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Apr 19, 2013 By John Everhart Web Exclusive

Shane Carruth, who directed 2004’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning Primer, has taken an audacious artistic leap forward with his sophomore feature Upstream Color. He imbues Upstream with a visceral gut-punch of emotional resonance lacking in the surgically precise and coldly calculating time travel ethics quandary that was Primer. Copious theories abound about Upstream already, and for good reason. The film is gloriously abstract, starring Carruth as Jeff, and Amy Seimetz as Kris. They bond over a shared experience with an ageless organism, one that leaves them bereft, prompting the pair to essentially discard their old identities and to grapple with the conundrum of what remains when you’ve lost everything. Disparate themes such as the relationship between piglets and humans, Thoreau’s Walden, a mysterious sound sampler with nebulous intentions, and orchid harvesting factor largely in the byzantine equation, but this is a film best left to interpret on your own, ideally after repeated viewings and careful deliberation. The dots are there for you, like stars burning brightly in the sky to be connected, and they form a beguiling constellation in Carruth’s strange and twisted universe. Under the Radar caught up with the director at his publicist’s office in New York City shortly before the film’s release.

John Everhart (Under the Radar): Seeing this film reminded me of a David Lynch quote where he said that he felt as though viewers got more out of his films than they initially thought, albeit at a subconscious level. Coming out of two screenings, I feel like a lot was absorbed and synthesized after the fact.

Shane Carruth: That’s the hope. But films like this just start with a different ambition. There’s the way an audience is 99% of the time met with a work. And then there’s this other thing in this film. For me, with David Lynch, when I see one of his films I know what I’m getting myself into and I’m not going to know everything about it, and the same goes for something like The Master as well. But you know what you’re getting into. You’re either going to be into that or you’re not. To me, those are the rich works. Those are the ones I want to revisit. Those are the ones I find more satisfying when I pull them apart. I don’t get a lot of satisfaction with having everything summed up and being told everything at the end. I guess that can be a fun experience, but that doesn’t give me anything to do afterwards. I guess I’m more interested in work that gives you something to do, in the same way an album gives you a reason to revisit it after one listening and something to think about. No one goes into an album and thinks that they know everything after one listening. It’s a more internalizing experience.

It was interesting how you controlled the marketing of this, and the images that were presented. I’m really glad Spring Breakers is doing well, but seeing that film it was obvious that it was marketed to a demographic that maybe didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. But you really wanted people to understand what they were getting themselves into here.

I’m not naïve enough to think I could trick enough people to bring 100 million dollars of box office revenue to this film. But that’s not why it was made. I think about things on a very long timeline. Is it possible to make work that’s relevant in another 50 or more years? I’m not saying that what I do is going to be relevant, or that’s how great it is. What I am saying is that if what I’m doing doesn’t have a chance to be relevant, and if it is only temporarily interesting, I’ll have to stop, because I don’t have a passion for that. But that dictates that the work needs a certain quality. It needs to be dense with exploration. I feel like I might be on to a new thing film is capable of. Well, not a new thing, but going down this avenue that’s worth pursuing. Because we’re not doing much right now with film. We’re treading water and just creating books you can watch. And that’s not the end of film. We have to find the other thing it’s capable of and what it’s for, in the same way a sculpture’s different than a painting. Film needs to be a different thing.

The older I get, the less I feel a connection to feature films with straight-forward narratives. It’s the films like yours, and the works of Tarkovsky, Malick, and Paul Thomas Anderson. Those are just the ones that I connect with.

Wow, that’s great. That’s how I feel as well.

And I think there are other modern filmmakers doing this as well. Another one of them is Amy Seimetz, who obviously stars in this film. I was curious as to how you cast her? Did it have to do with Sun Don’t Shine?

I met David Lowery [editor] and Toby [Halbrooks, co-producer] before hand, and I was calling everyone who could potentially play this role [Kris], because it was so crucial obviously. So I called her up, and she was in the middle of editing Sun Don’t Shine, and I blew that off. I didn’t know what that meant, because I thought she was an actress. “Does that mean she’s sitting in an editing suite watching someone editing?” But the more we talked, the more it became clear that she was doing Final Cut on her laptop. And she said, “Well, do you want to see it?” And I said, “Great.” And I expected to see some experimental short, and instead it’s this wonderful feature that she wrote and directed. And I got 10 minutes into it, and was just more or less decided that if this can work, she should be in the film, because 90% of what’s on the page is already done because she already gets narrative the way I do. I feel like that bore out. I mean, she showed up and she knew what we were doing, and we did it. I mean, not that she isn’t a wonderful actress, because she obviously is. And that performance answers for itself. But it was the fact that she was a storyteller that keyed me into her.

