It was viewed as a Hollywood film trying to infiltrate Sundance.

It was the wolf wolf in sheep's clothing all of a sudden.

Now, when it came to sell the film, everyone passed.

Now, there were some foreseeable reasons, like the movie was simply too long.

According to producer Adam Fields, the cut that screened at Sundance was 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release.

But that shouldn't necessarily prevent a film from being sold.

Many films are bought at festivals, and then the distributor works with the filmmaker to cut them down into a more appropriate runtime for the release.

But there were other issues like Columbine.

In April of 1999, so roughly two years before this, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, two high school students murdered 12 of their classmates and a teacher in what was for at least a decade or so, the most infamous school shooting in American history.

And of course, this film ends with Donnie Darko murdering Frank after the death of Gretchen with his father's handgun.

As Richard Kelly later said, people were not comfortable with any movie that showed a teenager holding or firing a gun.

They thought the movie was potentially going to promote suicide or something.

There were a lot of people who backed out of the room completely after they screened the movie and were like, we don't want anything to do with this.

It's not hard to understand why general audiences would grapple with that.

I mean, he is,

like you said, a teenage boy who commits gun violence at the end, who's also a vigilante throughout the movie, who is rebellious against authority.

Spends his time shooting, you know, a 22 or an air rifle out in the field.

You know, right.

He's, he's openly talks about how he's disturbed.

He's antisocial.

So, yeah, that coupled with stigmas, with mental health issues, which I think.

This still was not a time where we were talking super openly about mental health problems.

Yeah.

One of the commendable things this film does, I think, is shine a light on it and create this very lovable, endearing character, despite the fact that he struggles so much.

But on surface level, it's easy to see how audiences would have a hard time wrapping their head around it.

I think what the movie does really well is that it shows that even though he's dysfunctional, the family is actually very functional.

Right.

And he has wonderful parents.

And I actually love the way that their relationship is portrayed.

They love each other.

They're a team, right?

You know, there's no unnecessary conflict there that needs to be written in.

It all feels very natural.

Yeah, even between him and his siblings, there is that natural abrasiveness that siblings have, but there is the undertone of love in each of them caring about each other.

I agree.

Now, there was also just some random, weird, bad luck.

Sean McKittrick says that Harvey Weinstein showed up to the Sundance screening wearing a Donnie Darko crew hat.

Nobody knows where he got it from.

And so a lot of distributors left the screening early because they assumed that he had already purchased the movie when he hadn't.

Now, according to Adam Fields, they did receive an offer from HBO for an HBO release.

This would be non-theatrical for roughly $1 million, which would have been a big loss for the financier.

Months pass.

There's no buyer.

The songs haven't been paid for.

They're going to lose the music.

And potential distributors are suggesting...

possibly the dumbest idea you're likely to hear today, which is to slash the movie by 30 minutes, cut the gun scene, and reframe it as a horror film in which Frank the Rabbit kills kids.

And they said, call him Stabby Frank.

Oh my God.

That

I can't even, my reaction to that is extreme, and I can't even imagine what Richard Kelly must have felt.

Basically, turning it into Five Nights at Freddy's.

So maybe it would have been a billion dollars.

Who knows?

Now, Sam Bauer, the editor, did end up trimming 20 minutes to the film with Richard Kelly, not to turn it into Stabby Frank, but to get it to the hour and and 53 minutes that the film finally is when you finally see it.

And as always, Kelly's savior came from an unexpected place, his competition.

In early 2001, Hollywood was a buzz about the debut, the American debut, of a young vundikin that had bucked narrative rules to tell a non-linear story.

And no, I'm not talking about Richard Kelly and Donny Darko.

I'm talking about Christopher Nolan and Memento.

Aaron Ryder, who worked at Newmarket Films, the company behind Memento, received a call, it's unclear from who, saying, hey, why don't you guys try to release this film as well?

Ryder set up a buyer's screening and invited Christopher Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas, to come see Donnie Darko.

