Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color

Writer, director, composer and actor Shane Carruth is about as independent as film gets.  He wrote, directed and co-starred in his first film, “Primer”, nine years ago.  “Primer” won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival with its complicated and mind bending time-travel-based storyline and won over audiences soon after.  If it’s possible to be more independent than that, he’s done it with his new film, “Upstream Color”.  In addition to writing, directing, and co-starring in “Upstream Color”, he composed the score for the film, and is self distributing it as well.   The new film has been generating constant buzz ever since it debuted last fall  at  Sundance , with its unconventional narrative and thought provoking themes.   Shane stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk about the new film with Ron Bennington recently.  Excerpts from that interview appear below.

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Ron Bennington:  This music alone has put me right back into the same head as after seeing “Upstream Color” and I just wandered off through the city of New York trying to put it all together.  Shane, good to see you my friend.

Shane Carruth:  Thank you so much, you too.

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Shane Carruth Talks About The Narrative Style of Upstream Color

Ron Bennington:  What a strange place seeing this film will put you into.  I honestly believe like it was somewhat speaking more to my subconscious than to actually even my conscious mind.  Is that done for a reason with some of your films?

Shane Carruth:  Absolutely yeah, especially this one.  So much of the film is about personal narratives and how they come to be and how they define us and what happens if they were stripped away.  It’s an exploration of that.  The film itself starts off one way, sort of explaining the mechanics of the story in that world, but quickly gets into a much more subjective experience.  And so everything about the film from the cinematography to the music to the performances and just a lot of other elements are there to hopefully deliver a sort of POV, subjective experience.  Not technically POV, but everything about it is from the characters, in the character’s mindset for the most part.

Ron Bennington:  Now you know going into this that you’re making movies different from the way we think of movies.  You’re purposefully doing that, so you know that you are going to create a certain amount of confusion in either critics or viewers and that is one of the responses I guess that you’re looking for.

Shane Carruth:  Well it’s certainly not something I’m looking for, but it is something that I do expect.  I knew it would be somewhat divisive.  I can spin this the way that I would like it to sound, but I do really think this is true that the film has a different ambition than typical, and so that is necessarily going to be divisive.  There are going to be some people that key into what it is doing immediately and they’ll judge it based on that – they will either think its good or bad based on that assessment.  Other people, if I haven’t prepared them properly, then they’re going to have a different expectation of what this move is.  And to be honest, if we’re not lined up, I image it could be a confusing experience.  But I think that is just part of it.  And it is what has been really wonderful about having it come out — you know it came out at Sundance and its played a few festivals, and we’ve been doing these awareness screenings — is that I believe its the beginning of a conversation where we’re eventually going to get to the point where no one is going to randomly see this movie and not know what they’re in for.  Most people that seek it out or go to it are going to know that there is something else on its mind and will be prepared for that.

Ron Bennington:  And you’re actually out doing some Q&A’s in New York when it opens on April 5, and there’s going to be a sneak peak on April 4th at the IFC Center.   Also coming out on video-on-demand.  I remember with “Primer” a lot of people said that they really enjoyed it with the director’s cut, but I had no problem not knowing what it was about before I went to see it.  And I had no problem at all taking that ride along with it, but I think its going to be up to what are most people like — are they the type of people that if you go to someone else’s religious ceremony and its different than yours you’re thrown off, or if you happen to take a drug do you try to fight it or ride the snake and go the whole way?  I do think there are certain amounts of that — that if you surrender to that and let it come along; unlike a lot of narrative films that you see, there are a lot of other thoughts that will come up in your own head.

Shane Carruth:  The one thing I would say about that is this absolutely is a narrative.  I’ve spent a lot of time and maybe we are spending a lot of time talking about the more esoteric qualities of it, but it really is a story.  Nobody walks out of this thing not having known roughly what the story is.  Even the reviews that say that it might be a little bit too obscure, they still list out the plot beat by beat and they get it.  What I think is the film is telegraphing that it is exploring something pretty heady, so when that’s not all summed up at the end I think there can be this feeling of — I’m looking at the end credits, and yet I don’t know everything about this movie yet.  And that is part of what the film is aspiring to do, is to be something that hopefully is compelling enough that it’s worth thinking about and maybe revisiting to get to every little last nuance that’s in it.

Ron Bennington:  I guess what I’m talking about is we keep saying that film is such a visual medium, and yet when anyone uses visuals then everyone gets thrown off.  And you realize that after so many years, still, its dialogue.  Most of the films that we have seen are very dialogue driven.  

Shane Carruth:  Film, I believe, has not reached its height of what it is capable of.  I think for the most part most of film has been a book that you can watch.  And we’ve got a lot of elements to play with here with film.  We’ve got music and sound and visuals and all sorts of other things.  I think we can take that further.  You couldn’t say that a sculpture is a better version of a painting, so I don’t think we can have films just being book.  Films can aspire to something potentially different in some new direction, and that’s what this is trying to do.

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Shane Talks About How to Experience His Films

Ron Bennington:  When you’re watching a foreign film you are not going to capture every single word of it, and at a certain point your brain finds that is okay and you just start picking up on a lot of feelings.  You’re catching words here and there, but most of the time you’re picking up the feeling of the film.  And I think that’s what you were talking about, letting visuals, letting sound, letting music go to that.  The point I was making is that will bring things out of each individual in the audience.  So it isn’t a matter of this made me laugh or this didn’t, sometimes it is almost like sense memory if you let yourself go with it.

