The following notes on Donnie Darko were written by Sarah Mae Fleming, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A new 35mm print of Donnie Darko will screen on Friday, September 26 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Sarah Mae Fleming
In 2001, Donnie Darko was in trouble. After a bumpy debut at Sundance, no one in Hollywood wanted to distribute director Richard Kelly’s debut feature. The film’s dense and confusing plot led to countless demands for a clearer narrative, until it was eventually dumped into a small Halloween theatrical release. Six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, with a rogue jet engine as its inciting image, the film barely registered in theaters. But it didn’t disappear. On home video, Donnie Darko found a new venue. From a roommate’s couch to dorm televisions – and eventually, the marquees of midnight movie screenings – its strangeness ultimately reached the right audience. Part puzzle and part dream, Donnie Darko’s balance of time-travel rules and oneiric logic became a cult hit on disc after languishing in theaters.
The backstory is well-known among the converted. Kelly, a recent graduate of USC, wrote the script in a feverish 28-day stretch that matches the movie’s doomsday countdown (28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds, to be exact). Everyone in Hollywood read the script, but no one wanted to let the twentysomething Kelly direct it, even with certified star Drew Barrymore set to play the role of English teacher Karen Pomeroy. Jason Schwartzman’s early attachment as the titular Darko briefly stabilized things, even opening the door to a meeting with Francis Ford Coppola. But the slower timetable of American Zoetrope, Coppola’s production company, collided with a precarious reality: Barrymore had only one week to shoot her scenes. Barrymore’s presence, through her production company Flower Films, was also the key to the small amount of financing Kelly did manage to secure. Ultimately, Kelly didn’t want to wait and sacrifice Barrymore (or the $4.5 million). Choosing Barrymore forced Schwartzman out due to scheduling conflicts, resulting in newcomer Jake Gyllenhaal landing the part of Donnie.
Two production choices, both risky on paper, became essential to the film’s aesthetic impact. First, cinematographer Steven Poster and Kelly insisted on shooting anamorphic widescreen – an “extravagance” for a first-time director on a tight schedule that, in practice, lent suburban spaces an impalpable sense of eerie tension. Second, the production leaned into both grain and glow. The film was shot on fast Kodak 800 ASA stock, giving the images an aura of hand-me-down gloom that evokes an uncanny mix of both nostalgia and dread, suspending the audience somewhere in the middle. That quality pays off most strikingly on Frank’s rabbit mask. Under Poster’s light, Frank’s handmade head glows, producing a peculiarity that lingers when he’s off-screen.
The production carried a scrappy DIY sensibility into its biggest moments. Instead of the true story about a giant piece of ice falling through a suburban roof that inspired Kelly’s script, the director chose a jet engine to obliterate Donnie’s bedroom. The team rigged an engine shell to an air-pressure cannon above the set and only had the money and time for one attempt – one chance to get the key scene right. The result has the blunt, slightly impossible physicality of practical destruction, matched by a strangely contemporaneous news oddity: during the shoot, a real engine part fell from a KLM jet into the Pacific.
Despite the initial excitement surrounding the script, distributing Donnie Darko proved difficult. Every major studio passed after Sundance, until Christopher Nolan encouraged Newmarket Films, the company that had just found success with his puzzle film Memento (2000), to take a chance. But audiences still reeling from 9/11 were not in the market for airplane-engine devastation as entertainment. Donnie Darko limped away from its theatrical run with just a sliver over $500,000 from the domestic box office.
However, the DVD was released in March 2002 and soon became a runaway word-of-mouth success. The UK release turned into an indie hit, midnight screenings multiplied, and Michael Andrews’s score with Gary Jules’s spare (and much less expensive) cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” helped reframe the ending as something hushed and devastating rather than merely clever. Part of Darko’s home video success is credited to the film’s paratextual materials: a cryptic website, The Donnie Darko Book, and even DVD chapter titles each helped audiences pause, rewind, and play their discs, poring over details in an attempt to solve the puzzle: What are those translucent beams emanating from everyone’s chests? Who is Grandma Death, really? Is Donnie a superhero?
And if you are tempted to describe Donnie Darko as a superhero origin story, you’ll immediately run into the feature that makes it feel singular now: there’s no franchise plan. Donnie’s legend begins and ends in one finite loop. That finitude, audacious in an industry that monetizes narrative entropy across decades, is part of what makes Donnie Darko feel so remarkable. Kelly frames adolescence as a mix of both inevitability and freedom: it feels like unseen forces are pushing you forward, but you still make choices that matter. The movie is concerned with a puzzle that spans dimensions, but what really lingers is more local: a bike coasting down a predawn hill, a parent’s empty look across a kitchen table, a handmade Halloween costume that suddenly feels like it’s looking back at you.
Donnie Darko is a film defined by the roads not taken, and by the strange inevitability of the one that is. Kelly could have waited for Zoetrope and perhaps earned Coppola’s mentorship on a longer runway. He moved instead to keep Barrymore’s week and make the movie while the window was open. That trade resulted in a first feature that looks, sounds, and behaves like something that had to exist now or not at all. In the years since, Kelly has joked about the one shot he never got to shoot the way he wanted due to time and money: the engine ripping free in a miniature plane interior, plunging into a time portal. I like that unrealized image as a final emblem. For all its puzzles and paradoxes, the film wears its seams. That raggedness becomes a kind of beauty – the intuition that our lives are exactly as they must be and that, just off to the side, another version glows somewhere else.