In 2001, writer/director Richard Kelly's genre-busting rookie feature DONNIE DARKO crashed and burned at the box office. But it almost immediately rose from the ashes to become one of the first cult hits of the 21st century...and it took the music of '80s band Tears for Fears along for the ride.
Host Rico Gagliano tells this twisty tale with the help of Kelly, star Jena Malone (THE HUNGER GAMES), and the film's composer Michael Andrews—whose stripped-down cover of Tears's "Mad World" became maybe the most unlikely smash hit in UK history.
To celebrate our new season of the podcast, we’re partnering with the American Cinematheque to present a double feature of DONNIE DARKO and THE EVIL DEAD on Sunday April 9th at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre. Rico Gagliano and Richard Kelly will attend for an in-person discussion. For more details, check out the American Cinematheque’s website here.
The third season of the MUBI Podcast, titled “Needle on the Record,” dives into the unifying power of movie music and tells the stories behind some of cinema’s most renowned “needle drops”—moments where filmmakers deployed pre-existing music instead of an original score. Each episode explores an iconic marriage of song and image that’s become part of pop culture. It’s a six-part mixtape for film lovers.
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go
In 2001, writer/director Richard Kelly's genre-busting rookie feature DONNIE DARKO crashed and burned at the box office. But it almost immediately rose from the ashes to become one of the first cult hits of the 21st century...and it took the music of '80s band Tears for Fears along for the ride.
Host Rico Gagliano tells this twisty tale with the help of Kelly, star Jena Malone (THE HUNGER GAMES), and the film's composer Michael Andrews—whose stripped-down cover of Tears's "Mad World" became maybe the most unlikely smash hit in UK history.
To celebrate our new season of the podcast, we’re partnering with the American Cinematheque to present a double feature of DONNIE DARKO and THE EVIL DEAD on Sunday April 9th at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre. Rico Gagliano and Richard Kelly will attend for an in-person discussion. For more details, check out the American Cinematheque’s website here.
The third season of the MUBI Podcast, titled “Needle on the Record,” dives into the unifying power of movie music and tells the stories behind some of cinema’s most renowned “needle drops”—moments where filmmakers deployed pre-existing music instead of an original score. Each episode explores an iconic marriage of song and image that’s become part of pop culture. It’s a six-part mixtape for film lovers.
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go
Heads up, this episode includes adult language references to gun violence and spoilers. Picture this, a typical gray morning in England circa 1981, and a pop musician named Roland Orzabal, just on the cusp of 20 years old, just shuffling around his little apartment. I imagine him wearing a dingy bathrobe. Because... Roland Orzabal was kind of not working at the time. His then girlfriend, Caroline, who subsequently became his wife, apparently, she was doing three jobs. So obviously that afforded Roland the chance to sort of stay at home and hopefully, you know, write that hit. That's UK music writer Paul Clarke. And from what he says, it sounds like Roland needed a hit. He had grappled with depression. He'd left his first band just as they'd started getting some success. Now, here he was in the upscale city of Bath, holed up in a pretty downscale flat. Above a pizza place. So he was getting up every morning to write songs while everyone else was going about their daily business. From a window where Orzabal looked down at everybody scurrying around. Faces blank like robots. He felt so... detached from them and he was reminded of a detached kind of lyric from a tune he'd been listening to a lot. Paul Simon's <i>Still Crazy After All These Years</i>."Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars."I fear I'll do some damage one fine day." Orzabal grabbed an acoustic guitar and wrote a song about what he saw and felt looking out his own window.<i>♪ All around me are familiar faces</i><i>♪ Worn out places, worn out faces</i><i>♪ Bright and early for their daily races ♪</i><i>♪ Going nowhere, going nowhere… ♪</i> It's called <i>Mad World</i>. But he said it could have been called bourgeois world because that's what he was looking at. He was looking at people in a well-to-do area of England going about their, sort of, business while he was upstairs. Halfway through the lyrics pivot to one of Orzabal's obsessions. The damage this mad world does to kids. There are lines about childhood trauma, and nightmares.<i>♪ I find it kind of sad</i><i>♪ The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had</i><i>♪ I find it hard to tell you...