I think the greatest thing I learned from Terry is that every frame is worthy of attention to detail. Every frame is worthy of being frozen in time and then thrown on a wall like an oil painting, and if you work hard on every frame, the meaning of your film becomes deeper, more enhanced.
Film career
Donnie Darko was his first feature and was nominated for 21 awards, winning 11 of them, including a nomination for a Saturn Award. The film later ended up #2 on Empire magazine's list of the 50 greatest independent filmsof all time, behind Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. In 2005 Kelly wrote the screenplay for the Tony Scott-directed film, Domino. Kelly has said, "That was a wonderful experience. I wrote that for Tony Scott. That was Tony Scott's very personal project that he had spent eight years developing with Domino Harvey, a close friend of his and almost like a daughter to him. He had spent years trying to tell her story and so that for me, it was an honor for me to get to work with Tony and to write that script for him and to design this really elaborate puzzle for him to tell her story. So that was just a privilege." Kelly has written numerous scripts that have not been produced, among them adaptations of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Louis Sachar's Holes. His fourth film, and second feature, Southland Tales, a rough cut of which screened in competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, was released November 16, 2007 and stars Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Kevin Smith and Miranda Richardson. In 2008, Kelly's production company Darko Entertainment announced that it was producing the adaptation of the bestselling book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell with director Bob Gosse. The book's author Tucker Max detailed Kelly's involvement in the process on his blog. After the release of The Box, he said he was working on a thriller "set in Manhattan in the year 2014. We hope to shoot the movie in 3-D, and part of the movie would be filmed using full CGI motion capture." In 2011 he announced that he was writing and directing Corpus Christi, a Texas-set film to be produced by Eli Roth. The production was cancelled due to financial and casting problems. Kelly stated that he would instead focus on a true-crime thriller titled Amicus which was set to star James Gandolfini; however, the movie went unmade following the actor's death in 2013. In an interview with PopMatters magazine in 2017, Kelly said in regards to doing an official sequel to Donnie Darko, "I'm open to doing something much bigger and longer and more ambitious that could be a new story," Kelly said and then added, "We'll see what happens. I have a lot of stuff that I'm working on and it's ambitious and it's expensive and we'll see what happens." In regards to the 2009 Donnie Darko sequel S. Darko Kelly has said, "I had nothing to do with it. And I hate it when people try and blame me or hold me responsible for it because I had no . I don't control the underlying rights to . I had to relinquish them when I was 24 years old. I hate when people ask me about that because I've never seen it and I never will, so… don't ask me about the sequel." Despite this, he still has a characters writing credit in the film; which is to be expected, as some of the characters were those he created for the first film.
Reception
In 2016, filmmaker Kevin Smith said of Kelly: "He is insanely creative and is not unlikeChristopher Nolan. But Nolan wound up in the Warner Bros. system where he got special handling, and he got a lot of money to make huge art films like Inception. Richard can be one of our greatest filmmakers. He is right now, but just a lot of people don't realize it. He's still a kid, and someone needs to Nolan that kid."
