Normally, the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Walking into Richard Kelly’s hotel room in the Four Seasons Hotel, just behind Chicago’s famed Water Tower Place, I realize that one look at Kelly is worth twice that. The man is flat exhausted. While waiting for me, he has collapsed on the couch in his suite’s living room and is leaning heavily to his left, propped up against the couch’s side arm. If the arm weren’t there, it seems likely that Kelly would be sprawled out onto the floor. He looks at me with tired eyes and says hello, standing up half way–his knees never come close to straightening–to shake my hand. He motions me to a chair next to the couch and sinks back down into the cushions.

Unlike most other interview subjects of mine, I have a background with Kelly. Not only is this the third time I have sat down to speak with him (about the same movie, Donnie Darko, no less), but two of his family members had contacted me to get extra copies of the articles I’d written on him previously. For the record, there is no higher compliment for a writer than getting a phone call from the mother of one of your subjects who requests ten copies of your article.

Through our conversations, Kelly and I have been to one end of Donnie Darko and back; there is very little we have not covered. In 2002, Kelly even put me in touch with his producer and good friend, Sean McKittrick, to cover the aspects of production that he wasn’t involved with. McKittrick and I have stayed in touch since our interview and as the result of our phone calls, I am completely up to date on the goings-on of the Kelly/McKittrick team. They are itching to start filming a project entitled Southland Tales, a rollicking comic romp across southern California set in 2008 with a huge cast including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kevin Smith, Tim Blake Nelson, Jason Lee, Seann William Scott and Janeane Garofalo.

"Kind of like that Tim Allen movie, Big Trouble?" I asked McKittrick over coffee in LA earlier this year. McKittrick shoots me a look that sends shivers up my spine and he then says diplomatically, "I wouldn’t describe it exactly like that."

Kelly chuckles when I mention the incident to him. "It’s definitely not like anything people have seen before," he says, suggesting it won’t be like Big Trouble. "It’s very hard to describe what we are doing on Southland Tales, but it’s going to be completely different and off-the-mat, so to speak."

For once, I am going into my interview with the express purpose of not talking about the movie that my subject is traveling the country to promote.

"I really appreciate that," Kelly laughs when I mention this to him. "I feel like I’ve been talking about Donnie Darko my entire life and I’ll be out talking about it on my deathbed."

Appreciating this or not, Kelly occasionally lapses into standard interview mode and steers our conversation back to his director’s cut of the movie.

"I’m sorry," Kelly says, still slumping on the couch, "I don’t want to become a broken record. I’m very honored and pleased that this film has continued to arouse people’s curiosity and that New Market has re-released it and that I got to do a director’s cut."

"Did you ever think about tinkering with the structure of Donnie Darko while you were crafting your director’s cut?" I ask Kelly. "You know, just cut out the character of Gretchen or something like that?"

Kelly smiles and says, "Did we consider digitally inserting Jessica Simpson? Or having Donnie shoot first?" He shakes his head. "We always joked about how we could completely destroy the film, but no. We didn’t go and reshoot anything so, what you’re seeing was always supposed to be there."

Kelly starts into a thought strand about how he and his editing team tried to create a more complete story with his director’s cut when he’s interrupted by his cell phone. "Better turn this off," he says, switching the phone off.

I use the break in our talk to shift the conversation to one of my favorite Kelly quotes. Discussing how important he felt it was that he held onto his script for Donnie Darko, Kelly famously said, "If you sell your script, the studio can cast Carrot Top in the lead and you can’t do a thing about it."

"Nothing against Carrot Top," Kelly says, "The point is, if you sell your material, you don’t control it anymore and it’s gone forever. So I don’t have any sympathy for anyone who complains that his script was destroyed by another filmmaker or a studio." Kelly sighs and says, "The one thing I think I’ve learned is that everyone is trying to speculate what’s going to make money and what audiences want to see. It stifles the creative process ultimately. More than anything I think you just have to please yourself." He shrugs, "I try to do my own thing and not follow the market place or the trend of the week."

That logic is part of the reason Kelly is so in demand. He smiles at this and says, "Yeah, if people want to talk to me, I’ll happily sit down with them. I’m accessible to people who want to talk until they’re sick of me. Then I’ll go away."

With American audiences just starting to warm up to him, it doesn’t look like Kelly will be going anywhere soon.