</i> It seemed pretty dark for radio play. But Orzabal demoed <i>Mad World</i> with his band mate Curt Smith, who sang it. And... Initially they offered it to the band's A&R man, David Bates. And they said, "Oh, this is probably going to be a B-side." And he turned around and said "No."That's going to be a single." He was right. In 1982, <i>Mad World</i> became the first top ten UK hit for a band called Tears for Fears. But it was 20 years before the song reached number one, thanks to an indie film about another alienated kid. That gave the music industry a whole new verb. To 'Mad World'. I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the curated streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season three. We're calling it Needle on the Record, because we're diving into a few of movie history's most iconic needle drops. The moments when filmmakers take preexisting tunes drop them in their films and end up with something legendary. And Richard Kelly's 2001 movie,<i>Donnie Darko</i> has to be one of the unlikeliest legends ever. A genre defying box office flop that left its first audiences totally confused. Then somehow rose from the ashes and brought the music of Smith and Orzabal's band along for the ride. Yeah, I was 16 and I was not familiar with Tears for Fears, at all. I wasn't cool enough, I guess. That is one of the film stars. Jenna Malone and I talked to her and many others about the making of this movie, and how it helped make Tears for Fears required listening for 21st century kids on both sides of the Atlantic. It was so big. I mean, it's hard to fathom how big. I mean, people were calling in the radio saying like"I heard it and I pulled over on the highway"'cause I couldn't drive and listen to it at the same time." It's a movie and a soundtrack that unites Gen-Xers and Millennials alike. So turn up the volume as we drop the needle on <i>Donnie Darko</i>. My name is Richard Kelly and I am a writer, director of motion pictures. Not as many as I would have liked! But there's there's a lot more coming, I promise. Yeah, Richard Kelly has plenty of time to make more movies, because he made his first one so young right out of film school. The idea for it almost literally dropped out of the sky. There was a story I read about a piece of ice that fell from the wing of a jet plane and crushed the bedroom of, I think, a 15, 16 year old kid's home. He wasn't there. He was like a baseball practice or something when it happened. But I thought that's got to be disturbing. For something to fall from the sky and crush your bedroom. That feels like some kind of message. You know? Richard was just 23, but when he read this story, he took it as kind of a message himself. That he better hurry up and start writing. This is the very tail end of the nineties. And I was just in a panic thinking, if I'm going to be a filmmaker, I have to write a feature length script. And that was the idea that I latched on to. And then I think the piece of ice became a jet engine and then it became a mystery of like, where did the engine come from? And let's build a mystery around that. And it just came pouring out from there.- How long did it take you to write it?- 28 days. Probably right around the same time-frame of the film.<i>28 days, 6 hours,</i><i>42 minutes, 12 seconds.</i><i>That is when the world will end.</i><i>Why?</i> Donnie Darko is the story of the title character played by Jake Gyllenhaal. A sweet but rebellious suburban teen struggling with schizophrenia. He's out sleepwalking one night when he sees a vision, of Frank, a guy dressed in a ghoulish bunny rabbit costume, who tells him, "Yeah, the apocalypse is just under a month away." And moments later... A jet engine comes crashing through Donnie's empty bedroom. Everyone says it's a freak accident. But it seems to put Donnie's visions into overdrive. Soon Frank's showing up in his home, sending Donnie out on strange missions at night with cop Donnie.<i>Wake up Donnie.</i> Sometimes Donnie takes along an axe. Then he learns about a book that seems to prove the existence of time travel and of a tangent world parallel to ours and wormholes in space between them. Is that where the engine came from? Is there some kind of rift in space and time? Or is this poor kid just losing his mind? Even today, Kelly does not have an easy time pitching this story. It's kind of impossible to describe. It's... I don't know. It's a coming of age film, but it's also a science fiction journey. It's a story of a community in crisis, I guess. God! But it's a tribute to his writing that the script actually generated a tonne of buzz in Hollywood anyway. Actually, it sounds like the thing producers found weirdest about it was that it's set in 1988.<i>School's cancelled.</i><i>Do you wanna walk me home?</i> In fact, between all the sci-fi thriller stuff, the script read like a bittersweet homage to eighties John Hughes teen flicks. There's a romance between high school misfits.<i>My parents got a divorce.</i><i>My mom had to get a restraining order against my stepdad.</i><i>He has emotional problems.</i><i>Oh, I have those, too. What kind of emotional problems does your dad have?