Richard Kelly Wants Multiple ‘Donnie Darko’ Sequels After Writing an 800-Page Novel for Nearly 20 Years

Richard Kelly finally has a new project coming this year, but it’s a novel—we’ll have to wait a little longer to get a new film from Kelly, who hasn’t released one since 2009.

That being said, the novel is a “Donnie Darko” sequel, titled “The Philosophy of Time Travel.” It’s over 800 pages, and he’s apparently been writing it for almost 20 years. Per Variety, it’s an epistolary novel “written by” Donnie’s mother and father as they’re “vigorously documenting what is happening to them and why their son has died and their paranoia and their separate detective missions about how to figure out what happened and why it happened.”

Kelly has been trying to make the “Donnie Darko” sequel since the aughts, but studios have refused to give him the budget. According to Kelly, the book sequel is the first step in a larger plan to make multiple “Donnie Darko” film sequels. The filmmaker’s goal is to have this novel adapted into an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue the story with a live-action project that jumps 28 years into the future.

“I’ve kept in touch with all the cast over the years,” Kelly tells Variety. “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.”

Kelly adds: “I love my cast. I would love to reunite with all these wonderful actors, and now it’s just sort of up for the marketplace to decide, and that marketplace includes a global fan base and our wonderful cast of actors, a whole bunch of new characters who are new to the story, who can be played by new actors, and we have all this wonderful technology that didn’t exist five years ago.”

Here’s a director who hasn’t released a film in 17 years, but who has also repeatedly said that he’s been working on 10 to 12 different projects—almost all of them already scripted—over these last two decades. Or, in his own words, “enough screenplay material to last me for the rest of my life.”

In all seriousness, who is actually willing to give Kelly the money to make another one of his fever dreams? The industry has changed—for the worse—and filmmakers like Kelly don’t currently fit this latest mold of the business. There’s never been any question that Kelly wants to direct again, and there have been clear attempts at doing just that, but his wild ambitions, with high budget demands, and refusal to adhere to studio restrictions have paved the way for many hurdles over these last two decades.

As we speak, Kelly has only helmed three films in 26 years, including “Donnie Darko” and “Southland Tales.” His last one was released in 2009 (“The Box”), and ever since then, he’s been writing.