How did Christopher Nolan help Richard Kelly make ‘Donnie Darko’?
Richard Kelly’s feature-length directorial debut became an instant cult classic. 2001’s Donnie Darko told the bizarre story of a troubled teenager haunted by premonitions that the world will end in 28 days. It propelled forth Kelly’s career as well as a number of its young actors. However, getting the film into cinemas was not all that easy and was achieved, in part, through the tenacity of Christopher Nolan.
Kelly explained, “Christopher Nolan [and I] were at Sundance together in 2001, and Christopher won the screenwriting award. All the distributors that year were scared of this movie [Memento], and they were scared of Donnie Darko. They thought they were too cerebral, and so the company that financed Memento went on to self-distribute it.”
He added, “Our movie was orphaned, and no one would distribute it, and we were just sitting there, and then the executive producer of Memento, Aaron Ryder, brought Donnie Darko into the screen for the Newmarket people, and he strategically invited Christopher and his wife to the screening. They raved about the movie to the Newmarket executives and convinced them to buy it.”
So not only was Kelly himself fortunate to have Nolan on hand to give Donnie Darko’s eventual distributors a nudge in the right direction, but we as an audience were somewhat lucky to see the film at all too. “Then we were off to the races, and we got a theatrical little distribution deal for right after Halloween,” Kelly added. “Christopher Nolan had a lot to do with that, in kind of saving my career.”
Perhaps another beneficiary of Nolan’s belief in Kelly and Donnie Darko was its lead actor Jake Gyllenhaal who has one of his breakthrough roles in the film. Kelly said of Gyllenhaal, “He came in for a meeting on Donnie Darko, and within 30 seconds, I’m like, ‘Yep, you got the part’.”
He added, “He was doing all sorts of little things – I wasn’t even aware of what he was doing because I was so consumed with the responsibility of directing my first film – but he was just doing all these little things. That was a transformative performance. I think he became this great actor over the course of that whole experience.”
As for Kelly’s praise for Nolan and his filmmaking techniques, he said, “I love Interstellar; it’s one of my favourite Christopher Nolan films. The way he used miniatures is just extraordinary. Very few people are able to do that, and I love the way Chris is embracing the old-school kind of analogue technology, and he does everything real. Few people can do that, but I love that he’s holding onto that kind of old-school, old-fashioned nuts and bolts filmmaking.”
