Jedva shvatljiv ili potpuno neshvatljiv niskobudžetni film o posljedicama korištenja slučajno napravljenog vremenskog stroja. Valjda tako i treba biti kad je riječ o paradoksima, petljama, višestrukim vremenskim dvojnicima i događajima bez objašnjenja. Mentalni puzzle i klaustrofobija Feynmanove fizike. Kultni sf-klasik.
Cijeli film (talijanski titlovi):
"Primer was shot on a $7,000 budget, but it never looks or feels cheap. This story of four engineers who invent a time machine in a garage is decidedly unglamorous and consistently engaging; Carruth (who also wrote and stars in the film) throws the audience into the deep end, offering no exposition, let alone explication for the audience to latch onto. The film explores the bizarre moral implications—and possible side effects (and defects) of time travel." - Biblioklept
"An ingenious movie about the perils of ingenuity. Invigorating. Like 'Pi' or 'Memento', 'Primer' is the kind of movie likely to inspire both imitators and cultists. Carruth has invented something fascinating."- A.O Scott, The New York Times
"Anybody who claims they fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar. That's hardly a problem, though, since the experience of watching Primer is so intensely pleasurable that you'll want to see it several times, not so much to figure it out (that's a fringe benefit) as to revel in its striking composition and wry sense of humor.” -Mike D'Angelo, ESQUIRE
"The year's most effective science fiction film. 'Primer' is a reminder that the best sci-fi action requires you to think."-Jason Silverman, Wired
"Finally, a piece of clockwork science fiction that works. This smart, committed genre exercise well deserves its Sundance Grand Jury Prize."-New York Magazine
"One of the more inventive, tantalizing and ingeniously directed indies of the past few years." -John Anderson, Newsday
“Evidence of a unique and unified vision. Every shot has the surprise and intensity of a new idea.”
-Amy Taubin, Film Comment
“PRIMER is the minimalist 2001 for the post–Bill Gates generation!” - Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix
“Fascinatingly obtuse. Unfolds in the manner of Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick. PRIMER is a sci-fi film that can play convincingly even to a theoretical physicist.” -Cinefantastique
ABOUT THE STORY
PRIMER is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe and Aaron, are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities--ones that could enable them to do and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next.
"Shane Carruth's "Primer" opens with four techheads addressing envelopes to possible investors; they seek venture capital for a machine they're building in the garage. They're not entirely sure what the machine does, although it certainly does something. Their dialogue is halfway between shop talk and one of those articles in Wired magazine that you never finish. We don't understand most of what they're saying, and neither, perhaps, do they, but we get the drift. Challenging us to listen closely, to half-understand what they half-understand, is one of the ways the film sucks us in.
They steal a catalytic converter for its platinum, and plunder a refrigerator for its freon. Their budget is so small, they could cash the checks on the bus. Aaron and Abe, agreeing that whatever they've invented, they're the ones who invented it, subtly eliminate the other two from the enterprise. They then regard something that looks like an insulated shipping container with wires and dials and coils stuff. This is odd: It secretes protein. More protein than it has time to secrete. Measuring the protein's rate of growth, they determine that one minute in the garage is equal to 1,347 minutes in the machine.
Is time in the machine different than time outside the machine? Apparently. But that would make it some kind of time machine, wouldn't it? Hard to believe. Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) ponder the machine and look at their results and Aaron concludes it is "the most important thing any living being has ever witnessed." But what is it?
There's a fascination in the way they talk with each other, quickly, softly, excitedly. It's better, actually, that we don't understand everything they say, because that makes us feel more like eavesdroppers and less like the passive audience for predigested dialogue. We can see where they're heading, especially after ... well, I don't want to give away some of the plot, and I may not understand the rest, but it would appear that they can travel through time. They learn this by seeing their doubles before they have even tried time travel - proof that later they will travel back to now. Meanwhile (is that the word?) a larger model of the machine is/was assembled in a storage locker by them/their doubles.
Should they personally experiment with time travel? Yes, manifestly, because they already have. "I can think of no way in which this thing would be considered even remotely close to safe," one of them says. But they try it out, journeying into the recent past and buying some mutual funds they know will rise in value.
It seems to work. The side effect, however, is that occasionally there are two of them: the Abe or Aaron who originally lived through the time, and the one who has gone back to the time and is living through it simultaneously. One is a double. Which one? There is a shot where they watch "themselves" from a distance, and we assume those they're watching are themselves living in ordinary time, and they are themselves having traveled back to observe them. But which Abe or Aaron is the real one? If they met, how would they speak? If two sets of the same atoms exist in the same universe at the same time, where did the additional atoms come from? It can make you hungry, thinking about questions like that. "I haven't eaten since later this afternoon," one complains.
