Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Have I mentioned lately that I think Ghostboy is one of the best occasional contributors to this site? Because I do. And this interview with Shane Caruth is just further proof of that. PRIMER’s a damn fine film, and this is an interview well worth your time:
Howdy folks,
As a follow-up to my review of Primer the other day, allow me to present something on a related note: this interview with that film's writer/director/producer/star/etc, Shane Carruth.
A bit of a preface: I went into the film enormously skeptical about the seven thousand dollar budget. I've read Rebel Without A Crew like everyone else, and knew how Rodriguez did it (and how much money Columbia spent sweetening the sound, etc), so perhaps it just seemed too mythical a figure to believe. I left the film very much impressed, but still a bit unsure about how much money I was looking at on screen (I would have guessed 30,000 if I had been asked to blindly guess, and I figured that Think Film must have spent some substantial cash on the very impressive sound mix). But I had the chance to sit down and talk with him a few weeks after I saw the film, and now my cynicism has been vanquished.
Here's what he had to say.
GB: So how's it feel to have this big hit all of a sudden, as far as indie films go?
SC: It's...I mean it's...weird. I mean, it's obviously good. It's both, it's both...I don't know, it's completely exceeded my expectations.
GB: Do you ever read Aint It Cool News?
SC: Oh yeah.
GB: There was a review of Primer (from Mr. Beaks) there the other day in which you were compared to Kubrick and, to a lesser extent, Cronenberg. Did that freak you out?
SC: Yeah. Man, I just hope that...I don't know, I hope that it doesn't spoil people's expectations.
GB: Well, I think the Kubrick comparison is pretty accurate. I felt it has those same, austere sensibilities...
SC: Well, I mean, that's the thing. I rip off the best! (laughter) I do what I can.
GB: On that note, what were some of the inspirations, both for this film and for you as a filmmaker in general?
SC: I say that - to be honest, if I ever found myself being too much inspired by someone else, I'll stop what I'm doing. I'll find another way to do it. I would hate to just put out there what's already been out there, but I know that - you know, that the film is complete, when I look at it I realize that "oh wait, I'm ripping off a shot from Close Encounters, that reveal is exactly like a scene in that." So I don't know, I think it's just 100 different things. I know, growing up, I watched the same films as everyone else. I wasn't really an afficianado or whatever. It was all ET and The Goonies, like any other person. But there's something that happens - like, you know, I was writing it, I was reaching the end of the writing process for Primer, I was trying to envision what...how am I going to execute this? The idea was to keep it as realistic as possible so that when it gets fantastical, hopefully it's just an extension of that world.
And so then I happened to see All The President's Men for the first time, and you know, I'm looking at the acting and I was just blown away by it because it's - on the one hand, it's exactly what I wanted to do, so I felt stupid for thinking I'd come up with some new idea that they had already done in the seventies. But at the same time, I felt like it validated what I wanted to do, that there was a way to do it. All The President's Men is an investigative procedural with two guys and it just happens to involve a real life story. And I've got this story where the beginning third of it is an investigative procedural that is just the revelation of a lot of little details that add up to something bigger.
So, I mean, there are things like that, but if I ever find myself - I would never purposely rip off someone else.
GB: Now, I just happened to get the new issue of INTERVIEW magazine in the mail this morning -
SC: You're kidding me!
GB: And in the interview with you, the mention that you were originally planning on making an angsty twentysomething comedy. How far did that go?
SC: It's finished. I was actually trying to figure out how to get that shot when the idea for Primer came about.
GB: So had you made that instead, do you think you would you have held your own so well against Garden State at Sundance this past year?
SC: You know what, it actually took me a year to write Primer, so it would have been finished at least a year earlier. But you know, I haven't seen Garden State, but I think what I was writing - it was called Near Earth Orbit - and I think, I think it would have been okay. I mean, I look back at the script and it's not terrible. It has some new ideas about that genre, I guess. But you know, the more I thought about Primer, I became more and more passionate about it. And I was thinking about it: either way, either of these two films are gonna have to go the festival route and I was trying to think, "which one would I go to if I was reading the description in a festival program?" And, I mean, I know which one I'd go see, so I just put all my energies into that.