</i> There's a climactic teenage house party. And right from the opening scene, a bike ride through suburbia set to Echo and the Bunnymen's <i>The Killing Moon</i>. There's wall to wall eighties New Wave. But getting those music rights and actually recreating an eighties world wasn't going to make the movie easier or cheaper to shoot. And I got a lot of push back everyone was like, "Why is this necessary?"Just make it present day. Come on, Richard." You know, I'm like, "No!"I want to do the eighties music."I want to do all the incredible British post-punk, New Wave music and..."all that 1988 had to offer." And you got to pick your battles. One of the battles of Donnie Darko, one of the many was holding on to 1988 as a time-frame. Kelly had reasons to stand his ground. For one thing, in the year 2000 filmmakers just weren't mining eighties pop culture like they do today. Definitely not in dramas. He knew it would set his movie apart. But more importantly, the America of 1988 already felt like a way gentler place compared to the America of the brand new 21st century.<i>The investigation into the high school massacre is slow moving and dangerous.</i><i>The two gunmen who went on the rampage</i><i>booby trapped the building and even themselves.</i> I didn't want Donnie to be like a year 2000 teenager and all of the accompaniment to that. You got to remember when we made this film it was just like a year out from the Columbine massacre and the discourse around troubled teenagers had become much darker and much more severe and troubling. And I kind of wanted it to be innocent. I didn't want... if I had set the movie in 2000 and, you know, with Donnie, he would be online all the time. He'd be sitting in front of his computer and like, God, it was like, I would hate to think of Donnie being like the first Incel, you know? In fact, in the year 2000 world that had just gone through Bill Clinton's impeachment. Even the movie's politics were a throwback to a, let's say, more civil time.<i>I'm voting for Dukakis.</i> I liked the idea of it happening in an election year. The first line of dialogue in the whole movie is "I'm voting for Dukakis" and then a family discussion about the election.<i>Maybe when you have children of your own who need braces</i><i>and you can't afford them because half of your husband's</i><i>paycheck goes to the federal government, you'll regret that.</i><i>- My husband's paycheck?- Ha ha!</i> When we shot the movie in late summer of 2000, we were facing an election between George Bush and Al Gore. Yet we were making a film about the election of Bush's father. You know, we were in the middle of the sea change and we were kind of making a film about a much, much more innocent changing of the guard, I guess. Yeah, a time when you could have a conversation like that at the dinner table- and it wouldn't be a duel to the death.- Yeah, it would be playful.<i>Do you honestly think Michael Dukakis</i><i>will provide for this country'til you're ready to squeeze one out?</i><i>- Yeah, I do.- Hmm.</i><i>When can I squeeze one out?</i><i>Not until eighth grade.</i> But as the guy in the bunny suit might say, this world is about to end. You could argue the whole movie is about the moment innocence is lost. So it makes sense Kelly soundtrack, consciously or not, wound up spotlighting a band whose music hit that theme hard. This is not that band. This is an act called Graduate formed in 1980 and fronted by two guys who would go on to bigger things. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. Yeah, they were quite young when they started off. I think Roland was too young to sign a contract, so they had to wait for his 18th birthday. So that shows how young they were. You remember Paul Clark from the top of this episode? He wrote the book<i>Tears for Fears on Track,</i> a song by song dive into the history of Tears for Fears, starting with their genesis as yes, these guys.<i>♪ Catch me if you can</i> The Graduate is very kind of throwaway, very poppy. The lyrical depth wasn't there. One of their songs was<i>Elvis Must Play Ska</i>. I think Elvis Costello had said something derogatory about ska music, so they kind of wrote a reply to him and said, "You should play ska."<i>♪ Elvis should play ska</i><i>♪ Elvis should play ska</i> But Roland and Kurt didn't really enjoy being in that band. I think they weren't too happy with the poppy elements, so the pair of them left with the intention of setting up a studio based band, which was Tears for Fears. And the new duo's main influence definitely wasn't upbeat pop. In fact, it wasn't music at all.<i>This is a group session in primal therapy.</i><i>The idea is to go back, uncover the hurts of childhood.</i><i>Relive them, and free the real you.</i> The name Tears for Fears stems from the works of psychologist Arthur Janov who wrote <i>Prisoners of Pain,</i><i>Primal Scream Theory</i>. So Tears for Fears means using tears to kind of release childhood fears. Yeah, Janov's Primal Scream Therapy partly involved patients casting their minds back to their innocent youth and literally screaming their rage at the grown ups who'd corrupted it.<i>What did you want, Mamma?</i><i>What did you want? What did you want...</i> Folks like John Lennon were patients of Janov, and when Smith and Orzabal got turned on to his work, they felt, well, seen. Curt was a rebel at school. You know, he was always in trouble with school. Roland had a difficult sort of childhood. His mom was kind of mistreated by his father. So that came through in kind of later songs like <i>Woman in Chains</i>. So they both have difficult childhoods and they latched onto, sort of, Janov's work as inspiration for songs for Tears for Fears. So, <i>Shout</i> is kind of talking about Primal Scream without actually saying it's about Primal Scream.