Variety reports that not only is Richard Kelly publishing a (600-page!) sequel novel to Donnie Darko at the end of the year titled The Philosophy of Time Travel, he's hoping it'll help garner interest in film sequels. Here's the novel's synopsis:
As for the potential film sequels:
Even I think this is overly ambitious of Kelly, especially if you remember the last time he bit off way more than he could chew (hello, The Southland Tales). I also think Kelly seriously overestimates the demand for any further stories about Donnie Darko and I can't see any studio willing to indulge this massive project.
But I would love to be proven wrong.
“On October 4, 1988, a derelict jet engine falls from the sky over Los Cerritos, California, and crashes through the bedroom of sixteen-year-old Donnie Darko, killing him instantly. For his family, the tragedy should end there. It doesn’t.
Assembled entirely from recovered government transcripts, secretly recorded conversations, and early email correspondence, ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel’ reconstructs the eighteen months that follow through the eyes of Donnie’s mother, Rose Darko, as she and her husband Eddie, a senior CIA analyst, are drawn into a widening investigation that reaches from the Oval Office to the Mojave Desert. FBI surveillance teams, FAA officials, USC professors, and a mysterious circle of trackers and financiers all converge on the same impossible discovery: a strange ‘celestial fluid,’ a set of unexplained artifacts, and a forbidden book, Roberta Sparrow’s own ‘Philosophy of Time Travel,’ that appears to predict the exact circumstances of its own recovery.
Set against a real backdrop of the late Reagan era, the novel expands the mythology of the original film; Tangent Universes, Living Receivers, the Manipulated, into a sustained conspiracy that questions whether Donnie’s death was ever an accident at all, and whether ‘gone’ is the same as ‘gone for good.'”
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The novel is written in found-documents style with alternating pieces from Donnie’s mother, Rose (McDonnell), and father, Eddie (Osborne) “and them vigorously documenting what is happening to them and why their son has died and their paranoia and their separate detective missions about how to figure out what happened and why it happened.”
As someone who is a massive fan of the film (and, yes, the director's cut), I'm looking forward to reading the novel. I just hope the novel isn't a big letdown for me like Charlie Kaufkman's equally large tome, Antkind. Kelly's original manuscript was 800 pages so hopefully that means the editor at least steered the novel into something coherent and readable. Super long novels aren't inherently bad (I love the uncut 1100 page edition of The Stand) but I know they can easily be unweildy like Antkind.As for the potential film sequels:
According to Kelly, the book sequel is the first step in a larger plan to make multiple “Donnie Darko” film sequels. The filmmaker’s goal is to have this novel adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue to the story with a live-action project that jumps 28 years into the future.
“I’ve kept in touch with all the cast over the years,” Kelly tells Variety. “I’m fairly certain they’re aware that I’ve been working on all this stuff, everything, and the sequel is so big that this book starts off in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, and then there is much more narrative material that I’ve been developing where the time jumps 28 years into the future, and there’s a lot of really exciting stuff that happens starting around 2015/2016 and onward after that, so that’s where I started with the sequel.”
“This section of the sequel would be animation and then, in theory, should it happen, there would be a gigantic time jump of 28 years or so, and where the actors, should they want to play their roles live and in the flesh, that would be wonderful, too. So we’ll see what happens.”
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“My caveat with doing a real sequel was that I want to reunite the original cast, and I want to take it onto a gigantic scale and that takes time and it has a price tag and it’s hard to pull this off because it’s multiple movies,” Kelly says. “It’s this big, gigantic, unwieldy thing that I have to sort of wrestle into submission. But in my mind, that’s what it should be. Just given the way this movie has connected with people for so long. So I’ve set out to just build the whole thing out and map the entire thing out, knowing that there’s a lot of challenges associated with doing that.”
He continued: “I think what I realized as the story got bigger and bigger and bigger is that I needed to go back in time and away from the sequel, and tell the story of what happens in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, like immediately after his death, because there’s so much essential information in that section of the sequel. And in my mind, I was like, why don’t I actually put together a novel and just publish that part of the sequel as a novel, so that I can release it into the world, and that will set the ship on its voyage to wherever this goes. And so this, in my mind, is the final puzzle piece to launching this sequel and to see what becomes of it.”
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“I think there’s a lot of surprises when you realize who the characters really are in the reality of Southern California, how they were drawn into this collective dream. They were drawn into this thing called the tangent universe, this lunar month, this dream that lasted for 28 days that they collectively all experienced together, and they’re sort of all trying to piece it together. And they form this sort of support group that turns into a cult, in a way, and they all come together.”
“There’s a lot of surprises about who they are, and I think for me it was really gratifying to see all the characters start to interact with each other in response to Donnie’s death, and they all become really close friends. And there are characters who are villainous in the movie who you realize in real life they’re not villainous at all; they might have done horrible things in the dream of the first movie, but when you meet them in the reality of the sequel, they’re trying to process why they did horrible things in this dream, and they’re coming to terms with it and they’re analyzing it just like the fans are analyzing the movie.”
“So I just I wanted to write a really gratifying part for all the actors. And that goes down the line even to some of the actors who only appear in one or two scenes. You’ll see that they have really fleshed out narrative arcs and everything.”
Even I think this is overly ambitious of Kelly, especially if you remember the last time he bit off way more than he could chew (hello, The Southland Tales). I also think Kelly seriously overestimates the demand for any further stories about Donnie Darko and I can't see any studio willing to indulge this massive project.
But I would love to be proven wrong.