Her expressions added so much to the film. She really did just seem to intuitively get it.

Yeah, she was amazing.

I was curious about David Lowery, because I’m really excited to see Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Did you feel like his editing brought a lot to the film?

Absolutely. I was failing. I was falling further and further behind. I was losing sleep. And the other things I was doing were being affected by it. So I asked him if he could take a look at it to see what he could do. And I felt like he took a lot of time getting to understand what the project was trying to do. Not just editing it as it was meant to go into chronology, but really get the lyricism that I had been trying to cobble together up until that point. And he just got it, after a lot of conversations up to that point. And I got confident in him, and he got confident in me. He was editing while I was shooting. And then once shooting was done we just collaborated in different rooms, walking back and forth. I wasn’t expecting collaboration. It was the real deal. It was amazing.

It’s interesting to me that what’s left out of the film is almost as important as what’s left in. It’s like music to me in that regard.

Yeah, when you effectively have a story about being affected at a distance, by things you can’t really speak to, you never had a chance for anyone to talk about it, so anything that was conveyed to the audience was always going to have to be non-verbal. So yeah, using editing, using music, using soundscapes, subverting with writing that’s not dialogue but with what you’re seeing and when you’re seeing it-all of that needs to be as effective as it can be, because we weren’t ever going to have a lot of dialogue to sync.

The music and sound in the film are tremendous. I imagine that was a difficult process for you to compose it, more so than with Primer.

There was a lot more going on [than in Primer], so there was a lot of time spent on it. I was writing the music while I was writing the script, and I thought I had a full score by the time I was done with it. But I made an error. I’d written it for the audience’s frame of mind, to describe that, and not describing the characters’ frame of mind, their experience. And I didn’t necessarily notice that until some of the visual language was formed, and something about it was not working. I feel silly that it took so long to figure it out, but the problem was the camera work and the visual language was doing a good job of conveying the subjective experience, but the music was still so structured. It was movie music. I had to throw out half of it and just readdress what we were doing. So I started to incorporate lots of layers of sampled sound. I sampled a bunch of sounds from the pool area, the way the sodium lights were working under water, a lot of natural sounds like leaves rustling, and would pitch them down or up depending upon what they needed to do and created instruments from those. From that point forward I was only led by, “Do I think the onscreen character’s emotional experience is being conveyed by this? Does this feel like a mainline into where they are?” There are moments at the end that are true to that, but they’re subversive to the audience’s frame. They’re appropriate to the characters but they’re subversive to the text. I don’t know if that makes sense. [Laughs]

Well, it makes sense if you’ve seen the film a couple times. [Laughs] In modern films, so much is made of licensing music. So many films are like dream mixtapes for the directors. Are there films you see as inspirations with regard to their soundtracks?

I guess The Master. This isn’t meant as a criticism at all, but it goes to the point of being irritating to listen to alone as a score, and it could not be more appropriate to accompany that film. That’s really being earnest to do that, because it would be really easy to not. I respond to that. I’m trying to think… I’ve been listening to the Spring Breakers soundtrack, but I can’t talk about that. [Laughs]

What constitutes a successful film for you in 2013?

That’s a great question. Well, honestly, don’t tell anybody, but I’ve already hit my threshold for success in modern times. I want to do work that has a chance to be relevant in the future, as I think I said before, in 50 or more years. In that sense, my job right now is to make a big enough impact so that the film has a chance to live on its own. So I think at this point, it will have some life. It will have a chance to live. If it fails, it fails. But it has a chance to live. That, and if it could make some money which would mean another film is possible, that’s realistically a part of this as well.

But if you think about it, Primer‘s still being talked about 10 years on, which is remarkable.

That’s my hope here. And this film’s a thousand times better than Primer. It’s a good work. If that says anything about the response to this, it has a long life.

(erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor)