Donnie Darko – Mad World

It is the story of  a movie ending with a plane crash, that came out in the United States right after 9/11…If Donnie Darko suffered a box-office flop because of the circumstances, it since earned its status of a cult movie, thanks to the word spreading of his fanbase, which is always getting bigger and more obsessed with the mysteries of this labyrinthine teen movie, directed by a 25 years-old Lynch and Spielberg fan. He revealed Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, brought back Patrick Swayze as a scary guru  and a melancholic version of the song « Mad World »…

For a moment, Richard Kelly was perceived as the new golden boy of indie cinema, before Southland Tales (2006) made it all fall apart. Booed at the Cannes film festival, re-edited in haste and never distributed in France, this big pop-satyrical anticipation fresco is still waiting to be reevaluated and remains in the state of a cursed movie. A malediction calling for another, the director has been AWOL since his movie The Box (2009), another trip-movie, more nuanced than the others, but more innocuous too. We knew Kelly was focused on the writing of new scripts, but we were scared to see him disappear into the the dream factory limbos…He reappeared in front of our camera to talk about the theatrical rerun of Donnie Darko, in two versions restored in 4K, including the 2004 director’s cut. An opportunity to go back to our teenage years while waiting for his new beginning (soon, Kelly assured us).

On November 13th in a collector DVD and Blue-Ray boxset available here.