Donnie Darko Director Hoping to Release Extended Cut of Cameron Diaz Movie The Box

Summary

• Director Richard Kelly would love to release an extended cut of his psychological thriller The Box, but there have been no official discussions yet.
• There are visual-effects costs associated with adding back the cut scenes, but now in the era of streaming, there is more appetite for it.
• Kelly believes that people would appreciate the deleted scenes more now, as they add abstract and wild elements to the overall psychological and transcendental experiment of the film.

While speaking to The Film Stage, director Richard Kelly shared his thoughts on potentially revisiting his 2009 psychological thriller The Box and revealed that he’d be interested in releasing an extended cut of the movie.

The Box starred James Marsden, Cameron Diaz, and Frank Langella. Unlike some of Kelly’s films which feature complex storylines, The Box (which is based on the 1970 short story “Button, Button by Richard Matheson) offers a fairly straightforward tale. The movie follows Norma (played by Diaz) and Arthur (played by Marsden) who receive a box from a mysterious stranger (played by Langella) who promises the married couple $1 million if they press the button within the box. But, pushing the button also means that someone the couple doesn’t know will die.

After being asked about the chances of an extended cut of the film, Kelly stated, “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.”

He continued, “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.”

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Richard Kelly Would “Absolutely Love” To Release an Extended Cut of the Film “At Some Point”

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The Donnie Darko director then 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.”

While discussing a recent in-person screening that showed scenes cut from The Box, Kelly spoke about the film and the host of the event, saying, “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. 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.”

Kelly wrapped up by saying, “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.”

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