PRIMER

[Ghostboy]

It was cool. I went to see David Gordon Green, mainly, since I'd already spoken to Shane Carruth and Jonathan Cauoette, but it was a good discussion, overall (although I wish they'd said at the beginning that the food and drinks were going to be on the house).

[Chrisdarko]

I think thats why they didn't say it at the begging otherwise i would have certanlly partook.

It was really pretty awesome I got to meet David Gordon Green and tell him How much i loved George washington. And the room was really intamate the panel was probaly just 5 feet away or so.

The coolest thing about primer is simply the success story I thought the movie was ok but the fact that 2 years ago this guy was working at a bar living with his parents to make money for the movie is really rather inspiring and I hope he gets to make more movies.

Did you go to the Robert Duvall Interview?

admin tip:

[metroshane]

The coolest thing about primer is simply the success story I thought the movie was ok but the fact that 2 years ago this guy was working at a bar living with his parents to make money for the movie is really rather inspiring and I hope he gets to make more movies.

See, that's my main problem with the movie....all of the hype.   It just doesn't add up (see my $ arguments earlier).  I read, in the observer I think, that he was successful as an engineer, wrote a script and taught himself to make movies on the fly.  I've never heard the bar/parents angle.  These success stories sure are inspirational...but are the accurate...and are they fair to those that are really looking for inspiration?  I'm proud the dude did it himself too, but I think he'd rather let the movie stand on it's own without the hype.  

BTW, I'm really jealous too.

[Gamblour.]

For me, it's not proving that he did do it with exactly $7000, or that he'd never done it before. Those are extremes for a first time filmmaker and it's a miracle that he made it and got it sold. For me, the inspiration comes from the fact that this guy knew what he wanted to do and just fucking did it. That he did it as economically as possible is just fucking brilliant.

[metroshane]

I did learn one valuable lesson from him.  Confuse the audience and they will think you're f'ing brilliant!

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

Spoilers.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/board/nest/18735491

That is a pretty solid explanation of the order of events right there.  The Granger bit had me pretty much throwing my hands up in the air, but now I'm impressed that Carruth had the balls to not only make a non-linear time traveling movie, but he even put in something that has no answer on purpose.  That's the kind of filmmaking I like.

I like how the movie has a pretty simple and semi-logical explanation, but it wouldn't have really mattered.  The story completely sucked me in for this first go-around.  I anticipate further viewings to be less exciting, but if I'm wrong all the better.

Worthy of its admiration.

[MacGuffin]

Shane Carruth rocked the 2004 Sundance Film Festival when his $7000 directorial debut Primer won the Grand Jury Prize over such films as Garden State, Maria Full of Grace and Napoleon Dynamite. But it was accolades well deserved because Primer is one of the most brilliant and complex films to come out of America in many a year. Primer is the story of a small group of men who when attempting to make a breakthrough in error-checking devices instead make a breakthrough in time travel. Soon one of them is using the device for the wrong reasons and they all must confront one another.

Daniel Robert Epstein: How did Primer do in the theaters?

Shane Carruth: Terribly.

DRE: Did it make back the money that ThinkFilm spent on it?

SC: 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.

DRE: How did that affect you?

SC: 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.

DRE: When did you know that the DVD was going to be released by New Line Home Video?

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

DRE: What’s that?

SC: 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.

DRE: You must have been a bit excited because obviously New Line is a huge company.

SC: 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.

DRE: For the DVD, did you do things like supervise the transfer of the film?

SC: 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.

DRE: There are not a ton of extras on this, just the two commentaries. Will they do a better DVD if this one sells well?

SC: 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.

DRE: What kind of stuff do you have?

SC: 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.

DRE: How was doing the commentary?

SC: 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.

DRE: Is that attention to detail what made the shoot itself so hard?

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

DRE: When we last spoke you had said you met with the head of Paramount. Well now they have a new head of Paramount, did you meet with him?

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

DRE: Have you gotten the chance to do rewriting work?

SC: 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.

DRE: Did they send you scripts that you read and wondered what the heck they saw in Primer that made them want to send you those scripts?

SC: 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.

DRE: Your costar in Primer, David Sullivan, is going to be on an HBO series called Big Love which is about Mormons and polygamy. Did he get that as a result of Primer?

SC: 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.

DRE: Do you think you will want to act in the next project you do?

SC: I doubt it.

DRE: Did you like your performance in Primer?

SC: 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.

DRE: Is the next movie you’re doing this nautical romance I read about on CHUD.com?

SC: 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.

DRE: What religion were you raised with?

SC: 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.

DRE: Will your movie tackle those ideas?

SC: 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.

DRE: So it’s like Primer, meaning it tackles a lot of things without the characters coming out and saying it directly.

SC: That’s the hope.

[metroshane]

Not sure how I feel about that.  He never mentioned me slipping him my movie.  What a jerk.

Here's my problem with Hollywood...a movie's success has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with quality.  Since the majority of box office gross is made during the first weekend or twos 'first viewings'...you only have to get people into the theater once.  It's not like they ask for their money back if it's bad.  And it's not like it's a recurring charge they cancel.  They pay their money whether it's a good film or not.  So you need a big marketing budget to tell the sheep it's good and get their butts in seats.  Why do you pick up a movie and not market it?  Tax write-off?  

Here's my problem with the romanticism of independant film.  Listen to Shane talk about errors and omissions insurance.  Is that part of the 7K budget?  I don't think so...and do you really have a valuable product until you take care of all the legal stuff?  How did Robert Rodriguez get clearances from all of the people and places he photographed?  It's appearant from the books that he didn't the first time around.  What about the beer logos and playboy logos?  Did the distributor have to go back after they bought the rights to film and get clearances?  Sure I can make a movie for no money...but then I could just have a million dollars by stealing it.

