In an in-depth and self-defeating profile this weekend on Donnie Darko provoc-auteur (I proudly coined that term when describing Kelly in the table of contents for our October issue), The New York Times did not understate the importance of the box-office performance of his next film, The Box. "I have a lot riding on this film ... Until I have a theatrical hit, people aren’t going to keep giving me chances,” Kelly told the newspaper. The film in question is The Box, a paranormal thriller starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden. They play a couple in strife who get a visit from a mysterious stranger (a disfigured Frank Langella) who has with him a box with a button on top. If the couple pushes the button, they get $1 million, but someone, somewhere in the world, dies. While it sounds like the set-up to a straightforward thriller, the film's website alone (Kelly has been known to construct creepy maze-like websites for all his films) points to a trippy, offbeat film that probably has more in common with Kelly's Olympian flop Southland Tales -- the film that got him into this moment of career reckoning in the first place.

For any burgeoning filmmakers who consider themselves artists, and who one day hope to make successful movies on their own terms outside of the Big Brother confines of Hollywood's studio system, the Times article is positively soul-crushing. Kelly believed in Southland Tales, a bold and nihilistic tale that was a critical (it got booed heavily at its premiere at Cannes) and box-office disaster; it should have all but ended his career in Hollywood, much like Heaven's Gate ended Michael Cimino's. That experience was so hard on Kelly (“It was incredibly painful”) that he no longer wants to fight for his vision. The article ends with perhaps the greatest and most frightening example of artistic defeatism I have ever seen:

“I would like to stay in the studio business,” he said, naming Christopher Nolan, who’s moved from “Memento” to “The Dark Knight,” as a model. “Because having to depend upon a film festival and trying to get a distributor, having acquisition executives hem and haw over this and that -- I’ve done it, it’s scary and I just don’t want to do it anymore. Ultimately you can’t beat the studio.”