Last autumn, "Donnie Darko" writer-director Richard Kelly finally had his second feature film ready to show the world. It was called ""Southland Tales"" and by the time it was about to hit theaters, almost every critic in the world had prepped audiences to hate it.
"Donnie Darko" was ignored when it first appeared in movie theaters in 2001, mostly due to a perplexing marketing campaign that featured an eerie, skeletal bunny rabbit head on a poster and reviews talking about teen angst and the apocalypse. When audiences did take a risk, though, they were emphatic about "Donnie Darko’s" originality, humor and entertainment value, sparking one of the most rabid cult followings of recent memory (the Pioneer Theater in New York City offered midnight screenings of the film for 28 months straight). Enthusiastic demand prompted an additional director’s cut to be released both theatrically and on DVD. Perhaps most significantly, "Donnie Darko" launched Jake Gyllenhaal (more known to date for his co-starring role in "Brokeback Mountain") to dreamy, dour heartthrob status.
Depending on who you spoke to, people expected either nothing much or the world from Richard Kelly after ""Donnie Darko." Rumors abounded for years as to what the guy was up to, both in terms of writing as well as directing, but nothing surfaced until out of the blue a rough cut of "Southland Tales" appeared in the competition line-up at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, one of the most celebrated showcases in the world. And it was there that the film industry, press, critics, and a few lay people got more than a clue of Richard’s ambition. Due to the film’s unfinished state, motley cast (including The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Justin Timberlake, and Mandy Moore, to name a few), provocative language, explosive subject matter, and probably a million other things adding up to the kind of chaos that Richard revels in, "Southland Tales" was given some of the worst write-ups I’ve ever been upset over having to read, which didn’t bode well for its future in front of the general public. Still, Richard persevered, garnering both a major distributor (Sony) to get it into theaters as well as the funding necessary to add the special effects he needed to complete the film, even if it took more than a year after Cannes to do so.
I didn’t get to see "Southland Tales" until after I spoke with Richard, but when I did attend a preview screening about a week after our conversation, I came out of the theater a devoted fan. I can be pretty cynical to the point of subversion, especially when it comes to movies (I watch so many of them for my work and so many of them are so bad). Plus, I’ve been prone to quite fantastical extrapolation about conspiracy theory, government control, and human apathy, so I know that movie appealed to me due to those traits. I also really love movies that play with structure and max out the multisensory experience of cinema, which Richard did doubly so via creating a graphic novel series that complements the film. To me, what Richard did with "Southland Tales" was completely representative of the kind of creativity that’s hard to find in the mainstream these days.
So last fall—while Richard was still putting the last technical details into place for the film—I spoke with him about the odd success of "Donnie Darko"" the expectations that followed, and what it was like to stand behind "Southland Tales" in the midst of so much mudslinging. For winning out in the end despite all odds and without compromising one smidgen of his creativity and daring, I’m dedicating this Valentine’s Day column to Richard and giving you the chance to read the discussion we had about "Southland Tales." The film will be available on DVD on March 18. Mark your calendar and open your mind.
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Let’s talk about the stuff that you had to do to get this film out. You may not look at it that way; you may have been perfectly happy and willing to make adjustments to the film in order to get it out into theaters. And given how political things are, you can be as vague as you need to be.
I’m totally an open book with all this because it all turned out for the best. Basically, what we had at Cannes was never finished; it wasn’t even a print. Literally, we found out we got nominated for the Palme d’Or based on a very rough DVD we sent. So we were literally just scrambling to finish what we had in the best way we could in time for Cannes. We knew it wasn’t finished and we were going to continue to work on it after Cannes, but it was a slightly difficult thing to talk about when we were there because we were in competition and everyone was telling me, “Don’t go around telling people the movie isn’t finished.”
Why would you or your producers or whomever it was that put it into the submission process for Cannes have done that if it wasn’t finished?
