Carruth's first film captured the paranoia of time travel. Now he's back with a meditation on identity, nature and Thoreau's Walden.
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In person, Carruth is a polite, self-effacing guy. "I know I'm not good enough to do the jobs I do," he says with a deadpan laugh. As a filmmaker, though, he is not interested in holding your hand. "If something can be explored or illuminated that would have been difficult to verbalize, that to me is what a film should be," he says. "It's like trying to explain what a piece of music is like. You can't do it." In a Carruth film, there's only show--not tell.
Recently relocated to New York City, Carruth was born in South Carolina, and his family followed his Air Force sergeant father around the country and to South Korea before settling outside Dallas when Carruth was in high school. He experimented with stop-motion films and an early video recorder. "I wanted to be a director as a kid, but I couldn't admit it," he says. "It seemed like such a lofty goal."
Carruth started out in college studying marketing--"it seemed like the closest thing I could get to storytelling"--but he switched to math, captivated by calculus. (His favorite subject was nonlinear dynamics, which came in handy when plotting the time travel in Primer.) Around the same time, he began writing stories, including one about a possibly psychic furniture maker. But it didn't take him long to realize that his mind didn't think strictly in prose. "Film was the height of narrative to me," he says.
In Primer's narrative, which is hard to puzzle out on first (or second, or third) viewing, Carruth and David Sullivan play engineers who accidentally create a device that can send them back in time. Fans loved to argue online about the exact workings of both the time machine and the film's looping structure, while scientists and engineers hailed the film for capturing the hard work of authentic invention. And the film was more than its cleverness: with a creeping sense of paranoia and horror, it explored the corrupting effect that great power--in this case, the power to control the future by altering the past--can have on a relationship and on the self. "It used extremely technical dissections of a sci-fi concept to illuminate something that was essentially human," says Rian Johnson, whose 2012 hit Looper took time-travel lessons from Primer.
The same could be said about Upstream Color, which generated major buzz at this year's Sundance festival before anyone had a clue what it was about. The idea for Upstream Color--which came from Carruth's meditations on identity--helped break him out of his post-Primer development hell, which included years of fruitless meetings in L.A. The new film has enough sci-fi elements to keep Primer fanboys happily deducing, but it's also something unexpected: a Carruth version of a romantic story. With nothing left in their lives, the central couple fall warily in love, still haunted by what happened to them. "Everyone thinks they know what makes them them," he says. "I wanted to strip that away and force them to build themselves back up, together."