<i>♪ Shout, shout, let it all out</i><i>♪ These are the things I can do without</i><i>♪ Come on</i> And then there's <i>Mad World</i>. With that Janov inspired line about nightmares as a form of healing relief.<i>♪ The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had</i><i>Mad World</i> references "the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" an expression related to, you know, the intense nature of a dream about death, can release kind of tensions and pressures and what have you really. So, a band shouting about lost innocence and about confronting fears. They were the perfect match for Richard Kelly's coming of age psychodrama. So to me, it seems fitting that they're the only band whose songs appear on the soundtrack twice, and that both tracks kind of helped save the production. I'm going to tell you about the first time that happened in a minute, but to understand it... right now, I want you to hear a story from someone. My name's Jenna Malone, and I played... play, I have, yeah, played Gretchen Ross in the film. Back in 2000, Jenna Malone had already appeared in blockbusters like <i>Contact</i> and <i>Stepmom.</i> Still, she probably wasn't sure Richard Kelly would cast her as Donnie Darko's cool, but wounded girlfriend after what happened at her audition. Well, I remember being kind of a I mean, am I allowed to cuss on this? Sure. I mean, I just remember kind of being an asshole because it was Rich and it was Sean, his producing partner, and it was an assistant. And the assistant was older. And so instantly in my wildly, you know, indoctrinated ageism, I went to the assistant, the casting assistant, and was like, "Hi, nice to meet you, I love the script." And I thought that these two other, you know, young kids were just like, I don't know, assistants, or hanging out.- I don't know.- For pages. Yeah. And then Rich was like, "Oh, no, I wrote it." And I was like "Oh..." Yeah, it sounds like this was par for the course. Like I say, Kelly was super young, making his rookie feature. Even some of the crew didn't quite take him seriously. Yeah, you know, and you have to. And I was 25, you know who the fuck wants to trust a 25 year old with anything, you know? And I was, I was stubborn, you know, and I had to earn everyone's trust. Which he finally did when he shot one of the movie's signature sequences. A dreamy montage as the camera glides through Donnie's high school, set to a great song by a certain band.<i>Head Over Heels,</i> which is just a beautiful song. I'd always loved Tears for Fears growing up and the emotion of the song, the sort of lyricism of it, just the teenage yearning sensibility that I associated with that song. It just felt right. It does. On one hand, <i>Head Over Heels</i> feels like a grand love song, with big chiming riffs that might have been inspired by a guy the band was listening to when they recorded it. Bruce Springsteen.<i>♪ I wanted to be with you alone</i><i>♪ And talk about the weather</i> But lyrically it hits on the band's familiar theme. Yeah, it's about falling in love, but also about how scars from childhood make love hard. And the hope things will work out anyway. All that over images of kids and teachers drifting in slo-mo. It feels. Aching.<i>♪ ...and I'm head over heels</i><i>♪ Ah, don't take my heart, don't break my heart</i><i>♪ Don't, don't, don't throw it away</i> And I had that montage in my head and I wrote it into the script. It was literally choreographed and written into the script, that <i>Head Over Heels</i> plays. And then we follow Donnie throughout the the hallway of the school, and we reveal all the major characters in this musical montage. It's like a music video. We float through the window of the classroom as the lyric "Time flies" plays and we fade out of the song<i>♪ ...time flies</i> I checked that clip on YouTube. It has millions of views. Typical comment, quote "I can't explain why I fucking love this scene." But that's more or less what Kelly had to keep telling his own line producers almost up to the day it was shot. There was a lot of pushback that like, "Richard, why are you making us"spend half a day shooting a music video in the middle of your movie"where no one is talking, there's no dialogue, you're going to cut this out."The song is expensive."You don't even know if Tears for Fears will give you the song." There's all this just like push back, push back, push back. And I was like,"Trust me, it's going to work." And... By the way, you shot that without having the rights to the song? Of course we didn't have the rights! No! But I've found that sometimes you take that swing, and we did... I think it was when I realized we were doing something technically amazing. On the page, it was a pretty straight forward shot. You know, it's like two thirds of a page. And when I got there, this camera was like, rigged up on this crazy thing so that it could basically go 360 and it had this, like, horizontal frame on it. And I remember talking to the DP and being like "What do you,"what are you guys doing?" And people were sweating bullets. It was the second day of photography, you know, it was day two. And here I was devoting the entire first half of the day to this music video with Tears for Fears.