I think we submitted it thinking we had a 1 percent chance of getting into the festival. Listen, I’d always hoped that we’d get in, but I think that a lot of people who represented the film always thought it was the longest of long shots only because… (Pause)
It’s a delicate thing because of the kind of film that it is. (Laughs) It’s a very provocative film with a very pop cast and we thought, “Maybe this isn’t the kind of film that Cannes is going to like.” Then they came back and said, “We want to nominate you for the Palme d’Or,” and it was like, “Holy crap! We can’t turn that down—that’s such a huge deal for the film!” And it’s my second film, you know?
So we had to turn it in. We were very, very proud of what we had at Cannes. For me, mostly, I knew it was still running a little long and I knew that there was a lot of visual effects stuff missing. And when Sony bought it, clearly you know they wanted a shorter version. That was sort of the mandate from every distributor. Believe it or not, there were five distributors bidding on the film out of Cannes: Sony, THINKFilm, Picturehouse, Newmarket and First Look, I believe. Sony obviously had the ability to outbid everyone and they wanted a shorter version; they wanted me to continue work on the edit to try to tighten it up and make it better. The unspoken deal was if I nail the edit and make Sony very happy with a cut, maybe I’ll get more visual effects money to do all the stuff that I really always wanted to do to make the movie better but required more money. So it was like, “Cut the shorter version, maybe you’ll get more money.”
So I cut the shorter version and then after a period when I had to convince them, they gave me a bunch more money to add a bunch of visual effects and that was what saved the film for me. Until now, I’ve never been 100 percent confident in the movie and now I finally am. Now I know that it fires on all cylinders, whereas before, it was a V6 engine and every sixth cylinder was not firing properly. (Laughs) I’ll put together a longer version down the road maybe that has some of the deleted scenes that I do miss, but I feel very confident about this finished version. It’s only 19 minutes shorter.
From what I’ve read, I thought it was at least half an hour shorter than what was shown at Cannes.
No, no—it’s two hours and 24 minutes. It’s weird; we got it down to 2:17 in December and that’s when they agreed to give me all the new visual effects money. A lot of the new visual effects sequences that we added are completely new and that ended up adding seven minutes back into the film.
And Sony didn’t bat an eye; they didn’t flinch because they realized how much it helped the film, all this new stuff. They were totally fine with it getting a little bit longer and were that much more confident in it. So it’s only 19 minutes shorter and in the end, I feel like I worked my way through it. There was a scary time…
Every distributor wants a movie to be as short as possible across the board. I mean, for every single movie that’s ever made, usually the general rule is the distributor wants it as short as possible. So the fact that we were able to figure out how to get Sony to kind in love with the movie and understand it and understand its complexity and the fact that they’re cool with it being two hours and 24 minutes for me speaks to how confident they finally are in the movie. It’s been a long ordeal, but I feel like we’re gonna have a happy ending no matter what happens. Whether the movie makes money or not, whether it’s well received or not, I feel like we worked really hard and we got the movie to where it needs to be.
And for all of the negativity that the whole Cannes experience might have been perceived with, it seems like everything did turn out just fine.
Yeah! My attorney has said it the best way: “Getting into Cannes was the best thing and the worst thing that could ever happen.” (Laughs) But in the end, it’s the final outcome that matters, so I think it’s still the best thing that ever happened to this movie, for all the craziness and the negativity and the backlash and all that. We still got nominated for the Palme d’Or, you know? I got The Rock and all these great, talented actors on the red carpet at Cannes and I love that! I love seeing Dwayne on the red carpet at Cannes; I love seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar out there because they deserve it and they’re really talented. So I’m glad that we got there. You just gotta take things as they come, you gotta take the punches and take it like a man and continue fighting. And in the end the film is better because of it.
Because it managed to survive all this stuff and get even better.
Yeah, and we knew that it could survive and we knew that it was worth fighting for. You know, the more time passes, people start to give up hope and they start thinking, “Oh, well I guess that movie’s never coming out,” or “Oh, I guess they just gave up on it,” or something like that. But, really, this entire time we’ve been working; it hasn’t been like the movie’s just been sitting there on a shelf. Literally, the film is at [post-production facility] LaserPacific going through this really amazing Kodak degraining process, so the first print isn’t available until early next week. The film is still being finished and we’ve been working on it this entire time! (Laughs) Sometimes there’s a film that just sit there and collect dust and doesn’t get released for a long time. But we’ve literally been working this entire time on ours.
I’m sure that level of dedication will show up in the final product.
I hope so.
If not, people are going to be even more pissed!
Yeah! (Laughs) That’s right. Well, now I feel like I did the best I could so we’ll see what happens.
If you can’t do any more, it doesn’t matter what people say. But that raises an interesting question about perception and expectation. I’m not just talking about the type of work you’re known for given "Donnie Darko." It’s also about perceiving what an audience wants or what an audience can take. The fact that Sony’s willing to release this and the fact that you chose to go with a bigger studio rather than a smaller company like THINKFIlm or Newmarket is hopeful to me, an indicator that you guys are suggesting there is a wide audience for "Southland Tales." You’re giving an audience credit that it would want something like this and it can digest something like this.
Well, I think the new version of the film—and I say this absolutely as an artist—is more accessible. I’ve made it more accessible in a way where I don’t feel like I’ve compromised myself or changed anything.
A lot of it was that at Cannes, I hadn’t finished the graphic novel prequel—a lot of essential information is in the first three chapters because the movie is chapters four through six and the books are one, two and three. So there’s a lot of essential back-story information that we needed to incorporate in this new animated prologue near the beginning of the movie and none of that was ready or finished by Cannes. The opening reel was always the toughest because we were losing people. It was confusing and once you lost people, it’s hard to get them to engage in the rest of the movie. So the most significant improvement has been to the first reel of the film.
I always felt like "Donnie Darko" was a commercial movie. (Laughs) And no one else thought that at Sundance when we premiered it, but then over the years it’s sort of proven to be, I believe, a very mainstream movie even though it’s very idiosyncratic and complex and at times very challenging. I always felt like "Donnie Darko" was commercial and I feel even more so about "Southland Tales". I feel like I’ve made a very commercial pop art film and the fact that we had Sony interested, I always felt that was the right place because if I could get the big studio infrastructure behind this movie, it would have a chance to reach a wider audience.
When they have an interesting acquisition, they have this great relationship with Samuel Goldwyn: when a film like "Southland Tales" doesn’t really fit into the Screen Gems mold or the Sony Classics mold, they can literally call up Samuel Goldwyn and say, “Hey, will you partner with us?” In this case, it was Sony’s marketing division that handled all the trailers and the marketing materials, but it’s Goldwyn putting the movie in theaters and the actual cinema distribution duties. So you have a partnership that I think will really work for this film.
You’re talking about "Southland Tales" being a big pop culture kind of phenomenon and that goes back to my question of expectations, too. You also alluded to something earlier about going after the caliber of talent that you did in order to give them the chance to be seen in a different light and do different things. But of course, there’s a whole set of expectations and perceptions that they bring with them—baggage, so to speak, even if it’s a good kind of recognition. People are going to expect to see The Rock or Sarah Michelle Gellar in a certain kind of light. So how do you handle the potential liability, I guess, of having that caliber of celebrity in your movie when you’re trying to do completely different things with them?
I think I used it to my advantage. Every performer has baggage; they have things about their life or about their previous work that they bring to the table and that’s just the nature of being an actor. Dwayne has the pro wrestling thing, Sarah has Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seann [William Scott] has Stifler from "American Pie," Justin has *NSYNC, Mandy has her pop star stuff. And this is all great work that they’ve done, but it’s stuff that they get pigeonholed by, you know?