Shane Carruth:  Yeah absolutely, and especially with a film that has so much to do with sense memory.  I’ve started to think about it like an album that you put on.  Nobody puts on an album, listens to it once, and then thinks they know everything they are ever going to know about whether they like this or not.  They put it on, you get a sense of it, and then if it was a positive experience you put it on again, and before long — weeks later, whatever — you’ve so well internalized that music that you know every last crook and cranny about it that you like.  And so my hope is that narrative can potentially do something close to that — that if I don’t waste a second of the audience’s time and I try and stay as compelling as I can be moment by moment that maybe I can pack it full of really dense material as far as exploration goes.  Maybe there’s a way to have a film that’s not just once experienced one time in a year.

Ron Bennington:  And the difference I think with an album is you may or may not be ready for that album when it happens.  I’ve been a Bowie fan for a long time.  So when people go, ‘What do you think of the new Bowie?’  I’m like, it’s gonna take me a long time because I’m still shaking the old Bowie away.  I’m still almost disappointed that he’s made some changes.  And a lot of times I’ll go back and say, ‘Where was my head? This album is great.’  And it was such a disappointment to me when it came out, but it really has to do more about me.  You talk about identity plays a very big part of this, and that got my head spinning on this because how do we know the people we like, the things we like, all that stuff is not a moment by moment decision; it’s this pile that we find ourselves sitting on in that moment.

Shane Carruth:  Yeah exactly.  Just the shear subjectivity of everybody’s experience.  I don’t know, I find that really haunting.  It covers everything.  It covers how much control you are in with the choices you make and then how much control you are in with the things that seem to be affecting you and whether they are happening because of your frame of mind or your belief system or what.  It really is trying to explore the whole gamut of personal narrative.

Ron Bennington:  And some of these people that more or less get a fresh start.  Because I don’t want to give too much of it away — but they’re given a fresh start — how much are they like what they would have been before?

Shane Carruth:  See that is really interesting.  What I’m curious about is whether what they were before really was substantial in any way, or whether it didn’t matter.  I’m really curious about whether behavior dictates identity or whether it’s the other way around.  I’m not smart enough to know, I’m only diligent enough to talk about the question in a really exploratory way.

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Shane Carruth Talks About Asking Questions

Ron Bennington:  It is also of course about connection, whether we know those connections are there or not.  And do you have some beliefs that there are ways that we’re connected that we still can’t figure out through science or even religion at this point?

Shane Carruth:  I think it’s the fact that I’m constantly questioning it that led to this.  I only know the same things that everybody else knows.  I feel like you have to have some plurality of thought: That there are so many mysterious things going on in the world that I could not use one belief system to explain all of them.  If we could and if it worked and if it was bulletproof, then everybody would believe the exact same things.  No, I don’t know.  I don’t have any solid feeling; I just know the question is interesting.

Ron Bennington:  And you love the question, which in a lot of ways seems to be the exact opposite of religion or even philosophy where people go, ‘I need to immediately get to answers.  And I’d like to have my answers fast, and then I’d like to go back to my life.’  But if you can fall in love with the questions, if you can fall in love with the mysteries, it changes your life amazingly.

Shane Carruth:  Yeah that’s so interesting to hear you put that that way.  That’s exactly right, or that is how I feel anyway.

Ron Bennington:  So what do you think keeps us as a people from doing that?  Because you’d have to think that ancient people were at least staring into the sky a little more open about not knowing what they were looking at.

Shane Carruth:  I mean I can guess.  I’m certainly not smart enough to know, but my guess would be that one of the most basic things that we do is find patterns and solve them.  If two events happen close to each other we think they’re somehow related and we try to make them related, we try to find some pattern.  And we come up with — sometimes it is superstition, sometimes it is a whole school of science that turns out to be wrong 200 years after it’s invented.  And I think that is part of our survival nature is how do I connect this?  How do I get to a point where there is an answer?  So maybe all I’m really saying is that it’s innate.  We need to solve something and then, yeah I guess get on to hunting and gathering (laughs).

Ron Bennington:  Yeah, as long as we can feel some sense of solving, then we can put it away and get back to other things.

Shane Carruth:  Well it feels scary to not have it solved.  It feels scary to be bombarded with information and not know how it’s all related.  And you know maybe the further educated we get, maybe it is becoming easier and easier to say okay well maybe I don’t know that or we don’t know that, but we will eventually; we’re eventually going to figure that out.  But I imagine in the past, and now sometimes, is that it’s just too frightening to say that that is impossible to solve.

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Ron Bennington:  It’s upstreamcolor.com to check out where this is playing.  It’s going to come out on video-on-demand, iTunes, and Amazon.com Tuesday, May 7.  You can see it in New York City at the IFC Center, which is always a great place to go and hang out.  Sneak peek on April 4 and then opens April 5, and you’ll be doing some Q&A during the weekend.  

Shane Carruth:  I will.

Ron Bennington:  Nine years between these two films.  Is the next one going to come to us a little sooner?

Shane Carruth:  Much sooner.  I’m finishing the script now and hope to be shooting by end of Summer.

Ron Bennington:  Shane, pleasure to have you come in here.  Really, really enjoyed it.  And I’ll make sure to see you the next time coming through.

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Get more information at upstreamcolor.com or follow @shane_carruth on twitter.

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews atRonBenningtonInterviews.com.