GB: So is all the technical jargon in the screenplay accurate, or did you just fake it, so to speak? Would someone who understands this stuff be able to follow the movie better that someone who has to work to keep their head above the water (like me)?
SC: It is heavily researched. What they're saying is based in real stuff, up until the point where we say it's affecting time. What they're doing at the beginning, with trying to degrade gravity using superconductors, these are real things, you know. Diamagnetism, the ability to make objects not metallic or magnetic appear to levitate, or actually levitate, or appear to lessen the effect of gravity, that's all real stuff. There's machines that do it, and they're about the size of a house and they have to be cooled to absolute zero. And so our guys are finding a way to get this to happen under different conditions.
But everything they're saying, it's all real. I've actually - one of the more gratifying moments was at Sundance, I had a couple guys come up to me afterwards and they were engineers and they were able to follow it. And their question to me was, we really enjoyed seeing our work up there, but why would you put it there? Because no one else is going to know what you're talking about."
And the thing is, it was important to me that they were saying real things, just so that as I'm explaining it to the other actors, we all believe in it, and it's real. The thing is that those scenes are kinda written with a couple of purposes, so that even if the tech jargon isn't working or nobody cares about it or what it is, there's information there about the politics of the group: who's proprietary about what, and who's enthusiastic, who's on who's side. So those scenes were trying to accomplish enough so that if the tech doesn't work...
GB: It totally works. That was one of the things I loved about it. So with the budget, you've hit that magic El Mariachi 7000 dollar mark. Is that something you planed on, or was it a coincidence?
SC: A little of both. When I would go to the lab to negotiate a price, I basically had a price that I was willing to pay and I told them about it, based on the fact that I knew El Mariachi was shot for seven thousand. And you know, that kind of dictated the 2:1 shooting ratio; that dictated that I wasn't going to pay for some of these things. Like locations, I never paid for a location. I wasn't able to pay actors.
I probably, I should have changed it; I should have changed the budget from anything but seven thousand, just so it didn't look like I was trying to reproduce what he had done, but it magically turned out to be that number. And to be honest, I should have found another couple thousand dollars, I think it would have made a huge difference.
GB: So how long was the shoot?
SC: It was five weeks, and there were two breaks of about four days so I could take the film to the lab.
GB: And otherwise it was non-stop shooting?
SC: For the most part, yeah. I mean, I made sure - you know, I worked on one independent film. I volunteered to do sound on a local independent film. It was a much bigger budget, it was about 150,000 dollars. And one of the things that frustrated me about it was that we would all get prepared, the actors, sound, lights set up and everything, and then, at that point, that's when the director would figure out where the camera was going to go. And it just seemed so inefficient, and so I did my best to do away with that. I did storyboards, 35mm stills, so that you would know exactly what the composition was, exposures, color temperature and everything. And...shit, there was something else I was going to say, I completely forgot what it was. What was the question again?
GB: You know, I don't even remember. It was, ah, how long was the shoot?
SC: Right. Oh, I was gonna say something about the fact that we never - on this other shoot that I was on, we would find ourselves in the middle of a field at four in the morning, because of that, and so I made sure that we never worked past 9:30. For the most part, we were done at 7:00. Just to make sure that we were...well, it was to make sure because I would usually lose a location or something during the day and I would have to find another one, and so I'd have to spend the evening either rewriting the scene for another location or trying to find another location.
GB: So you had a 2:1 shooting ratio. I was just blown away, seeing all these dolly shots were dialogue, which are just so tough to pull off -
SC: Yeah!
GB: And they all were flawless! Did you have trouble with those?
