Donnie Darko: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We are your six foot rabbits of research. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Tagel. That makes it sound like we're cosplaying Watership Down. No, that that's possibly as frightening and unsettling as the movie we're going to discuss today. It's a tale as old as time, folks. It's a story of boy meets girl. Boy gradually realizes he exists in a tangent universe created by a rupture in the spacetime continuum after he sleepwalks out of his bedroom just before a giant gen engine falls out of the sky and crashes into his room. Boys haunted by a terrifying six ft tall rabbit who encourages him to commit acts of violence. Girl gets run over by a car driven by a man dressed up as the aforementioned six ft rabbit, and boysacrifices himself to set the universe back on its proper timeline, thus saving the world. Did I miss anything? No, I think that was how Joseph Campbell outlined it too, we could only be talking about Donnie Darko. Not an easy movie to explain, that's for damn sure. But it's a scrutability made it an immortal classic in college dorm rooms at least back in my time. You can watch it again and again and again and get something new from it and yet still never completely figure it out. It examines the concept of fate, time travel, on the very nature of the universe, and just like all of those things, it's a mystery that you can never truly solve. Some of it seems a little overwrought and self consciously deep, but if it hits you at the right time in your life, it sticks with you. The movie's composer, Michael Andrews likened the movie to quote everybody's first deep thought, which I just thought was the most perfect way to encapsulate what this movie means to me and so many people. What do you think, higo, what are your experiences with Donnie Darko? Oh? I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's exactly about when you saw If you saw it like beyond the age of twenty one, it's you're just gonna be like, what is this Like, I don't I it is. It's also like another perfect encapsulation of what I like to call the first bomb rip idea, um, a moment of inspiration that should be taken back to the board and never was. Um. But yeah, I love this movie, dude. It's so good. I saw you know, we had movie club in high school and this was one of the movies that we watched in there. Um, they've let you watch this, dude. They let us watch Requiem for a Dream. Good god. Yeah that was or fiction, pulp fiction too. Yeah, it was not a well supervised club, but it's sure s you know. Yeah, it's great. I mean it's so good. It's it like plays into every part of being a teenager, like Nasson, clinical depression, Messiah complex. Um, you know, yeah, it's perfect. I it is. It is. It's like lightning strikes one situation. It's not like boogie Nights are like promising new voice in cinema. It's like he had one thing and he knocked it out of the park. And then yeah, I'm still very young. He's not even fifty yet. So Richard Kelly, the writer and director of this movie, still got time yeah, I I again like you. I came across this movie in probably the most stereotypically early two thousand's way possible. I I was turned onto it by mine, my one cool friend, who was really valiantly trying to get me to consume media that I couldn't find on Nick at Night or Oldiest One of three point three or American movie classics. And he was the guy who wore skinny jeans and ear rings and eyeliner and occasionally dyed his hair and taught me, or at least tried to teach me about the difference between emo and scream. Oh, and he took me to my very first non boomer rock show, the Wister Palladium, to see the Alkaline Trio Saves the Day and Taking Back Sunday. Then it was that this show that I was offered special K by a guy, and I thought he was talking about the cereal Um. Yeah. So anyway, my friend, he'd already blown my mind with fear and loathing in Las Vegas, so for our next movie night, he busted out Donnie Darko, and as soon as it was over, I think I told him to rewind it and started again, because there was just so much happening that I felt like I needed a recap. And like you said, it's the perfect movie for those entering adolescence, partially because it's basically a warped version of those John Hughes teen romance movies with an added dose of you know, psychological thriller, sci fi, even a little bit of superhero thrown in for good measure. And the other thing is that it treats the really troubled teenage characters with a degree of respect that I feel was rare for a Hollywood movie. It really does. He has a lot of love for them, It treats a lot of a lot of dignity and a lot of agency. And and it's never punching down yeah, which is which is really what's I think it's part of its most of it's in during appeal. Yeah, he's just he's the perfect teenage character. He's just flooded with these intense emotions. He's alienated, he's angry, he's railing against conformity, but he's scared and lonely and sad, but romantic and determined. He's got every emotion, every quality, which is what being a teenager is. I guess this is a tornado of feelings, and he's Jesus, and he's Jesus. That's right anyway, Without further ado, listen on to learn all the ways that rookie director Richard Kelly beat the hellish odds to make his incredibly ambitious feature film debut, why Jason Schwartzman was very nearly the title character, and how this movie quite literally couldn't have happened without Drew Barrymore, the true m v P of his production. You'll also find out the song they wanted to use for the Sparkle motion dance sequence, learned why Gary Jules Haunting Mad World cover was a last minute edition, and why Donnie Darko is real life neighbors with Ferris Bueller. We allowed to cover, So let's get into it. Here's everything you didn't know about Donnie Darker. The spirit of youthful inquisitiveness and adolescent growing pains is strong and Donnie Darko because it was made by a guy who wasn't far off from being a teenager himself. Writer director Richard Kelly was fresh out of usc film School when he found himself quote in a panic about how to build a career in the movie industry. By day, he was working as an assistant at a post production facility for I Believe music videos, earning six dollars an hour, four, as he'd later say, serving cappuccinos and making cheese and cracker plates for Madonna, Puff Daddy and Jennifer Lopez. Uh. This was not his ultimate am so when he was just twenty three years old, he began writing what will become his first feature film script, Donnie Darko. He later told the Hollywood Reporter, I remember writing Donnie Darko back in October. That's part of the reason why it said at Halloween. It's like I was looking back at a decade or so in my life. Donnie's a little older than I would have been a night teen eight. But I was basically writing a nostalgia fantasy about my adolescence, and the heavy sci fi elements were indeed part of his upbringing. Richard Kelly was the son of a NASA scientists who helped develop the first camera used to photograph Mars. That's awesome. I love that. And his mother was a high school teacher who worked with emotionally troubled teens, and Richard grew up with reverence for the two, Steve, Stephen King and Stephen Hawking, and he also really loved the sci fi writer Philip K. Dick, who was very into alternate universe timelines. Richard Kelly was inspired to become a filmmaker when he sawd David Fincher's music video for Aerosmiths Janey Got a Gun. And he was so taken by this music video that he actually called MTV up and asked who made it. Put all this together, you basically get the plot of Donye Darko. You know his father was a NASA scientist. Mom Mork with Troubled Teens, loves Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Stephen Hawking, and David Fincher. As Richard Kelly said in the documentary Davis ex Machina The Philosophy of Donnie Darko, I saved up for twenty three years to write that script. It was twenty three years in the waiting, and the floodgates opened and I went for it. Now. The exciting incident of Donnie Darko occurs when a huge piece of mechanical equipment from a jumbo jet falls out of the sky and crashes into Donnie's bedroom. In the Darko family home. Thankfully, well, Donnie himself was elsewhere because he sleepwalked, slept walked, sleepwalked. This terrifying scenario was actually based on a true story that Richard Kelly remembered reading about as a kid, when a large piece of ice fell off a wing of a jet and smashed into a house somewhere near where he grew up, and into the bedroom of a teenager. Thankfully, the kid wasn't in his bedroom at the time, but the house was severely damaged. I tell you, man, I tried to look up ice falls from plane for nighties to to to get this um that happens a lot. Yeah, I really don't like that entirely. Too many instances of giant blocks of ice falling from planes and crushing things. As Kelly later told games Radar, I remember reading about the story and it always stuck with me. How disturbing that might have been for that boy. Yeah, and he he must have felt like, is that some kind of warning? Were they trying to kill me? Was this some kind of a sign? And as an interesting slash terrifying aside, I guess. Throughout the production of the movie, Richard Kelly dealt with all these naysayers who insisted that you couldn't have an engine fall off a plan because that simply doesn't happen. Then on August two thousand, supposedly the very day they were shooting the scene where the jet engines smashed through the bedroom set, a Boeing bound for Amsterdam made an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport after quote, a dishwasher sized engine part reportedly fell off, landing on the nearby Doc Wiler Beach. That's horrifying. I don't like flying as it is now. I felt like planes as a concept. So this real life plane incident provided a starting point for Richard Ellie's movie, And he says he remembered thinking, okay, piece of ice. That's interesting. But what if it was an engine that fell off the plane, And what if they never found the plane? And that's part of the mystery, figuring out where the engine came from. And then if Donnie got out of the bed and wasn't in his room when all this destruction occurred, why what was the voice that draws this teenage boy out of bed to dodge the bullet from the heavens? What's the journey he goes along? That's that's the first bonder if idea if I've ever heard one. But it's a compelling one despite the dense plot and really rather rigid rules about time and space that make up this movie. Richard Kelly says that he wrote the original one hundred and fifty page script in a stream of consciousness fashion in just twenty eight days. As someone who's been working on a screenplay, the same screenplay on and off for seven years, I find that infuriating. Uh Interestingly, Donnie Darko takes place in the same length of time tim that it took to write it, or at least that's what Kelly claims. The mythology around this movie is very dense. The movie opens up with Donnie's countdown to the end of the world twenty eight days, six hours, forty two minutes and twelve seconds. That is when the world will end. Kelly says that he wanted this movie to take place over the length of a lunar cycle, and that time frame that he created for this movie came from adding or subtracting one number from the precise length of a lunar cycle, which is twenty seven days, seven hours, forty three minutes and eleven seconds, which is why the film opens with the song The Killing Moon Lunar Cycle by Echo and the Bunny Man. We'll talk about the bunny stuff later. This is layers upon layers of this. I I gotta tip my hat to the world building this guy does. Um. This was the movie that first taught me about Easter eggs, And for years I thought that they were called Easter eggs because of Frank the bunny in this movie, before I realized that wasn't true. You know. Shockingly, the own the fan theory