"Primer" is a puzzle film that will leave you wondering about paradoxes, loopholes, loose ends, events without explanation, chronologies that don't seem to fit. Abe and Aaron wonder, too, and what seems at first like a perfectly straightforward method for using the machine turns out to be alarmingly complicated; various generations of themselves and their actions prove impossible to keep straight. Carruth handles the problems in an admirably understated way; when one of the characters begins to bleed a little from an ear, what does that mean? Will he be injured in a past he has not yet visited? In that case, is he the double? What happened to the being who arrived at this moment the old-fashioned way, before having traveled back?
The movie delights me with its cocky confidence that the audience can keep up. "Primer" is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review. It will surely be hated by those who "go to the movies to be entertained," and embraced and debated by others, who will find it entertains the parts the others do not reach. It is maddening, fascinating and completely successful.
Note: Carruth wrote, directed and edited the movie, composed the score, and starred in it. The budget was reportedly around $7,000, but that was enough: The movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look. In a New York Times interview, Carruth said he filmed largely in his own garage, and at times he was no more sure what he was creating than his characters were. "Primer" won the award for best drama at Sundance 2004." - Roger Ebert
"With only one film to his credit, Shane Carruth can tick off at
least eight film professions: cinematographer, editor, composer, writer,
director, producer, casting director, and lead actor. The film is Primer. Like Darren Aronofsky's Pi,
it's a low-budget science-fiction indie that makes virtues of its
limitations. I spoke with Shane Carruth at San Francisco's Hotel
Carlton, on October 11, 2004.
Groucho: So your inspiration for the script partly came from reading about mathematical and scientific discoveries, is that right?
Shane Carruth: Yeah. I mean, I got my setting from that. I knew what the story was, like, thematically, before it turned into a science story, but yeah, yeah, it was from innovation.
G: Can you talk about what it was in those readings that you took for the film?
SC: Yeah, um, you know, there's these commonalities. And some of them I know specifically, and then other things are just kind of an accumulation of a lot of little details but, you know, this idea—like John Beardon and the transistor. You know, he's trying to perfect—or to get a more—a pure vacuum tube that will be more efficient and accidentally discovers the transistor from the materials that are lying around in his lab. And, you know, it's just—you know, the transistor, of course, it's by an order of magnitude above this vacuum tube and it's—but it was completely an accident, and for the most part it was a thing that he was trying to get rid of: this ability of resistance and non-resistance. It was—I don't know. So there's that. The idea of, like, Newton and the calculus is almost the same thing. He's got this amazing power that is dependent on the idea of, you know, an infinite number of infinitely small parts. And, from what I was reading, it says that he didn't like this idea. It was very uncomfortable because 1) when you talk about infinity at the time, it was not an easy thing to discuss because it said something about God. I mean, if you can talk about infinity, then you're talking about something much bigger. And so they were uncomfortable with that. But it was also the fact that it seemed silly, I guess, that there was this powerful concept built on this thing that, um—I don't know another way to put it. But they just, um—it didn't seem like sound to talk about infinity. And so, you know, he's trying his best to get rid of this thing, but it ends up being, you know—it's a—I don't know, it's like a necessary attribute. I don't know. There's that, there's the—I feel like I'm all over the place now; I'm not being very precise. But in—the Wright brothers: you know, they fly at the Paris Air Show, and they pilot this prototype or this plane around, and it's in the air for twenty minutes. And people still aren't sure about it. They're still—I mean, it's three years later until they actually get a contract to build planes. I mean, I think—you know, in my head, I'm thinking, "Oh, it was Kitty Hawk, and the next day they got, you know, a hundred million dollars to build planes, and they're, y'know, king of the world." And it's just—there's always that weird moment when the thing exists in the world, but no one knows what it is yet. And no one can appreciate what it is. So, I mean, there's a lot of little things like that that just seem like—I don't know. The way true stuff happens seems to have kind of a feel to it that I wanted to see.
G: Other than being evocative of modern discoveries—or the work of Apple computers and that sort of thing—the garage afforded you a comfortable location—or a controllable location—.
SC: Yeah.
G: Can you discuss some of the challenges of shooting on a budget on location and on a tight schedule?