SC: That's the thing, see, it's obvious to you that those are difficult shots, but I was so naïve that I didn't even know that. "Yeah, we'll do a dolly shot, that'll be interesting, it'll add some depth!"(laughter)
Yeah, we rehearsed for a month, because I knew that we could only take one take on the set, we're not going to keep shooting until I feel comfortable with it or something magical happens. If we're going to hammer out the details, we need to do it before we get to the expensive dolly shots. So those dolly shots, we would rehearse them a few times, but that was really for camera, to make sure the dolly was moving at the right speed and all that. The performance, you know, luckily we did it so many times that the performance never really changed. You know, once you repeat something for the fiftieth time, the fiftieth through the seventieth are all pretty much the same.
GB: You had a really nice, rapid-fire David Mamet style delivery going on.
SC: Yeah, that was the hope.
GB: So what kind of equipment did you have on a shoot that was so low budget? Natural light and household lamps?
SC: Yeah, mostly it was available light. I bought some fluorescent light bulb banks from Wal Mart with daylight balanced bulbs, because you know on tungsten film they tend to go blue. So I was experimenting during the storyboard stage with the idea of flooding a room with this blue light and then using practicals - you know the way these lights (gestures to hotel room lamp) tend to go yellow - using those to kind of isolate parts of the scene. And I just really liked the lighting effect; to me, it's interesting, but it's also realistic. It doesn't look overly lit or too soft or glamorous, it kind of looks like the real world. But that's the only lighting equipment. With available light, I'd blow out windows whenever I could.
GB: To get that nice Janusz Kaminski look?
SC: Yep.
GB: So you spent two years on post?
SC: Yeah. I mean, a lot of it was editing. Because I stuck so strictly to the shooting ratio, there were a lot of problems that needed to be fixed. A lot of it was dubbing audio, doing foley work, learning how to compose music for...I had messed with music before, you know, but not...there's a whole art that I wasn't aware of, you know, the way that music works in film. When it's comfortable to hear it and when it's jarring, and how it suits the movie. It's just a huge learning process.
GB: And when you were done with it, you took it to LA?
SC: You know, I had finished it in August of last year, in time for the early deadline for Sundance. And you know, my hope - I was still naïve I guess, but my hope was that it would get into Sundance. And I wasn't even going to apply to any festivals until I got a no. Because they have a -
GB: - premiere policy -
SC: Exactly. So I wasn't even going to take the chance of showing it anywhere else until I definitely got a no from them. But I did - through the entire process, I was saying, you know, when I ever get this thing finished, I'm going to go out to Los Angeles and I'm going to spend a week there and you're gonna see a Shane you haven't seen before.
I went out there and I just called, I called hundreds and hundreds of people: managers and producers and publicists and agents. Just anybody who I thought I could get the film to and if they saw it and liked it, they might know somebody. Because I was scared to death that an intern would look at it and spend forty five seconds fast forwarding through it and then dispose of it, because I had heard horror stories.
And to be honest, I don't know exactly how much good that did. The little I've heard, I tend to think that it got it a little above the intern level; I know it didn't get it into the festival, but it got it to the point where one of the five or six programmers took notice of the fact that it existed. And so - I don't know. A few months later, I got a call from Geoff Gilmore. And I had actually only learned his name a few days before, I found out he was the director of Sundance. He said that him and his programmers had watched the film and they'd been talking about it for an hour and they all were sure that they knew exactly what it was about, but none of them could agree. And so he wanted to make sure that-- he wanted to talk about the film, but I think what he was trying to do was to make sure that the movie was actually about something. That it wasn't just, I don't know, a grouping of random plot points. So once we were able to talk about it, I don't know, I felt pretty good about it. It was never a done deal, it was still another month before I found out that it was in.
GB: So when you found out you won the grand prize, what was your initial reaction?
SC: I was -- I mean, did you see the Awards Ceremony?
GB: No, I didn't get to.
SC: I watched it when I got home, and I - yeah, I was just in complete shock. I mean, there was just - because it won the Alfred P. Sloane award, and I found out about that on the Thursday night of the week -- the awards ceremony was on Saturday.-- and so, and basically the way I found out was somebody came up and said, "hey we're doing an Alfred P. Sloane ceremony tomorrow night, and Primer won, and so you need to be there." And I was like, "that's fantastic." But because of that, and because...At the awards ceremony, whoever won for like director, writer, audience award, they were so eloquent, they had a list of people to thank. So since I knew that, well, we already won the Alfred P. Sloane award and someone came up to me, I figured someone had come up and told them and that's why they were so well prepared. And since nobody had talked to me, I had no doubt that we weren't going to win. So I was just kind of enjoying the ceremony. You know, there's celebrities there, and they're all up on stage, and it's being broadcast. And so when Danny Glover said "Primer," I was just in shock.
