UPSTREAM COLOR, a new film from Shane Carruth (Primer)

Kinda crazy that first sentence in that Hollywood Reporter piece refers to him as an "emerging talent."

So what happened with Modern Oceans? You'd think that cast would have gotten him enough funding, plus he's got lots of high profile friends. Anyway, glancing at his wikipedia page, there's an interview back from October where he talks about quitting, too. How long did Soderbergh's retirement or sabbatical or whatever last, two or three years?

Yes, retirement comes up in that interview I read sometime, wish I could remember when 🤔, specifically because they mention that he made headlines last year by talking about retiring.

Hardly like-for-like, given Soderbergh's level of output from before the retirement, but:

He announced his retirement from film-making in February 2013.

During his retirement he: had a completed telemovie screen at Cannes in competition for the Palme d'Or and enjoy theatrical release outside the US; directed & shot & edited ten hour-long episodes of The Knick; did a draft cut of Spike Jonze's Her, trimming the film from 2.5 hours to 90 minutes; developed & produced the half-hour-episode dramedy series Red Oaks; developed a six-hour narrative / 18-or-w/e-hour interactive mystery; shot & operated camera on & edited a feature film sequel to an earlier feature that he'd directed & shot & edited; compiled & music directed an installation piece combining the 1946 The Killers with the 1964 The Killers; edited & sound directed a mashup installation piece incorporating parts of his The Underneath and the noir it was based on, Criss Cross; generated a "silent" film version of Raiders Of The Lost Ark by removing the colour and scoring it with Reznor & Ross cues from The Social Network; cut a 110-minute edit of 2001: A Space Odyssey; cut a 108-minute edit of Heaven's Gate; directed & shot & edited another ten hour-long episodes of The Knick; and EP'ed the Girlfriend Experience TV series, hiring Shane Carruth to score it. Plus he started a new day job as importer and promoter of a Bolivian liquor.

He un-announced his retirement from film-making in February 2016.


(Then before he made the unretirement film, he cut & music directed a feature-length mashup of the three theatrical films starring Michael Caine as Len Deighton's Harry Palmer.)

I think my interpretation of his dickishness in that interview can be chalked up to my “takes one to know one” instinct. Then again I usually am surprised that more people don’t think I’m a dick.

wait I forgot Sodes's mashup of Psycho (1960) and Psycho (1998), called Psychos

also he revived an earlier side-gig, directing Chloe Grace Moretz in a play by his frequent collaborator Scott Burns

i agree that carruth has been pretty consistently himself since he surfaced; he's a smart, intense guy who is well aware of the conditions working against him. i can understand the reasoning in not wanting to continue to hustle for budget when the ideas in your head aren't going to be realized for anything close to the 100k upstream color cost. at the same time, i was never particularly optimistic that the shipping routes movie or the other stuff he was working on post-UC would ever see the light of day.

oh well, we'll always have upstream color, one of the most beautiful and affecting movies i've ever seen.

yeah Primer is technically astonishing but leaves me cold, UC surprised me with its beating heart

Fwiw i would’ve said the same thing abt orson Welles if ilx threads existed back then

Here's another current interview covering much of the same ground: https://theplaylist.net/shane-carruth-interview-retirement-20200523/

He says of The Modern Ocean, and even A Topiary, that they're 'probably' over. Though it doesn't sound totally definitive and he maybe suggests letting someone else tackle them? Maybe I'm just being too hopeful.

Soderbergh seemingly loves to work and believes he hones his craft by going through the actions, which makes Carruth's insistence that he find the right situation to make the right thing more frustrating if you like the latter's work.

I guess it comes down to personality and view, whether you make the work you like by grinding through tons of material to the point where you're confident in your technique, or you meticulously work through a couple hours of movie by your own hand for years in order to make the one thing you love.

Yeah good point, its an interesting divide. I feel like I've been on different sides of it at different times in my own life. "I love getting slightly better at this!" vs "what annoying stuff do I need to figure out to get this thing out of my brain & into the world."

Soderbergh namechecked Carruth in that State of the Industry speech thing he did, I wonder if they ever sat down together.

I think I'm definitely in the anxiety/procrastination side of things where I'm afraid to finish things because I want a good outcome? Trying to become a little Soderbergh of my field in recent years

Soderbergh definitely seems to do stuff just to challenge himself, like the "Raiders," "Psycho" and "2001" larks, or filming on an iPhone, or "Bubble," or acting as his own DP or whatever else it takes. Like, I must have known this, but Soderbergh apparently filmed second unit stuff for the first "Hunger Games" movie, more or less just as an exercise. But he can also make slick movies and work with movie stars, which who knows if Carruth is capable of doing but which seems key to getting green lit by studios. Though if Robert Eggers and Ari Aster et al. can do what they do, I don't see why Carruth couldn't. "The Lighthouse," a more or less academy ratio, black and white psycho-sexual homoerotic tale of seamen/semen/seamonsters, was a pretty bonkers movie to get such a wide release. Carruth must have some specific, particularly ineffable goals he has convinced himself he can not achieve.

I love Soderbergh but some of his movies are absolute dogshit. I get the impulse to only want to put out things that live up to a very particular/rigorous standard.