What I did is I tried to take elements of their image and then twist them, flip them over, and all of a sudden Sarah is now a porn star. Dwayne is now an action star stricken with amnesia who’s schizophrenic. Seann now has amnesia and has a twin brother who he doesn’t understand and he’s caught in the midst of this conspiracy. Justin is now a famous actor who’s been drafted and sent to Iraq and is disfigured and being used by the government as a propaganda spokesperson and he’s involved in this underground movement with this experimental drug… (Laughs) And Mandy plays a bratty daughter of the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.
So they have one foot in their persona and they have one foot in this new sort of dangerous parallel universe and that’s what the movie is. It opens with two nuclear bombs going off in Texas; they explode in your face and you’re like, “Whoa!” Before you even have a chance to breathe, you’re whisked through this new three-minute animation sequence that we’ve added covering what happens over the next three years. It’s the road not taken and it’s where we go as a country over those next three years into 2008. All of a sudden you meet all of these popular actors, but they’re in this new, freaky future. It’s a future that literally could happen to us in a snap, in the detonation of a bomb or another 9/11 type of thing.
And I think it helps to have the familiarity of these faces and the comfort of seeing, “Oh, there’s Buffy!” or “There’s Stifler!” or “There’s Justin!” “There’s Cheri Oteri!” “There’s Amy Pohler from 'Saturday Night Live'!” “There’s Jon Lovitz!” They’re all these really fun people—they’re the funnest people for me to watch! You talk about how you want to populate a movie like you’d want to host a dinner party. (Laughs) They’re all very fun people you’d like to have at a dinner party and that’s what I wanted this movie to be because it’s about the end of the world; it’s about too many big, heavy topics—disturbing things and troubling issues—and I thought, “Lets make it as fun to watch as possible.”
But also, if you’re going to be more philosophical about it, these pop stars traverse that really fine line between happiness and complete destruction all the time, in a way.
Yeah!
They have such precarious images that they have to keep up, that they’re not allowed to play with a lot of the time. And maybe they don’t feel like they can be in movies like this because they have a responsibility to this image of wholesomeness or fitting into a certain mold—one wrong move and their career, their livelihood, is destroyed. So perhaps they are the perfect people to be in an allegory about the apocalypse because they know how it feels best. (Laughs)
Yeah. You look at where our country is right now and we’re in the midst of a crossroads with an upcoming election, figuring out how we can out of Iraq, if we can get out of Iraq, and the entire country is transfixed by Britney Spears and her performance at the VMA’s. The [MTV] ratings went up 23 percent! (Laughs) We need this pop distraction because it’s so troubling and there’s so many life-or-death decisions that need to be made right now. There’s an upcoming election in a country that is so polarized and divided, more than we have ever been in my memory or as long as I’ve ever been alive, and yet we have this pop distraction that we need. We have Perez Hilton and we have all this celebrity culture that’s become like a tonic, I think, for a lot of people and it exists right next to all of the horror of Iraq and what’s happening. You go to a newsstand and you see them sitting right next to each other in magazines.
That’s what the movie is about, in a way. In the beginning I brought up a lot of influences of Phillip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Chandler, but I also brought up Andy Warhol and the idea of fame, the idea of that Campbell’s Soup can. There’s a lot of product placement in the movie that we use as pop art. We used logos and companies that gave us endorsements and we used them in the film so it has this kind of subversive corporate pop art quality. It’s very subversive and you’ll see it when you see the finished film; it’s very intentional. (Laughs) It’s meant to be this sort of dreamscape that’s just a moment away…an alternate path, a road not taken, that starts July 4t, 2005. We’re very close to being in "Southland Tales" right now; it’s just a step away.
How do you get corporations—who, like celebrities, are so careful about their image and their depictions—to allow you to use their likeness in a subversive project like this?
