Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, released in 2001, was and remains the greatest cult film of the 21st century. His sophomore effort, Southland Tales, not so much: In the most savage review we could find, the New York Sun’s Bruce Bennett calls Southland “the worst American movie of the century thus far.” Not everyone hates it, though: Across town, Newsday’s Jan Stuart scored it three-and-a-half stars—higher marks than he gave both Rendition and American Gangster—and the Times granted it “Critics’ Pick” status.

It must be said, though, that most of the reviews are negative—and that the film never had a chance. First, you’ve got the setup: The story actually starts in a series of graphic novels and ends on the movie screen—a storytelling tactic that had Donnie Darko obsessives salivating but failed to entice stodgy critics. What, you mean we have to read something before we see the movie? That’s a drag. (Those so inclined can obtain the first of the three graphic novel prequels in PDF form here.) Worse, it’s still got a stink on it from Cannes. In May 2006 the film showed at Cannes to disastrous result: A chorus of boos, a mass walkout. In 240 minutes, Southland went from presumptive festival darling to certain dog. The buzz went silent; magazines (like this one) that had assigned interviews or feature stories on Kelly and his film put them on the shelf. In the 18 months since Cannes, Kelly has been fiddling with Southland to bring it to its present maybe-not-all-that-bad state. Freelance writer Jim McLauchlin spoke with him in 2006.

PLAYBOY: A little background please: Who are you, where’d you come from, what are you doing here?
KELLY: I always dreamed of being a filmmaker, but it wasn’t something I was always comfortable talking about, coming from a background in a Red State where being an artist is not something you boast about. “Go out in the woods and shoot something, boy!” But I hope that attitude’s changed, and I hope it’s gotten better. I don’t know for sure, but I hope kids who grow up with an interest in the arts don’t feel embarrassed about it, and that there are supports in place that allow them to get out of the mold that public education presents of the ‘right’ and responsible way to do things. We’re not all prom kings. Then again, if kids can just get out of high school without shooting everyone and blowing the place up, maybe that’s the best we can hope for. At USC, I found an environment that was simultaneously very liberal with the university being liberal and Los Angeles being this great melting pot where any ambition is seemingly embraced, but quickly balanced that with a very conservative influence by immediately joining a fraternity filled with a bunch of business majors from Orange County who wanted to get into investment banking. I made friends with a lot of these people, and many are friends to this day, but I still felt an embarrassment among these people for being in the film school, thinking it wasn’t a “real” or a worthy major.

PLAYBOY: In the wake of Donnie Darko, are you the overnight sensation that took five years to become an overnight sensation?
KELLY: Ha! We had a great Sundance, but when we came out of Sundance, the film was damaged in the perception of the distribution system in Hollywood. Everyone had the perception that the film wasn’t marketable, that there was no audience for it. The acquisition powers-that-be at Sundance were kinda confused by all the hype on the film. They didn’t know what to think of it. You had to watch it a couple times to figure it out and … it was done. It was cooked. It was cooked in their minds. It was gonna go straight to home video, and it almost did. It almost went straight to the Starz market. New Market rescued it, but it was pretty much doomed to be in-and-out of theaters in a week or two, and that’s pretty much what happened. But it got resurrected and found by a lot more people over time, and in the UK, and Italy and Australia. It’s the film that surprisingly had these marathon legs. That’s what I’m most proud of. It’s given me a formula, a design principle to design Southland Tales around, and the narrative in that. Southland Tales operates under the same principle as Donnie Darko in that it requires—probably—multiple viewings to process all the plot in its entirety. There are many, many clues to this puzzle. Both films are puzzles that the audience needs to try to solve.

PLAYBOY: Donnie Darko has had huge resonance in a very hardcore audience. Why did it resonate with people so strongly, and why did it take so long?
KELLY: Because it requires the audience to do a lot of thinking, and I think maybe that’s something audiences aren’t used to doing in a lot of films. A lot of films tend to do all the work for you, and cross all the Ts and dot all the Is. Maybe it’s made audiences a little lazy, or maybe the marketing machine is so caught up in demographics or research scores that a lot of narrative filmmaking has become kind of predictable. So the open-ended nature of Donnie Darko, that puzzle nature, is kind of intriguing because there’s a bottomless pit of clues. We tapped into ideas of science, philosophy, dream theory, alternate dimensions, you name it. We also tried to make it as funny as possible, because that’s a great way to deliver the ideas and information. We’re doing that even more with Southland Tales—using comedy to deliver social commentary. We’ve designed this epic political cartoon that deals with a lot of issues that our country is now facing.

