The Box

[Kal]

Every time I read this plot I think of this as one of those terrible TV movies you never see...

[MacGuffin]

Richard Kelly says The Box is finished and ready for October
Source: SciFi Wire

Director Richard Kelly wrote on his MySpace page that his upcoming sci-fi movie The Box is completely finished and ready for its Oct. 30 release date.

"The release date has been shuffling around a bit, but this is common with studios, and everyone feels like this is the best date for the film," Kelly posted last week. Based on the 1970 short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson, the film is written and directed by Kelly and stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple who receive a box with a mysterious power.


In other updates, Kelly wrote:

♦"The film is completely finished. Principal photography was completed in March 2008, and it was officially delivered to WB right before Christmas 2008. A March 2009 release was briefly considered, but a fall 2009 release was always a better fit."
♦"We shot in Massachusetts and Virginia. The film takes place predominantly in Virginia, 1976."
♦"The running time is 1 hour 55 minutes long, including end credits. ..."
♦"There is more than 300 visual effects shots, which required eight months of post-production. ..."
♦"Win Butler, Regine Chassagne (of Arcade Fire) and Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, frequent collaborator with Arcade Fire) recorded more than 80 minutes of score for the film."
♦"Here is a list of artists whose songs appear in the film: Grateful Dead, Derek & The Dominos, Wilson Pickett, The Marshall Tucker Band, Scott Walker."

The official Web site will go live this summer.

Kelly added: "This is my most personal film to date, and I'm very proud of how it turned out."

[Kal]

ADMIN EDIT: to include larger poster.

[Stefen]

Put a Brett Ratner in Richard Kelly. He's Michael Bay'ed.

[SiliasRuby]

Come on Stefen, that was a bit mean.

[MacGuffin]

Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly reveals just what's in The Box
Source: SciFi Wire

Richard Matheson's 1970 short story "Button, Button" was simplicity itself. A box with a red button under a glass dome arrives on the doorstep of a New York couple, Arthur and Norma Lewis, followed shortly by a mysterious man, Mr. Steward, who tells them that if they press the button, they will receive $50,000. But someone they don't know will die.

The moral and ethical quandary could not be more naked. If it were that easy, would you do it?

In the course of the very brief story—only a few pages in an anthology of Matheson's work—the button gets pressed, and the twist ending highlights the true cost of shirking moral responsibility for material gain.

That diamond-like metaphor for our modern world so captured the imagination of filmmaker Richard Kelly that he chose to use it as the point of departure for his upcoming feature film The Box, a much more grounded, intimate and personal drama after the sci-fi extravaganza of 2007's Southland Tales and his trippy cult debut, 2001's Donnie Darko.

"This science fiction concept that he came up with [was] a crystal-clear statement that this button is going to absolutely cause the death of another human being, [and] it became, to me, something that really warranted further exploration," Kelly said in an interview earlier this month. He added: "I spent several years trying to figure out how to adapt this into a film."

The answer was to use the short story as the first event in a longer, original story that explored who and what was behind the odd little wooden box and how Arthur and Norma could uncover that truth and, perhaps in the process, find redemption.

"Are they next?" Kelly said. "Can they survive this? Can they uncover the truth, and can they redeem themselves and save themselves, perhaps? For me, that became the jumping-off point. ... Maybe expanded into a feature where there's a way to present the setup from the short story. It felt like it could be the first act of an entire film, and it felt like something that was sort of asking to be resolved, in my mind. But resolved in a way that hopefully was still very faithful to the spirit of what I believe that Matheson was kind of trying to say in a nutshell: ... that the pushing of the button, ... it's the key to the downfall of man."

Kelly changed a few things: Moved the location, upped the money to $1 million, made Mr. Steward a bit more menacing. But he kept the story in the same period (1976, to be precise), a pre-personal-computer, pre-Internet era in which the box's mysteries could remain plausibly opaque to Arthur and Norma. (Can't just Google "Steward" and "box.")

