Kelly was also affected by watching music videos on MTV; he singles out David Fincher’s work on Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got A Gun,” which he first saw at age fourteen, as the catalyst that first made him want to become a filmmaker. This mélange of influences contributes heavily to Darko’s enduring appeal; blending pop sensibility with enigmatic undercurrents, it fuses together familiar elements into something singular.
Over the course of Darko’s 28-day shoot—which coincidentally mirrored the film’s structural conceit, counting down 28 days until the apocalypse—what Kelly lacked in experience turned out to be more than made up for in his clarity of vision, as well as in the exceptional support he had from more seasoned participants like Barrymore.
Cinematographer Steven Poster, for instance, told a little white lie to uphold Kelly’s vision of shooting this “weird” film classically, pairing Panaflex Millennium cameras with Primo anamorphic lenses. “The producers came to me saying that we couldn’t afford to shoot anamorphic,” Poster recounted to American Cinematographer in 2021; he managed to persuade them otherwise. Poster pointed to a new Kodak film stock with high-speed emulsion designed for low-light settings, eliminating the need for more light than spherical lenses would have required. He proposed anamorphic’s more horizontally compressed field of view would allow him to install more lights on the low ceilings of houses they were filming in—while keeping them out of view—speeding up the shoot without costing extra.
“Everything I said was BS,” Poster recalled. “I just made that up on the spot. I mean, it was correct. But I made it up. I had never shot the 800 stock. I’d never put one foot of it through a camera. So I didn’t know what it would do. I just said, ‘Well, Kodak has the stock. I’ll find a way to use it.’ It was the only movie ever shot on that stock all the way through.”
Kelly found another invaluable collaborator in Gyllenhaal, who eagerly signed on to play Donnie after the film’s initial lead actor, Jason Schwartzman, dropped out over scheduling conflicts. “I remember pulling over to the side of the road to finish reading Richard’s script and being mesmerized,” Gyllenhaal told The Guardian in 2016. “It beautifully captured the experience of moving into adulthood: the world that felt so solid becoming movable and liquid. I thought, ‘This is what my adolescence felt like,’ although I don’t speak, and have never spoken to, rabbits.” (Sure, Jake.)