Southland Tales

nik.mercer — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:19:06 -0700

Southland Tales, the sophomore effort from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, is finally out on DVD. Your Senior Editor spent the latter part of ’07 explaining how genius this film was to anyone who’d listen; most of those people later wanted to kill him. Still, trust us, this is a demented, magical, immersive, thoroughly tweaked film that—yes, okay—makes next to no sense, but is still moving and emotional in a way that belies simple descriptions. Plus you get Justin Timberlake covered in blood, playing a mangled Iraq War veteran while lip-synching The Killers. Oh, and John Lovitz. And Sarah Michelle Gellar singing a song called “Teenage Horniness Is Not A Crime.” And an apocalyptic finale involving a blimp and a floating ice cream truck. We could go on, or you could just rent the damn movie.

Anyway, a while back we’d sat down with Moby—for a while we were always ‘sitting down with Moby,’ and that’s fine by us, because he’s cuddly and lovable—to talk about his work on the Southland Tales soundtrack. (Pssst—you can also catch the bald techno star chatting about monogamy in hookers with Andrew W.K. in our current print issue).

“I saw a four-hour rough cut [of the film],” Moby explained. “I showed it to some of my friends, and I loved it…and they hated it, to the point where they were angry. And when they debuted it at Cannes, same thing, people were walking out, and people hated it. There’s so much innocuous art in the world, and there’s so much culture that people just don’t really care about; I love the fact that there’s this movie that people have such polarized opinions on. No one will see that movie and be ambivalent about it. No one will say, ‘Oh, it was okay.’ One of my favorite reviews was the New York magazine review of it, where they refer to it as being ‘bat-shit crazy,’ which it really is. The final cut, the theater release, is much more coherent than the original cut. It was a four-hour cut that made no sense whatsoever. They were able to edit in such a way so there was a borderline cohesive narrative; the original one had no narrative. It introduced these characters and you had no idea what was going on. What’s funny is I’d be out and about and I’d run into some of the actors, like Amy Poehler and Janeane Garofalo and Wallace Shawn, and I would say ‘I saw this cut of the movie’ and their first question was always the same. They’re like, ‘Oh so you’ve seen the movie do you know what it’s about?’ And this is after they’re in the movie, they’ve read the script. The last time I heard from Richard Kelly was a couple weeks ago. He says, 'So you’ve finally seen the finished cut, what do you think it’s about?' And I sent him my answer, involving different chemical valances. I sent him a long, four-o’clock in the morning crazy answer, and I haven’t heard back from him yet….”