that I haven't read about this is that Donnie Darko is a werewolf. Um, we tied to the lunar cycle. We should have got Matt to be honest. Oh wow, that's good. That's really good. Huh. Yeah, I've never even considded that it's all a werewolf fever dream. But yeah. The the whole twenty eight days thing is a recurring theme in this movie. Uh. He says it was written in twenty eight days, plot takes place over twenty eight days, and the shoot took place over twenty eight days, which feels like some kind of like Freemasonry style rigid adherents to I don't know, maybe the number twenty three starting Jim Carrey. Have you seen that movie? Yes, that long time ago? Uh genlem Malone's character memorably asks in the movie Donnie Darko, what the hell kind of name is that sounds like a superhero, to which Donnie replies, what makes you think I'm not? Which I thought was so badass when I first saw this movie. Oh my god, I love that line. Richard Kelly fashions Donnie Darko as kind of a superhero, with you know, the following jet engine as his origin story. That's what sends the universe off into I'm not even going to continue that line of thinking because it gets too complicated. Never mind, and in keeping with the tradition of comic superheroes, Kelly gives him a literate name Allah Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, and Susan Storm, and other characters in Donnie Darko have similar fake sounding names. Is Trita Chen, Frankie Fiedler, Dave Dennis, and Joni James and I have that literate thing. Yeah, um. And though he would deny it for years, Kelly would later admit that Donnie Darko did draw from his own upbringing. He later said It's probably much more of an autobiographical film than people realize, and I've pretty much been able to reconcile that now that I'm much older. As a result, he set the film in the fictional town of Middlesex, Virginia, similar to where he grew up in mid Lothian, Virginia. Um, shout out to a boatload of my Virginia friends. A lot of them grew up in and around Midlow. It's a suburb of Richmond. Uh. This got a little tricky though, since they did film this in Long Beach, California, and Kelly said that they had a hard time shooting around all of the palm trees and even got um fake. Uh. I guess what is it like a tree truck like a bark that you wrap around the palm tree to make it look like a not a palm tree. Um. Yeah. The old lady, who is uncharitably referred to his grandma death by all the students was based on a real person that he knew and Okay, that's weird, and self help lessons were apparently part of his school curriculum, although yeah, they probably didn't get quite a character on the order of Patrick Swayze's to come and talk to kids. At least I hope they didn't like these whole Tony Robbins, Joel Austin, guy with the headset, Mike, how are we doing today? Come on, you guys can do better than that. You guys can do better than that. How are we doing? Mid Lothian High School? And the most obvious tell, of course, is that the film is set in twelve years earlier than when it was shot in the year two thousand. This is obviously a reflection on the Reagan era suburbia that Kelly had lived through, although he does make Donnie slightly older if you're trying to do a wonder one comparison to the ages. And the studio thought that this was a weird choice to set the film in this close of an recent era, basically because it caused them just enough headaches to be annoying, but doesn't actually impact the plot in any meaningful way. Um Kelly later said, when we made Donnie Darko, the eighties wasn't that far behind us. No one was making eighties period pieces in the year two thousand, but we did a lot of people from the financial side thought we were wasting resources by doing it. They told us just to set it in two thousand. I said it had to be eight. I saw it as a very specific time. My movies take place in very specific times. The date, the month, the year are always very identifiable in my movies. For this movie, it's Halloween, right before the election, Bush versus Dukakis, and that would uh, you know, obviously the first line of the movie, Maggie Jillenhall's character says, I'm voting for Dukakis. Man. Every single line of this movie was like some mine or someone else's. I knew um a I m status profile away message at one point um. And for Kelly, this was a conscious choice to signal an era of cultural shift by having a liberal teenager confront her conservative parents at the close of the Reagan era. And some people have said that this is kind of a way of putting Donny darker in the lineage of Reagan era horror films, but according to Kelly, it actually went deeper than that. He said, I intended it to be at a time of transition, setting it on the eve of an election where Ronald Reagan was leaving office and you had all these teenagers who were rejecting the war on drugs and seeing censorship and the last temptation of Christ being banned from theaters. You know, stuff like that, and the self help movement and motivational speakers showing up in schools gave kids something to fight against, and of course a new sort of liberalism emerged in those teenagers who obviously went on to help elect Bill Clinton four years later. So against Richard Kelly not giving an inch when it comes to making this movie. I'm twenty five, I must direct, It must take place in this One shot needs to be one unbroken shot. Yeah, I know, God bless him. Yeah. After finishing the script, Richard Kelly spent most of trying to get this thing sold, and his obvious talent got a meetings, but this unclassifiable, intricate, ultra cerebral script led to a lot of rejections. He said, all of was just meeting after meeting after meeting of people saying thanks, but no thanks. Every studio said no, and it was universally rejected. People were telling him, you know, look, this is a great writing sample, but the script itself is functionally useless. It's a great, unproducible script and most studio people just advis him to water it down into like a standard issue teen horror movie, but Richard Kelly wasn't about to let that happen. There was tentative interest from Ben Stiller's production company and also director Sydney Pollock, of all people, and there was also a rumor that Joel Schumacher was really interested in directing the movie. But the other problem about why this wasn't getting sold was that Richard Kelly was extremely possessive of the story and he wanted to direct it himself. Needless to say, it was not exactly appealing for studios to let a twenty five year old first time or run rampant with his needlessly complicated vanity project. Kelly said, there were people that thought I was very foolish for not letting someone else make it, But I knew that they would rewrite it, and they would not set the movie in he would be a modern day piece, and they would change a lot of the story. I just could never let that happen. The tenacity of this guy, damn. In the meantime, as he was trying to get the script of Donnie Darko sold, Kelly Rose screenplay adaptation for the young adult novel Holes by Louis Satcher, which is amazing. I think it was later made with um Yeah, but the studio unsurprisingly went with another writer because Richard Kelly's version was too dark an adult and he also sold a TV pilots of Fox about a group of comedy writers at Harvard University, probably Harvard Lampooners, who befriend the fellow student and bring him to Los Angeles after their pranks drive him to a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, the pilot was never produced, but I would love to see that. That sounds great. So despite considerable buzz being generated by the script, Donnie Darko was basically dead around l A in early two thousand, That is until too big name actors intervened Drew Barrymore who will talk about in a second, and Jason Schwartzman. Jason Schortzman was fresh office star making role in another offbeat high school movie, Wes Anderson's Rushmore, and he wanted to sign on the play Donnie Darko, which I think would have changed the whole movie. I cannot imagine that. I know it would have been too quirky, to to melodramatic, to or not even melodramatic. Yeah, to like Jason Schwartzman would have just been too feel like precocious. Yeah yeah, I like him. I love Rushmore but oh yeah no, Rushmore is great, but I mean, I don't know, man, Jake Jillen Hall is weird enough to offset his handsomeness. I think in this movie, like he really has that kind of like dead eyed stare thing that the guy who who was in the bunny suit talks about being terrified of Jake Joean Hall, which is hilarious because the guy in the bunny suit was probably freaking at everybody else on the set. But yeah, I said, when Joan Hall would like look at him with his head lowered down and his eyes right so upsetting. Yeah yeah, yeah, so really hard to imagine this with Jason Schwartzman, but yeah, he basically called Richard Kelly out of the blue. Before this it gets even weirder. There were some other people who are I guess up for consideration for Donny Darko, and all of them across the board were terror choices. I talked to Vince Vaughan, who I guess took himself out of consideration because at thirty one he thought he was too old to play a sixteen year old high schooler. That's the worst idea was that Joe Schumacher pitched this. I don't know, I mean, this was like he's properly like old. Mark Wahlberg also met with Richard Kelly about playing Donnie Darko, but for some reason, Wahlberg insisted that he played Donnie with a lisp, and this I guess did in the ligne with Kelly's vision. So they passed on Mark Wahlberg. And there was also Patrick Fuguet, who was the kid who played the lead and almost famous. I could see that. Yeah, that actually gets a little closer. But everything changed when they had a meeting with Jason Schwartzman, and Richard Kelly later said, when Jason became attached all of a sudden, it legitimized me as a director. I owe him an enormous debt. I don't think I'd have a career if it weren't for Jason and his support. He helped bring a lot of enthusiasm and financing to the screenplay. And another nice thing that Jason schwartz And did was arranged for Richard Kelly to have a meeting with his uncle Francis Ford Coppola. Obviously huge deal for this first time director who was at the time to have a bit of mentoring from such a heavy hitter, and Kelly later described this as a once in a lifetime meeting. I had this amazing hour long meeting with him, and he outlined my script and he was asking all these questions about the themes, and it was just amazing. He had mapped out the dialogue and was trying to get me to extract all the thematics and the meeting of the piece, and even proposed that Kelly and the actors involved with the project go up to his vineyard in northern California together to talk it through, which I thought it was very nice. And I guess during his meeting, couple of circled one of Drew Barrymore's lines in the script that read, the kids have to figure it all out these days because their parents they don't have a clue. And Kelly said, couple of circled that and slid the binder towards him and said that line of dialogue, that's what your whole movie is about, right there. And Richard Kelly reflected on this meeting with Frances. He said, I think he was looking at me as being at the very beginning of my career, and he probably saw potential and he wanted to make sure that I didn't screw it up. But the key figure that got Donnie Darko made was Drew Barrymore. Really the just the Yeah, she is absolutely unquestionable m v P at this movie. Um. Not only did she lend her star power to the film by signing on to play the role of Donnie's liberal English teacher, Ms. Pomeroy, but her production company, Flower Productions, put somewhere in the neighborhood of four and a half million into this movie. You said it was sent to her by Jason Schwartzman or his agent. I think Jason Schwartzman's agent sent it to Drew's production company because Drew was a big fan of