In seeking a way to flesh out Matheson's story—which was previously adapted as an episode of the 1985 incarnation of The Twilight Zone by Matheson himself (under the pseudonym Logan Swanson)—Kelly went into his own personal history, he said.

"Even though ... it's the first film I've done that's based on someone else's origin material, it is my most personal film, because when you read the short story, Arthur and Norma, it's only six pages, so there's not much time to delve into their backstory and who they are," Kelly said. "And I decided, ... since I'm setting this in 1976, and I'm setting it in Richmond, Va., where I grew up, I thought, 'How am I going to flesh out Arthur and Norma?' And then my instinct was, 'Why don't I base them on my parents?'"

The married couple in The Box share the same biography as Kelly's parents: Arthur works at NASA on the Viking Mars probe, as did Kelly's father; Norma is a schoolteacher from Texas, like Kelly's mother. The film's stars, Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, spent time with Kelly's folks, with Diaz even adopting the Texas twang of Kelly's mom.

Kelly also gave the couple a son. "The kid, I guess, is kind of me," he said. "I had an older brother, so I wasn't a single child, and I was barely 1 year old in 1976, but the kid is 10 or 11, so it became, all of a sudden, this really personal thing. ... It become a way for me to sort of expand and interpret Matheson's story but also make it very personal to me. And it kind of helped me ... bring some ... degree of authenticity to the story, in the sense [that it] feels like part of the story really happened, in a weird way. ... Because the love story part of it really happened."

The Box also stars Frank Langella as the mysterious Mr. Steward. It opens Oct. 30. Kelly and his stars will be bringing the film to Comic-Con International next month as part of the Warner Brothers panel.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

[polkablues]

Uh.... no.  No, I think not.

[SiliasRuby]

Uh, yes. I think so. I've been reading alot about this film and I guess I'm alone but I really want to see this terribly bad.

[MacGuffin]

Richard Kelly on 'The Box': 'It's the most personal film' he's made
Source: Los Angeles Times

In his relatively brief career, writer-director Richard Kelly has seen plenty of controversy. His 2001 debut, "Donnie Darko," played the Sundance Film Festival, flopped at the box office and then went on to find a massive and loyal cult audience on home video (not to mention bolster the career of star Jake Gyllenhaal). His follow-up, "Southland Tales," was a wild, sprawling narrative set in a futuristic version of Los Angeles that drew a decidedly mixed reaction when an early cut screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006; it was more than a year later before the movie saw a very limited release in the U.S.

Now, the Virginia-born filmmaker has crafted what might be his most conventional outing yet, the Warner Bros. thriller "The Box." Based on the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson, Cameron Diaz and James Marsden star as a married couple who receive a strange visit from a man, Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) bearing a fairly nondescript-looking contraption. He tells them that if they press the button on top of the unit, they will receive $1 million, but a stranger will die.

Just before Kelly debuted new footage at Comic-Con on Friday, he told Hero Complex contributor Gina McIntyre in an interview that "The Box" is the most personal of all his films. It opens Oct. 30.

What made you want to adapt this particular Richard Matheson short story?

This story just stuck with me. I read it as a kid and I went and optioned it about six years ago from Mr. Matheson himself. I wanted to know who Mr. Steward was. Why does he show up with this button unit? Who does he work for? Why is he doing this to people? What does it all mean? Like a kid in Sunday school, I had all these questions and I felt like I wanted to be the guy to have a crack at answering some of those questions and playing this six-page short story out. The short story is the framework for Act 1, then Act 2 and Act 3 become all about Arthur and Norma [Marsden and Diaz] and their journey of redemption and discovery and salvation, dealing with the consequences of having pushed this button and then discovering why have they been chosen.

How was it to work with material that was originally created by someone else?