<i>Donnie?</i> But we shot it, and I told the editors to just cut it together with the Tears for Fears. Get me a tape of it in rush it to set. Please, so I can just show to everyone and prove to everyone that this is going to work. And I brought everyone in to my trailer, this little tiny trailer where I'd never even spent more than like five minutes shooting the movie. And we put the VHS into the player and I'd already seen it. So I just looked at their faces reacting to it. And you could just see one by one everyone was won over. They were all like,"Oh..."Oh, okay, okay."Richard, okay, Richard, let's let's... Okay, we're back. Let's go." You can just see this like, galvanizing, like even my first AD, who was just like a nervous wreck for the first week, I thought he was going to, like, blow his brains out. You know, you could see him just exhale. And off to the races we went. So that was the first one. The second, Tears for Fears miracle is yet to come. Richard Kelly and company learned just what a mad world this is. Coming up in just a minute, stay with us. And so listen, everyone, MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them hand-picked by real people who really know movies. It's the best of cinema, streaming anytime, anywhere. And we love going out to theaters to, in fact, check this out, the theater where Donnie Darko goes on a date to see the movie<i>The Evil Dead</i> is actually my local theater, The Arrow in Santa Monica. That is where they shot that scene. I go there all the time, and we want you to do the same at your local cinema. Which is why we came up with MUBI Go. When you sign up, you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters. Previous picks include award winning films like<i>Decision to Leave, All Quiet on the Western Front,</i><i>Eo, Holy Spider</i> and Guillermo del Toro's<i>Pinocchio</i>. MUBI Go is now available in the UK, Ireland, Germany, India and select cities in the U.S. To learn more, check out MUBI.com/go Also, speaking of the Arrow, if you're in the L.A. area on Easter Sunday, come see <i>Donnie Darko</i> there with me and Richard Kelly. I will be interviewing him live before your very eyes after the film. And then we are going to show<i>The Evil Dead</i> as well. Yes, it is a double feature. That is April 9th, 2023. Get tickets at americancinematheque.com Finally, after you finished listening today, you can stream some of the films we have featured on this podcast. All you got to do is head to MUBI.com and look for the collection called Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Go figure. That's on the Now Showing page. And I know I just threw a tonne of information and websites at you. As always, you will find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. So it's December of 2000. Shooting on <i>Donnie Darko</i> is wrapped, and for Richard Kelly, life still hasn't got any easier. We were rushing to get the movie mixed and finished for Sundance the way that all filmmakers spend their Christmas holiday if they get into Sundance, they don't go home for Christmas. They are in a sound studio. Like sweating out, like, late night hours, getting their mix finished. A major source of sweat? Two moments that needed music bad. First, a montage scene Kelly hoped to cover with a very expensive U2 song. And second, something for the end credits. So for that... enter his in-house music genius. Well, I'm Michael Andrews or Mike Andrews. Or Elgin Park, depending on who is talking to me. But I am a musician. In 2000, Michael Andrews was a rising film and TV composer. He'd just wrapped work on <i>Freaks and Geeks</i> and under the <i>nom de plume</i> Elgin Park he'd been playing and producing music down in San Diego for years. But when he took the <i>Donnie Darko</i> gig, Richard Kelly still managed to knock him for a musical loop. You know, well one of the things that was interesting is that I had been a guitar player at that point for about 20 plus years, and he was like, "Okay, cool."So we don't want any guitar on this score." And I was like, "Okay, well, I'm a guitar player, so"I guess I'm going to just like play a different instrument." He chose the piano, an instrument he'd never studied. But he says he just put on a VHS tape of edited <i>Darko</i> scenes... Pressed play and I started playing the piano and started writing themes. I still have the tape.- Wow. Really?- Yeah. I was thinking of actually releasing it'cause there's so many mistakes on it'cause I could barely play. It's funny! It's really funny. Apparently he was a quick learner. This is called the<i>Artifact and Living</i>. One of 16 Andrews instrumentals laced through <i>Donnie Darko</i>. It's simple and heartbreaking. And to fill the end credits, he imagined a full song, lyrics and all in the same vein. So one night he sat down at the piano and just to get the vibe started replaying this piece. Right? I start playing that. I'm thinking, oh, cool. I'm like, huh, let me think. And then I thought, whoa, <i>Mad World</i>.<i>Mad World.