PLAYBOY: You wrote Donnie Darko. You shot Donnie Darko. The world is still confused, albeit intrigued, by Donnie Darko. In as tight a nutshell as you can put it, what’s it all about?
KELLY: In the end, it’s about … it’s about … it’s about sacrifices, I think? Sacrifices that must be made by every individual to come to terms with the truth. That’s a very tough question to answer. Even for me. The answer changes every day, and that’s my answer for today. Call me Friday, we’ll see what’s changed.

PLAYBOY: This is a four-part saga; three books and one movie. How ambitious/crazy is it to roll something out like this across multiple platforms and through multiple chapters?
KELLY: Like Pulp Fiction had three chapters, this has three chapters. The graphic novels are chapters 1, 2 and 3, and the movie has 4, 5 and 6. I’m definitely ambitious, and I’ve definitely pushed myself to the brink of insanity over the past year and a half. I don’t think I’ll ever embark on anything this ambitious ever again in my life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do something like this again. We’ve been in production on a movie with a budget of $16.9 million, but has a scope and scale of something three times that. Trying to deliver that, and at the same time writing and working with an illustrator to publish three 100-page graphic novels that tie the entire tapestry to the plot together and weave all those threads—it’s been an ordeal. I feel like 20% of my brain is melted already. With God knows how much to go. And all this without drugs!

PLAYBOY: What’s the film all about and how is it a “political cartoon”?
KELLY: Well, I think we really need a political cartoon right now. Or at least people from my generation need it right now. I feel there are so many things young people need to be talking about right now, whether it’s homeland security, counter-terrorism surveillance, border security, alternative fuel systems or lack thereof, and the nature of tabloid culture and how it affects people. There are a lot of these issues explored as part of the plot until it becomes this big apocalyptic tapestry. The reason why I’ve cast this film with a lot of people with this pop sensibility—the Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Kevin Smith—is to sort of use their pop culture status as a way to bring in an audience that might not otherwise be interested in a big political film. I tempt ’em with candy, and them make them eat their vegetables. So if there’s a bunch of people who love pro wrestling a love the Rock and they go see this movie, I hope they’ll laugh at a lot of the subversive humor. But they’ll also be getting exposed to Karl Marx and ideas about alternative fuels. If I’ve succeeded in delivering some of these ideas in that way, then maybe we’ve succeeded in doing something new. And if they embrace and discuss some of these issues, and we make some progress on the front of cultural awareness, hell—I’ll call that a win.

PLAYBOY: Will the film make sense to people who haven’t read the graphic novels?
KELLY: The film literally begins right after the cliffhanger on the final page of the final graphic novel. We recap as much of the story as needs to be recapped in the film, and start right off with a bang. And in terms of backstory, if the film is another puzzle, the graphic novels reveal the solution to many of those puzzles in the movie. And it opens up all new puzzles at the same time. We started with the graphic novels to whet the appetite of the core audience I developed with Donnie Darko, and anybody else who might be curious about this.

PLAYBOY: Are you a comic geek yourself?
KELLY: I’ve sort of become one in the process of this whole thing. Kevin Smith and Bob Chapman are partners in publishing this, and in the process of working with them, I’ve discovered a lot of comic properties and really come to enjoy them. I think comics are becoming more literate, and more accepted among people who might consider themselves of “higher taste.” In the past, I think comics have been ghettoized as not being as literate as a novel or a similar piece of literary fiction. But now you’re seeing comics being made into films that are nominated for Academy Awards, such as Road to Perdition or A History of Violence. With the graphic novels, Kevin Smith and Bob Chapman rolled the dice and agreed to finance the art and the publication of these books based on a film that didn’t even have a domestic distributor yet. It was very generous of them to do that. This was completely uncharted territory.

PLAYBOY: What’s the eventual dream for you? You’ve adapted a Kurt Vonnegut novel for the screen, yes?
KELLY: Yes, and it will probably never see the light of day, but it was fun. The dream is just to really get these ideas across to people in an interesting format, and make people think. I came out here from Virginia with two suitcases and an art scholarship. So if I get hit by a bus tomorrow I’m happy with what I’ve done.

PLAYBOY: These movies are puzzles, they’re satire, they’re political—don’t you just want to do something with monkeys, tits and car chases?
KELLY: Absolutely. I like monkeys, I like tits, and I’m a fan of car chases as well. So I guess the drill is to do a movie that has all three of those things, and is still a little outside the box. Southland Tales has monkeys. There are no exposed breasts, but there are porn stars talking a lot about porn things. And there are car chases. And car accidents! So I feel like I’m taking those elements that are commercial and non-pretentious and use them as a delivery mechanism for scientific and political ideas. If you look at The Simpsons, obviously one of the great achievements of pop culture in our time, they do the same thing. They deliver on so many levels. And there’s no better delivery mechanism for subversive thought than comedy and pop culture.