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Richard Kelly Goes Southland
March 4, 2008

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony, March 18) is an expansive film about life, love, lust and politics in the nearly-post-apocalyptic Los Angeles of the future—make that the “near-future” as it’s set in the summer of 2008. Featuring an equally sprawling ensemble cast that includes Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Miranda Richardson, Christopher Lambert and Justin Timberlake, the film premiered in May, 2006 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a largely negative reception and prompted the most mixed assortment of pull-quotes we’ve seen in quite a while, ranging from Variety’s Todd McCarthy, who called it a “wannabe visionary epic,” to The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, who proclaimed that “Southland Tales has more ideas, visual and intellectual, in a single scene than most American independent films have in their entirety.”

 

That’s a pretty broad swath of positive and negative criticism for filmmaker Kelly, whose 2001 movie Donnie Darko is one of the decade’s biggest cult sensations. So what does he think of all the talk?

 

“I try to avoid a lot of the reviews--I think what I care about is what people think a year from now,” Kelly told us in a recent interview. As a filmmaker, I chose to delve into dangerous territory and I chose to push some

buttons. And if you’re going to talk about politics, religion and pop culture, you might as well do it on a grand scale with a bunch of fun actors.”

 

Kelly fiddled around with his film (which was budgeted at approximately $17 million) after its Cannes premiere and the final version opened in limited theatrical release last November, where it made less than $500,000 at the box office.

 

“The environment right now with independent films is a little scary, because if you don’t have a big marketing budget or a window to get a lot of people in there to hold the theaters, it’s impossible to get it seen!,” said Kelly.

 

“But I got to make it and I got to finish it,” he added.

 

Next up for Kelly is The Box, a horror-thriller that Kelly directed earlier this year. Currently in post-production, the film stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden and, according to Kelly, is the most “mainstream” feature he has ever made.

 

With The Box, I’m making a film that’s getting a wide release, but it’s also the most personal film I’ve ever made,” said Kelly. “I’m lucky that I’m getting to do what I want to do within the studio system.”

Posted by Laurence Lerman on March 4, 2008 | Comments (0)