We had a really great product placement girl named Jennifer Bydwell. She did an amazing job. It’s a very provocative film, an R-rated film, but I think it’s a very even-sided film. I’m a liberal, I’m a Democrat and I vote that way, but we’re definitely showing the danger of polarization on both sides of the political spectrum. I didn’t want this to just be a liberal screed; I wanted to make sure to also poke fun at liberal extremism and the sort of dysfunction of the Democratic party as well even though that’s what I am—I’m the frustrated, dysfunctional Democrat, you know? But you have to make fun of yourself as well to make your point stronger. So I think this movie appeals to everyone, I really do; I think, believe it or not, this movie appeals to progressive Christians. (Laughs)
So someone’s right-wing, born-again Christian Republican grandfather in Texas is going to be ok if they go see it?
Well, I say “progressive” and I think of the Christians out there who are a little more hip. Believe it or not—you might think I’m crazy and maybe I am—but when you see the finished film, I think in a strange way it does reinforce some of the good ideas in Christianity. When you see it, you’ll understand. (Laughs)
But I tried not to alienate that part of the country. I didn’t want this movie to completely alienate the red states because the movie is about what a dangerous place the world is right now because of polarization in the sense of what has happened with the neocons and how they have taken such an extreme position and divided our country. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe this movie will be absolutely hated by a lot of people in red state America, I don’t know. But I think that a lot of the actors and a lot of the comedy in the film plays very mainstream and certainly there’s a lot of people in red state America who love a lot of the actors in the film, who know Dwayne from pro wrestling and Seann from the "American Pie" movies.
So, I like to think of this as a purple state movie, not a red and blue state movie—that’s not accurate. The logo for the alternative fuel [in the film] is taken from … I believe it was the University of Michigan that did a distortion of the 2004 electoral college map where they distorted everything not by state but by how individual counties voted and they distorted the size of each county to reflect population. Los Angeles County becomes this gigantic thing and all of the counties in Montana where there’s no population get shrunk down. So the United States becomes this big distorted blob of purple and that’s what we really look like. We don’t look like a blue-and-red state Electoral College; that’s how outdated our electoral process is. So I look at the movie as being representative of the fact we’re this big, purple, distorted blob.
Speaking about some of these locales, you were raised in Virginia, right?
Um-hmm.
And your mom is from Texas.
Yes. We shot the opening of the film in my aunt’s house in Abilene, Texas.
Do you think that there’s something about having a background that’s rooted in more middle America—though I don’t know how liberally you were raised in those circumstances—that gives you a kind of sensitivity to people living outside of a place like L.A.? You’re talking about this very diplomatically, giving everybody the opportunity to understand what you’re going for and being very careful about not polarizing and or about making fun of yourself. Do you have that very conscious sensitivity because of where and how you were raised?
I think so. Maybe I was always raised with a kind of diplomacy, but I was definitely raised in a Republican environment, in a conservative environment, and these are all people that I love and I care about and I think it’s a mistake to lash out and to attack someone who’s on the other side of the political spectrum. That’s part of the reason why we’re in such a sad place right now as a country. I mean, I point my finger straight to the neocons, obviously, being on the side that I’m on, but I think they made the mistake of taking matters into their own hands and not listening to dissenting opinions and manufacturing evidence and lying and doing all the things that they did to get into this mess.
The problem is—well, there’s obviously many problems—but I guess what I’m trying to say is we’ve been in a polarized place for seven going on eight years now, since 9/11, and it’s not working. We obviously need new leadership and I think it needs to push, obviously, way to the left. But to really succeed it’s gotta be realistically closer to the center on the left side, you know? We’re at a crossroads coming up here with this election and I’m just glad that this movie’s like a time capsule; it’s about the climax of the Bush administration and I’m glad it’s coming out in Fall 2007 and not even further down the road. I feel like this is the right time—it’s found it’s right time and everything, like I said, happened this way for a reason.
Let’s segue very abruptly into the making of the movie, the more technical side of stuff. Since you mentioned this is just your second film, was there any way that doing something so small and under-the radar as "Donnie Darko" prepared you for "Southland Tales", which has a much bigger budget and much bigger talent, not to mention much more ambitious? Did you learn anything from that first production that you were able to carry over or was this like starting over again?