SC: Sure. I don't know where to start. I guess the biggest one is, um—well, I don't know what the biggest one was. But because of the budget, you know, we only had enough footage to shoot what was needed. There was, you know, only one take of everything. And not only that, but it was only the lines from any given shot that I knew I would need, with an overlap of maybe one or two lines. You know, that's—it's very—it's odd, and it's frustrating, and you're—. Luckily we had rehearsed for about a month in advance, and so we kinda—we knew everything cold. But, you know, being asked to—y'know, sometimes we would pick up right in the middle of a conversation and just do three lines, which you've got to perform as if they're stacked between the conversation. And so we did it a couple different ways. One was just to "Okay, let's turn the camera on and let the actor figure it out. Y'know, just perform it as if it just happened, or as if it should fit in there. And then we were kind of doing stuff where, you know, "Okay, start performing it, and we're gonna turn the camera on about the time when we need the lines to be recorded." So, I mean, there's things like that. There's the Texas heat in July, which is insane. We never got that garage cooled lower than 80 degrees, I think. There weren't really—there weren't producers on the film, and so that was kind of frustrating because I didn't really know how big this thing, or how complicated it was going to get. And so my time was spent—you know, we'd lose a location, so I'd be scrambling around to secure another location, or picking up the camera from the rental facility, taking the film to the lab, making sure actors are wearing the right clothes—you know, picking f-stops and checking—. You know, it just, it never—it feels like it wasn't really directed; it was just kind of roughly orchestrated. And that was—it's not a very satisfying process. I think, not just for me, but for the other five guys involved, you know, everybody's having to do double duty on different jobs, and it's just—.
G: Right. What I think sounds most surprising to me is that you
were able to maintain a level of commitment from that core group. How
difficult was that? Did you come to a head with people that you were—
SC: I'm surprised that they stayed because—yeah. 'Cause they'd started off—I mean, there were maybe twelve people that showed up for the first time, and it was, you know—maybe by day three or four, we were down to our core group. And they stuck it out through the end of the month. But, um, yeah, it was not a fun place to be, and especially not to be giving up your free time. Because, you know, everybody's working part-time jobs through this.
G: Right.
SC: I don't know why they stayed, to be honest. I mean, I know David Sullivan: he's an actor, and he wants to be an actor, so—and his face is all over, so he's got some definite investment in the film getting completed. But as far as everyone else, I think—I don't know. I don't know what it was exactly.
G: Hm. You were, of course, self-taught as a filmmaker. Can you talk about how you became familiar with or comfortable with the technology to shoot the film and also the process of storyboarding the film, knowing what you wanted to shoot?
SC: Right. Yeah, I didn't know anything about it, so I just tried to piece it apart the best as I could. You know, I got paranoid about cinematography...'cause I had been told that it's very difficult to get an image on film—and it is. And so I read as much as I could, and when I finally realized that it was just photography with a set shutter speed, then that meant that I could experiment with it cheaply. I had an old 35mm still camera, and I bought some tungsten slide film to mimic the tungsten motion picture film. And I just—I went about storyboarding the script, shot by shot, the way that I imagined it. And so I could really just take my time picking compositions and experimenting with depth-of-field and color temperature and different lighting set-ups. So yeah, by the end of it, by the time we were shooting, we had the script and we had these slides, and y'know, you put the two together, and you've got an idea of what the film's gonna look like.
G: Now, did you have to train somebody else to be—were you your own cinematographer? Were you lighting all the set ups, or how did that work?
SC: Umm, yeah. There were—I mean, there was very little lighting equipment there. Most of it is practicals and available light. I bought some daylight-balanced fluorescent bulbs from Wal-Mart that cost me thirty bucks. And I would use those—like the general principal in the garage was to flood the room with this blue light and then isolate different areas with tungsten practical—(gestures at the lights) well, these are fluorescent, but a normal light bulb would tend to go yellow on the tungsten film. And that, to me, seemed—you know, it seemed to be interesting, and it looked real, so that's kind of the two things I was hoping for. And, I don't know, most locations—it's mainly just available light that we tried to use in the best way possible. Yeah, I mean, it was all—it was pretty much pre-set-up with the storyboards.
G: Huh. Both you and David Sullivan give terrific, subtle performances. You're the casting director. Explain how you two ended up in the leads.