This is the first time I've made a film that isn't a 100% original screenplay, but I feel OK with it because it was only six pages long and it was almost begging to be revisited. It's such a tantalizing concept that it sort of deserves feature-length treatment. It warranted that -- if anything I just wanted to make sure to kind of thoroughly investigate the premise and really do it properly. It took a while to figure that out. Sometimes you find that the best way to go about something is to go back to your family. I imagined what if this were my parents. What if my parents got this button unit back in Virginia in 1976 and my dad having worked at NASA. I thought about NASA and the nature of the experiment, the government and everything that exists in that area of Virginia in terms of the CIA, the FBI in northern Virginia, all that infrastructure there. All of a sudden it started to click in my mind and become something really interesting and complex, a big kind of conspiracy.

You were a writer-director and producer on this film. How important is for you to have that kind of creative control?

I'm definitely a control freak. To do your job properly as a director you have to be a control freak, so I'm really happy to be a part of all those processes. If I'm ever lucky enough to find someone else's screenplay that I really identify with and would want to direct, I'm sure I would always do a little bit of rewriting of it, just because that's the nature of my control-freakishness. I'm getting more open to doing other stories and other people's stories, but at the same time I'm writing two original screenplays right now. I feel like I need to be the person controlling the idea.

Will one of those two scripts be your next project?

I hope so. I've got my new script done.

Can you reveal any details about that completed script?

It's a thriller and it's about 35% motion capture. To be able to create a world from scratch is an exciting idea and seeing what all these amazing filmmakers like Jim Cameron and [Robert] Zemeckis and Peter Jackson -- I'd love to be able to use some of the tools that they're pioneering. That would be really exciting for me.

After everything that happened with "Southland Tales," was there less pressure on you with this film?

The third film is maybe a little easier than the second one. I didn't make my life so difficult with this one as to try to do something so incredibly ambitious. "Southland Tales" was a huge challenge. This was also a challenge, but it's a much simpler story with three characters and certainly something that's quite a bit more commercial in terms of a studio being able to market and release it. So there was less pressure in that. It was great to have a studio on board from the beginning. That was a relief.

You didn't have any problems working within the studio system?

It actually was a pretty easy experience making the film with the studio. I actually kind of enjoyed it, just the security of knowing it's going to get release, that you have them have a vested interest from the beginning. I got to make exactly the film I wanted. "Southland Tales" was such an ambitious film, just getting it finished. I knew that after Cannes it was going to be a very small release with no marketing money and I was just grateful that Sony gave me some more money to finish the visual effects. The cut wasn't finished at Cannes. We had so much unfinished visual effects work to make stuff look right. It was frustrating, it was difficult, but I bit off a lot, and it took me a long time to chew it. I'm so proud of what we accomplished with that film. If anything I would love to be able to revisit it down the road, do a director's cut, maybe one day when I'm in my 40s, who knows. It feels good to have the third film done because maybe the first act of my career is sort of over and I can move into the second act. In the same way, "The Box" is my first grownup film. The first two were certainly adolescent in the sense of being really provocative and aggressively unconventional. Now, "The Box" is a much more conventional story, but I will say it still is idiosyncratic. I don't feel like I've sold out or watered myself down. I still feel like it has my sensibility. It's the most personal film of all the three ironically.

[MacGuffin]

Another Move for The Box
Source: ShockTillYouDrop

Warner Bros. has pushed Richard Kelly's thriller The Box to November 6th. Perhaps it's because The Wolfman recently scampered out of that date? The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, was originally set to debut on October 30th after multiple release date shifts. On that date it was all alone, genre-wise. Now it'll compete at the box office with Universal's The Fourth Kind with Milla Jovovich.

[Neil]

Put a Brett Ratner in Richard Kelly. He's Michael Bay'ed.

Banner?

[MacGuffin]

Richard Kelly explains his weird film The Box to us
Source: SciFi Wire

Filmmaker Richard Kelly has had a weird career: He hit it big as a first-time movie director with the cult smash Donnie Darko, then went large with an epic follow-up, Southland Tales, which flopped despite its grand ambitions. So for his next act? A more modest sci-fi thriller, The Box, based on Richard Matheson's 1970 short story "Button, Button."

