Carruth's first film captured the paranoia of time travel. Now he's back with a meditation on identity, nature and Thoreau's Walden.
There are Independent filmmakers, and then there is Shane Carruth. In 2001, Carruth quit working as a software engineer and began making a movie from a screenplay he'd written himself. Not yet 30, he had never finished a script before, or shot a movie, or acted in one. But an idea had taken hold, and Carruth--who immersed himself in oblique 1970s films like All the President's Men and The Conversation while he was laid up after a car accident--needed to make it into a film.
The result was Primer, a mind-bending, meticulously plotted time-travel story set in the world of Dallas tech startups. Shot on Super 16 for $7,000--enough money to shoot just one take per scene--it won the top prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. It also inspired endless Internet message-board debates, earned rave reviews and attracted notable fans, including director Steven Soderbergh. For a rookie outsider filmmaker, the triumph of Primer was like winning the lottery on a single ticket--and a likely launchpad for higher-profile projects.
There's a well-worn path that leads the indie filmmaker from the festival circuit to Hollywood. Christopher Nolan took just seven years to go from the $6,000 Following to the critically acclaimed Memento to the blockbuster Batman Begins and its sequels. After Primer, Carruth seemed to be heading in that same direction, shopping an effects-heavy sci-fi screenplay around Hollywood. The would-be film, A Topiary--which involved a cult and a group of kids who discover how to make robot-like creatures--was Carruth's attempt at a more conventional movie format with more-conventional financing. Despite interest from Soderbergh and David Fincher, who agreed to come aboard as a co--executive producer, neither the money nor the movie ever materialized. Carruth realized he had to find a path of his own. "I knew there wasn't a sliver of common ground between me and the studios," says Carruth. "There's no need for me to think about studios now."
His new film, the mysterious and entrancing Upstream Color (in limited release April 5), is even more DIY than Primer. Carruth wrote, directed, produced and co-stars in Upstream Color. The script, the score, the cinematography--it's all Carruth. This time he's also handling the distribution and the marketing. Carruth will do just about everything for Upstream save hand-deliver the prints to theaters--I think. "He trusts himself completely, and he doesn't trust what other people tell him," says Amy Seimetz, Carruth's Upstream co-star.
Even more than Primer, Upstream Color is a challenge to summarize, though it centers on a damaged couple who slowly come to realize that their core identities have been tampered with. There's a worm sampled from a flower that, when ingested, causes people to go into a suggestive trance. Passages from Thoreau's Walden recur amid a cycle of nature that feels both contemporary and ageless. Like Primer, it has a withholding narrative, doling out information in bits and bytes, relying on the audience to construct the story.