</i> Michael had been producing a record for his childhood friend Gary Jules, and they'd been playing covers of eighties tunes. Also, he grew up loving Tears for Fears, and I get the feeling he never really didn't have their music on his mind. And so I went to the fucking Tears for Fears record and I listened to the thing and I thought, can I superimpose that song on this score? Can I make that feel the same as my score? He riffed a little on <i>Mad World,</i> using the same tempo and style as <i>The Artifact</i>. And so I figured out how to do it. And I called Nancy Juvonen. She was a producer on the movie. I said, "Can we license this song? I'm going to make a cover of <i>Mad World</i>." I sang it to her. She's like,"That sounds awesome." I said, "I'm not going to sing it."My friend Gary is going to sing, and he lives down the street."We'll do it tomorrow." Gary Jules did come over the next day. The song was done in an hour. It was going to change their lives.<i>♪ All around me are familiar faces</i><i>♪ Worn out places, worn out faces</i> But first it was going to change the movie. When U2 fell through, Richard Kelly tried moving Andrews <i>Mad World</i> from the credits to that montage. A series of shots tracking across the familiar faces of every character waking up from a dream. In which someone is dying.<i>♪ The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had</i> Richard called me. He's like, "You're not going to believe this. We're going to send you something." And I said, "Okay, so what is it?" He's like, "It's <i>Mad World</i>." And I was like, "What?" He's like,"We put <i>Mad World</i> over the montage and it's absolutely incredible." So he sent it and I was like,"Whoa, it's insane. It's amazing." And then that was it. And it lived there. It just kind of vibed with what was there already. They didn't even have to edit it that much. They did... I don't think they edited it at all. They didn't edit the song and they didn't edit the movie. It was just like this weird thing that happened. It's very sort of symbolic of of how a lot of the great things in this movie happened, which is just like they just strangely happened. And strange is definitely the word for the next stuff that happened, Though it took a while for it to get great.<i>Donnie Darko</i> premiered at the Sundance Film Festival January 2001. I don't think we did a screening before Sundance. Sundance was the first time. Jenny Malone was there. Yeah, it was wild. I mean, I think we were at the big theater, too. And what's cool about Rich is that he had shown bits and pieces as we were working, so I felt like I was like, oh, okay, cool. Like, that's going to be that and that's going to be that. And so I kind of had an awareness, but... I felt like I was just like glued to my seat, like I couldn't even stand up after. I mean, you want to make films. I mean, you believe in them. You do them because you love them. And 90% of the time they don't really ever reach what you thought you were making. But this was even better than I thought I was making. Also there that night was an indie film mogul who's hated now, but who Michael Andrews remembers was everything then. There was this moment. It was sort of like <i>Waiting for Guffman</i>. We're waiting for Harvey Weinstein, right?"Harvey Weinstein wants to buy the movie!" Blah, blah, blah, waiting for Harvey. He's going to see the movie. And at this point, he was such a superstar. If he showed up to your movie at Sundance, it was like,"Oh, shit, bidding war!" You know? And he showed up, got out of his limo. I remember seeing him get out of his limo and I thought, oh, shit, he's going to buy the movie, whatever. And everybody was really excited. And then it turned out nobody wanted to buy the movie at Sundance. It was like it went from like, this is going to be the biggest thing ever to like, nobody wants this thing. I think most people, they tend to focus on the sort of sci-fi element and they can't figure out the ending and, you know, the bunny. And really it's so deeply full of longing and sadness. You know, and talking about a young boy's mental health. And I think people were still a little reticent of like, do I like this? Are people going to get this? Like, do I even get this? I think there was a lot of that. Like people didn't know whether to really fully love it or not. And it put everything in jeopardy, starting with the soundtrack. We didn't even have any of the music paid for until well after our very, very disappointing Sundance debut. So the music was always in a precarious place of being just completely dropped. There was a version of events that could have happened to <i>Donnie Darko</i> where literally all of these songs would have either been just completely removed, cut way down, and you would hear some really crappy sound-a-like eighties music. Even when a company called Newmarket stepped in to buy the film and pay for the music, it took a rising filmmaker and <i>Donnie Darko</i> fan named Christopher Nolan to convince them not to dump it straight to video. And they gave us a brief theatrical release. They're like, "Okay, we'll give you a tiny little theatrical release,"very little marketing." But we got the movie finished, We got it... We clung to the five or six pop songs and we had it all ready for an October 26 