Donnie Darko's writer-director plans a sequel
Richard Kelly says it’ll be “much bigger and more ambitious”
As the recent 15th anniversary restoration and UK re-release shows, there’s a lot of love around for Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly’s mysterious teen sci-fi drama from 2001. Initially a box-office and critical failure when it was released in the States, the film found a dedicated audience when it hit UK cinemas a year later, before becoming a cult favourite with students everywhere on DVD. And now Kelly has revealed he has a sequel in mind.
“I think there’s something much bigger and more ambitious to do in [Donnie Darko’s] universe,” he told HMV. “It’s big and expensive and I think there’s time to get to that. I want to make sure we’ve got the budget to do it justice and not to compromise anything. Another story in this world needs resources and we need to have that in place. I need to get my next film out of the gate and then we can go back and look at it.”
Donnie Darko already has a sequel of course: S. Darko, which centers on Donnie Darko’s younger sister, Samantha, seven years after the events of the first film. No one much likes it (it currently holds a 13% 'Fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes) least of all Kelly, who had no involvement in the production. “I’ve never seen it – it was horribly violating,” Kelly told NME earlier in the year. “It was incredibly painful to think about what they were doing, it made me very angry, filled with rage.”