math major in college and an engineer by trade, Shane Carruth one day decided to switch tracks, pursue his love for storytelling and become a filmmaker. His very first project is Primer, a realistic time-travel tale firmly grounded in hard science that explores the likes of causality and paradox, friendship and trust, and ambition and responsibility. This exploration is no walk in the park, though—it's likely to be an intensely mind-bending and intellectually challenging experience for most moviegoers, science fiction fans or not.
The story begins fairly normally—with a group of young engineers who, after hours, run a garage-based technology company based on their own inventions. Things are going well enough until their most recent experiment starts producing some truly bizarre results. Two of the group decide to keep the results from the others and try to find out what they might mean. When the pair finally realize that they've got a time machine on their hands, things start getting complicated. Very complicated.
Carruth, who wrote, directed and co-stars in the film, sat down with Science Fiction Weekly recently to discuss his ideas, inspirations and experiences making an indie science fiction project like Primer, which walked away from this year's Sundance Film Festival with two awards.
You actually studied mathematics in college and, after graduating, worked as an engineer for a while. What drove you to film?
Carruth: I started writing stories in college, and, to be honest, I think I had a different college experience than my friends—I don't think I woke up until college, I didn't realize anything until then. I didn't realize what you could do with a story, what literary value is, or subtext or irony or what any of these devices or properties of a story are, or what the purpose of a story was. I thought a story was just an interesting little thing you tell, like a Twilight Zone episode or a joke or whatever. But when I came to understand what a story really was, I just became obsessed with it. So the short version is that while I was studying math I was also writing a lot, and that eventually turned into screenplay writing. Then, when I was working, I was saving up money to put toward [Primer].
Where did the idea for the story come from?
Carruth: I knew thematically what I was going to do with these characters. I knew that they were going to start off as lifelong friends, and, because of the introduction of some kind of power, they wouldn't be close in the end. I wanted to deal with the equation of trust and how it changes if you up what's at risk, what's at stake.
I knew this story was going to happen, but as I was working on it I was reading a lot
of nonfiction about the history of the transistor, the history of calculus and the number zero, and I was just fascinated by it. It seemed like there were so many commonalities in these stories of innovation that I hadn't seen play out in film, and I really wanted to see it. Just stuff like how it always seems that there's something the inventor is heading for, or trying for, and there's a byproduct that he kind of dismisses at first; then it becomes a problem, and then suddenly that thing becomes the most valuable part of what he's doing. I mean, the transistor was a complete accident. They were looking for a purer crystal for radio tubes or something. And with the number zero, for the longest time math was so close to religion that the concept of zero was too close to the concept of infinity, which was too close to talking about God, and they didn't want to touch on it.
So it's never as simple as it seems, and I was really interested in that, and I knew that was my setting. I knew that it was going to be about guys puzzling stuff apart and this invention that comes to be through their investigation into these properties that are being exhibited by the thing they're trying to make.
What can you tell us about the look of the film? Did you know what you wanted from the get-go? As this was your first film project, I imagine a fair amount of experimentation was involved.
Carruth: Yeah, it's the end result of a lot of experimentation. I was scared half to death of getting an image on film. I was raised on video cameras—you shoot, you rewind it, you play it back and you're watching it. But the concept of shooting on film and not being able to see what you've shot for another three or four days? That's crazy.
So I got an old 35mm still camera, and I got some tungsten slide film (because I knew that motion picture film is tungsten-based), and I storyboarded the script so that I would know everything—I knew my framing, I knew my exposures, I knew the color temperatures and what I could expect to get on the negative. Basically I spent two or three months just doing that.
So it was just me, alone, taking my sweet time trying to find the perfect framing, and then, after I got the slides processed, tweaking them on my computer and seeing what was the latitude of these images, what could I do with them.
You've opted for a very realistic, or hard, science fiction.
Carruth: I knew from the get-go that, because of where the story goes, how it gets fantastical, you've got to believe in the reality in the beginning. It had to look pretty much mundane and very conventional, the way you're used to seeing films look, so that when it goes fantastical the way that it looks can go there too—I can quit my still shots and go to jump cuts and hand-held stuff and more elaborate dolly shots to match the tone of the story.
Are you much of a science fiction fan yourself?
Carruth: I try to be [smiles]. I love conceptual stuff. When it turns into the aesthetic of sci-fi, when all it is is lasers and alien skin and stuff, I get turned off. But Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl—there's a lot of great stuff out there.
Was there any science fiction that particularly informed this project?
Carruth: No, no more than I think your average person knows about paradoxes and causalities and whatever. I know there are great time-travel stories that exist; I don't honestly think I've read any of them, though.
Any film influences or inspirations?
Carruth: Yes—All the President's Men. But I always hesitate to say "influence," because it was the kind of thing where I had written the script, or at least a good portion of it, and in my head I kind of knew what we were going to be doing, and I thought I had this new idea—I'm going to have this fantastical story, and these guys are actually using portable time machines, but you're going to believe it because I'm going to set it in this really real world. So I thought I was doing something innovative or whatever, and then I happened to catch All the President's Men, and that world is so perfect, I believe every second of it. It looks like a documentary. The interaction between the actors isn't about drama or winning the Oscar, it's about "What does a real journalist look like when he says this line?" And once I saw that, it validated what I wanted to do and at the same time made me feel kind of stupid for thinking I had come up with something so novel, because here it was 30 years ago and [these filmmakers] were doing it.
Many viewers will likely find Primer to be one of the more intellectually challenging films they'll ever see. Are you at all worried that some people just might not get it?
Carruth: Yeah. The thing is, I know that it's get-able, it's just of matter of "Is that people's tastes?" Like my mom—I've heard her say over and over in my lifetime that she doesn't want to go to a movie to think, she wants to be entertained. So if that's a person's taste, then the movie probably isn't for them.
I think it would be fair to call this film an uncompromised vision. Would you agree, and how set were you on sticking to this vision?
Carruth: I agree that it's uncompromised in that I didn't ever have to take studio notes from anybody, but it's definitely compromised by budget and by me learning. In order to stay on budget I was too rigid with filmmaking. We had a shooting ratio of two to one (so we shot twice as much film as we actually used), which, after you get rid of the slates and the roll-out stuff, there was maybe 85 minutes of movie, and the final product is 78 minutes, so there's really nothing left. Everything was one take. I made us all rehearse a month beforehand, knowing that I could only do one take each time—we weren't going to wait for the take to come out on take 43. But because of this ... and I don't know that I'm supposed to talk about how it's flawed, but ... you shoot a film for $7,000 and it's going to have some flaws.
So not a lot of extra features on the DVD, then?
Carruth: Right, no deleted scenes.
As a first-time filmmaker, how did you find the experience?
Carruth: I hated it. I hated every second of it. It's ridiculous—you want to say it's like your 'Nam or something, but you can't say that because in the end you're just making a film; you're not curing cancer, you're not saving anybody. So not only is it excruciatingly stressful but you don't even have any noble purpose in doing it. I don't know ... it was not a good experience at all.
How did it stack up to being an engineer?
Carruth: I couldn't imagine two things that are further apart.
Why so?
Carruth: In the engineering world, what it seemed like is you're given 40 to 60 hours a week to do something, and it maybe took 45 minutes, and then you found a way to fill the rest of the time. And in film it was 18 to 20 hours a day, and I would forget to eat. Every second of the day is doing something.
Despite all this, do you think you'll stay in the world of film?
Carruth: Yeah, I just hope the next time around I've got the right tools and a proper budget.
Have you gotten any feedback from any former engineering colleagues?
Carruth: No. I was a pretty bad engineer. I basically did my time and then I went home. It wasn't my passion, unfortunately, so I didn't throw myself into it. It was always a day job.
Primer won two awards at Sundance, one of them the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. Did you know you had such a success on your hands when you were sitting at your computer in post-production?
Carruth: No, definitely not in post. Before I was shooting, when it was just a script, I was kind of fantasizing, but if I ever thought there was a chance that it wouldn't get into Sundance then I probably would have kept writing until I was sure that there was no possibility of that.
So before I started shooting, the possibilities were endless. "Oh, it could be the next Brothers McMullen or Pi," or whatever, I thought to myself. And then about three or four days into shooting I was certain: "OK, it's not going to be a Sundance film, but maybe there's a chance it'll be a film that'll go to another festival." And then, a couple weeks later: "OK, it's not gonna get into any festivals, but maybe it'll be a film that I'll have learned filmmaking on, and I'll get to the next one." It was that bad of an experience.
So the post process was trying to get it back to something that was respectable. But I got so close to it that I don't think that I could ever have stepped away from it and said, "Oh, I hope it gets to Sundance. I hope it wins an award."
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