[Ghostboy]

Why do you pick up a movie and not market it?  Tax write-off?  

Fact: most non-event films (and even some of those) never have a chance of making money theatrically, and thus the mareketing is minimal. However, the theatrical release is an important form of marketing for the DVD release, which is where profit is eventually made. Movies that were released theatrically sell a great percentage more DVD/video units than straight-to-video titles. It all evens out, from the financial perspective.

So, Primer will make money back eventually on DVD. And I hope to god Carruth's cache isn't as gone as he implies, because I really want to see his next film.

[cowboykurtis]

I hope to god Carruth's cache isn't as gone as he implies, because I really want to see his next film.

I think he was being sarcastic.

[grand theft sparrow]

Who knew time travel could be so fucking boring?  

I can't think of a better argument against this movie than that the resident David Lynch freak said this about it:

as for primer i saw it yesterday and it made me feel stupid....please someone help me understand this film.....please..pleaase..

This is a movie that has traded completely on its production value.  If this movie wasn't made on the cheap, everyone would have realized how impenetrable it was.  Visually, it's great and the IDEA of the movie (since there's no real plot) is interesting.  But the characters are 1-dimensional, covered up by copious amounts of boring dialogue so they have plenty of chances to "act" (this is THE textbook example of why starving actors shouldn't write their own scripts), and this is the first time I saw a movie where the lack of exposition insulted me.  This flick was so intentionally incomprehensible that I didn't necessarily feel stupid like Neon said, but I felt like I was being made to feel stupid, which I found insulting.

Naturally, I was reminded me of Pi, but more because I was trying to think of why Pi worked for me and Primer didn't.  It was similar with the technobabble but at least there was something more to grab onto in Pi.  The number was the MacGuffin and that's OK because we really don't need to know the actual significance of the number, we just need to know that there is a significance to the number.  

In Primer, we're just watching two guys time travel, which sounds great but it ends up being infinitely more interesting to the characters than it could ever be to anyone except the .0001% of the audience who understands quantum physics.  It boils down to a pseudo-intellectual mess.

That all being said, I think that for a $7000 movie, it looked good, but all my praise for this movie is limited to the technical aspects of it.  Shane Carruth is a decent director, even if he cribs the FUCK out of Soderbergh (which I intend to do with the short I'm filming this fall, so I can't fault him for that).  

But those shots where characters went in and out of focus (which I liked) implies, to me anyway, that it's not meant to make sense to anyone... and frankly, I have no use for that unless your name is David Lynch.

I haven't been this pissed about a movie in a while.

[Gamblour.]

Pissed? This movie made me excited to be alive. To think that an idea could be unrelentingly thrown at you, no time to slow down and think, that a movie would really challenge its audience. Not just with moral and value dilemmas (there are plenty of those), but of pure narrative confusion, and yet if you looked at it closely, it still all makes sense. It's not going fast to make up for it's lack of plot, it wants to take the audience further by refusing to spell out anything. Maybe this is over the top, but I saw this back in October, and I've felt the same way since I saw it. I love the fact that this is the most confusing movie I've ever seen, but it's really just a puzzle waiting to be unwrapped.

[w/o horse]

That was such an enjoyable reply and reminded me completely as to what I liked the movie.

[grand theft sparrow]

Pissed? This movie made me excited to be alive. To think that an idea could be unrelentingly thrown at you, no time to slow down and think, that a movie would really challenge its audience. Not just with moral and value dilemmas (there are plenty of those), but of pure narrative confusion, and yet if you looked at it closely, it still all makes sense. It's not going fast to make up for it's lack of plot, it wants to take the audience further by refusing to spell out anything. Maybe this is over the top, but I saw this back in October, and I've felt the same way since I saw it. I love the fact that this is the most confusing movie I've ever seen, but it's really just a puzzle waiting to be unwrapped.

After sleeping on it, I've had a chance to think about what made me have such a violent reaction to a movie I've been eagerly waiting to see.  It comes down to length mostly.  I still think that it's a slight degree of contempt for the audience to not even give a clue as to what's going on but if you're going to do that, don't pad your movie with at least 40 minutes of useless dialogue.  

Plain and simple, Carruth could have accomplished everything he set out to do in 30-40 minutes.  The opening 10 minutes of dialogue that means nothing to the audience was unnecessary.  Honestly, just show us the goddamn machine and get right to the bit about the watches and how the one guy builds the machine in the storage space.

It's not even so hard to grasp what's going on in it so much as it's just difficult to want to wade through the parts where nothing happens to get to the good stuff.  There are so many scenes where nothing actually happens - we don't really learn about the characters (to the point that I don't know enough about them to care about them), we don't really learn anything about the machine, we don't really learn anything about anything except that these two guys like to talk really fast back and forth to each other... great.  

Bottom line, I can't say that Primer is poorly constructed but it's just that I see what he was trying to do and I just don't like it.  I don't think it was actually "challenging" but manipulative.  I don't think there's a real puzzle there, just the pretense that there might be.  Very little of the dialogue seems to be there for any other reason than to squeeze all the shit that Carruth wanted to squeeze into the movie.  If he had cut the script in half, he'd have been able to shoot one fucking great short for half the money... but no one would know who he is, so things worked out well for him, I guess.

[Ghostboy]

I don't know...every time I see it, I pick up new things that do factor into the plot. There are very few throwaway lines or moments...there's a real economy of narrative at work. Sure, he could have told the story in 30 minutes, but that's sort of like saying 'Memento' could have been told in normal progression, isn't it?