The director of the cult favorite Donnie Darko was once hailed as the next David Lynch. Now, as fans rediscover his 2007 flop Southland Tales, he explains why patience is still a virtue and Trump’s victory was a ‘grotesque inevitability’

Talking with the writer and director Richard Kelly, it’s easy to steer the conversation toward the end of the world. After all, Kelly developed a fervent cult following (and alienated it) through tales of prophesied apocalypse – 2001’s cult curio Donnie Darko and 2007’s cult-classic-in-the-making Southland Tales. But it’s not the collapsing buildings or rivers of blood that fascinate Kelly; it’s what comes right before. The creeping panic. The normalizing of insanity. The casual disregard for your neighbor. The lump in your throat that signifies your newfound understanding that this was inevitable.

If those feelings sounds familiar in our current Trump-addled dystopia, that was not Kelly’s intention. Southland Tales, a post-9/11 satire melded with a retelling of the Book of Revelation that also includes a complex theory of time travel, was never meant to feel like a pre-game show for the next decade of global misery.

The sprawling narrative – set in an alternative 2008 in which a nuclear attack on Abilene, Texas, triggers a third world war – revolves around an amnesiac action star named Boxer Santaros (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) who falls in love with a porn star/talkshow host/entrepreneur/pop star/psychic who goes by the professional name Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who has written a screenplay about the end times.

Oh, and there’s also a government agency dedicated to spying on Americans, an underground neo-Marxist cult, an alternative energy source that might be ripping a hole in the space-time continuum, a United States military sponsored by Hustler and Bud Light, and a mind-altering drug that keeps American soldiers docile and dependent. Jon Lovitz plays a racist cop, Seann William Scott plays identical twin police officers, Amy Poehler shows up as an anarchist improv comic, Justin Timberlake plays a drug-addled war veteran and Wallace Shawn of The Princess Bride fame is the antichrist (or a reasonable facsimile).

I really wanted it to be something that you would get lost in and that would sustain multiple viewings

It’s overwhelming to process, and reflects so much of the anxiety of our age, even if it isn’t always pleasant to watch. “I really wanted it to be something that you would get lost in and that would sustain multiple viewings,” Kelly tells me over dinner in Los Angeles. When discussing the film, his eyes widen and he projects an impish yet tentative enthusiasm – as though he’s feeling out whether you’re going to receive his ideas without judgment. “Now, that ambition can be a self-defeating prophecy, as we saw clearly.”

Kelly seems wistful about the experience of making and releasing the film, which, after a disastrous Cannes screening at which the film was booed heavily, almost lost theatrical distribution. “We were in Boston, in pre-production on [his Southland Tales follow-up] The Box, the weekend Southland Tales opened in 50-some theaters. The upcoming Monday was our first day of principal photography. We were scrambling for our first day. We had done the AFI Fest premiere and they rushed me back to Boston. And then, I remember that morning, we’re shooting Cameron [Diaz] and Frank Langella, this really emotional scene in the Boston Public Library. Someone comes up to me and tells me per-screen averages on Southland Tales. It was such a bummer.” A screening Kelly attended with the actor James Marsden was attended by only four other people. Roger Ebert likened the film to “the third day of a pitch session on speed”. One of the rare positive reviews of the film came from the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who called it “funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired”.

“I definitely remain proud of the ambition of it. I feel like sometimes things just need time to marinate,” he says. The film has started to find a new audience. At the time of our meeting, he’s in between hosting screenings of Southland Tales thanks to a roadshow tour of the film sponsored by the Alamo Drafthouse chain of arthouse theaters. The newfound appreciation for Southland Tales by both audiences and emerging pockets of critics hasn’t yet translated to tangible opportunities for Kelly. “I don’t ever want to feel defeated or that I’ve let the system defeat me,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Michelle Gellar in Southland Tales. Photograph: Publicity image from film company

Southland Tales finding an audience almost 10 years later would not mark the first time one of Kelly’s films gained esteem upon second (or third) glance. Donnie Darko grossed a scant $517,375 when it was released a month after 9/11. When it found a huge audience on video and DVD, Kelly became a hot commodity, an heir apparent to the surrealist tradition of directors like David Lynch. “Sometimes, the wind is at your back. Sometimes, it’s at your front,” Kelly says about the ups and downs of his career. Darko remains his greatest up, a film that’s become a touchstone work for the generation that grew up with it. “Darko was a disaster at Sundance too,” he tells me. “No one remembers that, but it was. I’m grateful for any rosy glow of hindsight. I remember it took us almost six months to sell the movie. It almost went directly to the Starz network. We had to beg them to put it in theaters. Christopher Nolan stepped in and convinced Newmarket to put it in theaters.”

Darko was a disaster at Sundance. Christopher Nolan stepped in and convinced Newmarket to put it in theaters

After those issues, Kelly could have gone the expected route and taken on a big-budget studio tentpole. He could have directed the sequel, which he declined to do (it ended up being terrible and going straight to DVD). Instead, he chose this peculiar, dense story about the decline of American power.

President-elect Donald Trump was only a reality show curiosity when Southland Tales was released, but his mix of profane and pious could easily have made him a character in the film. “I think that Donald Trump is this grotesque inevitability that has gotten this far because there was something really, really dangerous hiding beneath the surface, that has been hiding beneath the surface for many, many years.” The Republicans Kelly imagined in Southland Tales were the neocon religious zealots that seem almost quaint to modern eyes. They seemed like the ultimate boogeymen in 2007, but as Kelly points out, “no one in the Bush family would even show up at the RNC [Republican national convention]”.

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What Southland Tales expressed better than most politically charged films of the Bush era was the sentiment that it would get worse, that something had been unleashed that could not be put back. “At the time that we were making Southland Tales, it was Iraq war and Britney Spears. That dichotomy on your TV screen. The branding and everything was happening. It seemed inevitable that everyone would start to co-opt branding. Social media hadn’t really exploded yet. To see politicians going after each other on Twitter, it’s bizarre. To see Elizabeth Warren quoting the monorail on the Simpsons. To see politicians co-opting this millennial social media branding, it’s a blurring of the lines.”

Each of his three films reflects that sheepish rebellion that is part of his personality. Donnie Darko was a mostly passive protagonist struggling against both the oppressive system of high school and the levers of fate that he could only pull at the film’s climax. Boxer Santaros is a pawn in a conflict between fascism and socialism, religion and science, and love and death. Eventually, those characters succumb to a power greater than any on Earth, something unknowable. So does Kelly think all this is down to higher power pulling the strings?

“I don’t think any of this happened by accident. That’s just depressing and absurd, in my opinion,” he answers. “I do think there’s a design to things, and we can never hope to know it in any of our lifetimes. Part of the challenge is trying to make sense of it. That’s what’s cathartic for me as an artist, to try to make sense of it.”