SC: Um, I tried out, um, a hundred guys. I added five casting calls. And I was very frustrated with the process. I couldn't—you know, I wasn't offering to pay anybody, and, y'know, they were showing up, and they wouldn't look at the material. I was so worried. I made sure to give it to 'em. I emailed everybody. There were a few people, I actually went by their house to deliver it to them—the page or so—and it was only—it was a small paragraph at the top of a page that they were trying out with. But I couldn't get them to prepare it. So I would ask everybody back for a second time, or at least the guys that kinda fit the rough description of what these guys were supposed to be, and again, it was just—y'know, they wouldn't look at the material. So by the third time, David Sullivan memorized the paragraph. And that was just it. That was the end of it. I—immediately, he was cast. But it was so frustrating, and I realized through that process that if I cast somebody and they work out for, like, three weeks, but then they leave, I can't recover from that with this budget. So I tried to limit the number of people that could break this thing. And so I figured I was roughly the same age, and I'd memorized a good portion of the script by that time, just kind of showing these guys what I was looking for, so I just tried to—I stepped into it.
G: Despite their intellect, Aaron and Abe are essentially childish. Where does Aaron's need to prove himself heroic come from?
SC: I just assumed that that was universal. Y'know, I just—I've
set this premise up and I'm trying to watch these guys follow their
baser instincts, and I guess just—you know, money is the obvious one,
and I was trying to figure out, you know, what is next? What is—once you
have that money, what do you want? And I guess—maybe I'm just giving
myself away there, because I think, y'know, that's what I would want, is
to be considered a hero or noble or something good by other people.
G: Yeah. I suppose it might also be a function of having this great deed that he has to sit on, too, of having discovered what he's discovered and can't share.
SC: Right. I hadn't thought about that.
G: So the title refers in part to a moral initiation—is that right?
SC: Yeah, I mean that's where—I picked it for a couple different reasons, but yeah. Just the idea: this beginning lesson plan for these guys. But yeah, I mean, y'know, later on when they are actually talking about this—using this machine and going through the day over and over and over again, or what—they have to plan for the idea that it's been going through over and over again—y'know, where the experience of the first is the same as the second is the same as the third: that power position is always the first [sent] through. He's always the guy you want to pretend to be. You don't want to think you're in someone else's past, and that you're just one of an infinite number. So yeah, to be prime, or primer, seemed appropriate.
G: So the story—it plays like a cautionary tale. I think it is one, in moral terms. In terms of scientific inquiry, do you think there are some discoveries better left undiscovered?
SC: That's the thing, is I think any story that has science fiction in it, if it ends badly, it can be called a cautionary tale. And, I mean, yeah, there's definitely like—I was definitely thinking about those things in the story, but if it wasn't universal and about how relationships can be corrupted because of power, then I don't think I would have done it. Because there's definitely—I mean, it is interesting: I have the same worries, I guess, as anybody that—you know, my mom always says there's nothing new under the sun, but we're rapidly getting to the point where I don't think that's true anymore. I mean, the innovation is turning exponential. I mean, everybody knows that. It just—yeah, I don't know—you know, who knows if it's going to be a kid with his own home virus kit or a kid with his own home atomic bomb kit, but it's like, at one point, how do we police all these ideas that exist that are out there? So yeah, I mean, there's—I guess there was a little of that in the fact—I don't know. Maybe they're the same, to be honest. They kind of feel the same.
G: Let's talk a little bit about the issue of confusion arising from the film.
SC: Okay.
G: You designed a complete picture puzzle, I think, and then removed some of the pieces—and the audience's journey through the film is partly trying to connect those pieces that they watch, I think. Do you think it is any more confusing than is necessary or is that—it seems kind of integral to telling a time-travel tale.
SC: See, that's the thing is, yeah, I think the device dictates that it's going to be complicated. Like, you know, we're talking about causality and paradoxes and, y'know, looping, and it just—I know that there's a way to sum it up, and to have that nice tidy ending—
G: Right.
SC: But it seems like it just does the subject matter a disservice to do that. And, you know, I was worried about it as I was writing, trying to make sure "Okay, is there enough information here?" and I guess the thing is is I'm confident that there is. I mean, the information is in there. And there are people that walk out of it and, you know, for the most part, they know every little thing, and if they see it a second time, then it's just—now it's a done deal. It's just I think the thing is is it's such a different film—it's, I think—I guess my opinion is that it has a lot to do with expectations. If people know what they're getting into, it seems like it's a much different experience. But, um, yeah, I mean, it's not summed up.
G: Right. Certainly there is something to be said for ambiguity.
It makes the film a more intense experience. I think every person
probably has a few things that they leave questioning or unsure about.
But, as you said, I think a lot of people—they know more than they think
they do.