I learned a lot and this was a much bigger undertaking; we have over 500 visual effects shots and stunts and action… And you know what? I’ve never been intimidated by this stuff. It’s scary when you don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money—that’s the worst, because you don’t know if you’re going to be able to pull it off in time or if it’s gonna look right and you depend a lot on your colleagues to help you out—I had the best crew. But the best part of this whole experience, even though it was long hours and it was so exhausting and stressful, was the production of this film, the 30 days that we shot this film in late summer and early fall 2005. That was the best part of it all. This is what I do; I don’t get intimidated by visual effects or stunts or any of the physical production stuff. The only thing I’m 100 percent confident of in my life, really, is making movies.
Did you get that confidence from film school or from earlier practice making movies at home?
Film school and then I went and made this ridiculously ambitious grad film that had a bunch of effects. (Laughs) I put myself through self-financed grad school in a way; I graduated undergrad but then right after graduation I went and made this ridiculous short film with a lot of visual effects to challenge myself. I just wanted to put myself through the ringer and I came out of it with a lot more confidence, I think.
Technical confidence, but not necessarily confidence in the business side of it, which is the whole other aspect of moviemaking.
Yeah, technical confidence. I’ve always tried to march to my own drummer and I’ve always tried to do things that I think are commercial in my own way.
You know, all throughout production on "Southland Tales," there were a lot of actors and crew who were like, “Ok, we have no idea what is going on with this story, but we trust you.” (Laughs) And just holding onto that trust… It does get a little frustrating after a while when people are just like, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand what you’re doing.” And I keep saying, “Trust me, and at the end when it’s all finished, you will!” It was the same way with "Donnie Darko"; people were like, “I have no idea what’s going on here. It’s confusing, but you sound like you know what you’re doing and you’re the director, so I’m going to try and I’m gonna follow what you say, but…” So there’s been a lot of that and it’s just a little exhausting after a while when people keep saying, “We don’t get it. We don’t get it.” But I’m always confident that when it’s finally finished, they’ll come up to me after the screening and they’ll say, “I get it now.” (Laughs)
So I’m counting on that moment and I hope to get it this time. If I do, great; if I don’t, great. But, like I said, I’ve finally got the movie across the finish line.
And it must be comforting that you’re finding collaborators—whether on a financial level or a technical level or a talent level—who are willing to put themselves in your hands.
Oh, yeah! I’m incredibly lucky. There’s not a second that goes by where I don’t stop and remember that. If anything, I try to use that luck or that good fortune that I have been blessed with to try and put something unusual and interesting out in to the world. I try to put something out into the world that is different and will hopefully inspire discussion or debate and also pleasure; I hope to entertain people and I hope people laugh and enjoy this film.
In between "Donnie Darko" and now, there have been a slew of rumors and reports of all this stuff you’ve been working on—scripts and rewrites and things that were going to go into production but didn’t. Do you think that all of that work helped you in terms of professional practice? Or do you think that it’s hindered you in any way because people have all these expectations that you’re gonna do one thing or another that never comes to fruition?
Well, I’ve taken a lot of writing jobs at studios and I wrote a film for Tony Scott [Domino], which he directed. I have since written another film for him, just very recently, and I wrote a big World War II film at Warner Bros. I’ve written a lot of scripts at pretty much every major studio and they’re in various stages of development.
It’s very hard; there are so many scripts that get written and very few of them actually ever get made. A lot of people don’t realize this, but I wrote the very first draft of that movie "Holes"; I turned it into a post-apocalyptic kind of thing and they went the complete opposite direction. I probably could have gotten a writing credit, but I didn’t even submit—I just didn’t think it was appropriate.
