BUNNY PECULIAR
THE HEAD-SPINNING BLEND OF HIGH SCHOOL MOVIE AND TEMPORAL PARADOX DONNIE DARKO THAT IS CULT CLASSIC MARKS ITS 20TH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR. WE HAVE A FRANK CONVERSATION ABOUT IT WITH DIRECTOR RICHARD KELLY
BOY MEETS GIRL – IT’S AN EVERYDAY story. Except when boy meets girl in a Tangent Universe created by a rupture in the space-time continuum, due to boy sleepwalking as a jet engine falls on his bedroom, setting girl on the path to being run over by a car driven by a guy dressed as a demonic rabbit. Then boy must set the universe back on track, sacrificing himself to save girl – and the world.
Twenty years have passed since Richard Kelly’s mix of mind-bending sci-fi and high school slice of life debuted at Sundance, and the film continues to fascinate (and confound) audiences. It’s an achievement even more remarkable when you consider that the first-time director was a callow 25-year-old when the cameras rolled.
“I was very young,” Kelly tells SFX, seemingly scarcely able to believe it himself, “And god, the world was so different. I was just out of college, I’d gotten this incredible opportunity, and it was a life-changing experience.
But it’s an ongoing experience!”
David Fincher is responsible, to a degree: his video for Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got A Gun” inspired the 14-year-old Kelly to become a filmmaker (he called up MTV to ask who made it!). But the specific spark was a newspaper article about an occurrence in Kelly’s home state, Virginia.
“A large piece of ice fell off the wing of a jet plane and smashed into a house somewhere near where I grew up, into the bedroom of a teenage kid,” he recalls. “He wasn’t in his bedroom, but it damaged it. I remember reading about the story, and it always stuck with me how disturbing that might have been for that boy. It must have felt like, ‘Is that some kind of warning?’ What was the psychological impact of that event on that teenage boy?”
For Kelly, not long out of USC film school in 1998 and “in a panic” about how to build a career in the industry, this seemed a promising conceit. So he began interrogating the concept.
“I thought, ‘Okay, piece of ice – that’s interesting. But what if it’s an engine that falls off a plane?’ Then I thought, ‘What if they never found the plane, and that’s part of the mystery: figuring out where the engine came from?’ And then, ‘If he got out of bed, why? What is this voice that draws the teenage boy
out of bed to dodge this bullet from the heavens? What’s the journey he goes along?’
“My mind actually works in a pretty logical way, believe it or not!” he laughs. “All the crazy films I make come from a scientific operating system. So then I built the architecture of this story. I decided it should take place over a synodic lunar month – somewhere between 27 and 29 days. And I started building all this science into the journey. I thought, ‘Well, he dodged the jet engine, so he must be a superhero’, so I gave Donnie a superhero name. And then I thought, ‘Well, no one’s really doing ’80s period pieces...”
HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN
The screenplay emerged stream of consciousness-style – almost as if Kelly was (to use his terminology) one of the “Manipulated Living” – within roughly the same timeframe as the film’s countdown to the end of the world. “I wrote it in about 28 days, and it just poured out of me. The first draft was pretty long – 150 pages or something – but it was pretty damn close to what you see. In terms of the architecture of the story, everything you see in the finished film was there.”
Though critics often draw parallels with the work of Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and John Hughes – all of whom the young Kelly admired – he stresses that he didn’t consciously set out to imitate them. “Their films are all imprinted in my subconscious mind, but the idea of ‘I’m writing a high school film’ wasn’t my thought process.”
Instead, he tapped into personal experience. “I drew a lot from my hometown in Virginia [Midlothian], and the teachers I had growing up, and all my friends and their parents. The environment of suburban Virginia was very much an influence upon the landscape which I was crafting.”
When the script began doing the rounds, it generated considerable buzz, but it was only thanks to the enthusiasm of two actors that it finally got greenlit, after a year of pitching. Firstly there was Jason Schwartzman, fresh from his success in another offbeat high school movie, Rushmore. “Originally, Donnie was going to be played by Jason,” Kelly explains. “I owe him an enormous debt. I don’t think I’d have a career if it weren’t for Jason and his support. I think Jake would say the same. He helped bring a lot of enthusiasm and financing to the screenplay.”
A scheduling conflict eventually caused Schwartzman to drop out, but his agent had brought it to the attention of Nancy Juvonen, producing partner of Drew Barrymore. She then became the project’s “godmother” (and also liberal English teacher Ms Pomeroy).
It was in Barrymore’s office that Kelly first met his Donnie, Jake Gyllenhaal (pronounced Jee-len-hall-er, for those still unsure...). “Within 30 seconds, it was clear to me that he was the right actor,” Kelly says. “It was a gut intuition that he was the one. He kind of came from showbusiness royalty [director father, screenwriter mother] and I felt he was an incredibly strong anchor for the film.
“And he delivered: he really put all his blood, sweat and tears into that role. It was a make or break situation for both of us.”
Another key collaborator was cinematographer Steven Poster, whose CV caught Kelly’s eye thanks to second unit work on films like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and collaborations with Ridley Scott. Despite a nearly 30-year age gap, the two proved to be sympatico, with Poster the perfect foil for his strong-willed fledgling director. “Steven was a wonderful collaborator,” Kelly says. “He’s very collaborative, and works well with someone who has a strong point of view, and he’s very good at supporting that point of view, with a lot of strategy.
“He’s not combative; he helps course-correct and guide you in the right direction. When, y’know, I wanted to do a Steadicam shot that would take way too much screen time, he’d advise me how to divide it up into three sections. He brought decades of experience that I didn’t have.”
It helped that Kelly – who got into USC on an art scholarship – had a clear vision of how the film should look. “I had all these drawings and illustrations, so I could show Steven those. And I’d already done some sketches for the film itself.” You see several of these on-screen: a sketch of Frank the rabbit that the troubled Donnie, haunted by visions of the bunny, tacks to his calendar; the “infant memory generator” concept he discusses in class; the design for the sinister Frank mask.
The two also “referenced a lot of films” in their discussions. The opening scene, for example, in which Donnie wakes up on a hillside, took inspiration from Montgomery Clift’s introduction in 1951’s A Place In The Sun. Kelly also watched Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) several times as preparation (something nodded to in the Halloween party scenes: Donnie’s sister’s costume resembles Lolita character Vivian Darkbloom).
“One in particular might be surprising to people,” Kelly says. “We were going to photograph the movie in Southern California, and it kind of exists in a fantasy suburban landscape, and a film I referenced for Steven was Peggy Sue Got Married.”
I wrote it in about 28 days, and it just poured out of me… The first draft was pretty long