For those of you who are confused with Donnie Darko, and the now on DVD/Blu-ray S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale, Bloody-Disgusting chatted with Chris Fisher, who directed the brand new tale of Samantha Darko (Donnie’s sister), who has entered not one, but two tangent universes of her own. Beyond the break you can read some bits and pieces of the chat, which will hopefully give you a better understanding of the science behind the “Darkoverse.”
One of the most daunting tasks is taking on a world created by someone else, especially a confusing and complex as Richard Kelly’s DONNIE DARKO. We caught up with director Chris Fisher who talks about his experience in taking on someone else’s vision.

“I’m a huge, huge fan of the original film. To have the opportunity to revisit the cosmology and DONNIE DARKO universe through a differ perspective and point of view seemed like a great opportunity to me,” Fisher tells Bloody-Disgusting. “Certainly Nathan Atkins had to create the script knowing it wasn’t fully his vision, we were adopting a sandbox, a set of tools, a cosmology, that’s the genius of DARKO,” he explains taking about taking on someone else’s franchise. “It’s not only the genre-mixing , storytelling, and mysticism of a teen story that it started out being… he (Atkins) had to jump into some one else’s vision, so I had to jump into someone else’s vision. How do you go into some one else’s world and make it your own without destroying that world? It’s a huge challenge.”

While DONNIE DARKO and S. DARKO might be confusing to some viewers, Fisher is proud of the fact that all viewers need to grasp is the underlying lesson of sacrifice.

“What’s beautiful about DONNIE DARKO is that it can be viewed in many different ways. In short, DARKO was about self-sacrifice. It used time travel, it used sci-fi to tell a story that resonated with audiences. And whether they understood the physics of it or not, people got the story.”

Beyond the simple conclusion, both films are loaded with scientific theories delving into the fourth dimension.

“In my movie there’s a feather, but its not a feather, it only looks like a feather to the 3-D mind. The feather is form a different universe; the feather has 4-dimensional properties,” he explains. “Carl Sagan does this excellent description of the 4th dimension (watch it here) and explains what the fourth dimension might look like to our 3-d world, using a 2-d world looking at a 3-d world. It’s really fantastic. Things in my movie aren’t what they look like. I want the audience to care about Samantha Darko like they cared about Donnie, to try and figure this out. We certainly didn’t want to answer questions for people. We wanted to take the cosmology of DONNIE DARKO and enter it from a differ POV – that being Samantha’s. I really wanted to do a dark fairy tale; it’s a strong feminine POV and a female drive film. We really wanted to capture this crazy post-modern fairy tale.”

While it might appear that Daviegh Chase is the star of S. DARKO, the movie takes a turn and centers on Briana Eviga for quite some time.

“We lose Samantha Darko for awhile,” he reveals. “I don’t want to spoil it and say why but one of the big challenges for this movie is there’s 15 pages of script, 15 pages of movie time, and we take this character who’s an antagonist and turn her into the protagonist (Briana). She has this complete change in arc, it completely flip-flops. We need the audience to come in and jump on her back and go along with her. I probably spent the most time with her. ”

In DONNIE DARKO a jet engine sets of the tangent universe, while Fisher explains that they only hint at the cause in S. DARKO.

“Certainly there are three universes in our film. In DONNIE there is primary and one tangent. In ours we have one primary universe – the world we live in and call home – and two tangent universes, which our movie doesn’t necessarily explain why these occur.” He continues, “There’s this suggestion in my film, there’s this outer space sequence that explains kinda why this tangent universe occurs. The jet engine entering the primary universe is not the creation of the tangent universe, but it’s a sign that the tangent universe is created and that were inside of it. Everyone inside the story once we are inside the tangent universe, 90% of what you see takes place in tangent universe. Once inside, the characters take on one of three archetypes: the manipulated dead, in our story that’s Samantha and Billy, the ghost boy; or the living receiver, which is Iraq Jack and also Corey; and the manipulated living, the rest of the characters. The jet engine in DONNIE is the artifact, once this artifact lands in the primary universe the tangent universe is created all of these character receive these quests and powers and ultimate goal is to return this artifact – the meteorite, or car in our film – to send it back into the primary universe to stop the tangent universe from collapsing and creating a black hole,” he explains telling us the ultimate goal of both films. “There’s a very definitive cosmology. We made extreme efforts to follow this cosmology perfectly. ”

S. DARKO is now on DVD and Blu-ray everywhere, go check it out to really get inside the mind of Chris Fisher’s sequel.