PRIMER

[Ghostboy]

I got the impression too that the 7k on Primer included the transfer -- especially since when I interviewed him he talked about working with the lab to stay within that budget. While 1000 dollars for a camera and 400 for a dolly on a weekly basis is a very reasonable rental rate, I'll also bet that the two breaks in the 5 week shooting schedule knocked things down a bit -- he probably didn't pay for a full 5 weeks (he talked in my interview about having to return the camera and gear during those breaks). And he probably didn't rent the dolly for the whole shoot either.

If he shot on a 2:1 ratio and the film is only about 80 minutes, that's about 6500 feet of 16mm film; average processing price is about 15 cents per foot, but he could have got a deal on that too. He probably did a one light transfer and didn't pay more than 100 bucks an hour (that's the low rate that Video Post & Tranfer here in Dallas often gives) for that (for about three hours of footage). So I think it could be feasible that he didn't spend more than 2000 on the film stock, processing and transfer.

[metroshane]

Yeah, I guess it's feasible...7k or 10K.  What's the difference, really?  I just wanted to bring up conversation.  After all, it's a great achievement...but is it possible to replicate?  I mean could he make his next movie for 7K?  Is it fair to have all the actors and crew work for free once you've gained success?

BTW, my movie only cost 3K! 8)  But then I haven't won any awards.

[Ghostboy]

After all, it's a great achievement...but is it possible to replicate?  I mean could he make his next movie for 7K?  Is it fair to have all the actors and crew work for free once you've gained success?

Nope. One of the things I hate the most about indie filmmaking is not being able to pay people, and as soon as anyone has the opportunity to do so, even if it's very small amounts, that should be a big priority.

And while I guess anyone could make a movie for 7 grand if they really worked hard at it, it's probably more trouble than it may be ultimately worth -- especially if you don't have to. As great as it may be for marketing a first film, I doubt Rodriguez or Carruth or Joe Carnahan (who made his first film for somewhere around that figure too) would ever have any desire to work under those conditions again.

[Pedro]

why don't we stop talking about the budget and start reviewing the movie.

[metroshane]

Perhaps you have short term memory problems...or didn't read any of the other posts.  We have discussed the merits, take a look.  Perhaps you have something constructive to offer?

[Pedro]

Perhaps you have short term memory problems...or didn't read any of the other posts.  We have discussed the merits, take a look.  Perhaps you have something constructive to offer?

i was kind of half joking...or i guess, really, making a point that this film gets too much attention because of it's budget, and the film is judged too much on that rather than the story.

[Sal]

Perhaps you have short term memory problems...or didn't read any of the other posts.  We have discussed the merits, take a look.  Perhaps you have something constructive to offer?

i was kind of half joking...or i guess, really, making a point that this film gets too much attention because of it's budget, and the film is judged too much on that rather than the story.

A point well brought up.

[metroshane]

Yes, he did bring that topic up well.

[Sal]

How unsettling.

[hedwig]

Primer
Director: Shane Carruth (PG-13, 80 min.)
Cast: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan


At a time when the science-fiction label generally applies to big-budget space adventures with nothing on their minds, it seems fitting that Primer, the $7,000 debut feature of writer-director Shane Carruth, should bring the genre back to smart, idea-driven speculative fiction. An achievement at any cost, the film makes an asset out of its financial liabilities, because without the money for gleaming spectacle, it can only afford to tinker with the audience's imagination. Much like his brainy heroes, who run a scrappy tech-hardware business out of their garage, Carruth creates a homemade wonder out of available materials, stitched together with just enough credible pseudo-science to stoke an atmosphere of escalating paranoia and dread. And he does it all through little intangibles—subtle grace notes in the dialogue, a dense soundtrack, the suggestive use of screen space—that don't cost a dime.

An engineer who taught himself filmmaking, Carruth also stars as one of four young hardware developers who sweat over their obscure gizmos in a cluttered suburban garage. Unbeknownst to the other two, Carruth and David Sullivan are secretly developing an amazing invention that can disrupt the space-time continuum in ways both potentially lucrative and catastrophically dangerous. A time machine of sorts, their creation allows them to glimpse the future by manufacturing doubles of themselves, but they have to be careful not to make themselves conspicuous or alter events in an irreparable way. At first, they seize on obvious benefits like retroactively "predicting" the stock market, but when they start to lose the thread, matters quickly veer out of control.

