Interview: Richard Kelly on Southland Tales As an Ever-Evolving Work in Progress

“Movies are like haircuts,” David Fincher once quipped. “They seemed like a good idea then, and you just don’t want to see a picture of it later.” Richard Kelly would likely beg to differ. He’s never far removed from tinkering or overhauling one of the three movies he directed in the first decade of the 2000s—Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, and The Box—each of which faced some struggle or interference in making the leap from script to screen. If he doesn’t like the way his films look, Kelly isn’t afraid to keep playing around with them until they meet his satisfaction—even if a cult fandom has sprung up around the rough-hewn imagination on display in their shaggier original versions.

Nearly 15 years after it bombed in spectacular fashion at the Cannes Film Festival, Kelly’s sophomore feature, Southland Tales, can finally be seen as originally intended, courtesy of an Arrow Blu-ray release. But don’t call this restoration a director’s cut, as the so-called “Cannes cut” is still unfinished. This version of the film still leaves intact some rickety visual effects and doesn’t attempt to impose any further intelligibility on his ambitious saga of post-9/11 paranoia and panic. Southland Tales is better left unexplained (if it can even be explained), just experienced as a collage of spectacularly staged aughts-era anxieties.

Getting the Cannes cut of Southland Tales in front of fans is just the latest step in Kelly’s long-gestating desire to “complete” the film, which may require him to envision and create a transmedia project the likes of which audiences have never seen. It’s a prospect that excites more than it daunts Kelly, who spoke to me last week about the arrival of the Southland Tales Cannes cut on Blu-ray and his desire to incorporate new material into the film.

How would you introduce Southland Tales to someone who doesn’t know its backstory?

Well, first I would say that it’s still a work in progress. It might be better to start with the theatrical version because it has both more narrative information and less. It’s set up as chapters four-to-six of a six-chapter story, where the Cannes version is set up as much more dreamlike but has a complete narrative arc because it has more scenes and character development. But it’s also unfinished. It’s sort of like two companion films that are both unfinished. That’s what I’d tell them on a technical level, but on a thematic level, I would tell them it’s a portrait of the aughts, the aftermath of 9/11, and a kaleidoscope of paranoia.

Are your films, or the ideas behind them, ever finished?

Well, I would love to be able to properly finish a film one day! [laughs] I say that with humility and gratitude for the opportunities I’ve been given. I was very lucky to have been able to start directing movies at the age of 24, which is when I sold Donnie Darko, and 25 when I made and edited the film. That’s very young to start making movies. I definitely didn’t have the budget that I needed on the first two films to do everything I wanted to do in terms of visual effects. Really, on Southland Tales, we needed to make about six hours of story. We needed to make two big movies to tell the whole story. We needed a lot more resources, visual effects, animation—all these things that just didn’t exist in 2005 when we shot the film. There’s always a chance to expand on these stories. With Southland Tales, so much has happened in the world in the 15 years since that it just feels like the world of the film is worth revisiting. I’ve done so much work to expand the story, and there’s a graphic novel prequel series to the film. It just feels like now’s really the time, if we’re going to do it, to try and engage with expanding the story and really finishing it with all the resources we have today. I think my first two films, and especially my second film, were kind of just built to be expanded upon.

Is there something psychological that keeps drawing you back beyond the mistimed or mismanaged releases to the films? You seem like an outlier among directors in your willingness to hold onto a project for so long.

Hollywood has always been obsessed with sequels. Growing up, part of me always wanted to be either a novelist, a political cartoonist, or an architect. As a filmmaker, I get to be all three. To be a novelist requires a great deal of patience and commitment. It’s an enormous challenge to write a big, sprawling novel. There are two books—well, there’s many books—that you see in Donnie Darko. One of them that you see being read by Donnie’s parents is It by Stephen King, one of his longest novels. In my mind, some of the films that I’ve made would just be one chapter in a much bigger novel in my head. The best version of a sequel that Hollywood can make is a better chapter in a novelistic story, and it’s something that feels necessary, justified, and organic to the material. At the start of my career, especially with Southland Tales and the graphic novels, I was making part of a novel in my mind. That’s my version of a sequel. Southland Tales is a prequel and a sequel sort of all baked together in a dual timeline narrative. That’s what I envision for the six-hour expansion that I’m hoping to shoot.

You’ve mentioned that Southland Tales, if released today, might make more sense as a limited series or a two-part movie. But given how you want to incorporate graphic novels or other intersecting forms of media into the film, it seems like you might need something even bigger. Have you seen any transmedia projects that you see as a potential template, or are you going to have to invent the wheel here?

It’s a new template for what I’m trying to do, and I don’t think it’s exactly been done before. Obviously, a lot of longform films are being made with the same director, screenwriter, and crew. I think what Scott Frank just did with The Queen’s Gambit, a limited seven-chapter story that was very contained and had a singular vision, is an example. You’ve also got something like Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of five films with five separate storylines. Also you got what the Coen brothers did with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and, obviously, Zack Snyder’s cuts of his prior work. With Southland Tales, I’m wanting to create a whole new film and shoot new footage that would integrate into the existing one to make a big double feature. It’s just a question of whether there are streaming platforms that are amenable to these ideas, open to letting filmmakers present expanded narratives and sequel-ized narratives in a way that’s revisionist and forward-thinking in how we’re digesting narrative in the streaming world. I think there’s a new frontier that we’re able to explore now because so many people are watching movies at home, and they’re watching them on their computer screen. They’re watching them in chapters. And as much as I love the theatrical experience—and if I do get to finish my two big Southland Tales movies, I would love for them to play in theaters at some point if possible. I’m just very cognizant of the fact that a lot of people are going to be watching things at home. That’s just the nature of the way the world has evolved.