Rushmore and just purely interested in knowing what he was up to next, And so when he got attached to Donnie Darko, they got their hands off script and really liked it. Interesting. Also, they named Drew Barrymore's character Ms. Palmroy after UM researcher at the sex researcher at the Kinsey Institute Okay, sure everything is meeting in this movie. It will drive you insane. Well, anyway, we'll get we'll get to this. Uh. Kelly visited Drew on the set of Charlie's Angels, which is the least Donnie Darko movie in the world, directed by mcg I think McGee was giving him first time director tips. It's like Francis Ford Coppola invited him to his vineyard to talk over the script. McGee invited him into his trailer for Bumps of Cocaine into like Augal the dailies. Um Kelly described it that set visit as uh, stepping into candy Land. I met Cameron Diaz. It was wild. Then we went to Drew's trailer and she was finishing reading the script, you know, and again basically came down to her, you know. He told The Guardian a different interview. Once Drew Barrymore signed on, we got the finance that we needed four and a half million. Having Drew also helped us get other actors who might have been reluctant to work with the first time director, and perhaps unsurprisingly, no one was paid especially well for this movie. Uh. The actors basically worked for scale, which is wild. When you do consider that Drew Barrymore or Network TV, then Star Noah Ile and Swayzee. He said, nobody did Donnie Darko for the money Kelly did. Nobody got paid well to do it. It was about the artistic experience. Those experiences are the most pure when you're there for the material. Speaking of Drew Barrymore, we cannot get through a twenty page podcast about this without bringing up cellar door, which she explains is posited by a quote a famous linguist as the most beautiful combination of words in the English language. I always heard that it was C. S. Lewis. Is that right? Is that? What did you hear that as well? Or am I confusing cis Lewis and C. S Lewis. There have been a number of authors who have praised this combination of words, and C. S. Lewis was one of them. Okay, well, okay could be written in the nineteen three Cyrus Lauren Hooper novel g boy Um, where an unnamed Italian savant believes that cellador is the most beautiful combination of English sounds. In no less an authority than H. L. Mencken wrote that the phrase cellar door is musical. Twelve years later, Dorothy Parker commented that she preferred cellar door to some of the words that Wilfred J. Funk, who is not the frontman of Grand Funk Railroad but the president of Funk and waggles over his choices and talking yep. The Lord of the Rings. Guru praised the phrase in his nineteen fifty five essay English and Welsh, in which he writes, most English speaking people will admit that cellar door is beautiful, especially if disassociated from its sense, and it's spelling more beautiful than say sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Uh and yeah, Norman Mailer, which is hilarious to me, like seller door. Today, most reputable linguists, however, are united in believing that the most beautiful phrase in the English language is hog waste lagoon. I'm so still sad that you never used that as an album title for our band. There's There's There's time. Yeah, that's true. That is true. C. S. Lewis and Alvis Huxley died on the same day in nineteen sixty three, but they both got overshadowed by JFK, who also died the same day November do you say Huxley didn't Huxley they supposed to get like loaded on mushrooms right before he was going to die. I think it was acid. I think is the last thing ever wrote was like what he wanted his wife to inject him with. Yeah, good lord, all feels relevant to Donnie Dark or something. Yeah, yeah it does. So. Drew Barrymore was the savior of this movie, but her involvement posed a problem. She was only available for a single week during the summer of two thousand because she was tied up appearing in the Penny Marshall movie Riding in Cars with Boys. This created a scheduling conflict with Jason Schwartzman, and considering Drew Barrymore was both the bigger star and also putting up the money for the movie, she went out and Jason Schwartzman had to drop out. That's the official version, at least. Richard Kelly says that he maybe Jason's wordsmen, was having some second thoughts about the movie. I don't know, but I guess Richard Kelly had a panic attack after Jason dropped out. As Steve should first time director who you know he's mentioned earlier, what having Jason Schwartzman signed on the star in this movie did for him about making this project a reality and legitimizing him as a director, and now he's gone. But he says that he got a voicemail from Drew that night, and he said it was one of the nicest voicemails he'd ever received. And she said on this voicemail that she was into the film regardless, and uh, you know, whether or not they had a buzzy lead or not, and they'd make a great film together, which I thought was very nice. And it was in Drew Barrymore's office that Richard Kelly first met Jake Jillen Hall, and he'd just been in his first major lead role, October Sky, and it was basically love at first sight. Kelly said, within thirty seconds, it was clear to me that he was the right actor. And he apparently was in the midst of a bit of an emo phase because he came in with a metal chain belt and spiked hair. And it was only nineteen, which wasn't too far off from the age Donnie was supposed to be sixteen. Uh, And one of the producers in the room described it as like meeting Holden cough Field. Richard Kelly said it was a gut intuition that he was the one. I felt he was an incredibly strong anchor for the film, and Jake Joean Hall. Over the years, I've spoken eloquently and extensively about reading the script for the first time, and this is an interview we did with The Guardian in I was frantically running around Los Angeles doing loads of auditions. I remember pulling over to the side of the road to finish reading Richard's script and being mesmerized. It was clearly influenced by classic directors Ron Howard Steven Spielberg, but with this strange psychosis, it beautifully captured the experience of moving into adulthood, the world that felt so solid becoming movable and liquid. I thought, this is what my adolescence felt like. Although I don't speak and I've never spoken to rabbits, that was a really beautiful way to explain that. Hilariously. Jake Joan Hall initially didn't want to meet Richard Kelly because he figured that their person responsible for the script must surely be some kind of antisocial goth weirdo obsessed with death. But when they did finally meet face to face. Jake said he found this preppy college kid totally unassuming, really lovely, very kind, just the regular guy. But Jake did actually base some of his Donnie Darko mannerisms on Richard Kelly, including his self conscious, slouched posture and sometimes mumbled speech. Joean Hall told the l A Times in two thousand one, I'm a firm believer of the unconscious being the teller of some truth, and I feel Richard wrote the script very unconsciously. The issues that Donnie Daco confronts are metaphors for things in Kelly's life. They obviously resonate with him in a pretty intense way. I mean, there must be some stuff going on in Richard Kelly's mind. And then pretor Kelly was also interviewed for this piece, and I guess, in an effort to dissuade the inevitable comparisons, he said, I'm not Donnie Darko explicitly said that I didn't realize this until researching this episode. Jake, Joe and All's parents were big deals in Hollywood. His father was a director and his mother was a screenwriter, and his godparents were Paul Newman and Jamie Lee Curtis. So clearly this kid has ties the old Hollywood, and for his performance in Donnie Darko, he borrowed a trick from one of my favorite acting legends. I know yours too, Michael Caine. We've talked about this in several episodes. Jake tried to blink as little as possible because he felt like it would make Donnie look more psychotic to just stare, and also, as all good actors know, blinking weakens you. We're quoting a fantastic tutorial that Michael Caine made in the eighties that's on YouTube about how to act to camera, and it's incredible. Go check it out if you haven't seen it. Uh. Speaking of the Jillan Halls and their golden road paved for them by their forebears, Uh, we cannot forget Jake's sister, Maggie, who plays sister in the movie. Jake took credit for her casting uh in telling The Guardian, it was my idea to have my real life sister Maggie played my sister in the film. We were going through a competitive phase which fed into the dinner table scenes where Uh, you don't remember she indelibly tells him to go suck a. Uh that was you? Did you read that was improvised? No? No, yes, sorry, yes, Jake continued, Maggie was the reason I got into acting, is and is the more formidable of us, yet I was the one who started my professional career first. Imagine being in a movie with your obnoxious little brother as the lead. However, Richard Keller so that his actual idea to cast Maggie was inspired by seeing her in Cecil b Demented. I've never seen that movie, that's right, yeah, uh, and that is a film in which her character drinks You're in uh. But he was also interested in seeing how the gillen Halls real life sibling rivalry would show up on tape, and apparently Maggie actually tried to talk him out of casting her because she hadn't done much serious film acting before. Why did she do Secretary? I think it was right after I think yeah, um. And as for the rest of the family, there are some fun fantasy castings going on here as well, as they're always are. Tim Robbins was the first choice for the role of Eddie Darko, but they couldn't fit his genormous body in the frame. Um, that's Donnie's dad. Yes, Johnny said, I always feel I always forget how tall Tim Robbins is and then you just see him with like next to the other actors in the film, You're like, holy god, Um, it's the most realistic part of Jacob's ladder is that he has debilitating back problems in that movie. Uh. But the role would go to Holmes Osborne, who is Guy Patterson's dad in That Thing You Do. Mura Wilson was considered for the role of little sister Samantha Darko, who memoriably is part of Sparkle motion figures into the Duran Duran lip sync at the end of the movie, but she turned it down on The role would eventually go to actress dave A Chase. Donnie Darko's mother, Rose was played by the actress Mary McDonald, who was so stoked to be on this movie that she got a speeding ticket on her way to the set, the first one ever in her life. I love that. Good for her, And we can't go any further before shouting out one of my favorite actresses in this movie, the legendary Katherine Ross probably I mean to me, most famous for her role as Mrs Robinson's daughter Elaine and the graduate you know, the one Dustin Hoppin runs off with at the end of the movie. Spoilers Heroin. Oh yes, sorry, spoilers for this year old movie. And also she's the heroine of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. And I think she's also in the original Um Separate Wives. And she had dropped out of the limelight her awhile when her name was mentioned for consideration to play Donnie psychiatrist Dr Thurman, and Richard Kelly later said he didn't even realize she was still acting. But they drove out to visit her at home in Malibu, and they were a little surprised when they knocked on the door, and Sam Elliott answered, fain, I just think of him as like a living Old West stereotype, and just picture him as the character in The Big Lebowski. All the time, I had no idea they were married, Sam Elliott, Captain Ross, and I guess Richard Kelly had driven all the way out there to try to sell her on the roll, but Catherine spent the first twenty minutes pitching them on why she should be cast, and finally they said wait, wait a minute, like you want to do this. We thought we were here to convince you, and she said, oh, well, this is one of the easier meetings I've had, and that was that she signed on. And Donnie Darko's ties with Classic Cinema aren't just relegated to the actors, but also the sets. I love this factoid so much. In many ways, Donnie Darko is a perverted, warped version of a John Hughes eighties teen movie, from the whole weird Kid meets the New Girl in School narrative to the fact that it was set in the eighties and the musical choices. And this is all fitting because the home in Long Beach, California that was used to shoot exteriors for John Hughes movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off was just a minute walk down the road from the Donnie Darko house that gets crushed by the falling jet engine. I think the neighborhood was called the Virginia Country Club, which is weird because it's in California, and the production just set up camp there for a week, which helped the very tight deadline. They just shot all throughout the neighborhood. The bus stop scenes were there. Patrick Swayze's self help guru character's mansion was there, and the Darko's house was there. I just think it's so cool that the Darkos and the Buellers were kind of neighbors. They would not have gotten along. No no, no no. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. Richard Kelly had a tough time during this shoot because it was his first movie and he only had four weeks to do it. And I cannot stress us enough. He was twenty five years old. At what age? What age you directors typically make their first movies? Is it? Do they like late mid late twenties. I I don't have an answer to that, and I'm embarrassed because I went to film school and I should. But I mean, I'm sure, I mean there are young directors, but something on this scale is yeah, is unusual. P t A was twenty six when Boogie Nights came out. Really yeah, alright, that's still okay. Let's still also incredibly young, and, as Richard Kelly told The Guardian, because so many of the cast and crew were young, there was a real energy on the set. But I was stressed out, being twenty five. I had to justify myself a lot proof I had the skill. I lost one he pounds on the shoot, but he got a little help from his director of photography. Got by the name of Steven Posner, who was thirty one years older than Kelly and had worked on classics like Blade Runner and Close Encounches the Third kind, Uh, and it was really cute. Posner sense that Richard Kelly was nervous to meet him because he was so much older and established, so he told him, Richard, from this point on, you and I are the same age. Don't think of me. He was being more experienced than you. My experience is yours. I won't tell you how to direct your movie, but I'll be there to guide you through it. I thought that was really classy. Supposed to Steven Spielberg could just elbows people out of the way. Let me direct this wearing a hat that says the real director of this movie in a fisherman's vest. Richard Kelly said that the toughest part is always the first week of the shoot. He said, I'm always trying to do so much with not enough money and not enough days, not enough hours in a day, So that first week is really terrifying for everyone. And it was extra terrifying because it was this wild, per vocative script that no one could really categorize, and we needed ten million but only had four point five, and it was this crazy twenty eight days schedule. And here I was just turned twenty five and a lot of people were doing side eye at each other, like, does this guy know what he's doing? I guess. The first shot of the movie was an early shot in the film when Donnie's asleep in the middle of the road and he's like up on the mountain. Then he sees this like incredible vista in the background at dawn, and Richard Kelly was so nervous and so excited when he was shooting this his first shot of his first major movie, that instead of yelling cut when he was done, he just yelled action again. Yeah. It doesn't exactly in gender confidence on the part of the crew, but sweet all the same. But the turning point came when Kelly shot the montage at the high school that is set to Tears for Fears head over heels. Incredible shot. It's just it's so yeah, it's so perfect and it's such a great introduction, but it was just again the hutzpah of this man. Uh they were shooting basically was a full on music video without actually having secured the rights to the song, which as, uh, what episode did you explain that in cruel intentions cruel intentions for Bitter Sweet Symphony, you do not do that because if you don't get the rights, you're scene is cut to the completely wrong thing. And yeah, this is just one of several scenes that he insisted on doing that with and it did backfire on him for one scene. Would get to that later, but it came together for Head over Heels. Kurt Smith of Tears for Fears later told The Ringer for their Johnny Darker Oral History that it took a personal request from Drew Barrymore herself to get them to agree to license it out. That's like Gwyneth Paltrow going bowling with Paul McCartney to get uh for Royal tenor pumps. Yeah, Drew Barrymore m VP can't say enough. But Kelly continued to refuse to make this easy on himself or others. He wanted the entire elaborately choreographed scene to be shot in a one er, a single take all of the Boogie Nights opener. I'm younger than p t A. I'm gonna do the opening shot too. Whatever p t A can do, I can do better, like the cigar chopping example. Um but yeah, it's insane, insane to do it, even even done a single day, by the way, which, oh my god. Yeah, the producers talked to uh, the aforementioned director photography, Stephen Posner, to tell this kid, Hey, there is just too much ground to cover this. We have no time and no money. How about we doing four or five shots? And uh yeah, the studio thought he was out of his mind. And then he brought an edit in his part of the Daily As a few days later and as in his words, this is the moment that made him that everyone thought okay, he said. Everyone immediately flipped out. They got it. They were so excited. You could see everyone breathe a sigh of relief that I just might know what I'm doing. Good for him, Uh, Patrick Swayze once again, this film for the first time director really around some talent. There's Drew Barrymore, Catherine Ross, Mary McDonald who there's an Independence Day connection going strong. In this movie, we'll talk about that. Mary McDonald played the first Lady Independence Day and Swayze. Swayze plays the creepy new age guru Jim Cunningham, who uh you know, wins over the hearts and minds of the moms of the town and clashes with Donnie during the school assembly when Donnie objects to the love and fear binary. Cunningham's entire philosophy is based around, and then he's lazy. He's revealed to be a child pornographer at the film at the end of the film. Not a subtle moment, but effective. Nonetheless, just like the nuclear option of making your character reprehensible, people are more willing to forgive murders than they're like genocide and John Born, this is not a subtle movie. A jet engine crashes through the kid's bedroom. It's true. Richard Kelly later described Patrick Swayze as the nicest guy. He wanted to take a flamethrower to his image. He was fearless. Uh, he was fearless because he frosted his hair for this role and apparently brought articles of his real life clothing from the nineteen eighties like the pink eyes od and the white pleated pants, good for him for still fitting into them, and he filmed the self help commercials infomercials in the film on his own ranch in Calabasas. And the kid who yells I'm not afraid Anymore, who later appears at Donnie's um school assembly, asked the question, yeah, It's so great, which suggests that he's one of Cunningham's plants. Put a fake kid in the audience. Haven't set up all your all your bits do this podcast. I'm I'm an elaborate plant of yours. It's a long con. The writer Lindsay Romayne wrote a really interesting theory about this whole part in her piece on Roger Ebert said, Jim is a beloved, empathetic figure in the community, but is in truth a predator. Donnie burns Jim's house and exposes his secret stash of child porn, but his contingency of zealots won't accept Jim's true nature and instead pledge fealty to his innocence. Not so different from the Trumpe and Logic were forced to endure even now, an omnipresent, insidious reminder that the hell of non truth is inescapable another flavor in the Neapolitan scoop of Barren Hope. That is truly an all time sentence. I'm getting that tattooed on my forehead. Um. I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but we have Noah Wiley. He was starting in the r at the time, and he originally thought he was getting the Jim Cunningham roll. Uh, and he gets the slightly shaggy ear but still important in terms of exposition dumping role of Kenneth Monitoff, who is another of Donnie's teacher who is dating Drew Barrymore's character and no less, no less, a similarly eighties macho icon than David Hasselhoff, was also considered for the part of Jim Cunningham. I bet you they couldn't afford the half. They couldn't afford the half. This is pre Burger video. He was still flying high. Maybe the fact that he missed out on those incredible roles, what what what triggered That's fine? Lord knows. Uh. This is probably the least interesting reason why Donnie Darko was notable, but it marks the live action feature film debuts of both Seth Rogan and Ashley Just theyll Seth Rogan was eighteen, and then I think he was a year into his Freaks and Geeks role when he was cast as the bully Ricky dan Fourth, which is just such a tremendous name. This was a few years before he appeared in his next movie as Scott the Overeager cameraman in Anchorman The Legend of Ron Burgundy. During an interview with Collider, Seth Ruggan remember the shoot as a great experience, but he quote didn't get the movie back when he filmed it, and quote, I still don't get it, but I had a good time. He was joined in his movie Bullying by Alex Greenwald, who's better known as the singer of the band Phantom Planet, who did the opening song California for the show The o C. He plays the coke sniffing bully. Seth Devlin, that must have been Schwartzman. I'm just putting that together. What who got him in there? Because Schwartzman is a Phantom Planet, right, Rooney? Oh that's aren't they? Why are those bands indelibly linked in my mind? Well, Schwartzman, the lead singer Rooney is a Schwartzman. But I don't know if it's I don't know which Schwartzman. I don't know if it's his brother or cousin or what. No, it was Jason Schwartzman. I was right, He's drummed his Phantom Planet. Yep, what I didn't know that. Yeah, Jason Schwartzman is his brother. Okay, so well, the Schwartzman's have Rooney Dynasty and Phantom Planet. Wow, we didn't even get into Tala shar and uh Sofia, Nicholas Cage and Nicolas Cage. Good lord, I did not know that Phantom Planet was part of the Tangled Web of the Coplas. Wow. Incredible but a pre high school musical. Ashley Tisdale also makes an extremely brief appearance as a sort of nerdy girl named Kim with freezy hair who asks a question at the school assembly to Patrick Swayzey's character. Well, as you might expect for a film nerd like Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko is jammed with nods the classic cinema. For example, the opening scene where Donnie wakes up on a hillside took inspiration from a place in the sun. When Montgomery Cliff's character is introduced. Richard Kelly also watched Danley Krubrick's Lolita very often wall preparing for this movie, Yeah, which is referenced obliquely during the hardy scene where Donnie's sister is dressed like a minor character in Lolita Vivian Dark Bloom. Um. I don't know if you think about it, between the child pornography of Patrick Swayze's character, even to a certain extent, the sparkle motion dance sequenced song that made me uncomfortable. It's weird, It's