Already swimming with technical jargon and logical conundrums, the last 30 minutes of Primer are nearly impossible to fully decipher on first viewing, and probably aren't much clearer several screenings later. This isn't a flaw. Carruth deliberately refuses to dot i's and cross t's, because at a certain point, the logistical ramifications of what his characters have done spin off into infinity, if not some sort of apocalypse. A brainteaser of the first order, Primer ranks among the best of recent thrillers such as Memento or The Matrix, which rupture the fabric of reality and radically destabilize the narrative in kind. While it's not always easy to gain a solid foothold, the resulting anxiety triggers the mind into concocting new solutions to explain what's happening, which is a far more frightening experience than knowing with any degree of certainty. As a riddle, Primer gains its seductive power by leaving the solution tantalizingly out of reach. —Scott Tobias

[Sal]

I saw this last week at the Denver film festival.  It was funny, too, because I'd been up for 24 hours and the film kept me awake the whole time.  So that's the first good thing about Primer.  It's interesting and never dull.  The story kind of reels you in because you want to know what these characters are up to.  Now, you walk into a movie like this, and the first thing you're thinking is, okay, my mind is running on full cylinders because people say the plot becomes confusing.  So that's what I did.  I tried being attentive to whatever I could, but also became distracted by the movie's style, which I liked a lot.  Its pace was just the right amount of "cool" to give it the benefit of the doubt.  The acting stays in one level and doesn't fluctuate into any intense moments, probably because it's a limitation on the actors.  So a good eye on Shane's part to understand that and let the plot pull the movie forward.  I thought there were genuinely ambiguous moments in the movie, however, that could have been clarified.  I do believe all of the information is in here for you to break down and resolve into a cohesive story, but it seems like there were intentionally misleading things here that can't really be understood through a first viewing until you settle upon the end.

[Gamblour.]

I had a lot of problems with it. First off, in the first half, a lot of shots were out of focus. I thought this might be the theater, but then the shots would be in focus afterwards. That was really distracting in an already complicated movie. Then, I remember my brain had to cram in all the information from like the last 45 minutes, because some small logical puzzle piece was missing, a piece that would have caused all the dominoes in my brain to finally topple over. But instead, I couldn't figure it out, and the dominoes kept standing and getting longer.

After the movie, I was really pissed off, because I thought it was stupid for a director to choose to confuse an audience rather than have them enjoy a movie. Not enjoy, but at least kind of understand it. And Ghostboy, you fucking nailed it on the head when you said this movie has 'negative amounts of exposition.' That is probably the most accurate description of this movie so far. When I remembered you saying that, I thought well ok so it was Carruth's intention to make a ponderous movie, and it's clearly not 'bad filmmaking' that makes it so confusing. Plus, I've been thinking about this movie for the past week, and it's so much fun to just think about.

I also thought about movies that were this puzzling, and I couldn't think of one that was puzzling like this. Some are symbolically puzzling, but none are logically puzzling, which is fantastic. I hope this gets a good dvd release.

[MacGuffin]

Here's a how-to 'Primer' in film
Shane Carruth's audacious learn-it-on-the-fly method of getting his first feature in the can and then to theaters was a three-year journey that left even him a bit amazed. Source: Los Angeles Times



Roughly one-third of the way through Shane Carruth's cerebral sci-fi drama "Primer," two amateur scientists invent a mysterious technology that will allow them to elliptically curve the time-space continuum — in effect, to travel through time. Voice-over narration addresses the difficulties the twentysomething protagonists Abe and Aaron face: "Their enthusiasm became a slow realization that they were out of their depth."

The same might have been said of the movie's writer-director, who nearly quit the project in disgust four times during "Primer's" three-year production. Unlike the characters he created, however, Carruth stifled the self-awareness that he had most likely bitten off more than he could chew. With no formal training in film, the former software engineer wrote, directed and edited "Primer," relying on filmmaking procedures he mostly taught himself.
 
Further, Carruth, who earned a degree in mathematics from Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, composed the film's score with no professional knowledge of music, single-handedly raised its $7,000 budget and performed one of the lead roles, despite never having acted before.

