L'Horreur! L'Horreur!
A Director Faces the Dark Side of Cannes

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 27, 2006

CANNES, France -- Richard Kelly looks not good. His face is the color of a mollusk. He is as clammy as a gym towel. His eyes are these little itchy, red-hot BBs. He confesses that earlier he almost passed out.

This is his story.

(Perhaps young filmmakers should look away.) The wunderkind director of the indie cult hit "Donnie Darko" is making his first appearance in the rarefied competition category at the Cannes Film Festival with his new work, a political, apocalyptic farce called "Southland Tales," about the end of the world, set in Los Angeles in 2008.

The director of the festival, Thierry Fremaux, described it as "an audacious, musical, poetic and political futuristic film about the United States of tomorrow -- and therefore of today."

It is the worst-reviewed film at Cannes.

This portrait of dystopia is 2 hours 42 minutes long. It stars (believe me, this isn't easy for us either) Dwayne Johnson (the TV wrestler formerly known as The Rock), Sarah Michelle Gellar ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Seann William Scott (Stifler from "American Pie") and Justin Timberlake, who sings.

Plus: cast members from "Saturday Night Live." Did we mention the film is about the end of the world? And alternative energy, and the Patriot Act, and war, and porn, and stop.

Peter Bradshaw of the British newspaper the Guardian calls it the "festival's real clunker."

"The greatest disappointment so far this year is an easy choice," agreed Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. Time Out London's Geoff Andrew: "Morally and metaphysically confused, unfunny, heavy-handed and as prone to waste, excess, idiocy and decadence as the emphatically allegorical world it imagines, it comes across as the dopehead nerd hipster's alternative to 'The Da Vinci Code.' "

It actually gets worse. Ray Bennett writes in the Hollywood Reporter that when one of the film's characters "places a gun to his temple and says, 'I could pull the trigger right now and this whole nightmare will be over,' . . . every impulse screams: Do it!"

This is the horror of Cannes. There are 4,000 journalists and critics here. There are 10,000 film buyers and sellers. When they love you, the festival is caviar dreams and champagne wishes. But there is another Cannes, the bad Cannes, and when there is garbage in the pail, it can get downright insectoid out there on the Croisette. A brutal drubbing at Cannes may not only ding a young director's career, it can cause deals to unravel. Distributors get harder to find and offer less-lucrative deals. Some films just drift around the festival circuit, looking for love, never getting a theatrical release.

It doesn't necessarily mean the film will tank at the box office. The critics were blah on Ron Howard's "The Da Vinci Code." Some of them hissed at Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." They didn't much embrace Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," nor, really, his "Scanner Darkly."

Kelly, 31, holds on to his glass of water poolside at the Martinez Hotel and explains the feeling: "It's incredibly difficult and it's the reality of my world. I have no, absolutely no, concept of what's going to happen to this film and what version will be seen in the United States and what it will look like or sound like or what message it will convey."

The man is showing two of the three symptoms of shock. "Right now, I'm just so exhausted I'm at a loss."

He begins, "All my colleagues . . ." and stops.

Kelly reunited the "Donnie Darko" team and shot "Southland Tales" for $20 million in 30 days on the streets and beaches of L.A. After principal photography ended, the filmmaker rushed to complete and edit his project for Cannes, and perhaps in retrospect that wasn't the best thing.

In his remarks, The Rock Johnson confessed that he didn't quite know where the movie was going as it was being filmed.

Kelly says he took as his inspiration "Pulp Fiction," "Brazil," "Blade Runner" and "The Big Lebowski."

This almost makes you want to cry.

What will happen now? Universal Pictures owns the international rights to the movie, but it has not yet sold the film to a distributor in the United States. For that to happen, Kelly has been told by his producers, the film will very likely have to be recut.

"Ninety minutes," Kelly says. "A distributor would make me cut it to 90 minutes, that's what I've been hearing."

We do the math, 162 minus 90 and calculate, like, that's a lot.

He sips some water. He appears to be fading.

"Apparently I need a babysitter. It's my reality. I don't have final cut. I want the film to be seen, so I got to. I got to do it. I just hope all my work, all their work, will be seen."

Will be seen.

We mention that there was this funny scene where Gellar, who plays the retired porn actress Krysta Now, develops her own reality talk show, in which other porn stars gather to discuss, like "The McLaughlin Group" (but in bikinis on the beach at Malibu), the issues facing society today. Then the show lists them: "Issues like terrorism. Civil rights. Education. Crime. Poverty. Abortion. Quantum teleportation. Teen horniness. War." And then of course all they talk about is teen horniness.

That was funny.

"Yeah, thanks," Kelly says. "That's probably all getting cut."

Okay.