weird and weird. Okay, good, I'm glad. Okay, this isn't a movie reference, but there's another shot at the house party that features a kid jumping on a trampoline wearing a Ronald Reagan mask. Supposedly this is a reference to a photo of Hunter S. Thompson doing the same thing, which I choose to believe. The scene where Donnie rides a bike while wearing a hoodie, of course, is a reference to Et, which was not only one of Richard Kelly's favorite movies as a kid, but also started Drew barrymore so a nice little nod there. He also paid tribute, although in an oblique way, to Francis Ford Coppola. Kelly said that he watched the slightly lesser known or lesser appreciated mid eighties Francis Ford Coppola movie Peggy Sue Got Married with Kathleen Turner. He watched this movie with his DP because he wanted to shoot in the same kind of locations to create what he called a fantasy suburban landscape. And also, the outfits for the aforementioned dance troup Sparkle Motion, who performed at the end of the movie were modeled after Kathleen Turner's silvery prom dress and Peggy Sue Got Married, which I thought was funny. So that's weird. But there's also a weird connection with another Hollywood classic thanks to customer April Fairy, who has a long storied career including work on your beloved Big Trouble, Little China. It's like a multi decade career because she was held to a strict budget. For Donnie Darkou, she was the one who decided that all the students should be dressed in a school uniform. Not only does it really work well for the plot because it signifies the stifling conformity that Donnie's railing against, but in reality it was just cheaper and easier to have all the kids dressed in identical white shirts. But this low budget sent customer April Ferry into her garage to sift through outfits that she'd save from earlier productions, and she found an outfit that she'd kept that was warned by Glenn Close in The Big Chill, and it was this brown jacket kind of number. She gave it to the actress playing Donnie Darko's mother, Mary McConnell, and she wears it in the scene that takes place at a school assembly. Well, speaking of a ferry, we must now arrive at Frank. Oh, Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank. Oh, it's so good, It's so perfect. Richard Kelly once said I never want to hate my characters. You've got to love all of them. He did not mention if Frank was the exception to that um people. Many people have long assumed that it is a reference to the comedy Harvey, in which James Stewart's best friend is a giant, invisible rabbit, but Kelly explicitly told Entertainment Weekly that he has never seen that film. His true inspiration was Richard Adams young adult novel Watership Down Uh and the director's cut Drew Barrymore shows the film version of that in her classroom, which has always code for the teachers hungover. H Kelly designed Frank's horrifying rick this green himself. Those are his actual design sketches in the film during the final Mad World montage. In addition to his convoluted role in the film's multiverse plot, Kelly wanted Frank to be Donnie's only friend, almost like a comfort blanket. What comfort blankets did you have? Growing up? Dude? Movie is a terrifying insight into Richard Kelly's psychology and inner working, and there are a number of rabbit themed Easter eggs in the movie. The film opens with the killing Moon by Echo and the Bunny Man. There's a scene which a Volkswagen rabbit drives through the frame. There's a stuffed rabbit next to Maggie Gillenhall's character's bed. Donnie appears in a family photo dressed as a rabbit, and he carves Frank's likeness into a jack O lantern, which is an ambitious design um That whole get up was made by costumer April Ferry, who later worked on Game of Thrones and it was worn throughout the movie by actor James Duval, and you can see him when he takes the mask off and he has a gross open wound where his eye should be. Um. We mentioned Independence Day earlier. He is in Independence Day starring as Randy Quaid's long suffering son who then watches him get blown up at the end of the film, Hello Bulls. And Donnie's mother has mentioned played by Mary McConnell, who played the first lady in Independence Day. So canonically the films take place in the same cinematic universe. You heard it here first. Um, j Yeah. James Duval as creepy as he wasn't that bunny suit, was freaked out by Jake jillen Hall's dead eyed stare, and as with most things in this movie, most of the production team thought Richard Kelly was insane for basing an enormous part of the plot action around a man in a life size bunny costume. And then just a few days into shooting they had someone dress up as Frank and come onto the set and jaws literally dropped. He told Entertainment Weekly that was the moment where I knew I was either going to live or die by the rabbit and how people responded to it. He said, the set got really quiet. It was almost like everyone had taken mushroom. I was starting to hallucinate. Everyone was like, this is really intense. So I knew it was working, and I felt a sense of relief. I could look around and the makeup artist and the production assistance in the second a D they were all just really freaked out about it. Stephen Posler, my cinematographer, came up to me and he was like, Rich, I wasn't so sure about the rabbit, but now I get it. Yeah. And that movie theater in which we'll talk about later also figures in was where Frank takes off the rabbit heads the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, and in honor of its auspicious place in Donnie Darko history, they play this movie every Easter, not Halloween Easter. Adorable and terrifying and now for a quick it belongs in museum segment. The Frank suit are rather than free franc suits. They all currently reside with illustrious figures in entertainment. The maid mask and suit is owned by producer Jack Morrissey. Who co produced Beauty and the Beast, not the man I would have imagined ending up with that. Another mask belongs to Drew Barrymore's production partner, Nancy juven In. I think it's how you say her name, and the production team I guess had a chromed and given to her as a gift. Imagine getting that as a gift when you weren't expecting it, like opening a box, and especially if you haven't even seen the movie that registers is Hostile. Yes. Uh. And then my favorite Metallica guitars, Kirk Hammett, owns another backup of the Frank masks because he's apparently a massive fan of Donnie Darko. Yeah. Hammett's horror and horror movie adjacent memorability collection is it's insane. I mean, he's a millionaire heavy metal musician. This is what they get up to when they have more money than than Since uh, he's had his poster collection displayed as its own exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, all of his vintage horror movie posters and uh. He also has Boris Karlov's costume from The Black Cat and Bella Laghosie's outfit from White Zombie and one of my favorit. He has this horrifying Tom Savini designed zombie puppet that is used in the opening shot of Day of the Dead by George Ramarro, which is the third in the of the Dead trilogy. And um, yeah, it's it's the it's just missing a lower jaw, so you see its tongue come out through like the bottom of its throat. It's it's disgusting. It's really stomach churning stuff. And Kirk Camon owns one. Do you know Parliament Funkadelic once drove through Pittsburgh while they were filming that one of them, Yeah, Parliament Funkadelic bassist Billy Nelson, Billy bass Nelson. Excuse me, I have to say the whole thing every time uh was driving and he found them a shortcut to get to Ohio and they wound up in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where George ra Merrow was filming Night of the Living Dead. And if you know anything about Parliament Funkadelic, they were on drugs. Can you imagine inadvertently driving onto the set of Night of the Living Dead after George it in his handed out acid to the entire torbus was when did that? Yeah? Wow? Well on the topic of terrifying things to see why you're high? Wow, incredible that I wrote that transition before we had this amazing. Uh. Let's talk about the scene where a liquid sphere blob thing emanates from Donnie's chest out in front of him, leading him to where fate decrees he should walk next. I'm sorry, there's no other way to describe that. I think Richard Kelly describes him as liquid spheres, so we'll go with that. Yeah, it's on the soundtrack. Is liquid spear Waltz? Okay? And isn't there? Isn't that? That's the scene that the church right the yeah under the Milky Way the parties. Apparently that idea came to Richard Kelly the you know, liquid spheres one night when he was high and watching football and commanentator John Madden r I p, you should draw lines on the TV screen to diagram the play showing where the players were about to go when they rolled the tape. I think it's called a tell Us straighter And Richard Kelly began the wonder, as one does, what would happen if quote, someone upstairs was doing this to humans. Someone has someone with more video editing and impression skills than I do needs to dub John Madden do it over that scene in Donnie Darko. Hi, He's going, what do you see in the way he hooked there into the coming into the batfield. Lawrence Steisman came out of nowhere just creamed him. Uh yeah, and s he said it was a nod to the Abyss the Liquid Metal animation too. But yeah, it's funny. I mean watching interviews with Kelly, he talks about it being a nod James Camers the Abyss. But I've also seen in numerous other Uh yeah, A lot of other people say, yeah, he was just high I watching football, So I like that extremely high thoughts. This brings us to the conversation Donnie has with his friends well and they speculate on the sexual behavior of Smurfs. Richard Kelly had to go to the state of the animator named Peyo who created the Smurfs to get permission to have this discussion, and apparently the state agreed because the logic about smurf sex checked out. So this is um And now the scene takes place when Donnie and his friends are shooting at bottles and cans somewhere on a ranch. In the script, they were supposed to be shooting at a smurf doll. That's why they're talking about smurf sex in the first place. Uh, and also why Kelly felt compelled to get everything cleared by the payo a state. Uh. Probably not a good look to be having inappropriate conversations about your children's character and then literally shooting guns at your figures on camera. Um. But I guess apparently the production team couldn't find a Smurf doll, which is why they switched to shooting at bottles. Which this is what truly baffles me. For all of the stubborn insistence on doing things exactly his way the entire shoot, he backed down when it came to obtaining a vintage Smurf doll. I'd like to imagine that was the line in the budget, the cigar shopping executive Drew drew the line. And this kid, he's giving me a ga. He's got a seven forty seven turbine, got three bunny suits. No smurf doll. God, And speaking of getting the rights to discuss stuff in sexual terms, Christina Applegate during one of Donnie Darko's sessions with the psychiatrist Dr Thurman, I hypnotized Donnie had missed the fantasizing about Christina Applegate unmarried with children. Apparently that reference was supposed to be Alissa Milano, who was then starring in the Tony Danza sitcom Who's the Boss Back, But this was changed for legal reasons. I guess I'm not really sure why. I h maybe because Elissa Milana was just sixteen and eighty eight, but oh, I guess Christina Applegate was only like a year older. