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1. ART & INDUSTRY
by Amy Taubin
PRIMER: THE NEW WHIZ KID ON THE BLOCK
About a month after Shane Carruth's Primer won the Grand Prize at Sundance 2004 as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's $20,000 award for films referencing science and technology, THINKfilm closed a distribution deal for the North American rights. Mark Urman, the company's head of theatrical distribution, began pursuing the film at Sundance, even before it won the grand prize. He and Carruth had a handshake agreement, which then turned into what Urman says is the longest negotiation he was ever involved in.
"Shane is a complete autodidact," explained Urman. "Just as he taught himself everything about filmmaking before he made Primer, he and his attorney walked with us through every possible permutation of a distribution deal. Interestingly, the deal he proposed in the end was very different from what most filmmakers want. He was less interested in getting the maximum up front than in reserving certain kind of rights. I think he will do very well with it."
Primer was the most exciting first feature by a U.S. director at the festival since Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko in 2001. Like Kelly's film, Primer is a muted sci-fi time-warp narrative with allegorical underpinnings, but the similarity pretty much ends there. Where Kelly's high-school hero sacrificed himself to save his loved ones from being destroyed by a demonic rabbit, who was also his evil twin (other interpretations welcomed), the protagonists of Primer are bored 30-year-old engineers trying to invent some get-rich gizmo in a garage. In the process, they stumble onto a device that's too valuable to market and that will allow them to have pretty much anything they want. Since the device is a crude form of a time machine, and since film itself is a kind of time machine, one can read Primer as a film that mirrors its own DIY production. Carruth spent three years teaching himself screenwriting and filmmaking from scratch. He wrote, directed, edited, and scored Primer and also played one of the lead roles. The film was shot in Super 16mm for $7,000 (excluding postproduction and the 35mm blow-up). The look is mysterious and elegant, with frames inside frames and overexposed, blown-out areas. Carruth makes Southwest suburbia look mundane but a touch radioactive. Heady is the word for the film, which doesn't yield its narrative in a single viewing. But even more compelling than the time-warped storyline is the way, visually, every shot has the surprise and intensity of a new idea. The film feels like a succession of brainstorms, held together by a nearly subliminal overlay of sound effects and music. Carruth, his co-star David Sullivan, and rest of the inexperienced cast handle the professional jargon as deftly as the veterans on ER. But despite echoes of La Jetée, The Killing, and various prime-time medical/crime shows, the aptly titled Primer is not a pastiche. Rather, it is evidence of a unique and unified vision.
Carruth is 31 years old and lives in Dallas, where he shot Primer. He has a degree in mathematics and worked briefly at three engineering companies before he decided to be a filmmaker. He is soft-spoken and has an understated, even ingenuous, manner. On-screen, he looks a bit like Noah Wylie on ER. Off-screen, you'd have trouble picking him out in a crowd. This Q & A is excerpted from a February 2004 phone interview.
Your little biographical note in the Sundance catalog is kind of mysterious. How did you get from engineering to film?
I quickly learned I didn't want to be an engineer. I'd written a lot of short stories and I was halfway through a novel when it occurred to me that I don't really like writing inner monologues. I don't want to write about what someone's thinking. I'd rather find a way to show it through their actions. So, basically, what I had was a screenplay. And I'm really interested in film, and a lot of my favorite films are independent, in that the director has a lot of control. So that seemed to be something I wanted to try to do.
How did you go about it?
I read a lot of scripts, just to see what they're supposed to look like, and I went to town writing. When it came to production, I went to the few production houses here in Dallas. I asked them what they did and how they fit into the general scheme of things. I just asked a lot of questions from end to end about, you know, which cameras do what. Once I found out that cinematography was really photography with a set shutter speed, I got an old 35mm Minolta and bought some tungsten slide film, because I knew that motion-picture film for the most part was tungsten, and I used it to storyboard the entire script. It took a long time, because I didn't know about photography. I didn't know anything about depth of field or how to get the look I wanted. I had to learn everything through the pre-production process. So I storyboarded and I set up my lighting, which wasn't elaborate - it was mostly available light. I had read Soderbergh stuff where they talk about him using available light, which is true for the most part. So I thought I could get away with that, but I found there were some situations where I had to buy some florescent bulbs from Wal-Mart and set up a rudimentary bank. And then I just learned how to cast. But after trying out a hundred guys, I was only able to find David Sullivan. It was so much work finding him that I wasn't interested in doing that again. I'd kind of learned the script myself, so I thought I'd try my hand at the other part, because I knew I'd at least be there every day, so it was one less person to have to call in the morning.
When you say you were interested in independent film, are there particular films that come to mind.
In the Company of Men comes to mind. I thought for a long time that independent film meant really cheap. And I've learned that it doesn't necessarily mean that. Most of Kubrick's films you'd have to call independent, because he had so much control. One voice delivers the entire film so that it's not diluted. It's like reading a great novel from one person's voice.
I also thought about In the Company of Men when I saw your film, and The Killing. But I thought about a bunch of avant-garde films, too, particularly some of James Benning's. Benning also was originally a mathematician. I had the same feeling when I saw Benning's early film 11 X 14 as I had when I saw your film - that every shot was a surprise when it came on the screen.
My film education kind of ends with Turner Classic Movies. I'm a little embarrassed that I don't know as much as other filmmakers. I've only seen a few French New Wave films. I'm not educated in film history.
