TORONTO -- It was an offer he couldn't refuse. The Cannes Film Festival invited writer-director Richard Kelly to screen his second feature as part of its prestigious competition section. So Kelly took his "Southland Tales" to France in 2006, even though there was work still to be done on it.
The response? Disastrous. A "career killer," according to more than one industry watcher. Variety's review called it "pretentious, overreaching and fatally unfocused." The Village Voice said it was "a high-voltage farrago of unsynopsizable plots and counterplots" -- and that was one of the kind notices.
"Even with all that happened, I don't regret it," Kelly said recently of the experience. "Now that all the dust has settled, the movie is actually better off because of it. Honestly, it is. The hope is we can still somehow recover and the movie can find an audience."
Kelly will soon find out. He and his team, including producing partner Sean McKittrick, have been hard at work on revising the film nearly nonstop since that awful summer. "Southland Tales," which will be released Nov. 9, has been trimmed by approximately 20 minutes since Cannes and now has about 600 visual-effects shots, of which at least 100 are completely new.
"One of the biggest knocks on the movie was that it was too long," Kelly said. "I knew it was too long. But it's like a really elaborate puzzle. Like Jenga, you pull out enough blocks and it's still structurally sound; you pull out too many and it starts to collapse."
The now 2-hour, 24-minute story is purposefully byzantine for even the most attentive of viewers. Characters have multiple names and identities, plot strands ebb, flow and intersect. Add to that Kelly's casting choices -- drawing together such pop figureheads as Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Mandy Moore into a kaleidoscopic swirl -- and the experience of simply taking it all in, and it's pretty overwhelming.
The film is broken into three chapters, IV, V and VI. The first three chapters came out as graphic novels after Cannes, and Kelly admits they were the key, even for himself, for getting a handle on what was happening to the characters on screen.
"I couldn't get to a place, emotionally, as an artist, where I really felt I could finish this movie properly until I had the books done," he said. "I was a nervous wreck and I was depressed. I tried to do too much, and I failed. I felt I wasn't going to fulfill this movie, how great I had it in my mind. But once I finished the books, a big monkey was lifted off my back. I could really figure out how to solve the puzzle of the film. When we went to Cannes I hadn't finished with the books yet."