You’re very clear that the Cannes cut is by no means a “finished” version of the film or even a “director’s cut.” When you’re able to finish it, are you going to be approaching it from trying to return to your mindset circa the mid-aughts? Or are you going to let all the insight you’ve accumulated over the last 15 years guide you?

I think I’ll try to do both. There’s an aesthetic, tone, rhythm, and style to Southland Tales that I would very much want to maintain. That’s part of the challenge of doing a project like this: You have to build a time machine and travel back into the past. If I’m using animation to create a prequel narrative that leads up into the existing story, which is the 2008 timeline, I’m going to make sure that it’s fluid—that it flows directly into the existing timeline and the style, technique, and the delivery of the story is consistent. That’s a challenge, but you also have the gift of the footage that exists that we captured in 2005 as a companion, guide, and style rubric. That’s very exciting. And then there’s the opportunity to look into the future and the sort of nesting-doll narrative that exists inside, which is Boxer and Krysta’s screenplay looking forward to the year 2024. It’s exciting to think of things that were teased in the existing film. When you see Boxer and Krysta [Dwayne Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar] discussing their script, they’re going into great detail, very excited about the roles, and what the world’s like. Again, it’s very obedient to the rules and laws set forth by the existing material.

When you’re writing something ahead of its time like Southland Tales, are you keeping in mind the audiences of the time? Or are you writing it for posterity?

I like to think that I’m more mature today than I was in 2005. And I’d like to think that I’ve grown a lot as an artist, that I’m a more organized person in terms of my skills as a screenwriter in planning and mapping things out. My films have never really gone down easily in terms of their reception. Southland Tales was received in a very disruptive, polarizing way at Cannes. The movies definitely suffered because of that. We weren’t even allowed to bring The Box to a festival. My movies have never been particularly audience-friendly, but they’ve aged well with the test of time. That’s challenging, and not really a way for me to sustain a long career. I do need to connect with regular audiences immediately. I’ve been really focused on writing, for the most part, over the past 10 years and building an arsenal of projects. When the floodgates finally open, I’ll hopefully be directing for a long time. This new world with streaming platforms, you’re not as beholden to the risks of theatrical box office revenue. That’s a treacherous world to live in because you’re judged and sometimes condemned based on an opening weekend or a per-screen average. That’s ultimately not the filmmaker’s fault, but rather the marketing strategy. On a streaming platform, you don’t have to spend all this marketing money and play the lottery of which weekend you release it.

I’m curious what you make of this ret-conning of the George W. Bush administration? Watching Southland Tales recently, I think what I found most striking is that it takes place in an alternate America that actually grapples with the psychic toll of the Iraq War in a way that I don’t think we as a nation ever did.

The Trump presidency was just such a big and traumatizing event for so many people. We just went through a four-year Twilight Zone episode in a lot of ways. I think the whole world feels like it was in this surreal dream world, and that we’re all still kind of waking up from it. I think we’re kind of trying to come back to a sense of normalcy. But I will always kind of go back to 9/11 as another catastrophic, seismic event that just altered the course of history. Southland Tales is very much a post-9/11 piece of art that’s a product of that aftermath. It was made in that aftermath, four years later. It was made in 2005, completed in 2006, and even a little bit into 2007 in terms of trying to finish the theatrical version of the film. It’s definitely looking back further, much earlier than Trump. But, again, there’s a cause and effect. You can look at cause and effect all throughout history, and how this led up to that. [Many] catastrophic events occur either on the day of a presidential election or the immediate aftermath with the policies and events that occurred in their shadow. If I’m ever visiting or looking into the past, I’m always trying to take note of what were the events that got us here. What would be the seismic events that transformed the world and made us who we are? How can we analyze the recent past to make sense of the present tense and even into the future? It’s always really important for me to keep looking back. Boy, will we be studying those four Trump years for a long time in history books, but it’s really important to keep looking back. Particularly in 21st-century studies, because I’ve really been only doing this since the year 2000.

Was there any backlash toward setting the film in 2008? There’s something perverse and unsettling about having it be the site of social decay rather than hope, which many people saw given that it was when the Bush presidency was ending?

Listen, this was a film about doomsday, but it was intended to be a therapeutic portrait of doomsday. Literally, as we were shooting the film, the Katrina disaster was unfolding. Things weren’t looking good. We were in a dark place. And I think even when we brought the film to Cannes, people were exhausted and angry. There wasn’t hope yet on the horizon. I don’t think we even had a glimmer of an idea of who would be our president in the 2008 election. We hadn’t even gotten to that point yet, the light was pretty far down at the end of that tunnel at that point. I think opening a film with nuclear bombs exploding in Texas isn’t necessarily a pleasant idea; it’s a terrifying idea. Our intent was to put you into a situation where you think, “Oh, this could be so much worse. What if this became so much worse?” And then let’s flash-forward into this dream world with all of these candy-colored, fun, joyful performers that you remember. And let’s try and be therapeutic about doomsday, make sense of it, and go on this bonkers journey together. Try and find resurrection, salvation, and some kind of paradise on the other side. So that was always our intent. It was a lot to digest back then. But, now, maybe it feels like a meal that we’re ready to really sit down and devour six courses of it.

Boxer and Krysta’s script is set in 2024. Think we’ll have something just before then like the original release of Southland Tales?

I’m just trying to get this off the ground and get it done before everyone gets too old! There’s an expiration date on all of us, but a lot of us are still in our prime. I would just love, more than anything in my whole career, to be able to finish this project. We’re working really hard to figure out how to pull it off. 2024 sounds like a great deadline, and I would love to meet it. I hope we’re all still here and in a much healthier place by then.