The story's not very long: Six pages in a recent anthology. It's also simplicity itself: A box with a red button under a glass dome arrives on the doorstep of a New York couple, Arthur and Norma Lewis, followed shortly by a mysterious man, Mr. Steward, who tells them that if they press the button, they will receive $50,000. But someone they don't know will die.

The moral and ethical quandary could not be more naked. If it were that easy, would you do it?

For Kelly's feature film, he had to expand the story quite a bit.

"This science fiction concept that he came up with [was] a crystal-clear statement that this button is going to absolutely cause the death of another human being, [and] it became, to me, something that really warranted further exploration," Kelly told us in an exclusive interview in June. He added: "I spent several years trying to figure out how to adapt this into a film."

The answer was to use the short story as the first event in a longer, original story that explored who and what was behind the odd little wooden box and how Arthur and Norma could uncover that truth and perhaps in the process find redemption.

"Are they next?" Kelly said. "Can they survive this? Can they uncover the truth, and can they redeem themselves and save themselves, perhaps? For me, that became the jumping-off point. ... Maybe expanded into a feature where there's a way to present the setup from the short story. It felt like it could be the first act of an entire film, and it felt like something that was sort of asking to be resolved, in my mind. But resolved in a way that hopefully was still very faithful to the spirit of what I believe that Matheson was kind of trying to say in a nutshell: ... that the pushing of the button, ... it's the key to the downfall of man."

Kelly changed a few things: Moved the location, upped the money to $1 million, made Mr. Steward a bit more menacing. But he kept the story in the same period (1976, to be precise), a pre-personal-computer, pre-Internet era in which the box's mysteries could remain plausibly opaque to Arthur and Norma. (Can't just Google "Steward" and "box.")

In seeking a way to flesh out Matheson's story—which was previously adapted as an episode of the 1985 incarnation of "The Twilight Zone" by Matheson himself (under the pseudonym Logan Swanson)—Kelly went into his own personal history, he said.

"Even though ... it's the first film I've done that's based on someone else's original material, it is my most personal film, because when you read the short story, Arthur and Norma, it's only six pages, so there's not much time to delve into their backstory and who they are," Kelly said. "And I decided, ... since I'm setting this in 1976, and I'm setting it in Richmond, Va., where I grew up, I thought, 'How am I going to flesh out Arthur and Norma?' And then my instinct was, 'Why don't I base them on my parents?'"

Cameron Diaz plays Norma Lewis, and X-Men's James Marsden plays her husband, Arthur. "The Box" also stars Frank Langella as the mysterious Mr. Steward.

Norma and Arthur share the same biography as Kelly's parents: Arthur works at NASA on the Viking Mars probe, as did Kelly's father; Norma is a schoolteacher from Texas, like Kelly's mother. Diaz and Marsden spent time with Kelly's folks, with Diaz even adopting the Texas twang of Kelly's mom.

[modage]

Falling somewhere inbetween the promising Donnie Darko and the disasterous Southland Tales, The Box is essentially a very stylish bad movie.  After the epic failure of Southland Tales, writer/director Kelly needed to make a film that would appeal to a wide enough audience to rescue his career and it appeared that The Box would be it.  After seeing it I can say it's just as idiosyncratic as his previous work with many familiar science fiction elements popping up.  Based on the short story "Button Button", the film plays like an episode of The Twilight Zone (for which the story was previously adapted) as directed by Dario Argento.  There was a lot to admire in this film, Frank Langella is great, as is his makeup, there are some genuine scares and paranoid creepiness but the film also captured a sort of 70's cheese so accurately it was hard to take seriously (and the film wanted to be taken seriously.)

[RegularKarate]

That actually makes me want to see it.