The Box’s Richard Kelly: Button Pusher

Kelly also nearly escapes the sappy, very American fascination with the afterlife, when Norma and Arthur have to make a final, personal choice at the movie’s end. Without revealing too much, let us say that Sartre is quoted twice in The Box. Kelly cops to the facile parallel, saying it’s fitting for a high school teacher like Norma to mount No Exit with her students. “The Lewises are three people trapped in a house, in their suburban life, soon to become a box of another kind,” he says. “A lot of people gravitate around that play in high school, because it is easy access to French existentialism.”

For all its genre conformity (it is almost classical in style, with a rather horrid, Russian-influenced and overemphatic score by members of Arcade Fire), The Box contains moments of emotion equal to those in Donnie Darko, and, most of all, a sense of time and place that was so sorely missing in Southland Tales. Clearly, Kelly needs this yearning for other times; today’s mindless, button-happy, greedy world is too much for him. In a way, that’s what Tales was — a rage-infused barf against vulgarity, against celebrity-fueled crap and dirty politics. Still, Kelly is not done with speculative-fiction films. His next project will be about the reconstruction of Manhattan’s Ground Zero, set in 2014, in the new towers. “It will be a much more mainstream thriller,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to make a New York film.”

Kevin Scanlon

Outside the box: Richard Kelly

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And what about S. Darko, the so-called Donnie sequel foisted on us earlier this year? “I have never seen it, and never will. I was offered to direct it and I said no. But I didn’t own the rights, so they made it anyway. It was just a matter of easy money.” And what’s with the pecs, and the obsessive exercising? Kelly laughs at the suggestion that what David Lynch achieves through transcendental meditation, he does through pumping iron, and concedes that he does a lot of his creative thinking that way. “It’s just a matter of taking care of myself,” he says. “Making these movies takes a lot out of you.”

The Box opens on Fri., Nov. 6 in L.A. theaters.