Donnie Darko Director Hoping to Release Extended Cut of The Box

Filmmaker Richard Kelly has a history of delivering audiences ambitious and confounding narratives, with films like Donnie Darko and Southland Tales both earning reputations for being complex and layered experiences, with arguably his most straightforward film being 2009’s The Box. based on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story “Button, Button,” the film starred James Marsden, Cameron Diaz, and Frank Langella, and even though it was a more digestible narrative than his previous films, Kelly recently confirmed he’d like to revisit the project to inject sequences that were scrapped for the theatrical release. The filmmaker pointed out that there might not currently be plans in place for the release but it is definitely on his “wish list.” 

When asked by The Film Stage about talks regarding an extended cut, Kelly detailed, “No, nothing official yet. I’ve always talked about that as something on my wish list to do. There have not been any official discussions as of yet. I would love to get to that — it’s on my priority list, that’s for sure. I think it’s just a question of timing and the arsenal of stuff I have in the works. When — knock on wood, hopefully — the floodgates open and I’m really, actively making new stuff again, I would love if that could ever happen. There’s visual-effects costs associated with doing that; there’s lots of footage.”

He added, “But some of the sequences that could, hypothetically, go back into that movie, there would be some visual-effects costs. It’s not anything obscenely expensive, by any means, but it’s not just throwing in a couple… it’s a fair amount of CGI and sound-mixing and opening up the edit. I would absolutely love to do that at some point, and I know that, now in the era of streaming, there’s more of an appetite for that.”

The story focuses on a mysterious man (Langella) appearing at the home of a married couple (Marsden and Diaz) to tell them that, if they push a button within a box, someone they don’t know will die, but they will be granted $1 million. The box is then taken to another couple who is presented with the same offer.

“In the trailer that they released for that movie there were a lot of shots that are not in the movie that are from the deleted scenes,” Kelly detailed of a recent in-person screening that highlighted scenes cut from the film. “So he had still images of James Marsden and Cameron Diaz in the padded room, the white and mysterious padded room; Cameron in the NASA hanger. These scenes are not in the movie! And he had cards printed up with color still frames, and he was using them like he was at a NASA presentation or a pitch meeting, and it was so funny: I was walking everyone through all the really cool, exciting stuff that we shot. It’s a lot of big, cinematic stuff. So I don’t know.”

He continued, “It was not easy having to lift those scenes out, but I think now — in hindsight — people would appreciate them more. It was some abstract stuff: transcendental gateways and NASA conspiracy stuff. It’s wild stuff, but the movie is just one big, elaborate experiment — a psychological, transcendental experiment — and it’s not meant to make sense at the end of the day.”

Stay tuned for details on an extended cut of The Box.

Would you like to see the film get an extended release? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!