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. One thing that they couldn't clear with legal is the movie that Donnie goes to see. The Genle Malone's character Gretchen, a date memorably crashed by Frank Richard Kelly had written that he goes to see the sci fi hor flick Chudd, which Jordan, I will pay for your dinner if you can tell me what that stands for. Oh something cannibal humanoid. Oh man, my one of my professors in school. No Chud too, but the Chudd, oh, the Misbegotten Chudd sequel, So I actually am relatively well familiar with this. But cannibal humanoid. I forget underground dwellers right on the first two though, Yes you are cannibal cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. Well done. You get half, you get half of dinner. I got appetizers. Uh. But they couldn't get the rise to chud. Uh it would Have you ever seen that trailer? No, it's one of the funniest it's like the it's the you know, it's the trailer voice guy who did everything for like thirty years, and they just keep like cutting to just the word Chud. It's literally just like shud. It's just such a funny word. It's should like I can't take the movie seriously. Starting home alone star Daniel Stern and John Heard too, right, Yeah, oh yeah. We talked about this in the Rugrats episode The Rugrat Chud alumni went went on to populate the cast list of Rugrats. Um really a talent farm from a minor league talent farm was Chud. Anyway, it would take eight to twelve weeks with the clearance for Chud to go through, and since he was working on a twenty eight days shoot, Kelly hadn't move on, so fellow director Sam Ramy stepped in and allowed Kelly to use footage from his movie The Evil Dead for free. In a funny coincidence, Sam Ramy drove past the theater in Santa Monica the same day they were filming and was just amused to see his uh, his old movie title pop up in the marquis. I love that for him. Uh. The other big clearance fail from the film, although this arguably worked out for the best, is the sparkle motion scene. Donnie's little sister is in this dance troupe coached by the miserable Kitty Farmer. Uh. They performed a choreographed routine to Duran Duran's Notorious in front of the school, but Kelly had shot the seed and choreographed it to a completely different song, west End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys. You can sort of tell that the choreography doesn't line up, you know. But and on YouTube there are some people who have put west End Girls in there, and it actually it's pretty cool all the way it sinks up there. Interesting. I wonder if he didn't do it in the director's cut for still the money reason. Yeah, I guess after and anyway, after you know, pushing for as many of the other songs as he did. He just ran out of money for west End Girls. Yeah, No, Smurf dollars, Smurf Dolls and west End Girls. The two things you cannot have, Kelly. A third one, son of a Bitch. There were three, there were three things he couldn't get. Smurf do All, west End Girls and Bono. Yes, there was another song that the Donnie Darko team failed to get. Composer Michael Andrews, who did the score for the movie, one of the song MLK by You Two to use for the final scene in the movie in case the Messiah stuff wasn't already getting a little little thick. Yes, but you two that they ain't cheap and so they couldn't get the rights, and instead Michael Andrews turned to his old friend and fellow musician Gary Jules, and they've been in a high school band together that had done a cover version of the Tears for Fear song Mad World, And maybe Tears for Fears are on his mind because there was another Tears for Fears song on the soundtrack, hit over Heels. But for whatever the reason, Michael Andrews decided that this was the song that should end the movie. And Andrew's rearranged Mad World as a piano ballad, and they ultimately recorded the song in what I've seen described as either fifteen minutes or six hours, either way very fast. Gary Jewels, who actually sang the song, later said I'm not a big fan of my voice and it was so naked in the thing. But one of our friends was in the control room with some other people that we know, and when I went in after we recorded it, she was crying. And the song went to the top spot in the UK in two thousand and three, earning the coveted title of Christmas number one, and more importantly to Gary Jewels, that earned praise from both members of Tears for Fears. Bandmate roland Or Zibal told Consequence of Sound that the Gary Jewels version was Mad World in quote its ultimate form, and he apparently called Gary and told him as much. I guess Gary was driving at the time and had the pool over. He was so excited, which is adorable, and fellow Tears for Fear as band mate Kurt Smith agreed, telling the ringer, a lot of things we do are lyrically poignant, but set the things that are far more rhythmic and maybe upbeat. The original version of Mad World was very much an up tempo song, whereas Michael and Gary's version is much more in tumbe with the lyrics. To be honest, it is it's perfect. It's it's a perfect thing. But is he to blame for the Is this ground zero for stripped down haunting covers of upbeat pop songs? Or is it Johnny Cash's American hurt? Yeah? I wanna said Johnny Cash doing her? Oh I mean that? Well that's not a pop song though, I guess, Yeah, that's true. Well, the American series started in like so he maybe maybe he did something before then, But yeah, I don't know. We might be able to blame Gary Jewels and my clan Drews for that. I'd rather blame Gary Jewels than Johnny Cash, to be honest, that's fair. I think so would Gary Jewels. Yeah, it seems like a nice guy. Yeah. Speaking at the end of the movie, the big destructive scenes were done. On the last two days of shooting. The production team went to was colloquially known as the Airplane Graveyard to get an old engine turbine, which they emptied out to make it slight lettle lighter. I think I read that it was something like three thousand pounds um and then they just drop that thing onto the set. All I got gotta make sure that everybody was on the A game because you're not doing that again. The lens cap was on. Guys, you're not gonna believe this. Oh and there's a disused shot from this scene. That is you can see it in the Dais x Makina Donnie Darko documentary that shows Donny impaled by a wooden beam in his destroyed room, but it was deemed way too disturbing and ultimately went unused. They were going to literally have him on a cross that was like right through his chest. It's so gross. And and the look in his face. He's got that look on his face that we discussed earlier, like it's really creepy. It's it's best left to the imagination. Yeah, no, it's a good thing they cut that. But sadly, Richard Kelly is not completely happy with how the ending of the movie turned out. He said, the one thing I never got to do this still drives me crazy, is the engine going through the time portal. The digital shot of the jet engine to me, I just can't stand looking at it. We just did not have the money. I wanted to do a whole big miniature of the engine ripping off the plane and the interior of the plane ripping apart, and then the engine breaking apart and plumbering down through the time portal. I wanted to do it the way Christopher Nolan gets to do things. Maybe one day I will get to do that, Not after Buddy, and the last day of the shoot took place at four am, when Donnie set fire to Jim Cunningham's living room. I guess they were so low on money that they actually took the set for Donnie's psychiatrists office, Dr Thurman's office, and redressed it with a giant portrait of Patrick Swayze's character in the middle, and just to make it look like his living room. And then they just just burned it all, just burned it all on a back lot. A cathartic end to Richard Kelly's first feature film. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information and just a moment therezarrely enough. Considering the stature of this film, I guess everyone passed on it. It got its premiere at Sundance, I should say in two thousand one, at which point every major distributor passed on it. Uh. Richard Kelly told no film school, no one knew what to do with it. The knock against this movie coming out of Sundance was that it was impossible to market, unreleasable or incoherent. It was unique, bizarre, and disturbing. Also, it was right after the Columbine massacre and in the movie we have a teenage kid who fires a gun. That was not something that made people feel comfortable. They were fearful that the movie would promote violence or suicide. He continued, there were a lot of people who backed out of the room completely after they screened the movie, and we're like, we don't want anything to do with this. So it left the festival with no distributor, which is not great. You don't want your movie that premieres at Sundance to do that. Uh. And they were looking at the real possibility that this thing we go straight to DVD or a premier on Stars. Cinemax was not available. But they ended up getting a helping hand from Christopher Nolan Memento had come out in March of two one. It was a hit, despite being just as bizarre and disturbing as Donnie Darko, and Nolan loved Donnie Darko so much that he convinced the team that distributed Memento to put Donnie Darko into theaters in October two one, and maybe also a lift from Drew Barrymore, who might have also put some of her own more of her own money into this man really truly the angel of this film. We owe her so much so that premier date you might have just perkedteriors up at it was, in fact in October two thousand one, and uh for a trailer that literally features an airplane engine crashing through the roof of a building, this was not the kind of thing a nation wanted to turn its healing eyes to. Mere weeks after nine eleven. There was even a minor kerfuffle ruhaha if you will, about the so called Arabic style font that was used in the title sequence, which was subsequently changed for posters going forward from the identify this font sub creddit that could be either broader buns, calligrapher or flat brush typeface or possibly Palatino m between this and the Columbine comparisons. Donnie Darka was controversial upon its released, to say the very least, coupled with the fact that it was released in like fifty something theaters across the country, flopped made a hair over five hundred thousand dollars from its theatrical release against its four point five million budget. Even the premier at Hollywood's Egyptian Theater was a bit of a said from Bone, there was not even an open bar. Man, when your premiere has a cash bar, that is rough. Cold Drew invited Charlie's Angels co star Cameron Diaz, who showed up though, so they got that going for him. And wasn't she in the box or South Entails. Oh yeah, you're right, l yeah, but you know the we did start to pick up momentum. It became popular in the midnight movie circuit, especially like New York's Pioneer Theater Um. It also became a big success when it was released a little later in two thousand two in the UK, which fueled the aforementioned popularity of Gary Jewels. Cover of Mad World, Richard Kelly joked that the soundtrack, which is heavy on sounds of the British new wave might have helped it resonate a little bit better, or, as he joked, maybe British people are just smarter. I have the whole thing about Christopher Nolan thinking that Americans are like dumb idiots. That's why, like all the big twists in his movies are so like heavy handed, flat footed. He's like, they don't really get it over there. But the biggest role in the film's late blooming success was the DVD sales. It became a cult movie across college dorm rooms and ultimately sold upwards of ten million in home release, which more than made up for that atrocious box office half a million dollars is incredibly bad. Yeah, I mean, I think the big factor in its uh DVD sales was just its rewatchability. I mean, like I said, I first saw it at my friend's house and had my mind completely blown, and immediately went out and bought it so I could watch it at home again and try to figure it all out. I'm sure that that was probably an experience with a lot of people. Do. Yeah, I mean that was ours. I mentioned A bunch of those kids I went to college with will grew up outside of Richmond and mid Lothian. So yeah, this movie got a lot of my eyelege in college. And this brings us to a section of the show that I like to call, what the hell does this movie mean? The short answer, no one knows. At the film's rap party, both Jake, Joean Hall, and Seth Rogan confessed to each other that they had no idea what this movie was about. During its fifteenth anniversary, Jake, Joe, and All give an interview to Entertainment Tonight, calling Donnie Darko quote an interesting story about growing up, and that's about as close as he gets to any sort of definition. Rogeriebert, who I believe knows everything or knew everything, said that even if he could tell folks what Donnie Darko was about, he wasn't confident that he would be right. And even Richard Kelly, who wrote interacted this, doesn't know exactly whether the movie depicts Donnie's dreams or if it takes place in an alternate plane of existence. He said, quote, I think that ultimately both of these things could be true. I try not to focus on fan theories, though, because I have my own. There's so much going on in this movie, and so many Easter eggs hidden in it. A lot are kind of staring you in the face, but you don't realize what you're looking at. Things that people probably still haven't figured out that maybe I've figured out. I've lived with it now for twenty years, and I'm trying to constantly look at it with fresh eyes, but also as an analyst, kind of like my dad was a scientist, and that's a scientist. Like we talked about earlier, the fact that the right director isn't exactly clear on what this movie is about should really let the rest of us off the hook. Uh Kelly released a director's cut version of the movie in two thousand and four, with an additional twenty one minutes added, as well as pages from the fictional book that Donnie reads in the movie, The Philosophy of Time Travel, supposedly written by the elderly woman in the film nicknamed Grandma Death, the woman who crosses the street every day to checker mailboxes if anything came, and these added scenes hint at Donnie's telekinetic powers and suggests that he's destined to save humanity. Some feel that this extra footage adds some clarity to the more confusing scenes in the movie, others don't. Kelly also expanded the world of film into an interactive website that features all sorts of additional reading, including full versions of this fictitious philosophy of time travel book and all. This kind of extra homework has fascinated some fans and also annoyed others, who basically argue that you shouldn't have to do homework to fully comprehend the director's vision and the writer. Andy Crump wrote an article for Inverse last year called twenty years Ago, Donnie Darko ruined sci Fi with one tedious trick, and in this piece he writes, released twenty years ago in October twenty six, two thousand one, Donnie Darko defined cinema for the generation coming up through high school and its release by mistaken obfuscation for death. Now return to our current cinematic moment, The Rise of sky Walker, the embarrassing capstone of j j Abrams Star Wars sequel trilogy, which demands that its viewers read Ray Carlson's novelization to learn how Emperor palpatine last scene plunging down a reactor cheft in Return of the Jedi somehow survived to serve as the antagonist a new Meanwhile, it's become impossible to watch the latest marvel What's It without revisiting half a dozen movies and now a six hour miniseries beforehand. That was interesting. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that necessarily Yeah, I guess he's right. There's a there is a line in Rise of Skywalker where Oscar Isaac's character literally says somehow Palpatine has returned. So I don't think that was always planned that it would be revealed in a novelization. I think it was like they didn't have any idea as they were shooting it and then made the It was like J. J. Abrams called the guy writing the book. It was like, you gotta, buddy, you gotta help me out of this one. But now we must arrive at Heigel's fan theory corner. Oh yes, Oh, I'm so excited for this. This is I haven't read any This is all surprised to me, so I'm extremely excited what you're about to share. Richard Kelly has advised people against going too deep on Donnie Darko. He told Vice, I try not to go down the internet rabbit hole. Hey, on anything too much, because I don't think that's healthy. The internet can consume us all that's rich of him. He launched a website to go along with this film. But here we go. Let's run down the theories. Okay, the classic Donnie was dead the whole time, which is sort of a lot of the aforementioned Jacob's Ladder and occurrence at Oult Creek Bridge famous short story spoiler alert for decades old pieces of media famous for their twists. The idea there is that Donnie dies at the beginning of the movie, and the entire plot is him either living as a sort of ghost or in his like dying moments, seeing all of the events of the film unfold uh and using the God's Channel or the which are the liquid spear kind of things to experience what his life might have been like before he allily accepts his own fate and moves on. Number two. Donnie is stuck in a time loop like Groundhog Day and will continue to experience the same twenty eight days over and over again, horrifying. Donnie is a schizophrenic and the entire movie is a manifestation of his mental illness. That's interesting, I saw and I wish I could remember where I read this, but I read somebody's talking about how this movie was really an incredibly apt description of mental illness, and the world is wrong and only Donnie can fix it. He's alone with the weight of the literal world and his shoulders. Time is running out. There's something wrong and he asked to fix it, but he doesn't know what it is, let alone how to change it. That's mental illness. That's exactly how it feels. That is from an article in nrdiced called does Donnie Darko Superpower hold up? In? My personal favorite one is that Donnie Darko is Jesus Um much like cool Hand Luke and the Chronicles of Narnia. He sacrifices himself for the good of the world. And there are a couple of aspects to this that actually lend credence to this theory. There's the fact that Richard Kelly name dropped the Last Temptation of Christ in one of those interviews. As we covered earlier, it's on the Marquis under under the Evil Dead And oh yeah, right, I didn't even think of that when you said it earlier. That film also spoilers for decades old piece of media famous for its twist. It has this whole scene that was very controversial about Jesus actually getting down off the cross and choosing to marry Mary Magdalen and have kids and live the rest of his life out and then that is revealed to have been just a vision that he had while on the cross. And this also ties into the whole Easter theme with Frank. And in this theory, Frank is God because he is pushing Donnie to fulfill his destiny as the sacrificial lamb. And there's this line of evidence about there that people pointed to it. Donnie asks Noah Wiley's character if you can find portals in the real world, and Noah Wiley's character says highly unlikely. That would take an act of God. And then just a few scene later, Frank opens a portal in the movie theater. Uh. There is the classic theory it was all a dream, to which I say, Uh, Donny, now that another theory Donnie is I think this is the closest to what Kelly may have actually been getting at, because I saw this on Reddit a couple of times, and people really seem to go to bad for it. Donnie is a cautionary avatar created in a tangent universe who has to die in order to restore order to ours, and the guy outlining this on Reddit pinned that to the ROBERTA. Sparrow book, which you can actually read chunks of. I'm paraphrasing here, Grandma. That's the grandmo Death book. The philosophy of time travel. Yes. Uh. When things start to stray too far from the true path of the universe, or I guess the correct path of ours, then a tangent universe is created. This is brought about by an object described as ROBERTA. Sparrow as the artifact, which in Donnie Darko is the plane engine which draws in the quote living character Donnie to find out it's or gin and once he finds out the origin, to act on it and reunite the universes or kill the tangent one, or whatever other aspects that are drawn from that book. There's a term called the manipulated living, who are people that the living character can manipulate or you interact with or whatever. That's Gretchen, whose role is to bring Donnie to the point where he has to return to this universe. Gentle Malone's character. And then the manipulated dead is also a thing, and that's Frank, who dies in the Tangent universe and now figures into Donnie's path to reunite the universe is and that is supposedly why Donnie writes the phrase he made me do. It is not referring to Jim Cunningham as some people have said. He's referring to Frank. Uh. Donnie is Neo from the matrix, now Franks, Morpheus, Grandma death is a sentient program like the Oracle, and Gretchen is Trinity, anything anything there. Um. This isn't really a theory, but it's uh, it's funny. It's you know, the weather on the eights as I'm calling it. The movie takes place in Frank tells Donnie the world will end in twenty eight days, six hours, forty two minutes, and twelve seconds, and if you add those numbers, the sum is eighty eight. When Samantha asks when she can have kids, Donnie says not until eighth grade. Donnie mentions to his therapist his dog died when he was eight. Donnie jokes about the Doloran and back to the future, the time travel powers of which you remember kick in at eighty eight miles per hour at the point at which you will see some serious According to the television report of the fire, Jim Cunningham's house was extinguished sometime after eight o'clock. The climax of Donnie Dark occurs one week before the presidential election, which saw George Bush elected on November eight. Movie was shot in twenty eight days. There are twenty eight scenes and the director's cut of this movie. None of this actually explains what's going on in the movie. It's just a recurring easter rig. The film is an elaborate Here's another one. The film is an elab are parable against drunk driving, hence the bit about Mothers against Drunk Driving, the organization that sponsors the festival in the film. And Frank was since he was driving out to get more beer, presumably drunk when he kills Gretchen. A lot to chew on, folks. Good lord. Uh. And now, as this episode begins to edge into the two hour mark, here's Richard Kelly debunking these theories in Enemy in two thousand and sixteen. For the theory that Donnie was dead all along, quote, I don't have an answer to that question. I think the film argues that life and death can perhaps coexist. The time is not necessarily a purely linear thing. Okay, it was Donnie hallucinating. I don't have an absolute definition of hallucination. I believe everything in the film was real to a certain extent, But what is the nature of reality? I this guy really starts to piss me off at a certain point with this. It's like, dude, just say you were baked, Like, honestly, people are putting in so much work here and you're just like, I don't know, man, Like, what even is real? I had a guy in a filmmaking class who looked up after everybody taking a beat after reading somebody's script and said, uh, seemingly proposed of nothing? Do you dream of infinity? Well, it gets even worse for the theory that the whole movie was a dream. Richard Kelly responded by saying life could be a dream. That bad, that's awful. The theory that the film was essentially an elaborate lesson against drunk driving. I'm very against drunk driving, and if people want to take it that way, I hope people call an uber. All right, Sure, not great theory gets a not great answer, but okay, And finally, do Frank and the jet engine exists in a tangent universe? Well, the tangent universe is certainly the first chapter from the prologue of the philosophy