After 25 years, early ’00s cult classic “Donnie Darko” is getting a sequel from direct Richard Kelly, albeit not one in film form.
Variety reports that instead, the sequel is a book, written by Kelly, called “The Philosophy Of Time Travel.” That title should be familiar to “Donnie Darko” fans: it’s the same one as the philosophical text by Roberta Sparrow that plays a key role in the film’s plot. Unlike the fictional Sparrow work, however, Kelly’s novel is a direct follow-up to the events of the 2001 film. Read on for an official synopsis, courtesy of Range Literary Publishing, who are currently editing Kelly’s 800-page manuscript to 600.
“On October 4, 1988, a derelict jet engine falls from the sky over Los Cerritos, California, and crashes through the bedroom of sixteen-year-old Donnie Darko, killing him instantly. For his family, the tragedy should end there. It doesn’t.
Assembled entirely from recovered government transcripts, secretly recorded conversations, and early email correspondence, ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel’ reconstructs the eighteen months that follow through the eyes of Donnie’s mother, Rose Darko, as she and her husband Eddie, a senior CIA analyst, are drawn into a widening investigation that reaches from the Oval Office to the Mojave Desert. FBI surveillance teams, FAA officials, USC professors, and a mysterious circle of trackers and financiers all converge on the same impossible discovery: a strange ‘celestial fluid,’ a set of unexplained artifacts, and a forbidden book, Roberta Sparrow’s own ‘Philosophy of Time Travel,’ that appears to predict the exact circumstances of its own recovery.
Set against a real backdrop of the late Reagan era, the novel expands the mythology of the original film; Tangent Universes, Living Receivers, the Manipulated, into a sustained conspiracy that questions whether Donnie’s death was ever an accident at all, and whether ‘gone’ is the same as ‘gone for good.’”
Kelly, who’s spent the past decade-plus writing “The Philosophy Of Time Travel,” envisions the upcoming novel as the first step in a plan to helm further “Donnie Darko” movies. This novel would be adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie, with a live-action follow-up set 28 years in the future coming afterward. “I’ve kept in touch with all the cast over the years,” Kelly told Variety about his plans. “I’m fairly certain they’re aware that I’ve been working on all this stuff, everything, and the sequel is so big that this book starts off in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, and then there is much more narrative material that I’ve been developing where the time jumps 28 years into the future, and there’s a lot of really exciting stuff that happens starting around 2015/2016 and onward after that, so that’s where I started with the sequel.”
Two films for a director who hasn’t made a film since 2009 is quite an ambitious one, especially as neither “The Box” nor 2008’s “Southland Tales” (a minor cult classic in its own right) made the same splash as Kelly’s 2001 debut. Still, Kelly hopes he’ll be able to reunite the original “Donnie Darko” cast (“that would be wonderful,” he said) for the two proposed movie projects later on. Kelly also admitted he’s spent more than two decades devising how to expand the original film’s world the right way, citing rights issues and “all sorts of permutations, and there have been multiple parent companies and studios that have been involved in the whole process.” For him, “The Philosophy Of Time Travel” serves as his pitch to the cast, and to studios, to return to the story cinematically.
“My caveat with doing a real sequel was that I want to reunite the original cast, and I want to take it onto a gigantic scale and that takes time and it has a price tag and it’s hard to pull this off because it’s multiple movies,” Kelly continued. “It’s this big, gigantic, unwieldy thing that I have to sort of wrestle into submission. But in my mind, that’s what it should be. Just given the way this movie has connected with people for so long. So I’ve set out to just build the whole thing out and map the entire thing out, knowing that there’s a lot of challenges associated with doing that.”
“I think what I realized as the story got bigger and bigger and bigger is that I needed to go back in time and away from the sequel, and tell the story of what happens in the 14 months after Donnie’s death, like immediately after his death, because there’s so much essential information in that section of the sequel,” Kelly went on. “And in my mind, I was like, why don’t I actually put together a novel and just publish that part of the sequel as a novel, so that I can release it into the world, and that will set the ship on its voyage to wherever this goes. And so this, in my mind, is the final puzzle piece to launching this sequel and to see what becomes of it.”
The original “Donnie Darko” premiered at Sundance in 2001 to wild acclaim, and hit theaters later that year via Newmarket Films. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, the ’80s-set film follows a troubled California high-schooler who narrowly escapes a tragic and bizarre accident via his habit of sleepwalking. But strange premonitions haunt him afterward, mostly through a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume named Frank who tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days. Kelly’s debut also stars Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Katharine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle, and Seth Rogen.
“The Philosophy Of Time Travel” hits bookstores on December 15, and is available for pre-order now. It’s the first novel released by Range Literary Publishing, a new imprint from Range Media Partners. Check out the cover for the book below.
