- Richard Kelly's Soph. effort Southland Tales took a nearly universal beating when it premiered at Canne ("hated as much as Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny?!") but he refuses to roll over and succumb to the heat death:

"The original draft of Southland was written just before September 11th and it was just about blackmail and a movie star and a porn star and two cops, and the Hindenburg over downtown Los Angeles, but that never had any context. It was more about just making fun of Hollywood. But now it’s about—I hope—creating a piece of science fiction that is about a really important problem that we’re facing... and the problem is very complicated, and hence the nature of the narrative... [T]he delivery mechanism is subversive humour.... [Y]ou go through all of the trouble to make a movie, and you put five years of your life into it, and you just want it to be about something." (movie city indie)