'Southland Tales' debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006.
“It’s extremely challenging to get a film that is that big and sprawling and bursting at the seams as Southland Tales is into theaters,” reflected the notorious opus’ writer and director, Richard Kelly. “It’s hard to get a distributor behind it, and it’s hard to get people to sit still for that long. It was just probably too much movie and too much ambition to ever succeed at the time it was released.”
“With everything that’s transpired since then, I’ve never given up hope. I’ve always hoped to revisit it and do something much bigger with it and more exciting with it. Either way, it’s nice to have the canvas and show people it’s not finished. It’s a very raw kind of work in progress version of the film. It’s a historical document of what we were crazy enough to try and put together back in 2006.”
What happened with Southland Tales is a tale of caution as much as it is a tale of inspiration. Headlined by Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, and Sarah Michelle Gellar, it cost over $17 million to make and grossed $374,743.
Its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival was, all in all, a disaster but Kelly, whose feature debut Donnie Darko was met with universal acclaim, is philosophical about it.
“Firstly, I’m enormously grateful and appreciative of everyone at the Cannes Film Festival for including us and for inviting us, but there was always this sort of cloud hanging over the film,” he mused. “It was a wild card. Many people were very dismissive or thinking that it was completely crazy, and we were all completely nuts for even trying to pull it off. It was maybe destined to fail. The budget was $17.8 million, we had this enormous cast of actors, and Dwayne Johnson was very generous and passionate about signing on to the movie. We felt like we were being responsible and minimizing the risk for such a wild, provocative and complex project. I think the Cannes response was almost like a mortal wound. We’d been stabbed with a knife and just trying not to bleed to death.”
2021 sees Southland Tales turn 15. To celebrate, the film is being re-released on special edition Blu-ray, which, among a wealth of other content, includes the theatrical cut and the rarely-seen Cannes Cut.
“After Cannes, we tried to scrape together as many digital effects dollars as we could and begged the studio, but at some point, they were just like, ‘We can’t throw good money after bad.’ I had to bring in art students from Chapman University to try to piece things together. It was a hugely challenging endeavor to try to even get the movie together. It has still never been finished. Neither version of Southland Tales that we’re releasing is finished. I’m hopeful that in the new world that we’re being delivered into post-pandemic, that maybe there’s a chance for us to do something extraordinary with it. We have time to try and get it right. There are all sorts of new technology, animation and motion capture, lots of tools that are light years beyond what we had in 2006.”
Director and writer Richard Kelly (left) and actors Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Sarah Michelle ... [+]
Casting Dwayne Johnson in one of the lead roles raised plenty of eyebrows, but Kelly knew greatness when he saw it.
“I met Dwayne in early 2005, and for me, it was like love at first sight,” he recalled. “Sitting across from him, immediately I thought, ‘This guy is the biggest movie star in the world.’ I knew he was also a great actor and that he had all this potential. He was also so open-minded and not afraid to take risks. He had all this extraordinary training in the professional wrestling ring over so many years that I saw as an incredible training ground for an actor. There were a lot of people who, at a time, would not take him seriously because of that background, but I thought it was a gift.”
“He had this amazing physical instrument for a body, and what he can do with the tiniest facial expression was wonderful. He can communicate so many different things and has wonderful comedic timing. I’m so excited that he has now become one of the biggest movie stars in the entire world.”
Ahead of its time when it was filmed and released, Kelly has continued to evolve Southland Tales, and the events of the last five years have played a vital role in that.
“The election of Trump was such a historic moment. The entire world felt the earthquake of that. It was almost like all bets were off,” the filmmaker mused. “I joke with my friends that now they could announce that aliens are among us and have been in contact with the governments of the world, and most people at this point would just kind of shrug and be like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ I think we’ve seen so much upheaval, so many things happening that are just so astonishingly vulgar and shocking, the levels of corruption and absurd comedy. I think those things are just going to change a lot of how art is created and perceived moving forward. It’s an opportunity for a lot more risk-taking in art. People are becoming much more open-minded to the mixing of genres, people are taking more narrative risks and stylistic risks, and audiences are ready for that. Even the way we deliver stories to consumers, I think we’re maybe even redefining what a feature film is and how films are classified because of the streaming revolution.”
Part of that could involve Kelly following in the footsteps of directors such as Quentin Tarantino, who recut his film The Hateful Eight and serialized it in four parts, adding over 40 minutes to its total runtime.
“I am hoping to do something much bigger. There’s a lot more to the story that I have figured out and that I think is really exciting,” he revealed. “I think with every single crazy chaotic thing that has happened in the world since we made this film, it has given me a new perspective. I saw what Tarantino did, and Steve McQueen has done with his Small Axe anthology of films and Zack Snyder with Justice League. With all the new streaming services and filmmakers who are doing these longer cinematic stories, I see that if the expanded version of Southland Tales were to happen, it would be like a big double feature.”
“There could even be chapters that people could jump to. I have been working on it. It’s been very therapeutic for me to revisit something like this purely as a creative exercise during the pandemic. It’s something that I believe in, and there’s a really exciting, surprising, and satisfying new version that I think really could exist. We’ll see what happens.”
The Southland Tales special edition Blu-ray is available from Tuesday, January 26, 2021.
