Sarah Michelle Gellar

Booed at Cannes, but Now the Real Test

“IT’S about the end of Western civilization as we know it,” the writer-director Richard Kelly said of his second feature, “Southland Tales,” which finally arrives in theaters next month, six years after his first. “That’s why it needed to be an epic. That’s why it took so long.”

Another reason it has been held up: When the film, Mr. Kelly’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to his 2001 cult hit “Donnie Darko,” had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the critical reception — except for a few staunch defenders — ranged from negative to vicious.

“It was painful,” Mr. Kelly said of the Cannes screenings, which were marred by walkouts and boos. “I just thought, ‘Please let it be over.’” At his press conference, seemingly shellshocked, he fielded hostile questions and muttered that he hoped the film would not “bomb.” In interviews at the time he expressed concern that he would basically have to mutilate his movie, which then ran nearly three hours, if he ever hoped to get it released.

In hindsight the reaction seems typical of the distorting atmosphere of Cannes. Within a week of the festival, said Sean McKittrick, Mr. Kelly’s producer, they had three distribution offers. Sony ended up buying the movie and footing the bill for the re-editing, which proved far less intrusive than Mr. Kelly had expected.

“Part of me feels like I got away with murder,” Mr. Kelly, 32, said in a recent interview in Manhattan. “It’s a film some people might consider an inaccessible B movie, and it’s been slaughtered at the biggest film festival in the world. They could have been like, ‘You want more money now?’”

“Southland Tales,” set to open Nov. 14, unfolds during the 2008 presidential campaign in a parallel-reality America. The country is reeling from a 2005 nuclear attack in Texas and apparently heading for an even bigger catastrophe. A cosmic phantasmagoria studded with pop-culture luminaries including Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, Justin Timberlake and Sarah Michelle Gellar, the movie traces a tangled web of interlocking conspiracies. The result is something like a Comic Book of Revelation, an Armageddon countdown in a plastic-fantastic universe where celebrities are military pawns in the Iraq war, and the quest for alternative energy is linked to Nikola Tesla’s tidal-wave generator and a breach in the space-time continuum.

The great appeal of Mr. Kelly’s films — the reason they lend themselves to fanboy worship and scrutiny — is that they seem like parts of a bigger whole. An entire cosmology lies off screen, waiting to be unraveled. In “Donnie Darko,” which mingles teenage angst and time-warp physics, the plot pivots on a book called “The Philosophy of Time Travel.” Mr. Kelly wrote a few chapters of this imaginary tome, posted them on the film’s Web site (southlandtales.com) and later folded excerpts into the director’s cut.

“Southland” has even more extra-textual stuff. Early on, when comic book publishers proposed tie-ins, it occurred to Mr. Kelly that he could expand the narrative beyond his shooting budget. “I had this really elaborate back story inside me,” he said. He decided to present the movie as Chapters 4, 5 and 6 and conceived of the first three chapters as graphic novels, which he produced in collaboration with an artist, Brett Weldele. (Already published separately, they will be available as a single volume next month.)

As “Southland Tales” was going down in flames at Cannes, Mr. Kelly was still sorting through the details of his back story. He wrote the first book before the shoot and completed the second just before Cannes. He wrote the third while re-editing the movie. Working on them simultaneously helped clarify the big picture. “I needed to solve the riddle in my own mind,” he said.

Perhaps the most significant change in the new cut is a brisk prologue that charts the major developments in the film’s post-nuclear America. Mr. Kelly added special effects ($1 million worth) and reordered and tightened scenes (it now runs 2 hours 24 minutes, 19 minutes shorter than the Cannes version). The major casualty, lopped off at the studio’s urging, was a subplot with Janeane Garofalo as a general. He also rerecorded Mr. Timberlake’s voice-over.

“I misdirected Justin,” he said. “It was a little too sarcastic. When we did it again, I had him watch ‘Apocalypse Now,’ so he ended up doing it very deadpan, very dry,” like Martin Sheen’s narration in that film.

Mr. Kelly’s new cut may be easier to follow, but he has not altered the movie’s kaleidoscopic structure or diluted its psychedelic nature. In other words, it’s still far from commercial.

“It’s a challenge,” said Meyer Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, which is releasing it in partnership with Sony. “But that’s one of the things I like about it.” The distributors will be counting on the obsessive fan base for “Donnie Darko,” which opened to mixed reviews and weak grosses but went on to a robust midnight-movie and home-video afterlife.

It can’t hurt that even more than “Darko,” “Southland,” with its dizzying pile-up of references, invites repeat viewings. There are nods to Robert Aldrich’s doomsday noir “Kiss Me Deadly” and David Lynch’s Hollywood noir “Mulholland Drive.” But literary allusions seem to outnumber cinematic ones.

Mr. Kelly cited as important influences Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Chandler. The film’s antic absurdism and mad sprawl could be considered Pynchonesque. A recurring refrain inverts the conclusion of “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot (“This is the way the world ends/not with a whimper but a bang”), and the title of the first “Southland” book, “Two Roads Diverge,” comes from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. (The Republicans in the film have nominated the presidential ticket of Eliot-Frost.)

Karl Marx emerges as the movie’s presiding spirit. Marx’s hometown, Trier, Germany, and his wife’s family name, von Westphalen, are reference points. The political left in the film has devolved into a violent resistance movement known as the neo-Marxists. “I’m making fun of myself, the angry liberal,” Mr. Kelly said. “The joke is that things have gotten so bad that even neo-Marxists have been forced to bear arms.”

Characters are as apt to quote Marx and the New Testament as they are to recite lyrics by Jane’s Addiction, whose song “Three Days” is prominently featured. The music is as lovingly chosen as the ’80s staples in “Donnie Darko.” In a druggy fantasy sequence Mr. Timberlake’s character, a disfigured war veteran, sneering and clutching a can of Budweiser, lip-syncs to the Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done.” “I heard that song and couldn’t stop thinking about Iraq,” Mr. Kelly said.

“Southland Tales” simulates the oversaturation of the 21st-century mediascape and delights in, even as it mocks, the vulgar absurdities of celebrity culture. Ms. Gellar’s character, for example, is a multitasking, politically minded sex-film star — “Jenna Jameson meets Arianna Huffington,” Mr. Kelly said — with a “View”-like talk show and a hit song called “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime” (co-written by Mr. Kelly and to be released as a single).

“American pop culture is certainly embedded in the DNA of this film,” Mr. Kelly said. In casting the ensemble, which also includes Seann William Scott and Mandy Moore, he undertook a kind of Warholian experiment. “I wanted to utilize not just the talent of the actors but their pop value,” he said, likening the strategy to how Warhol “took the image of celebrity and corrupted it.”

Beneath their slick, jokey surfaces, both his films are rooted in primal anxieties. “Donnie Darko” evoked the nuclear dread of an ’80s childhood. “I remember going to bed at night and being afraid of the bomb,” Mr. Kelly said. “Southland Tales,” he added, originates in part from that “childlike fear” being reawakened after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Kelly’s apocalyptic fever dreams, centered as they are on messianic figures, riff on the Christian notion of end times. This dovetails with the political critique of “Southland Tales.” “Some might argue the motivation for Iraq is rooted in fundamental Christian ideology,” he said. To his befuddlement “Donnie Darko” has attracted a sizable Catholic following. “I’ve heard that it reinforces Catholic values,” he said.

Mr. Kelly, who grew up in Richmond, Va., had an agnostic upbringing. “My mother did try to be a good Texas Methodist,” he said, taking her boys to church, but the influence of his father, a NASA scientist, won out. To research the biblical dimensions of “Southland Tales,” he said, sheepishly, “I bought ‘The Book of Revelation for Dummies.’”

Despite having directed only two features, Mr. Kelly wrote furiously through his 20s, “out of fear,” he said, that he would later lose his nerve and inspiration. He now has “a drawerful of scripts,” one of which will be the basis for his next feature, “The Box,” a psychological thriller adapted from Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button” that he is about to start shooting with Cameron Diaz. He’s aiming for “something a studio can comfortably put on 3,000 screens,” he said.

Mr. Kelly could have chosen a safer sophomore film, but he made “Southland Tales” to capitalize on a “window of opportunity,” he said. “Who knows if I’ll ever be able to take these kinds of risks again.” “Donnie Darko” is set during the Bush-Dukakis contest of 1988; Mr. Kelly said that at the time of its release he had never voted in a general election. But he has since become politicized by the war and now considers “Southland Tales” an activist salvo.

Citing the viral popularity of “Donnie Darko,” he said: “We’re hoping with this to get kids turned on in a more political way. You can use subversive humor as your delivery mechanism. It’s like, hey, none of this is real, yet, but it certainly could be.”

“When the elections are lost again and again and again, someone’s going to start selling automatic weapons out of their ice cream truck,” he continued, referring to a sequence in the film. “I feel like maybe I’m being a neo-Marxist, but instead of selling guns I made this movie.”