As Ryder later said, it was a great screening because while the movie was, let's call it flawed, there was also something so unbelievably captivating about it.

I think it's a fantastic description.

But it was Nolan.

who provided the linchpin of Newmarket's eventual relationship with Kelly because he's the one who told execs that they should distribute the film and he did start to carry some clout at this time.

Memento had grossed nearly four times its $9 million budget after being released in early 2001.

Further, Memento had a similar journey to Donny Darko.

Premiered at Venice.

Despite winning the screenwriting award at Sundance, the very Sundance that Donny Darko had appeared at, it also hadn't sold.

It was viewed as too cerebral.

So Newmarket decided to distribute the film themselves, and they'd been rewarded handsomely for it.

So why not do the same with Donnie Darko?

This wasn't Christopher Nolan's only contribution to the final film.

He and Emma Thomas suggested to Richard Kelly that he should add the countdowns under the title cards to keep the audience in the loop on how much time remained until the end of the world.

So when you see 20 days left and eventually one day left, thank you, Christopher Nolan.

Now there were some minor reshoots.

They spent the the summer of 2001 cleaning up the movie.

They added James Duvall, Frank, to the ending montage.

He was not originally part of the ending montage.

That was Aaron Ryder's suggestion over at Newmarket.

Great idea, Aaron.

However, Newmarket was initially angling for a straight-to-DVD release.

And again, it was Drew Barrymore who came in and strong-armed them into a theatrical window.

So Drew Barrymore, just saving Donny Darko left and right.

Yeah, geez.

So they agree October of 2001 would be the perfect time to drop this film.

And then, for the last time, disaster struck.

Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City.

At 8.46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into one World Trade Center, instantly killing hundreds and trapping hundreds more above the 91st floor.

Donny Darko's trailer featured a jet engine falling out of the sky.

The film was dead on arrival.

It opened on October 16th, 2001, just over a month after the September 11th terrorist attacks, just a month after America developed a new fear of flying.

And it bombed.

As Ryder later said, it was wildly disappointing.

I felt like, wow, we have something here, and I feel like there's an audience for it.

But that audience didn't show up.

The film grossed $110,000 in its opening weekend and just under $600,000 in its theatrical run.

Wow.

It wasn't just audiences.

I know you can go on Rotten Tomatoes Now and you'll see 90% or whatever, but the initial critical reactions were very mixed.

The New York Times basically said that Kelly was in over his head, that he didn't pull it off, but they did celebrate Jake Gyllenhal's acting.

And they ended with the quote, the actor's loyalty to the director's vision is evident.

The director just hasn't figured out what that vision is yet.

Variety was somewhat more positive, saying, Donny Darko has plenty of problems, but most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep flyout rather than a home run.

Kelly went to see the film at the Sunset 5 and then headed to a bar to console himself.

His collaborators tried to reassure him.

You know what, Richard, even if it's not going to make any money, you got it in theaters.

Be proud of what you did.

And then the bartender piped up.

He had no idea who they were, but he'd just seen this movie that blew his mind.

You guys have got to see this movie, Donnie Darko.

It's the most fucking incredible movie I've seen in years.

And that's the moment when Richard Kelly realized, maybe,

despite the failure, because it was, it was deemed an absolute failure, maybe it's going to hold on.

And the thing that Kelly had avoided, a DVD release, became the thing that saved Donny Darko in the end.

So in March of 2002, Donny Darko came out on home video.

And David, it's likely that this is when one of your sisters picked it up, looked at its weird cover and thought, maybe I should watch this.

Because a strange thing happened.

All of those teenagers who didn't go to see the movie in the theaters, they rented it from Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.

They started passing it around like a mixtape or a mysterious artifact.

Now, Kelly hated the DVD art.

It took the claws that they'd made of Frank's rabbit mask, shrunk it down, and then added more faces of the same actors around it.

So if you look close, like you see everybody's face twice and it doesn't really make sense.