release. But just before that could happen, something else did. 9/11. After which, for a long time, a lot of people just huddled at home. Not going to movies, and especially not to this one. They didn't want to go see a movie that where there was a plane that like lands in people's houses, you know. It wasn't where America was out at that moment. No, I remember getting a really, really solemn voicemail from my my agent at the time. Like, "So, Richard, happy Saturday."We got the numbers on<i>Donnie Darko,</i> 58 screens"and a per screen average of about $1100."Hope you're having a good Saturday, man."Check in and we'll talk soon." It was something like that, you know, It was like, wow, that's really not good. The reviews didn't help. Some critics raved many of the biggest guns didn't. The New York Times called it, quote,"Lumpy and dolorous." I think it was the first film I was a part of that was considered kind of a failure, you know. But I mean, I was also a teenager, so it was definitely like, fuck the world. Like, they don't get it. I don't care. Like, I love it. And actually, a few months after the film left theaters, Jenna got an inkling she wasn't alone. You know, for me, it's always the barometer, like, of what people recognize you from. I feel like previously it was a lot of like, <i>Step Mom, Step Mom, Step Mom.</i> And then all of a sudden, it was sort of like <i>Donnie Darko</i> and then more <i>Donnie Darko</i>. And I was like, "How did you see it?" People were starting to play it as a midnight movie in Manhattan. And then when it came out on DVD in like March of 2002, that's when it really took off. Enough so that by October the film got another theatrical release in the U.K. And people went nuts for it. I just remember it being one of those underground things that people were like,"You need to see this." You need to hear this kind of thing. That's Edith Bowman. She hosted the movie music podcast <i>Soundtracking</i>. And in 2002, she was a DJ on the BBC's Radio One, living in London, where she remembers a full on <i>Darko</i> phenomenon. What is there a word for something that's cult, but it's commercial? I don't know.- 'Cause that's what this is.- It's cul-mmercial. It's kind of, cul-mmercial or com-ult? I don't know. Yeah, but it was that. <i>Donnie Darko</i> is huge here still, you know, I remember doing a London film festival kind of conversation with Jake maybe four or five years ago. Jake Gyllenhaal. Yeah, and we did a kind of survey of attendees and going, what's the film you know, you want to want to hear him about and about 80% of that was like <i>Donnie Darko</i>.<i>Donnie Darko.</i> The movie showed on fewer screens in this way, smaller country and grossed nearly four times what it did in the U.S. It was a hit. All of a sudden, I had a hit movie and it was like, okay, maybe my career isn't over. Maybe I'm going to have a chance to keep doing this. So God bless the U.K. But why the U.K.? What made it such a hit there? Edith Bowman thinks it's not just that Brits were a year and an ocean away from 9/11. We like to keep things to our self as well. And that for me is a lot of what's at the core of films like <i>Donnie Darko,</i> where you kind of internalize things, you feel slightly a bit like an outsider. You're the only person going through stuff. That is a version of that stiff upper lip, you know, we bury stuff. Yeah. And this is a movie about a kid who's grappling with a lot of internal demons, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. He was kind of like, "He's one of us!" A country full of Donnie Darkos, bottled up, yearning for a primal scream. It's a theory and maybe an overly convenient way for me to partly explain the totally crazy thing that happened next. In fall 2003<i>Mad World,</i> as covered by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules for <i>Donnie Darko</i> started getting radio play in the UK. That's not the crazy part. It had already been getting airtime on the taste making L.A. radio station KCRW. And apparently a BBC DJ who was a fan of the film just followed suit. Gary Jules' manager, went to Britain to fan the flames. And then Gary called me. He's like, "Dude, this song they're saying, they think this song"can go all the way up the chart." I was like, "Yeah, right!"Call me when it's number ten or whatever." You know. It did get to number ten. And climbed higher. Suddenly... It was everywhere you'd turn on the radio, any radio station in the UK and it would be on incredibly heavy rotation. Literally you'd flick through every station and you'd probably hear it like within half an hour on every station. It was so big. I mean, it's hard to fathom how big... It was as big as like Adele. I mean, people were calling in the radio saying like "I heard it and I pulled over"on the highway because I couldn't drive and listen to it at the same time." It was ridiculous, you know? And as it climbed up the charts, I cruised over there. It was like number three or four at the time that I went over there and we played on Top of the Pops. Oh, yeah, I should mention all this was happening in the run up to Christmas. Which every year for decades has been the most hyped few weeks in the UK pop music calendar. So I don't know if it's a thing in the States, but in the UK it's like a kind of gladiator battleground of who is going to be Christmas number one, in the charts, in the pop charts. It's such a big thing the Christmas number one in the UK you can go to a betting office and bet on who's going to be Christmas number one. And <i>Mad World</i> wasn't the favorite to be the Christmas number one. It was a band called The Darkness and they had a kind of a euphemistic double entendre laden single called<i>Christmas: Don't Let the Bells End</i>. That was the song that everyone reckoned was going to be number one. And then all of a sudden...