Primer - Shane Carruth

I have a hard time nailing down what they spent on it but from what I’ve heard there is no way they could have made that money back.

I have limited information about what happened so I don’t know. On the Primer website forums and from what I heard it was frustrating to hear that there were people who wanted to see the film but they couldn’t find a theatre near them that had it or if they did it disappeared after a week. I live in Dallas and I would go out to Los Angeles for a meeting every month or so, because I’m a total sellout now, and even during the week of release and about a month afterwards people were asking me if I had found a distributor yet. The marketing wasn’t even touching the people who would be into this type of film.

I found out when ThinkFilm asked me to add New Line to my errors and omissions insurance policy.

There is something called errors and omissions insurance policy that if you accidentally put a logo from a corporation in your film and you get sued later you have insurance policy to cover that. A couple of months ago they asked me to add New Line to that policy.

Yeah I guess so but I didn’t know what that meant and I still don’t know what it means. There is more marketing now than there ever was theatrically. I go onto websites and there are Primer DVD banners. But I honestly don’t know who is doing that.

Luckily what is on the DVD is precisely what was turned into Sundance. We went through a digital intermediary process where the original Super 16 is scanned into the digital world in a hi-res format and then that’s lasered out to a 35mm negative and that’s where the all the prints, including the one that went to Sundance, came from. So we’re actually going back to the digital form that I first gave to ThinkFilm and that’s what they made the DVD from.

I don’t know. I had tons of stuff I wanted to put on there but I couldn’t reach an agreement with ThinkFilm about it.

A lot of making of stuff. I edited these featurettes together where it compared the original storyboards to what we ended up with. Some of them are even animated storyboards.

I’m really glad that we have the crew commentary because those guys were really involved during the shoot and this was the first time we were able to get together and talk about it. I’m glad the experience of that shoot is documented because it really wasn’t that great. For my commentary I tried my best to be informative about the preproduction and the postproduction process because I’ve listened to so many commentaries that I felt weren’t informative enough. I hated doing my commentary because I put a lot of pressure on myself for that reason. There are no silences in my commentary and I never say “Oh that so and so was a joy to work with.” I don’t think you can tell but I redid a lot of it. I would talk for a few minutes then stop and tell the engineer to let me listen to it then if I didn’t like it, I would redo it.

Possibly [laughs]. It was definitely not the number one reason, that was lack of funds.

No I haven’t [laughs]. All my cache is out the window now.

I’ve been talked to about that but I’m not interested so those conversations don’t go far. I’ve been sent scripts and I try to understand what someone in my position has the opportunity to do but in the end I have to write what I want to direct. So it’s been a year of becoming sure enough to do that. I’m writing now and I’ll be done in about four months.

Yeah that’s happened. The first maybe five scripts I got all had to do with time travel. Ok now I’m time travel guy.

I don’t think so. I know he auditioned for it so he must have got it out of sheer performance. The guy has been out there for a while and if Primer was going to be his lunch ticket I think it would have been that a while ago. It’s weird because at one point in my life I was interested in doing a story about polygamy. I thought it would be a good background for a murder mystery.

I doubt it.

Most of it is fine but I don’t think it’s great. Considering we only did one take on many shots, it's passable. But I’m not really an actor. I’m more interested in writing and directing. When directors act in their films I’m constantly trying to figure out whether it’s a distraction or not. What’s weird is that if any director has the ability then they should perform as a character in the rehearsals. Any information I have to be able to communicate with actors comes from the fact of experiencing the scene with somebody. I would find it difficult to be outside the rehearsal and be effective in talking to people about it.

That one I hope to do eventually. I’ve kind of been taken away with what I’m working on now. It’s about some kids, religion and ideology.

Christian, my parents used to be in a pretty charismatic church but my grandfather was a Baptist preacher. There was a lot of back and forth between regular Baptist church and then the more hippie church.

There is actually no mention of religion in the film because it’s all subtextual. It’s the story of the beginnings of ideology and how different people can look at the same sort of the same magic and come up with a different set of rules to explain it.

That’s the hope.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck