Director Richard Kelly Is Working on a Reinvention of SOUTHLAND TALES That He Hopes to Make One Day

After director Richard Kelly made Donnie Darko, he set out to develop an ambitious epic titled Southland Tales. While the film had some problems, I actually enjoyed this film and appreciated what Kelly was trying to do in telling the story.

Later this month, the original cut of the film, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival, will be released for the first time ever. The film will be released on Blu-ray and will include 15 minutes of additional footage that was initially cut from the film because the studio panicked after the film’s festival debut.

The filmmaker still has a vision that he’d like to fully realize for this film, and he’s currently working on a reinvention of Southland Tales that he hopes to make someday. This new version of the story would incorporate the stories from the prequel comics that were released when the movie came to home video. During a recent interview with CB, he said:

"There's been a significant amount of work done on revisiting Southland Tales. I'm actually putting together a polish on what I'm putting together, which is a polish on it, which is using the graphic novel prequels that were published....You'll see in the existing version of Southland Tales is chapters 4-6, so there's basically a prequel companion film that could, if it's made, theoretically continue onward into an expanded version of the existing film with new footage, and the most ideal version it would basically be a six-hour film, split in two, and within each film there's 3 chapters. So it's like a six-chapter story, but it would be presented in two epic movies, like a big double feature, that in an ideal world could exist on a streaming platform of something that is more amenable to these sort of long-form stories.

“If people want to skip forward to the chapters, they would have that option, but in an ideal world, it would be presented as a six-hour project split into two big feature films. There's definitely been an enormous amount of work that I've done taking the graphic novels and expanding them and adapting them into new screenplays, which is the first three chapters and then new material that would be incorporated into the existing film. So that is like the most exciting and ambitious version of what I would love to do with Southland Tales, and obviously there's all sorts of caveats and questions surrounding all that, but it's been very therapeutic for me to do the work and to try and put it together and have it ready for people to look at and to decide whether that's something worth pursuing.

“I'm very excited by it and I feel like there's definitely a lot more there in this world, that's worth of exploration, and there's a lot of new, surprising things that I think could really make it a much more satisfying experience. It was never really going to be a satisfying story within the parameters of a single feature film; it was just too much to fit into those parameters.”

I’d love to see Kelly get to fully realize his vision for this movie. The filmmaker is well aware that this sounds like what Zack Snyder is doing with Justice League and explains:

"We are entering into a new world of digesting narratives, and with the sort of streaming platforms, we have sort of trained the audience into being more open to digesting longer stories that sort of exist in that netherworld that exists between a feature film and a long-form television series. You see what Steve McQueen has just done with the Small Ax anthology on Amazon and you're seeing what Zack Snyder is working on with Justice League, and I think that if you have a film that can't really exist normally in the traditional theatrical distribution space, that has these running time requirements, you look at what Scorsese did with The Irishman.

“These are films that need to exist in a streaming platform but they're still films. They have the authorship of they're all directed by the same person and the same screenwriter and the same cinematographer. That's what's most exciting about the streaming revolution that we're experiencing right now, is maybe we'll start to expand the definition of what a film is. If it has a single director and a single screenwriter and it meets the general criteria of what a film is, I think we can maybe see an expansion of that definition. Even the way the Oscars are changing their rules in terms of streaming and eligibility, the streaming world can maybe start to imagine what a feature film is.

“I'm trying to embrace all this change with a positive attitude and if it affords me the opportunity to revisit something like Southland Tales...that's very exciting to me, and I'm going to lean into that and I”m going to do the work and do my best to try and sell everyone on the idea."

If you don’t remember what the film was about, “With the United States under the threat of nuclear attack, the lives of several people converge in a dystopian Los Angeles. Movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) plans his next film with the help of ambitious porn actress Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and troubled policeman Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott). Meanwhile, Marxist revolutionaries, greedy corporations and secretive government agencies pursue their separate agendas among a paranoid populace.”

What do you think about Kelly reinventing Southland Tales? If you saw the first film, what did you think of it?

Southland Tales will arrive on Blu-ray on January 26, 2021.