Filmmaker Richard Kelly astonished an industry with 2001 cult classic “Donnie Darko”. The film promised the arrival of exciting new talent in Kelly, helped turned Jake Gyllenhaal into a star and is just an all-round great film.
Things began to fall apart a few years later. A highly anticipated director’s cut became the poster child for showing how a theatrical version can be far superior. His highly anticipated second effort “Southland Tales” arrived at Cannes to famously dismal reviews.
Kelly heavily re-edited that film which not only didn’t improve reviews, it subsequently flopped at the box-office. Kelly is currently working on releasing the Cannes cut of the film sometime soon.
His third film was 2009’s “The Box,” a feature film spin on a Richard Matheson short story, and landed both mixed-weak reviews and soft box-office – garnering just $33 million off a $30 million budget.
Over a decade since the film’s release, Kelly says he’s interested in releasing a Director’s Cut of “The Box” and explains to Slashfilm that there’s a ton of material to work with:
“There is a lot more there. There’s probably 45 minutes of scenes that never saw the light of day. Out of all of it, I’d say there could be 10-15 minutes, maybe more with a few additional visuals effects, that could go into that film.
A lot of the stuff that got cut out of The Box was big, eccentric, head-trip stuff. Now, I think all these years later, audiences are a little more open to cerebral sci-fi material… I think it would be really exciting to expand upon the world we were exploring in that film. That could happen.
I would love to revisit The Box at some point because I do think there is a lot more there, a lot more big science-fiction ideas. There were also a lot of big set-pieces that got cut. Expensive stuff. I was proud we pulled it off and shot it.”
Amongst the few deleted scenes are Arthur (James Marsden) and Norma (Cameron Diaz) debating pressing the button, a chase scene with Arthur in the library, and an eight-minute-long action sequence near the film’s end.
Kelly hasn’t directed a movie since “The Box” but has been working pretty heavily, and he’s ready to go. He says that despite a lot of “false starts” with things over the years, there are a “lot of exciting things on the horizon… when finally the first thing happens, it’ll hopefully be a nonstop flow of production. All of the material is there.”
