The Making Of Donnie Darko (2001)

* A version of this article first appeared in the July 2011 issue of Empire magazine...

In 1988, a boy wakes up on a golf course with the secrets of an impending apocalypse written on his arm, shepherded to safety by the siren call of a man-sized rabbit just moments before a jet engine crashes through the roof of his family's suburban home… Most people reading this will get the reference straight away; since its modest release ten years ago this autumn, Donnie Darko has become one of the most iconic and original films of the early 21^st century. Rubbished at the time, almost sold for scrap by its financiers and rapidly pulled by nervous cinema chains, Richard Kelly's rich, philosophical coming-of-age movie is now (rightly) respected as a key film of the 2000s, not only launching Jake Gyllenhaal as an unconventional teen idol but creating a new template for science fiction, rich in character, emotion and, most unexpected of all in the genre, nostalgia.

The sons of Donnie Darko are all around us. Duncan Jones's Source Code, for example, aside from sharing its star, owes a lot to Kelly's film, off-setting a complex and potentially stuffy time-travel plot with a lot of pop-culture humour and a bittersweet romance. Whatever you may think of it, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is borne of the the same passion to create something fantastical, post-modern and new. Mike Cahill's upcoming Another Earth, about a woman haunted by the arrival of a doppelganger planet, breathes the same melancholic air, while Rian Johnson's just-wrapped Looper, starring Inception's Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hitman ordered to kill his future self, went into production with the security of knowing that there is a market for this kind of thing out there.

But Donnie Darko's journey from its creator's mind to the hearts of its cult followers did not, like its tortured hero's, follow a straight line. It began in a post-production house in Los Angeles, where Kelly, 24 and fresh out of UCLA's film school, was a runner, fetching coffee and making cheese and biscuits for Puff Daddy, J.Lo and Madonna. “I was sort of just moonlighting,” he recalls, “trying to get access to the visual effects and editing equipment for my graduate film, which I was still trying to finish.” Times were hard, and Kelly needed to get some work, badly. “I just said to myself, 'I need a screenplay.' So I sat down to write, and I finished it in about six weeks.”

You might assume it began with the image of Frank, the rabbit who guides Donnie through his narcoleptic adventures, but Kelly says otherwise. “It was the jet engine,” he says. “It all started with this story from my hometown in Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, about a big piece of ice that fell from the wing of a jet plane and smashed through this kid's roof and landed on his bed. He wasn't there at the time, but if he had been it would have killed him. I read about in the newspaper, growing up, and it just stuck with me. It felt like this interesting anomaly. And so the ice became a jet engine, and then it became a mystery, because there was no flight: they can't find the plane.”

Frank came later, as the entity that summons Donnie – “a herald”, says Kelly, who has clearly been boning up on his mythological studies. “I came up with the idea of a kid in a Halloween costume, and it just became a rabbit, for some reason. It might have had something to do with Watership Down, which Drew Barrymore's character teaches in Donnie's English classes. That's very autobiographical – my English teacher in eight grade taught us that book and it had a really lasting effect on me. So now it became a science fiction mystery melded with a lot of autobiographical components from my childhood, as well as a coming-of-age story and a hero's myth.”

The first draft was long, he remembers: an almost Tarantino-esque 150 pages (“It was one of those classic first screenplays where you end up pouring everything you've got into it”). Nevertheless, it was a hit. CAA took him on as a client and started setting up meetings. “It was definitely a hot script,” he says. “People wanted to meet me, but the consensus was that, although it was a great writing sample, it was risky and bizarre and would be difficult to get made with a first-time director.” Were there offers to make the film without Kelly? “Yes. Now, I was only 24 years old but I knew that if I ever sold that script it would never see the light of day. Or they would make changes: they wouldn't set it in 1988, they'd make it present day, or they'd make it a horror film...”

Kelly fended off the offers for about a year. “I was just this belligerent, stubborn, foolish young writer whose movie was never gonna get made,” he laughs. “And then, lo and behold, Jason Schwartzman read it. He was just coming off Rushmore, so he had a lot of heat. I met with him and he really wanted to do it. And that's when it got to Nancy Juvonen, who's Drew Barrymore's partner at Flower Films. She read it and flipped out for it, so I went to meet them both on the set of the first Charlie's Angels in downtown LA. I asked Drew if she'd play the teacher too, and she said yes.”

All of a sudden, the project was alive again, with Kelly back on board to direct. “It validated me to have those two actors say they were cool with me directing it. So we were able to raise $4.5m to make the film – as long as we shot it that summer, right after Drew wrapped Charlie's Angels and before she was gonna go do this Penny Marshall film called Riding In Cars With Boys.”

Everything was in place, but there was just one problem: Schwartzman was committed to another movie and had to back out. “It was a terrifying weekend,” admits Kelly. “I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart. And then Drew left this wonderful message on my answering machine, saying, 'You know what? It's all gonna work out. Jason's amazing, but, hey, the timing didn't work out so we'll have to find someone else. I'm in this for you, so don't worry – we're partners in this.'”

“So we met a few different actors,” he continues, “and I was in Drew's office one day when in walks this kid called Jake Gyllenhaal. And right away, I knew he had the part. He was right out of Columbia University, he was 19 years old and he showed up looking like a hipster college kid, with the spiky hair and the baggy jeans. Right away he was Donnie. The financiers were cool with him – as long as we had Drew, they were fine with anything – and we were shooting by July 2000.”

