Long after the failure of his metaphysical 2007 flop Southland Tales, Richard Kelly acknowledged that the film’s poor reception still hurt. “It was incredibly painful,” Kelly told the New York Times last year upon the release of his follow-up, The Box, adding, “It’s one of those things you can do only once in your career.” Or twice, it seems: In a recent podcast, Kelly admitted that he’s written a Southland prequel based on graphic novels released in conjunction with the original movie, and he hopes to make it into a feature-length animated film. “It’s funny because I wrote scripts that I handed over to Brett Weldele to illustrate for the graphic novel, and now I’ve taken that graphic novel and adapted it into a new screenplay, which is streamlined and more coherent,” he said. “So it’s becoming so meta that I don’t know what’s reality anymore.” Thematically appropriate!
But what’s the new film going to be about? Kelly attempted to explain it in a way that’s even more confusing:
“When you see the [first] movie, you see that Dwayne Johnson is reading a script called The Power, and there is actually excerpts of the script in the graphic novel. And you realize what the origin of the script is really all about, it’s this crazy analysis of the book of revelations … I would basically handle it as whenever [Johnson] is reading the screenplay, you go into his mind and you see the actors portraying the ridiculousness of what happens in that screenplay – with the baby, the farting and the earthquakes. The insanity of the screenplay within the graphic novel. There is a very specific plan I have to do that, if that day ever arrives when I can figure out how to bring it all together and make it visual.”
Babies! Farting! Earthquakes! Is 3-D too much to ask for?
Richard Kelly Has Written An Animated Screenplay Adaptation Prequel to ‘Southland Tales’ [/Film]
