Sarah Michelle Gellar

Wunderkind or washout? That’s the question that apparently was on critics’ lips at the Cannes Film Festival last week when Donnie Darko helmer Richard Kelly debuted his sophomore directing effort, Southland Tales, to a less than enthusiastic critical response. And now he says he may have to cut the film for its U.S. release as a result.

“The only thing that’s disappointing or frustrating for me is just that I don’t know that the film will be seen in the United States,” he tells Entertainment Weekly, as reported by Dark Horizons. “Maybe it will, but potentially it could be shown with almost an hour of it missing. I don’t quite know what that film is.”

The version screened at Cannes was almost three hours long, and critics complained that its storyline was generally unfocused. But it has also been reported elsewhere that the cut that screened was rushed once the filmmakers learned that Southland Tales had been accepted to compete in the festival, so perhaps a bit of tinkering is what’s actually needed to keep all the Donnie Darko fans out there happy.