Whedonopolis: The Buffyverse fandom has been waiting for "Southland Tales" with bated breath. Could you tell us where we are with it?

Richard Kelly: We’re about four weeks away from our final mix.

We’re laying in about 90 new visual effects shots that we’ve been working on, and the film will be completely finished and ready to be screened for the first time the second week of September. The studio will look at the finished version and then it’ll come out November 9th. The trailer will be out mid-August. So it’s all finally happening; I’m not the boy who cried wolf anymore. "The movie is coming out, I promise! I promise!" It’s printed on a poster!.

W: Very cool! Now, we know Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character in this movie is not the Buffy-type. How far apart is her character in this movie from her iconic role as the Slayer?

RK: From Buffy? (thinks) Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a character called Krysta Now in this film, and she is Jenna Jameson meets Ariana Huffington. She’s a porn star, but she’s also branching out into music, she has a talk show similar to "The View," only with porn stars talking about politics, she has an energy drink, a jewelry line and she’s very political. She has a very strong political opinion. Sarah plays the character in a way that plays upon, I think, her image as a young actress and as a starlet, growing up and starting in soap operas and becoming this kind of icon from "Buffy"– she plays off her own image, in a way. She’s a very smart girl and she’s very political herself; when you talk politics or religion with her, she can hold her own. So playing a porn star-her film noir-femme fatale icon is very interesting. So it’s a long winded answer, but I know how big Sarah is in your world, and you can’t talk about the character without talking about her.

So you read it here first. The film is out November 9th. Look for the trailer sometime mid-August and check out their MySpace page here.