Sarah Michelle Gellar

Kelly Teases Southland Tales

Richard Kelly, writer and director of the upcoming film Southland Tales, told SCI FI Wire that his difficulty in explaining the plot of the film has led to erroneous reports of what the film is about. "There’s been a lot of inaccurate information put out there," Kelly said in an interview at Comic-Con International in San Diego. "You’re so close to something, you’re so deep, you lose objectivity sometimes. I’ve lost all objectivity, so if I even try to describe the plot right now I wouldn’t do it justice. ... When you’re directing your own screenplay, sometimes there’s a shorthand, and you forget that you need to explain it to everyone. Otherwise they’re [confused]."

Kelly, best known for writing and directing the offbeat supernatural drama Donnie Darko, did eventually divulge some general details about the film, which stars Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Seann Willam Scott (The Dukes of Hazzard), Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (The Scorpion King) and Kevin Smith (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). "It’s set in the year 2008 over Fourth of July weekend," Kelly said. "There’s a T.S. Eliot poem called The Hollow Men, where at the end of the poem, the last three lines are, ’This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but ... a whimper.’ A movie starring The Rock can’t end the world with a whimper. It needs to end with a bang. So that’s what the movie’s about."

After years of preparation, Southland Tales is just four weeks away from shooting. Kelly said that one of the reasons the film took so long to go into production is because of the unusual sensibilities of his writing, which make his work difficult to categorize. "It’s stuff that doesn’t fit the parameters of what the studios are looking to do," he said. "So it took a long time to push this through the system. If this one doesn’t make money I’ll just have to go and sell out and do something more commercial, because this has just been a bitch to get off the ground."