I’ve been a part of a lot of writing projects at studios; that’s the way I make my money because I certainly don’t make any money on the movies I make! (Laughs) Everyone does those for free, including me—well, not free, but scale, absolute scale. Dwayne got paid $60,000 to act in this movie. All the actors did it for what’s called Schedule F [Screen Actors Guild pay tier]. Dwayne stayed at Shutters hotel when we were shooting and I joked with him that his hotel bill at Shutters—including room service and everything throughout the production—was more than he got paid to act in the film. (Laughs)
We all laughed about it because we were all doing something so crazy and we knew this movie would never get made, would never happen, unless everyone just did it for nothing. And that was the fun of it; it was like we all felt we were out there doing the impossible, doing something really subversive, but sort of pop at the same time, and that everyone was gonna get something out of it.
And that was also the fear that I had over the past year: if I can’t get this movie a proper release—if I can’t cross the finish line at a sprint and get it out there—then all these actors are gonna be disappointed in me and think that I failed them and that I couldn’t pull it off and couldn’t pull it together. That was the worst thing to deal with—having to run into, over the past year, people at a cocktail party and they ask, “What’s going on with your movie?” I’d say, “We’re still working on it! It’s gonna come out!” And they kind of nod their head like, “This guy’s so delusional…” because, you know, as time passes people just assume, “Oh, that movie just didn’t work,” or “He couldn’t pull it together.” That got a little frustrating and I kept saying, “Trust me—it’s gonna come out. They gave me more money and we’re adding new effects and stuff.”
We finally have the marketing, our poster actually premiered—it’s online today—so that’s exciting to show people. Our trailer’s going to come out I think on Monday. So it feels good to know that we can hopefully overcome the odds, because I think for a while people have felt that the odds were against this movie. This way, we can prove otherwise.
Let’s talk about those writing jobs that are your bread and butter. I would presume that all the practice you’ve gotten with them—as well as what you were taught at film school—makes you adhere to mandates like, “Have your story in place and make sure it has a beginning, middle and end,” et cetera.
Yeah.
Then you go off and do something like "Southland Tales", which is totally off that chart—the narrative is incorporated into the graphic novels, which serve as the intro, and then the story goes off into this different place entirely. Did you do that as a reaction to all the formula that you’ve been working with or was it not necessarily a conscious decision? And why did you go forward with shooting the film when you knew people weren’t going to understand, not to mention the fact that it didn’t necessarily have a beginning because the graphic novels weren’t finished yet? After having all this practice in proper film narrative, why would you go off and do something like "Southland Tales"?
I think, more than anything, it was the subject matter. It was the end of the world. (Laughs) It was 2008 and everything that’s happening right now on a much worse scale of post-nuclear attack America and the elections and alternative fuel and World War III and pop culture and Los Angeles… The subject matter was so overwhelming that I wanted to do it justice, I wanted it to feel thorough—feel like a thoroughly-imagined universe with a ton of detail so that every frame is filled with so much detail you need to see the movie three times to absorb it all and still that might not be enough. It has a really dense universe and the film couldn’t contain it all; it needed a prequel, it needed to feel like a movie like "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings" where "The Hobbit" is the precursor.
Because it’s about the end of mankind and the end of the earth, I felt like, “I’m still relatively young and this is my chance to do my big take on the apocalypse. Let’s do it right, let’s do it big, let’s do it epic and let me get it out of my system.” The graphic novels were a tool with which to do that and so it was just servicing the material; I didn’t want it to feel like an under-imagined or poorly imagined or incomplete piece of art.
I felt like what we had at Cannes wasn’t complete; it was missing stuff and that was part of what was so frustrating and why it wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I’ve since had the time to complete all those elements and fill in all the brush strokes and the details. So, in the end, I wanted to service the subject matter and do it right.
There’s no greater story that exists than that of the end of mankind. (Laughs) How the world ends is the reason why people read the Bible. Fundamentally, they are fascinated and terrified by their own mortality and why the world exists and why we’re here. So that’s why I think this movie can I hope connect with a mainstream audience.
I hope it does as well and that all the right-wingers go see it. Who knows—they’ve got a sense of humor!
They might laugh! If you’re gonna talk about politics and you’re gonna talk about religion, do it using comedy. (Laughs)
