A quarter century after Donnie Darko landed at Sundance and launched a cult of millennial goths, the film’s writer-director, Richard Kelly, is about to release the beginning of a long-awaited, multi-pronged series of sequels. It begins with The Philosophy Of Time Travel, an 800-page piece of found-document fiction set 14 months after the film’s conclusion. Kelly spent a decade writing the book, which lands in bookstores this fall for the film’s 25th anniversary. Kelly hopes the book will be the first part of a Donnie Darko sequel series, including an animated adaptation of Time Travel that features some motion capture. The story would then move on to a new live-action film set 28 years after the original.
Darko was an immediate hit with disaffected millennials in the post-9/11 malaise that sent them turning to Echo And The Bunnymen for comfort. The film was enough to get Kelly’s star-studded madcap sci-fi whatsit Southland Tales into theaters, giving the decade’s executives a monster, auteur-driven bomb to point to whenever an ambitious filmmaker wanted to do something that wouldn’t be appreciated until several years later. Kelly’s last film, The Box, was released in 2009, which was the year he produced an adaptation of I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, which, frankly, Kelly should never live down.
Despite working with Tucker Max, Kelly tells Variety he’s stayed in touch with the cast, which he’s “fairly certain [is] aware” that he’s been working on an 800-page Darko sequel book and multiple sequel films. If they’re not, this would be a good time to tell them that “there’s a lot of really exciting stuff that happens starting around 2015/2016.” A full cast reunion is Kelly’s “caveat” on “doing a real sequel” because of its “gigantic scale, “price tag,” and the fact that “it’s hard to pull off[…]because it’s multiple movies.” That cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Seth Rogen, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Noah Wyle. Hard to image what studio would turn down a “big, gigantic, unwieldy things” with a high price tag for a film director that doesn’t have a strong track record, but that cast would certainly help get it over the line. Still, Kelly doesn’t want to “pressure” anyone to join the project and instead will “let the marketplace decide,” which includes Darko‘s global fan base. If those actors don’t want to be a part of it, he has new characters in the story and “all this wonderful technology that didn’t exist five years ago,” which we speculate will be used to de-age his cast or, in the case of Patrick Swayze, resurrect them. Still, here’s the very clean and comprehensible description of the book Kelly offered Variety:
“I think there’s a lot of surprises when you realize who the characters really are in the reality of Southern California, how they were drawn into this collective dream. They were drawn into this thing called the tangent universe, this lunar month, this dream that lasted for 28 days that they collectively all experienced together, and they’re sort of all trying to piece it together. And they form this sort of support group that turns into a cult, in a way, and they all come together. There’s a lot of surprises about who they are, and I think for me it was really gratifying to see all the characters start to interact with each other in response to Donnie’s death, and they all become really close friends. And there are characters who are villainous in the movie who you realize in real life they’re not villainous at all; they might have done horrible things in the dream of the first movie, but when you meet them in the reality of the sequel, they’re trying to process why they did horrible things in this dream, and they’re coming to terms with it and they’re analyzing it just like the fans are analyzing the movie. So […] I wanted to write a really gratifying part for all the actors. And that goes down the line even to some of the actors who only appear in one or two scenes. You’ll see that they have really fleshed out narrative arcs and everything.”
The Philosophy Of Time Travel hits bookshelves later this year.
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