But it worked.

It was intriguing.

I remember looking at it and thinking what the hell is this thing yeah the film also came out in the united kingdom in october of 2002 and had a much better time finding an audience there and mad world became an international hit slowly climbing the charts wow gary jules remembers he was driving on melrose east of labrea And all of a sudden, my cell phone rang, and it was Tears for Fears co-founder, Roland Orzibal.

And I about shipped my pants.

I had to pull over.

He basically said, I like your version better than ours, and it gets closer to the soul of the song than the recording we finally had.

You just sort of feel like your life's going on, and then all of a sudden it's like, what the fuck was happening?

Donny Darko began popping up at festival screenings and through reissues earned more than its budget back at the box office.

That's not even talking about the DVD sales, which were big.

Of course, this all led to the fateful release of the director's cut of Donny Darko.

This expanded version of the film premiered at the 2004 Seattle International Film Festival.

It features an additional 20 minutes of footage, an altered soundtrack, and excerpts of Roberto Sparrow's The Philosophy of Time Travel.

I wrote about this extensively on our Patreon.

You can go read the post for free.

It also sought to answer all of the fun questions that drew audiences into the film in the first place.

My advice is to stick with the theatrical.

Now, Johnny Darko has obviously secured a place in film history.

It is truly the little indie film that that could, and I think will continue to be passed down amongst high school students for quite some time.

Obviously, a number of the actors went on to very impressive things.

Both Gill and Halls exploded into the Hollywood stratosphere, along with Seth Rogan, who's now the head of a studio on Apple's the Studio, which I've really been enjoying.

Obviously, production designer Alec Hammond, costume designer April Ferry, Steven Poster, Sean McKittrick.

They've all gone on to do a lot of really wonderful things.

But it seems like Richard Kelly, kind of like Donnie, stuck in the loop of the movie, didn't ever really escape being famous for, well, Donny Darko.

His sophomore feature, South and Tales, which we've covered on this podcast.

was, you know, a pretty poorly received, but extremely ambitious look at a politically charged sci-fi near future.

I think it's aged really well in terms of its vision of that future.

I would recommend watching it, listen to our episode.

And his third film, an adaptation of the Richard Matheson short story, Button Button, called The Box, was a commercial disappointment.

And Richard Kelly hasn't directed a film since.

I have heard he gets a lot of screenwriting work by way of rewrites and polishes.

Would not surprise me.

And we spoke with one Darko crew member who said that Kelly had more unbelievably good movies in him than the vast majority of movie directors.

It just happened to be only one unbelievably good movie, or maybe the better way to say that is so far.

Now, I read this quote that I want to share from Kevin Smith.

In 2016, he said of Richard Kelly, he is insanely creative and is not unlike Christopher Nolan.

But Nolan wound up in the Warner Brothers system where he got special handling and he got a lot of money to make huge art films like Inception.

Richard can be one of our greatest filmmakers.

He is right now, but just a lot of people don't realize it.

He's still a kid, and somebody needs to Nolan that kid.

And I think a lot of people that have worked with Richard Kelly would probably agree.

I mean, I certainly would think that Steven Poster, based on our conversation, would agree with that assessment.

But for me, Nolan and Kelly couldn't be more different.

I think of Christopher Nolan as a watchmaker, right?

Every movement is precise and calibrated and physics-based.

And I think Richard Kelly, even though he dabbles in science fiction, is at his best like an alchemist.

He takes things that have no business next to one another, you know, jet engines, teen mental health, six-foot bunnies, therapy, family angst, sibling rivalry.

He shoves it all together and it just works.

And I don't think it works because of the science fiction.

I'd argue it actually works in spite of the time travel and wormholes and destiny.

To me, it works because it feels very honest.

It feels very true, because I think it was based on his childhood, because Jake Gyllenhaal was impersonating him.