I would really like to read/hear more about his efforts to secure outside funding for more ambitious projects. Like I have no idea whether it was business realities or self sabotage (or both) that sunk The Modern Ocean.

seems fairly obvious that carruth indeed has some specific and ineffable goals.

"I want a movie that causes synesthesia! I want a movie that is spoken in English but heard in Esperanto! I want a movie that stars a completely CG actor that does not fall into the uncanny valley! And it must be screened exclusively in Cinerama!"

heh, i remembered seeing the upstream color premiere with carruth on hand saying his net film should be out shortly and, sure enough I mentioned upthread

Carruth spoke after the showing and when someone asked him how much the movie cost, he said he'd rather not say. That Primer benefited from the legend but that he was more than a little tired of hearing how it was such a good movie for so cheap and he wants this one to stand on its own merits.
apparently he's "nearly" done with his next film and this one won't have any super-real, fantastic plot devices. it's not a spoiler to say that, like Primer, Upstream Color rotates around some supernatural elements but only in the sense that Eraserhead does too
― I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. (forksclovetofu), Monday, April 8, 2013 8:39 PM (seven years ago)

https://t.co/aFYGCxYHbQ

This will probably get taken down because I lifted a bunch of shots from films.

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) May 29, 2020

Ah, wow. Ha, that's amazing, it's exactly as he described it.

it’s really funny that he used the music from Inception imo

I chuckled at his/the UC Twitter bio

The second film from the award-winning Writer and Director of PRIMER. Also it did fine domestically so...

The Wanting Mare looks really promising. I'm a sucker for films/literature that are couched in a scifi/postapoc/fantasy world, but aren't about those worlds.

As for The Modern Ocean, I suppose I'll have to make do with container ship time lapses.

That's got me simultaneously excited and pissed off about movies all over again! I really wanna watch the full A Topiary now. might revisit UC.

He's released The Modern Ocean screenplay!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xunl7kkmnvccgl/TheModernOcean_for_Steven.pdf?dl=0

https://t.co/x0tJTRN4qn

That's the script for The Modern Ocean. I kept it quiet for a long time because...I don't like scripts because they are not movies and movies are not film and I just didn't want to be embarrassed. But now I think it might be fun. It's all good, now.

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

He's also posted some music clips for certain scenes, plus a load of artwork done for A Topiary and it looks like some video. All linked on his twitter (@UpstreamColor).

I'm very excited to see all this, but it also adds to my worry about him (he says himself in a twitter reply to the Modern Ocean script post that he's "not alright"). I hope he has some good friends and/or family.

Can you reveal the casting for this? I know Radcliffe, Reeves, Holland, Moretz are all attached at one point

— tindell (@jimtindell) June 17, 2020

Yeah, they were all attached. I spent a weird few months where I didn't know why we were casting all these famous people but Carmen Cuba guided me and we were so clear about 'we need color in this'. We really tried. It's not easy. I skyped with Irfan Khan...

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

...who is/was one of the best actors in the world. I will never forget it. We only talked for 10 minutes. He was in New Delhi in an apartment smoking a blunt. We knew the same second yep this is going to happen. He would have been the captain of the Torc Eleanor.

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

So there's a sort of Modern Ocean tease he posted, too?

https://t.co/PXo4T00ugK

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

I basically don't read scripts but I might have to make an exception.

After looking at the cgi tests and fantastic illustrations, I'm doubly bummed out that I'm never going to get to see A Topiary.

Looking through the Topiary illustrations, those images of the doglike legs attached to those wooden crates... what a weird, rich piece of imagery.

Evidently Amy Seimetz has a restraining order against him, which he uh revealed with some artful framing on Twitter

So Shane Carruth posted a picture of a restraining order Amy Seimetz has against him and no one noticed what the hell #FilmTwitter https://t.co/w4pNyA2oTn

— Boomer CIA (@BoomerCia) July 25, 2020

ah, fuck.

This isn’t striking me as entirely shocking.

no comment

ahh jesus christ

mostly for the completely insane “just leaving this in the corner” bit but also my heart sinking in disappointment

kinda nuts no matter how you slice it

disappointingly unsurprised sigh

Yeah I don’t know wtf is going on here, pretty weird. Maybe unfair, but to me this dude has always exuded the kind of Sensitive Nice Guy Nerd aura that sends off some alarm bells. Like issues with women, questionable political takes, or a gross Reddit account surfacing wouldn’t surprise me.

wow, tombot proven sadly otm after all

He's proclaimed a lot of technological/social media ignorance lately on twitter, but I find it hard to believe it wasn't a deliberate thing to have it there in the corner of the photo, which is pretty bad in and of itself.

Variety has published some details and they're damning to say the least. My interest in him instantly soured on reading this.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/shane-carruth-accused-abusing-amy-seimetz-1234717339/

I guess the real reason he couldn't get any projects off the ground is cuz he's a psycho, huh. Welp, time to go throw my copy of UC in the trash

Don't throw out UC because its director turned out to be a narcissistic and abusive asshole (as if the ludicrously self-important, world-against-me interviews weren't clue enough) - don't throw out the art with the artist - throw it out because it isn't very good.

why do you do this

i for one will never be able to watch it again bc it stars shame carruth and amy seimetz as two people in a relationship

“throw it out because it isn’t very good” fuck off

woof i wrote that before i even read the details, continue to fuck off lj