of time travel, so I believe there's a lot more to that book than meet c I. Richard Kelly says, I tend to believe that Roberto Sparrow was onto something. And then Richard Kelly finally gets a little more specific. For the twentieth anniversary, he told Rolling Stone, I look at the events in the film as a story of divine and supernatural intervention where a select group of characters happen to be living in the proximity of the science fiction event. I don't want to spoil too much, but there's a lot more to the story if you look at it both through a prism of science fiction and the logical reaction to the events presented. He continued. That is not to take away any interpretation that people have of the film, which I think is valid because the way it's engineered, you can have any interpretation you want of the first of the movie. But then he finished, in my mind, the last ten percent of the movie is the reality of what carries forward. I didn't realize the divine I mean, I guess the divine indurtention thing. There's another easter egg. If the making of it is called d s x X mana meaning God from the machine, is not that a screenwriting term or is it just literary in general? I think it's literary in general, meaning like the plots basically resolved by God swooping in and giving you an unsuspected conclusion that solves all your problems. Pucci went back to his home planet. Uh, my personal favorite comes from the Hard Times UH satire site. The headline these Donnie Darko fan theories won't change the fact that you're thirty and need to get your together. Amazing. Um, all of this doesn't get into the unauthorized sequel of Donnie Darko, which I had no idea existed until researching it for this podcast. And there's a good reason I had no idea about this. Richard Kelly basically disowned it and had nothing to do with it. I've never seen it, he told n Emmy in the fan theory interview from up Top, from adding it was horribly violating, it was incredibly painful, to think about what they were doing. It made me very angry, filled with rage. Tell us what filled Richard Kelly with rage? Jordan's Well. It came out in two thousand nine and it was called s Darkoh, which, according to the Wikipedia pages pronounced s dot dark that. I'm not just out of spite and out of allegiance to Richard Kelly, who has also pissed me off multiple times in this episode. I'm not calling it by that ridiculous way. Um. Anyway, This followed Donny Dark's younger sister, Samantha the Dancer and the Sparkle Motion Dance Troupe. The original asterisk. Devey Chase was actually actually showed up for this movie, but she was basically the only tidy the original Donnie Darko. The plot is as follows. Samantha Darko is now a teenager and embarking on a road trip with her friend Corey. They end up in a small town in Utah, which is filled with various uh freaky people. Uh that damn Bunny comes back. There's elements of time travel and the familiar tropes of the original movie, but lacked the heart, lacked Richard Kelly's pathological Yeah. The whole movie gigantic miss Richard Kelly likened it to a fairy tale as opposed to his original film, which he described as more like a graphic novel, and S Darko was not well received, especially when word got out that the mind behind the original Richard Kelly, was not happy about this, which led to something of a backlash from Donny Darko's fervent fan base. And you gotta feel bad for the director of S Darko, a guy by the name of Chris Fisher, because he basically took this project on because he was a huge fan of the original, which just serves as yet another lesson to Hollywood. Just leave stuff alone, just please. Yeah, he's uh since gone on to do a lot of network television. That's funny. How two that's code for flop. He had put out the pass. But what about the possibility of a good sequel with Richard Kelly and the original team back on board? Uh, little dicey. Back in two Thousive, Richard Kelly suggested that he would never make a sequel because it would destroy the integrity of his original movie. That was before a sequel was released and didn't destroy the integrity of his original movie but he since reversed his stance on making a sequel, but for once is cowed by a more practical concern. He doesn't own the rights to Donnie Darko, telling no film school had to relinquish them when I was twenty four years old when I signed a deal to get to direct the film. It would be very upsetting to see someone else remake and reboot this film. I don't want anything to happen that's going to be done for the wrong reasons or outside my control. That's why I have to keep an open mind to doing something new with it that's artful and fresh and not allowing conformity to win. I'm not the world's biggest film buff, but I kind of lost tracker. Richard Kelly. I done Feaver blew Over in the mid two thousand's, and it sounds like that's kind of a good thing. His follow up was two thousands six is Southland Tails, which to me seems packed with people who seemed big at the time because they were still coasting on their nineties fame and uh, this movie was kind of where their career inertia ran out. Sean William Scott, a k A. Stiffler Sarah mah L Geller, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, and Dwayne the Rock Johnson with music by Moby Give me a thousand guesses. And I never would have imagined that Richard Kelly's follow up to Donny Darko would have started the rock Um yeah, strange. I would see even strangers the fact that he's the biggest star out of all of them at this point years later, it's fair. Yeah, even j T has dropped out. I have not seen this movie. I've never heard of this movie before today. Wikipedia tells me that it's a satire on the military industrial complex and the entertainment industry. Hey, I just can't believe. I got to show you the video of Justin Timberlake doing the Killer's lip sync. That movie grinds to a halt, so that Justin Timberlake can lip sync another band song directly into the camera. I mean maybe he thought it would work like the Hill Over Heels montage. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, dude. And so you've seen this once? That was any anything you care to share it is? I mean, I know, No, That's that's what I remember the most about it. I think admirably, the rock is actually like playing against type. Like he's like very He's actually supposed to be like very neurotic and weird in the movie. Um but yeah, man, just a misbegotten film. I don't even remember what it was trying to get across. Of course, it has its defenders. It's the Internet. The certainty that someone will come out of the woodwork to defend something is one. You know. Um, I mean, I I know we're crunched for time, but I want to get into a little bit of this because, in classic Richard Kelly fashion, Southland Tales was not a simple popcorn flick. It was initially planned to be a nine part interactive experience, with the first six parts published in six separate one hundred page graphic novels. Have in the film itself would comprise the final three parts of this quote experience, and much like Donnie Darko, there was a website launched to intertwine the graphic novels with the film itself. However, Richard Kelly was writing these graphic novels in the middle of directing the movie, which he said, quote pushed me to the edge of my own sanity, and ultimately he decided to cut it down the just three graphic novels instead of six, and the film premiered with the can Film Festival in two thousand and six. You know, Richard Kelly's big follow up to Donnie Darko is a lot of expectations. It was just eviscerated. Uh. Salon dot Com critic Andrew Here called the con cut quote about the biggest ugliest mess I've ever seen. Jason Solomon's for The Observer wrote, south Land Tales was so bad it made me wonder if Kelly had ever met a human being. An incredible disc adding that it quote maybe one of the worst films ever presented in the con competition. And I guess after this debacle, Richard Kelly slashed about twenty five minutes of footage, somehow got extra cash from Sony to to uh add some more effects to the movie, kept the justin timber Legs scene. Yes, um film was an enormous bomb, pulled in just shy of three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars thousand dollars less than Donnie dark against the budget of seventeen million. Uh. And unfortunately, unlike Donnie Darko, it did not make up the difference on home video. After that, Richard Kelly did The Box, which is an adaptation of the Richard Matheson short story Button Button, which I think had been previously done as an eighties era Twilight Zone episode, And since then he's produced the extremely dark bobcat Goldthweight movie starring Robert Williams called the World's Greatest Dad, Actually, Isn't that bad? And the Tucker Max book adaptation of I Hope they served beer in Hell? You're in Hollywood, How when they start sending you that kind of good Lord currently on IMDb a project he's written and directed, uh is producing. Oh, it's called Corpus Christie. It's listening pre pro. I looked at up la plot just says an Iraq war veteran teams up with a wealthy business owner in Texas and it's in pre pro. Anyway, they gave him enough money to do whatever the hell that is. Well, we touched on this to the intro, but stripping away all of this talk of the Stephen Hawking style, theoretical physics and time travel, Donnie Darko. Really, if you get down to it, it's a movie about growing up. That's how Jake Jillen Hall described it years later. When asked for some sort of explanation about Donnie Darko, he told The Guardian in two thousand and sixteen it wasn't a conventional adulthood film, and the American pie way Donnie's psychological journey is what's important. That's why it's had this lasting power. Anything psychological is a slower but ultimately longer burn. I'm talking about Patrick Swayze's self help guru selling a cure for general malaise by breaking everything down to a binary fear and love. And that's what Donnie fights as in this movie, because that binary is basically childlike thinking. When you become a teenager, everything stops being so black and white and you enter a world of gray, and life becomes a lot more ambiguous and therefore a lot more difficult to navigate and there are no easy answers. Richard Kelly has talked a lot about the whole exercise when Donnie's asked to put solutions the complex emotional problems on this goofy fear and love timeline in school. And remember this was something that Richard Kelly said he was in some form or another actually taught in his school, so this clearly had some emotional meaning for him, and Richard Kelly says it has to do with this idea of conformity. Part of being an artist is fighting against conformity, breaking convention, painting outside the lines. I think a lot of the system in place, whether it's the educational system or a system of Hollywood and its filmmaking. It's all about restrictions and labels, genre classifications, trying to emulate past success, sequels, remakes, reboots. The spirit of the character of Donnie Darko is about fighting against that conformity, and it's difficult to know where to eve off in an episode like this, but I think that's as good a parting thought as any. I hope that when this podcast comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to. That's in the letter he writes to ROBERTA. Sparrow, where's your damn ai M status spotting poser. I also had gone with go home and tell your parents that everything's gonna be okay. Oh yeah, how there you go. I felt a little too fraught. I was going to get a little for clemped, Oh, I think it's a nice thing to tell our your sweet parents. Serve it. Call your parents. Things are good, Everything's gonna better. I'm surprised we got through that as quickly as we did this one. Anyway, folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much Dark. Oh. My name is Jordan Front and I'm Alex Sagele. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.