DONNIE DARKO Director Richard Kelly is Looking To Release an Extended Version of THE BOX
Director Richard Kelly has made some pretty ambitious and confounding movies over the course of his career with films like Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, which are both known for their complex and layered stories. Kelly certainly has a knack for making wild movies that divide audiences.
In 2009, the filmmaker made a movie titled The Box, which was based on Richard Matheson's 1970 short story "Button, Button." This might be considered his most normal film, but it still takes you on a crazy journey.
In the film, “a suburban couple, Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden), face a moral dilemma when they receive a gift that bears irrevocable consequences. With the press of a button, their simple wooden box will bestow $1 million; however, a stranger somewhere else will die, at the same time. The box will be theirs for only 24 hours, and as time ticks away, Norma and Arthur confront the depth of their humanity as they consider their choices.”
It really was a solid and fascinating film! Well, the director wants to release an extended cut one day, and when asked about that in an interview with The Film Stage, Kelly said:
"No, nothing official yet. I've always talked about that as something on my wish list to do. There have not been any official discussions as of yet. I would love to get to that -- it's on my priority list, that's for sure. I think it's just a question of timing and the arsenal of stuff I have in the works. When -- knock on wood, hopefully -- the floodgates open and I'm really, actively making new stuff again, I would love if that could ever happen. There's visual-effects costs associated with doing that; there's lots of footage.
"But some of the sequences that could, hypothetically, go back into that movie, there would be some visual-effects costs. It's not anything obscenely expensive, by any means, but it's not just throwing in a couple... it's a fair amount of CGI and sound-mixing and opening up the edit. I would absolutely love to do that at some point, and I know that, now in the era of streaming, there's more of an appetite for that."
When talking about some of the scenes cut from the film during a screening that highlighted scenes cut, Kelly said:
"In the trailer that they released for that movie there were a lot of shots that are not in the movie that are from the deleted scenes. So he had still images of James Marsden and Cameron Diaz in the padded room, the white and mysterious padded room; Cameron in the NASA hanger. These scenes are not in the movie! And he had cards printed up with color still frames, and he was using them like he was at a NASA presentation or a pitch meeting, and it was so funny: I was walking everyone through all the really cool, exciting stuff that we shot. It's a lot of big, cinematic stuff. So I don't know.
"It was not easy having to lift those scenes out, but I think now -- in hindsight -- people would appreciate them more. It was some abstract stuff: transcendental gateways and NASA conspiracy stuff. It's wild stuff, but the movie is just one big, elaborate experiment -- a psychological, transcendental experiment -- and it's not meant to make sense at the end of the day."
I liked The Box and I hope that one day Kelly actually gets to release his extended cut of the film. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you should check it out! Here’s the trailer: