Donnie Darko

Richard Kelly" (born March 28, 1975 in Newport News, Virginia) is an American film director and writer, best known for 2001’s “Donnie Darko”. Born James Richard Kelly, son of Lane Kelly and Ennis Kelly, he grew up in Midlothian, Virginia where he attended Midlothian High School. When he was a child his father worked for NASA on the Mars Viking Lander program.He won a scholarship to Southern California to study at the USC School of Cinema-Television where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He made two short films at USC, “The Goodbye Place” and “Visceral Matter”, before graduating in 1997.

Kelly received only $9,000 to write and direct his film, Donnie Darko in 2001 and was given a budget of just $4,500,000. This was his first feature and was nominated for 21 small awards and won 11 of them including a nomination for a Saturn Award. At the age of 25 he was considered too young to be a professional screenwriter and director. The film later ended up number 2 on the 50 greatest independent films of all time, behind Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”. He has written many scripts that haven’t been produced, most famous of which are the adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” and Louis Sachar’s “Holes”. The latter screenplay is available as a PDF on (an unofficial Richard Kelly fansite) and Kelly hopes that he will one day secure the rights to the former script, so that fans may read that one as well. His fourth film, and second feature, “Southland Tales”, a rough cut of which screened at Cannes Film Festival 2006, was released November 16, 2007 and stars Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Kevin Smith and Miranda Richardson. It was nominated for the Golden Palm, the most prestigious award at Cannes Film Festival. In 2008, Kelly’s production company Darko Entertainment announced that it was producing the adaptation of the bestselling book “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” with director Bob Gosse. The book’s author Tucker Max detailed Kelly’s involvement in the process on his blog. After his latest movie, the critical and box office flop, The Box, he is currently working on a thriller “set in Manhattan in the year 2014. We hope to shoot the movie in 3-D, and part of the movie would be filmed using full CGI motion capture.”

Although Richard Kelly’s films differ considerably in setting and characters (Donnie Darko is about a suburban teenager, Southland Tales is an L.A. epic, and The Box is about a married couple in Richmond, Virginia), they share similar themes of time travel, existentialism, and spirituality. Richard Kelly’s style is composed of Steadicam based tracking shots and camera movement in general, satirical elements (as seen sparsely in Donnie Darko and much more prominently in Southland Tales), comedy, drama, and enigmatic plots. Some have compared him with David Lynch because of his foreboding, ominous style and puzzling narratives. Music also plays a large role in Richard Kelly’s films and one of his most famous scenes is in a closing segment of Donnie Darko where we are shown a montage of several characters awakening from their lucid dreams to Gary Jules’s version of the Tears for Fears song “Mad World”. —Wikipedia