GB: So after it won and was picked up by Think Film, what did they do to the film, other than provide prints and advertising?
SC: Nothing's been changed. It's exactly what it was on my computer last summer except that it's on 35mm.
GB: Which reminds me. How did the anti-gravity work? Was it CG?
SC: It is, but it's an in camera effect. That shot, you know, the film camera dollies behind the miniDV camcorder and racks focus...
GB: ...and you see it on the little screen...
SC: Exactly. So that effect only exists on miniDV tape. We had shot that about three days earlier for the camcorder, and then I took it home and placed the dots in on my computer and then dumped it back out to tape and put it back in the camcorder. And then for the film scene, we just, we mimicked the same scene.
GB: That's great.
SC: It's so frustrating though, because it took so much work and the one thing that would have been much better would have been if I would have been smart enough to put David in a shirt other than white or blue, because you can't see the dots. Because I have the tape, and it looks good, it looks real, but you can't see it nearly well enough because of the shirt. So it's yet another example of wishing there was a producer or someone -
GB: There's always that accursed hindsight...
SC: Yeah, yeah.
GB: So how's the response been? Is it positive, or do you just get a lot of people scratching their heads?
SC: It's - it's both, and I don't know if this is an illusion, but it does seem to me that half the battle is getting people to know what to expect when they walk in. You know, after Sundance, it went to Seattle and Cinevegas. And I don't really watch the movie anymore because all I see are problems, but I'll stand outside and listen to it, and I used to see people come in five or ten minutes into it, and you really can't catch up with it. It's just not that type of film, it's hard to miss a minute here or there. And I think now people know what they're getting into, they kind of know that, okay, they pay attention. If they're there, they've pretty much decided that it's their type of movie. They don't show up not liking this type of movie. So, I don't know - it's been good. I don't know what it's going to be like when it gets released.
GB: So here's a question I'm sure you're getting a lot: what's next?
SC: Um, I'm halfway through with a script and I really want to get it made next. It's a romance.
GB: Primer reminded me a lot of Christopher Nolan's work. Does this mean you might go onto something like a Batman movie a few films down the line?
SC: No, I mean, I've got four stories that I really like a lot. And I think that, you know, if I get to make films for a living, I think I'll do the best working on my own material. So that's what I hope to do.
GB: Are you going to stay in Dallas?
SC: I don't - I know I can't work in LA, I know I can't write there, and I wouldn't look forward to shooting there. But I don't know what's gonna happen. Like this story that I'm working on now, it's set at sea off the coast of Eastern Africa and Southern Asia and so I'd love to be able to - you know, I've heard about people shooting in Ecuador and how it's a good experience. I'd love to be able to shoot in three or four exotic locations that represent ten or twenty. I don't know, that's what I'd be interested in.
GB: Well that pretty much wraps it up. Thank you so much for chatting.
SC: No, it's great.
GB: I hope you aren't sick of these questions yet.
SC: Not yet, not yet. As long as people want to listen, I'll talk about it.
And there you have it, folks -- or actually, there you have most of it. The interview was actually a bit longer, and if you want to get the unedited scoop on a few more technical details about the production of the film (the kinda thing that would mainly interest like-minded indie filmmakers, such as what sort of dolly track was used on the production -- I'm a dork, but I love details like that), the full transcript will be available in a few days or so at my site.
Primer opens next week in NY and Dallas and expands from there. Check it out.
I'm outta here.
Ghostboy
As always, a pleasure, sir. PRIMER is worth seeking out in the week’s ahead. Great smart stuff sure to please any serious SF fan.
"Moriarty" out.
