James Richard Kelly (born March 28, 1975) is an American filmmaker and screenwriter, who initially gained recognition for writing and directing the cult classic Donnie Darko in 2001. Early life Kelly was born James Richard Kelly in Newport News, Virginia, the son of Lane and Ennis Kelly. He grew up in Midlothian, Virginia, where he attended Midlothian High School and graduated in 1993. When he was a child, his father worked for NASA on the Mars Viking Lander program. He won a scholarship to the University of Southern California to study at the USC School of Cinema-Television where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He made two short films at USC, The Goodbye Place and Visceral Matter, before graduating in 1997. Kelly spoke of viewing the film Brazil with author Robert K. Elder in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life: I think the greatest thing I learned from Terry is that every frame is worthy of attention to detail. Every frame is worthy of being frozen in time and then thrown on a wall like an oil painting, and if you work hard on every frame, the meaning of your film becomes deeper, more enhanced. Film career Donnie Darko (2001) was his first feature and was nominated for 21 awards, winning 11 of them, including a nomination for a Saturn Award. The film later ended up #2 on Empire magazine's list of the 50 greatest independent films of all time, behind Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. In 2005 Kelly wrote the screenplay for the Tony Scott-directed film, Domino. Kelly has said, "That was a wonderful experience. I wrote that for Tony Scott. That was Tony Scott's very personal project that he had spent eight years developing with Domino Harvey, a close friend of his and almost like a daughter to him. He had spent years trying to tell her story and so that for me, it was an honor for me to get to work with Tony and to write that script for him and to design this really elaborate puzzle for him to tell her story. So that was just a privilege." Kelly has written numerous scripts that have not been produced, among them adaptations of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Louis Sachar's Holes. His fourth film, and second feature, Southland Tales, a rough cut of which screened in competition at the 2006