Because like Donnie, who,

you know, despite Francis Ford Coppola's assertion that the movie's about kids figuring it out themselves, Donnie listens to some of the adults around him.

at really important moments and they're smart and they care just like the people around richard kelly like Stephen Poster and Nancy Javonin and Drew Barrymore and April Ferry.

And so, I guess what I'm getting at is, to me, this movie is such a perfect encapsulation of what happens when a movie works the way it's supposed to work, or at least one of the ways it's supposed to work, which is you have somebody that has a really unique idea of something in their mind.

And everybody else around them uses all of their incredible expertise and knowledge of story and how to express story through their specific departments to extract that idea with that person and put it on a movie screen for the rest of us.

And so, you know, I turn it to you now, David, with the what went right of Donnie Darko, what for you went right having heard this story, knowing that so many things had to go right for this movie to even exist.

I think that what went right for me is

the understated roles of big actors.

I think that seeing Drew Barrymore play an ancillary character, I think she plays it so well.

I think that she's really fun to watch.

I think that her sort of flirtatious manner with the students is something that it would have been hard to find with any other actress.

And that's to say nothing of her role in producing the movie and actually getting it made in the first place, which is remarkable.

I think that Patrick Swayze, who,

as I was editing the dirty dancing episode today, you referred to as the perfect fantasy figure, plays that in other movies in various ways, whether he's the impossible guy to get or

this

action hero, but in this, he plays this very familiar, very flawed character, again, in a very understated way that I think makes me appreciate him as an actor way more than i do when i see him playing some of these more extreme roles and the same goes for donny's mom for the for his therapist for noah wiley i mean not that he's a huge star although he's becoming big in the pit and also on the pit as an aside i found it very interesting that there's a character in the show the pit who is suspected of being a danger to his peers.

I won't say more because I don't want to spoil anything, but he is sporting a variation on the iconic skeleton t-shirt that Donnie wears for the back half of the movie.

And I don't think that is a fluke.

I think it's a testament to the staying power of Donnie Darko and the efficacy of this movie in capturing the spirit of the misunderstood teen in such a compelling way that it became a trope.

What about you, Chris?

What went right?

I will say fantastic work, Richard Kelly, an exceptionally directed film.

Fantastic work, Stephen Poster.

It's an amazing-looking film.

April Fairy, Alec Hammond.

There are so many people you could give it to.

I agree.

I would like to give my what went right

to

four actresses in the film.

So I think one thing that's really interesting about this movie is that the

key relationships that influence Donnie outside of Frank are

four women in his life.

One, Mary McDonald, his mom.

Two, Catherine Ross, his therapist.

Three, Jenna Malone, his love interest.

And four, Maggie Gyllenhall, his sister.

Those are the four key relationships that influence him across the film.

He obviously has interactions with Professor Monotoff and with his father, etc.

And then you could say Grandma Death as well.

I think those characters, if you were to just look at them on the page, are extremely thinly written.

This is very much a movie written from Donnie's perspective.

It's a fairly male-oriented movie to begin with.

Good lord, do

those actresses lend a lot of depth, gravitas, and personality to what could have simply been

five or six moments each on screen.

And like you said, I guess I will just riff off of your

character actor of the year, you know, sort of award.

I think it's an example of the power of a talented performer to take what is there and imbue it with life beyond what's on the page.

So I just want to give it out to those four who are all, you know, overqualified, I would say, for those roles.

As you said, you know, your focus was more on Drew Berrymore.

It's a great example of doing very, very, very much with very little.

Yeah.

And also Michael Andrews, because yeah, the music's fantastic.

He, I mean, yeah, I can't overstate how much that score influenced the

the music that i love and the music that i strive to write

guys thank you for sticking around for our coverage of donny darko it will not be the last richard kelly film we cover that will be the box if you'd like to learn more about mr kelly and his sophomore feature south on tales listen to our coverage of that film it's very early in our catalog so excuse any hiccups there as we were still kind of figuring out our format Now, if you're enjoying this podcast, there are four easy ways to support it.

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What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.