<i>Mad World</i> becomes number one. Second time in the history of Christmas number ones, that it's an American group. And I can't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I thought it was absolutely insane. But it happened. Years later at a live performance for the Spotify Landmark series Tears for Fears own Curt Smith sounded just as dumbfounded. Obviously living in L.A., the Gary Jules version I'd heard a year and a half before, I guess on KCRW. The fact it became a number one in like a year and a half later in England at Christmas time, shows you a little bit about the English mentality. You can chalk it up to the English mentality, or to geopolitics. The Iraq war began in 2003 and the world did seem pretty mad. But the song captured some kind of zeitgeist. Fired up Andrew's and Jules careers, and put Tears for Fears, back on the radar. They weren't a band who were being played a lot on radio. They weren't very visible. They were maybe at a bit of a fall out. There was kind of a bit of animosity, or they'd gone off to do their separate thing. They weren't touring, and... It kind of did two things. It kind of propelled this new version, but it also propelled people's minds back to this great band. Smith and Orzabal actually reunited the following year, something they'd apparently been planning, but which sure wasn't hurt by their old song's new fame, or probably by the cash it brought in. I mean, if you think about it, just go on Spotify and type up <i>Mad World</i>. And listen to all the covers of it and just know that like every time that that song plays, they get paid because they wrote it and just look at how many of them are exactly like the arrangement that's on <i>Donnie Darko</i>. There are a lot...<i>♪ All around me are familiar faces</i><i>♪ Worn out places...</i> Demi Lovato's.<i>♪ ...worn out faces</i> Lily Allen's.<i>♪ ...for their daily races</i> Adam Lambert's and Jenna Malone's. I did a cover of <i>Mad World</i>. I have a band. We just did it live. I think there's a video somewhere, but it's actually kind of hard to say now. I remember being like, oh, I should practice this more. You kind of kicked off a cottage industry of <i>Mad World</i> covers. Well, I mean, I think <i>Mad World</i> became like a verb, you know, where people are like,"Oh yeah, let's <i>Mad World</i> that." Which means... Which means take a song and put it on a dark piano and sing it slowly. That's what it means. Next time you hear someone doing that, you can say that they Mad Worlded it. Yeah, there's been lots written about the wave of movie trailers featuring sad, stripped down covers of pop tunes. It's usually traced back to the Galactic Brothers choral version of Radiohead's Creep, but I don't know. The <i>Donnie Darko</i> soundtrack came out first. As for Richard Kelley, when we talked, I noticed the word 'battle' came up a lot. The battle to keep <i>Donnie Darko</i> in 1988, to keep the high score montage, to keep the music, to get it in theaters. But as we were signing off, he used a different word. I'm grateful that I... so grateful that the people, the gatekeepers let me make this movie, even with all the... the obstacles and all the hurdles we had to to get past. You know, they let me make this damn thing and, you know, it changed my life. And taking the difficult path sometimes can be much more gratifying if you fight, if you can make it to the finish line. For Richard Kelly, maybe for anyone making art is a bad dream. The best you'll ever have. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into movies and music. Next week, the movie that showed the world there was more to Jamaica than Chill Island vibes. Suddenly everybody could understand reggae. You could say, "Right this is what it's about and it means something."It's not just there to make white people dance."<i>The Harder They Come</i> helps reggae catch fire around the world. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Stephen Colon mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Additional music by the band People with Bodies. Thanks this week to Selena Seay-Reynolds and everyone at the American Cinematheque. Jenna Malone's latest is the horror film<i>Consecration,</i> that's streaming now on Shudder. The series is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, won't you? Let them know we are not your standard movie chat show. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or your own cover of <i>Mad World,</i> you want to alert us to, chances are you have one, fire off an email to podcast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, be safe. Now go watch some movies.