"The only thing I can come up with is that I was really naive," said the Dallas native, 31. "And my naivete allowed me to get through."

It's not every day a math major makes a film that ties together quantum physics, renegade clones and time travel with conundrums involving trust and risk in a way that makes the viewer unsure whether what they are watching is more science than fiction.

And fewer still are the calculus freaks who get their movies into the Sundance Film Festival.

So when "Primer" won the Grand Jury Prize there this year, beating out more buzzworthy films including "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Garden State," no one was more stunned than Carruth, who remains so blindsided by his victory that he still possesses only fragmentary memories of his acceptance speech.

But to hear it from Mark Urman, the head of theatrical distribution at ThinkFilm, the company that bought "Primer" after the festival and released it two weeks ago, the filmmaker's broader achievement doesn't end with his festival win and distribution deal.

"It's not just the Sundance story of the little film that hit it big," Urman said. "It's the story of this fabulous autodidact who literally made a film all by himself in his garage — about guys who make a time machine all by themselves in their garage.

"Shane is an information junkie who really needs to figure everything out," he added. "This film was a learning experience for him."

Just as the talky, jargon-driven "Primer" eschewed the traditional three-act narrative structure, Carruth's journey of bringing the movie to the screen also defied the industry standard. In the years leading to the movie, he tried writing a novel but realized his storytelling agenda leaned more toward externalizing the characters' actions than revealing their interior monologues. Despite a spotty knowledge of film history and no industry contacts to speak of, he turned his hand to writing a screenplay with the intention of directing it.

The script took a year to complete, during which time Carruth experimented shooting and editing footage with his brother's mini-digital camcorder: "I would put it on a tripod and shoot me coming out of the bathroom, me coming down the hall and me going into the kitchen, and then edit the three together — stupid little things like that."

Auditing a film course for two weeks at Southern Methodist University, Carruth learned how to disassemble a Bolex 16mm camera and load a mag of film. But he ultimately lost interest in the class when the teacher steered it away from production and toward film theory.

Learning the basics

Carruth insists his screenwriting education was limited to scrutinizing a handful of scripts to learn such conventions as how to separate description from character names, how to distinguish voice-over from dialogue, and most importantly, to ascertain what font to use on his word processor.

After reading that writer-director Robert Rodriguez had shot his feature debut, "El Mariachi," for $7,000, Carruth decided that figure would also be the budget for "Primer." "That was roughly the amount I had," he recalled. "But once I had that number in my head and I knew it could be done for that much, I wouldn't let it get above that amount."

After the completion of the third draft, the writer-director was involved in a bad car wreck and wound up convalescing at his parents' home in Dallas. Awake with insomnia most nights, he watched seminal '70s dramas on Turner Classic Movies and found himself particularly inspired by the Dustin Hoffman-Robert Redford Watergate investigation drama, "All the President's Men."

"Here I am with all these pages of an investigative procedural that I've been writing about these two guys where we're finding out little bits of information that add up to something bigger," he said. "To see 'All the President's Men,' this is exactly what's going on."

Answering an ad on a local film production bulletin board, Carruth volunteered to operate the bat microphone on a Dallas-based independent movie production. The experience would heavily inform his shooting style.

"I got to see the director and cinematographer work," he said. "But the biggest thing I took away from that experience is we would show up and have a crew of 40 people trying to set things up, and we would wait for hours … each set-up is taking two hours and none of it is pre-planned. That had a huge effect on me in terms of where the cameras were going to be and how the characters were going to move."

From there, he decided to storyboard each camera movement on Tungsten 35mm slide film (to mimic the film stock on which he planned to shoot "Primer") and learned what kind of F-stops to use on his camera through reading articles from American Cinematographer.

When it came time to cast the leads, Carruth auditioned over 100 people for the roles of Abe and Aaron. David Sullivan, a local with an 8x10 glossy head shot but no professional acting experience, was awarded the Abe part. The director decided to play Aaron himself. "I couldn't find the right person," he said.

The two rehearsed for four weeks in the children's section of a Dallas library, a time in which "Primer's" low-key, conversational dialogue came together. "I just wanted it to be as naturalistic as I could get it," said Carruth. "The only trick I ever learned was that if we repeated something 30 or 40 times, we'd get so bored with the material that it would start to sound like it was ours."