The 28-day shoot in late summer of 2000 was, says kelly, a “crazy whirlwind”. He was now 25, but he knew in the first week – shooting Donnie's opening-credit cycle ride – that he could do it. “Once you get through the first shooting day, and then the first week, you know in your head and your heart if you're a filmmaker. And if you're not a filmmaker, everyone has figured it out too, and they're freaking out, thinking of ways to come in and either replace you or find someone to cover for you. I've seen it happen. Luckily for me, I was able to take the pressure.”

It was indeed lucky, because Kelly was fighting more battles than one. There were fights over the 80s setting, which he claims was “a metaphor for the end of the Reagan era”; the rabbit mask, which was deemed too weird (“It's supposed to freak you the fuck out!”); and even technical choices, such as Kelly's decision to use anamorphic lenses. Then there was the scene where they dropped the jet engine on Donnie's house, which could only be done once, using four cameras.

“It was an exhilarating, terrifying 28 days. Everything Donnie goes through, I was going through. It was a trial by fire. I was barely making each day. Literally, there were days on the film when my first AD nearly had a heart attack because he didn't think we'd be able to pull it off. I'm very used to that now – having people look at me like I'm crazy! – but we always figured out how to finish it.”

Against the odds, Donnie Darko was now in the can, exactly as its maker had intended. Excited, Kelly premiered his brainchild at the Sundance film festival in January 2001, where it received instant hype as the first competition entry ever to use CG. Everyone was on tenterhooks. Harvey Weinstein was in the crowd, wearing a Donnie Darko hat. It was the buzz title of the festival.

And it tanked.

“There was polite applause,” grins Kelly, “but people were confused. They were very disturbed, and it did not make them feel good – it made them feel confused, and freaked out, and alienated. This was still in the shadow of the Columbine massacre, remember, and here you've got a teenage kid with a gun who shoots someone... It was not seen to be a responsible film, and all the distributors turned us down. Harvey Weinstein had been a big cheerleader, but right afterwards he took the hat off, got a big megaphone and shouted, “I AM PASSING ON THIS MOVIE!!” Kelly laughs. “Well, not literally, but in 2000 Harvey was very much in his buying prime, and when he passed, other buyers passed too. We were the movie that everyone built up, and then immediately tore down.”

The next five months were miserable. “It almost went straight to cable. The financier was ready to dump it; they were sick of it. It was like we had the Ebola virus. Nobody wanted anything to do with us. And then this company called Newmarket, came to us. They had just released Christopher Nolan's Memento, which was also kind of an orphan at Sundance that year. Nobody wanted to release it; Newmarket had to release it themselves.” He laughs. “It's funny, everyone talks about the tastemakers at Sundance, and how they know what the zeitgeist is, but nobody wanted to buy Memento and Donnie Darko at Sundance 2001! But sometimes there are those years when the tastemakers get it wrong. And sure enough, Memento became a big hit. So they bought Donnie Darko and planned a very modest Halloween-themed release for it.”

Suddenly, things were looking up. And then just as Kelly was getting ready for his big moment, two planes slammed into the World Trade Centre. Six weeks later, the film about the troubled boy and the falling jet engine quietly disappeared from the few cinemas that were brave enough to book it.

At Sundance, critics said that Richard Kelly's career was over, and he started to believe it. But then a few small miracles began to occur. First, in March of 2002, he noticed that sales of the DVD were more than just respectable. And then one night, while we was walking the streets of New York wondering what to do with his life, he passed the Pioneer Two Boots cinema on East 3^rd Street. “The poster was in the window,” he recalls. “So I knocked on the door and I said to the manager, 'Why do you have my poster in your window?' And he was like 'That's you?! We're playing your movie every Friday night at midnight and it's selling out! Do you wanna come by?'”Kelly did, at 2am, and the place was packed. “It was, like, Woah. Maybe this movie has a second chance...”

It was here that Kelly realised that audiences had finally bought into the “rich mythology” of the world he created. “People most often ask me,” he says, “'Is Donnie going into a parallel universe or is it all just this dream that he has? Both are very valid interpretations. You can talk about schizophrenia and mental illness, or you can talk about a kid who has legitimate superpowers, who's actually travelling through time. I'm actually of the opinion that the superpowers and the time travel and the parallel universe – all that great science-fiction stuff – is much more interesting to me.

“I mean, we know so little about the human brain, why don't we use science fiction, the parallel universes and the wormholes as a way to explore mental illness? They can kind of work in tandem. Right? But I always thought of it as a superhero story. There's that line where [his girlfriend] says, 'Donnie Darko? What the hell kind of name is that? It's like some sort of superhero or something...' And Donnie's like, 'How do you know I'm not?' That, to me, is the whole movie.”

It hasn't made him rich – he doesn't live in a mansion, he doesn't even have a pool – but Kelly has a lot of affection for his debut, all its trials and heartaches nothwithstanding. “If anything,” he says, “Donnie Darko has taught me that movies that really have great ambition, a lot of detail and a lot of ideas, if they don't connect in cinemas, they will eventually connect on DVD. They'll find a way. I've gotten to make films” – Southand Tales, The Box – “that are trying to follow in the mythology I created with Darko, in terms of science fiction, physics and metaphysics. And it's been very challenging, very emotional, and at times very stressful.

“But I'm that kind of guy,” he grins. “Ambition is the only thing I know how to do, I guess.”