Twenty-five years ago, Richard Kelly took the world by storm — or vortex — with his angsty debut, Donnie Darko. The genre-bending cult classic launched Jake Gyllenhaal‘s career as a Hollywood A-lister when it premiered on Oct. 26, 2001, even as it polarized different generations of viewers with its time-twisting structure, visceral imagery, and one ultra-creepy bunny costume.
But even as Kelly celebrates his film’s Silver Anniversary, he’s also looking ahead to the future of the Darko-verse. “This anniversary feels different because there’s so much new to talk about,” the filmmaker tells Gold Derby, referencing the upcoming sequel novel, The Philosophy of Time Travel, due out in December. “So much is finally coming to fruition and coming into release in a tangible way, and it’s wild to think how many years have passed with the film just continuing to connect with people.
“Now that I’m working with a publisher, they have all this incredible data analytics and can show me numbers showing that the film has just increased in popularity with each passing year,” Kelly adds. “It’s very exciting, and it really motivates me just to continue to keep working.”
For those not in the know, Donnie Darko follows the eponymous lead who learns courtesy of the aforementioned creepy bunny, Frank, that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. And Donnie is not feeling fine. As he navigates his day-to-day life as an angsty high school student, he also commits a series of crimes with Frank’s guidance. Meanwhile, the film around him plays with themes of predestination, nihilism, and fear — not to mention the concept of variant universes. It’s enough to make you doubt your own commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Kelly took inspiration from his own adolescence in the 1980s, as well as his memory at being overwhelmed by Stephen Hawking’s seminal book, A Brief History of Time, which wrestled with big ideas about life, the universe, and everything. And the director knew early on that he wanted to give the movie a Halloween hook, setting it in October for the span of the lunar month as well as the idea of supernatural entity haunting Donnie.
“I was also very adamant about it being set in 1988, just because there was something specific about that year, with the election about to happen,” Kelly says, referring to George Bush’s ascent to the presidency. “There’s so much that happened culturally, musically, and cinematically that it feels like a head start on the ’90s.”
Kelly also modeled his titular character after the older people orbiting him in real life, like his elder brother. “I was writing a character who was maybe three years older than I was, but if you have an older sibling, you always look up to them, like, “I’m following in the path of my sibling,'” he explains. “You see the posters that are hanging on your older brother’s wall or the books he’s reading, and you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m going to read those books, too, and I’m going to have those posters hanging on my wall, too.'”
The script was written during his time as a USC film school post-grad working at a now-defunct post production company where he’d run errands for the execs, directors, and musicians who came through — most notably Madonna, who was doing VFX compositing for her famous “Ray of Light” music video.
“I was around all these super-famous successful people, and here I was making minimum wage,” Kelly recalls of that time. “Eventually, I was able to latch onto the idea of a jet engine falling from the sky, and the Twilight Zone-style mystery of that laid out the architecture of the whole script for me.”
Besides Gyllenhaal — and his sister, Maggie — Donnie Darko featured such soon-to-be stars as Jena Malone, Seth Rogen, Ashley Tisdale, and Jerry Trainor. It also handed a scene-stealing role to ’80s screen icon Patrick Swayze as motivational speaker Jim Cunningham. Kelly says that Drew Barrymore — who also has a role in the film and produced it via her production company, Flower Films — and Jason Schwartzman were the lynchpins to attracting “L.A.’s cool kid actors” to the project, along with a SAG strike that limited work options for much of the year 2000.
“People came in agreeing to be featured extras, and they had incredible resumes,” Kelly says now. “They just wanted to work. Even back then when things were much more robust in terms of the L.A. shooting economy, people just wanted to work and we had this movie that was set in a high school with all these little speaking parts for up-and-coming actors. Otherwise, we would’ve been forced to go to Toronto, and the entire cast of the movie would’ve been different.”
The budget was a constant challenge for Kelly, as was convincing his collaborators that the Tears for Fears song, “Mad World,” had to serve as the movie’s key needle drop. Kelly eventually re-directed the money he’d make on future residuals to pay for the music licensing and then fast-tracked the editing of that sequence to show to the creative team.
“You could see just a light bulb go off where everyone was like, ‘All right,'” he says now. “It was a renewed sigh of relief that it worked. We still didn’t have the song at that point, but we had the ammunition to go and get the song and convince everyone to give it to us, which they did. That was a make or break moment in the whole thing, and it was emblematic of the whole risk of the movie because there was so much skepticism going into it.”
Donnie Darko made its debut at the 2001 edition of the Sundance Film Festival and, not surprisingly, the first responses were polarizing, which made distributors too freaked out to take a chance on it. “No one would buy the movie,” Kelly remembers. “There was talk of it getting cut down to 90 minutes with all the ’80s music being cut out. At best, it might have gotten a Starz premiere or have gone straight to DVD.”
But the worm(hole) finally turned when the now-defunct distributor, Newmarket Films — which had just had a hit with Christopher Nolan’s sophomore feature, Memento — noticed the huge “For Sale” sign on Donnie Darko. In fact, Kelly reveals that Nolan and his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, saw it, and told the company: “You should buy this movie.” Kelly adds that Thomas passed along several notes for the movie, including adding a shot of Frank without his bunny mask into the “Mad World” montage.
Donnie Darko was also early to the kind of inventive marketing schemes that companies like A24 have mastered today. At a time when most movie websites simply housed showtimes and basic production material, Kelly collaborated with a London-based digital marketing team to design a whole interactive site that contained the initial pages of the film’s in-universe book, The Philosophy of Time Travel.
“I wanted to elaborate upon those dynamics with the book, which was never completely finished, but it went on that website,” Kelly says, recalling that the effort didn’t necessarily translate into box office dollars. Donnie Darko ended its theatrical run with only $2 million banked at the domestic box office. But the film found its audience on DVD, and Kelly found himself going viral before that was even a thing.
“People really went through those pages of the book, so all that stuff has been marinating in my mind for decades now,” Kelly says. Flash-forward a quarter century, and he’s finished the full 600-page tome, which follows the life of the Darko family after the events of the movie. (Donnie Darko technically already has a sequel, the 2009 direct-to-DVD movie S. Darko, but that was made without Kelly’s involvement.)
Picking up two days later after the film left off on Oct. 4, 1988, the novel spans 14 months, and Kelly excitingly describes it as a gigantic story that’s vastly different from the original film. “All this stuff was only hinted at in the text of the movie because it’s only two hours long and takes place in a dreamlike world,” he explains. “It was a really therapeutic experience writing it, as well as an enormous amount of work.”
Kelly hopes the novel will translate into additional Darko-verse features, sharing that there are about three sequels’ worth of material in the book’s page. And since it’s been 25 years since the first film, he feels that the best way to continue the tale is via motion-capture animation that can preserve the characters’ appearances from 25 years ago.
“Books are very powerful engines for cinema,” Kelly says of his hopes for using the sequel novel to create sequel features. “It seems like Gen Z are reading books. We’ve got them on #BookTok, and they’re going to see those movies.”