Over the course of the film's one-month shoot in 2001, the filmmaker says his main mistake was not budgeting enough money for production and taking on producing duties himself. The actors did double duty both in front of and behind the camera and most shots were completed in one take. For his part, Carruth scouted and secured his locations such as the U-Haul storage locker where much of "Primer's" time-travel action takes place, delivered his 16mm film stock to the lab for processing and rented his own cameras.

"I was so relieved when the shoot was over," he said. "It was such a joy not to feel like I was letting my crew down all day, every day. It was way too guerrilla."

But the filmmaker's main hurdles were still ahead.

Carruth had gleaned bits of advice from haunting local video production companies and pestering the assistants with technical questions. He arrived at the conclusion that the cheapest way to shoot would be to transfer his 16mm footage to mini-digital video film and then edit on his home computer. "I used Adobe Premiere, which isn't made for film," he said, still audibly exasperated at the mistake. "It … doesn't handle sound properly. I spent the first two months syncing audio to video. It was a hundred little things that I didn't predict and had to muddle through."

In all, postproduction on "Primer" took nearly two years to complete — an eternity in front of a computer screen by any professional standard. Beside technical inefficiency, Carruth's choice to shoot only one take of any given shot resulted in a dearth of material.

"For the most part, it saves a lot of time and money," he said. "But when there was some kind of continuity error or I lost a shot because of a tech problem, it becomes a puzzle trying to get it back in there.

"I quit the movie three or four times. I'd say … 'I don't even know what the story is anymore.' "

Instead, he returned to the project again and again, teaching himself sound design he says he "ripped off" from Steven Soderbergh's arty revenge caper "The Limey." And Carruth used a computer music program called Fruity Loops to create his own piano samples and sequence what he calls some "rough and quick" music for the film's ethereal, minimalist score. ("I took piano lessons when I was a kid, but I whined, so my mom let me quit," is all the musical education Carruth will cop to.) He finished cutting the film in November 2003 and submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival with a $50 check. And "Primer" was accepted.

Carruth spent the next month overseeing the film's blowup from 16mm to 35mm so it could be projected properly at the festival. During that time, he hired the film publicity firm mPRm, which began hyping "Primer" to the William Morris Agency. They took on Carruth as a client. At the movie's first public viewing, he says he was more worried about the film transfer than his career prospects. To his surprise, "Primer" first won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for science and technology in film. Grand jury members were unanimous in selecting "Primer" for the grand prize.

Gaining experience

Although Carruth entered into negotiations with both ThinkFilm and Magnolia Pictures, which offered him almost identical deals for upfront money, he ultimately entered into a handshake agreement with ThinkFilm's Urman — that is, before Carruth got cold feet and decided to protract negotiations with the company to land a greater percentage of back-end participation.

"Negotiations were lengthy, and quite frankly, they needn't have been so lengthy," Urman remembered. "But it was more about Shane learning than a tough negotiation. In the same way he taught himself how to make a film, he taught himself how to make a deal."

"I wasn't trying to strain every last penny out of them," Carruth said. "But the bigger thing is, if I'm lucky enough to ever make another film, I want to know about this process also."

In the final analysis, Carruth said he still can't explain how he persuaded himself he could defy all the odds. "I don't know why I thought I was going to be able to go out and do this," he said flatly. "It all boils down to one part being naïve, but also I have a religious fanaticism when it comes to story.

"It makes it so that I'm much less likely to compromise anything," he added, sounding like some kind of dispassionate mathematician. "I'd rather work by myself for months, doing something the way it needs to be done, than to find some compromising way around."

[tpfkabi]

luckily i stumbled across the movie listings for Longview and caught it on it's last night. i'm wanting to call Carruth a genius.
does anyone want to talk in depth about the plot and what exactly happened?

[Gamblour.]

http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=1&c=5625&n=1&burl=

New Line Home Entertainment has announced Primer which stars Shane Carruth and David Sullivan. The film tells the engrossing story of two engineers who stumble upon a remarkable invention that will change their lives in unimaginable ways. The disc will be available to own from the 5th April, and should retail at around $27.95. The film itself will be presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen along with an English Stereo Surround track. Extras will include an audio commentary from the writer/director Shane Carruth and a second commentary from writer/director and cast/crew. English and Spanish subtitles will also be provided.