SC: See, that's what I've kind of found, is, yeah, someone will ask a question, and I'll say, "What do you think it is?" and nine times out of ten, they're—it's what I intended. And I think—like in the Q&A's and stuff—what happens is—like especially at Sundance, I was very worried about the Q&A's turning into, y'know, plot-by-plot synopsis. And, yeah, at first, y'know, a bunch of hands would go up, and I could—you can kinda just get that vibe that all these are all, like, plot-related questions. And I would answer, like, the first or second, and then that would really be kinda the end of it. And, from talking to people, my understanding was that—it's that people want to know that there are answers. They want to know that it does make sense. They don't necessarily want to know what those answers are. They just want to know that there's a method to it and that it's not some random assemblage of plot points, that there's—there's some—there's a reason why these things are happening.
G: Right. I think that comes across in the film. I think people sense that. Though I think people also want to be able to stand next to you, in the room where you have the charts on the wall and be able to follow that a little more clearly. Let me toss at you a few...and feel free to deflect or refuse to answer, but maybe some of these might be useful for people. The earpieces that are used to realign conversations: how do those function?
SC: Umm, well, y'know, Aaron has gone through the day, and he's recorded this conversation in case he needs to do it again. And so when he comes back, he is listening to each of these conversations in his earpiece. So that he can perform verbatim, the way he did the day before, so that he can—he can only tweak the things he needs to tweak, and everything else he knows will play the same. So that he can kind of get the people he needs to to that party and, y'know, load or unload the shotgun depending on what he wants the outcome to be.
G: Right. Mr. Granger is a fleeting character in the story and remains on the periphery. He's the father of Abe's girlfriend, right?
SC: Yeah.
G: To me, it was somewhat unclear how he enters into their story.
SC: See, yeah, that's the thing—I—.
G: Maybe that's best left unsaid.
SC: Well, see, that's the thing is, y'know, the story is very complicated, but that's the one thing where there is—the information is purposefully not there. I mean, Abe and Aaron, for the most part, y'know, for this film, we're with Abe and Aaron, I think, and we're only learning the things that they know about. And they find themselves in a point where clearly this guy has used the machine. He's used it from some point in the future, and they know one of them must have told him, but they don't have any way of finding out any of those answers. And so, y'know, since it's the kind of the impetus for getting Abe to reboot everything—it's the first time he finds himself in someone else's past—it seemed wrong to tell the audience something that Abe and Aaron didn't have the ability to figure out themselves, at that point in time. And so it's left out because its so important that he feel like he's in an unknowable space, to explain why he would reboot everything.
G: Right.
SC: I mean, I know what he—I mean, I made sure that there was a way for it to go, and I—there's actually just little bits of stuff here and there, but yeah, it's just—that's information that's not in the film.
G: And when one Aaron confronts another Aaron, what is he trying to prevent himself from doing?
SC: Umm, what do you mean "prevent"?
G: Well, he restrains himself so that he won't be somewhere at a certain time.
SC: Well, I mean, when Aaron—see, the thing—when Abe and Aaron are using it to trade stocks, they're being very cautious, and they're maintaining symmetry with the hotel room, and they come back, they kind of free-reign, but this is a way they kind of contain the infinite number of doubles in that time-space, for that 9 to 3pm. And so, yeah, if you make it past then, everything's okay: there's only one of you because everything is contained there, and the experience of all of them is the same.
G: Right.
SC: What Aaron's doing—what we see that he's doing on that Monday—is not being cautious. He's just going back, y'know, knocking himself out so he can step into his life and re-perform all those things. So, yeah, so he does it once, and he does it again, and it's—you know, the narrator only knows about three possible loops.
G: Okay, enough quibbling about the plot.
SC: Cool. G: In a stylistic sense, which filmmakers do you respond to, or have you responded to, and did you in any way emulate them with your first film?
SC: I really try not to. I mean, I—you know, Kubrick, P.T. Anderson, Soderbergh with—The Limey, I think, is this amazing film that, y'know, will probably take twenty years for people to realize that that was the one, I think—I don't know, I just think it's amazing. But, um, not, uh—Wong Kar-Wai. Wong Kar-Wai is amazing. I don't know, I try not to be too inspired. If I ever find myself, y'know, copying or ripping stuff off or, worse, paying homage...
G: (Laughs.)
SC: ...um, I'll try to change what I'm doing.
G: So now that you are primed as a filmmaker, what do you see in your future? Where do you want to take this?
SC: I've got four story ideas. And what I usually do is I collect about thirty or forty pages of notes before I start writing. And those are all properly notated. And I can't wait to see if I can get them made.
G: Alright, great. Well, thank you for talking to me.
SC: Thank you. Thanks for coming. - Groucho Reviews
Groucho: So your inspiration for the script partly came from reading about mathematical and scientific discoveries, is that right?
Shane Carruth: Yeah. I mean, I got my setting from that. I knew what the story was, like, thematically, before it turned into a science story, but yeah, yeah, it was from innovation.
G: Can you talk about what it was in those readings that you took for the film?
SC: Yeah, um, you know, there's these commonalities. And some of them I know specifically, and then other things are just kind of an accumulation of a lot of little details but, you know, this idea—like John Beardon and the transistor. You know, he's trying to perfect—or to get a more—a pure vacuum tube that will be more efficient and accidentally discovers the transistor from the materials that are lying around in his lab. And, you know, it's just—you know, the transistor, of course, it's by an order of magnitude above this vacuum tube and it's—but it was completely an accident, and for the most part it was a thing that he was trying to get rid of: this ability of resistance and non-resistance. It was—I don't know. So there's that. The idea of, like, Newton and the calculus is almost the same thing. He's got this amazing power that is dependent on the idea of, you know, an infinite number of infinitely small parts. And, from what I was reading, it says that he didn't like this idea. It was very uncomfortable because 1) when you talk about infinity at the time, it was not an easy thing to discuss because it said something about God. I mean, if you can talk about infinity, then you're talking about something much bigger. And so they were uncomfortable with that. But it was also the fact that it seemed silly, I guess, that there was this powerful concept built on this thing that, um—I don't know another way to put it. But they just, um—it didn't seem like sound to talk about infinity. And so, you know, he's trying his best to get rid of this thing, but it ends up being, you know—it's a—I don't know, it's like a necessary attribute. I don't know. There's that, there's the—I feel like I'm all over the place now; I'm not being very precise. But in—the Wright brothers: you know, they fly at the Paris Air Show, and they pilot this prototype or this plane around, and it's in the air for twenty minutes. And people still aren't sure about it. They're still—I mean, it's three years later until they actually get a contract to build planes. I mean, I think—you know, in my head, I'm thinking, "Oh, it was Kitty Hawk, and the next day they got, you know, a hundred million dollars to build planes, and they're, y'know, king of the world." And it's just—there's always that weird moment when the thing exists in the world, but no one knows what it is yet. And no one can appreciate what it is. So, I mean, there's a lot of little things like that that just seem like—I don't know. The way true stuff happens seems to have kind of a feel to it that I wanted to see.
G: Other than being evocative of modern discoveries—or the work of Apple computers and that sort of thing—the garage afforded you a comfortable location—or a controllable location—.
SC: Yeah.
G: Can you discuss some of the challenges of shooting on a budget on location and on a tight schedule?
SC: Sure. I don't know where to start. I guess the biggest one is, um—well, I don't know what the biggest one was. But because of the budget, you know, we only had enough footage to shoot what was needed. There was, you know, only one take of everything. And not only that, but it was only the lines from any given shot that I knew I would need, with an overlap of maybe one or two lines. You know, that's—it's very—it's odd, and it's frustrating, and you're—. Luckily we had rehearsed for about a month in advance, and so we kinda—we knew everything cold. But, you know, being asked to—y'know, sometimes we would pick up right in the middle of a conversation and just do three lines, which you've got to perform as if they're stacked between the conversation. And so we did it a couple different ways. One was just to "Okay, let's turn the camera on and let the actor figure it out. Y'know, just perform it as if it just happened, or as if it should fit in there. And then we were kind of doing stuff where, you know, "Okay, start performing it, and we're gonna turn the camera on about the time when we need the lines to be recorded." So, I mean, there's things like that. There's the Texas heat in July, which is insane. We never got that garage cooled lower than 80 degrees, I think. There weren't really—there weren't producers on the film, and so that was kind of frustrating because I didn't really know how big this thing, or how complicated it was going to get. And so my time was spent—you know, we'd lose a location, so I'd be scrambling around to secure another location, or picking up the camera from the rental facility, taking the film to the lab, making sure actors are wearing the right clothes—you know, picking f-stops and checking—. You know, it just, it never—it feels like it wasn't really directed; it was just kind of roughly orchestrated. And that was—it's not a very satisfying process. I think, not just for me, but for the other five guys involved, you know, everybody's having to do double duty on different jobs, and it's just—.
G: Right. What I think sounds most surprising to me is that you
were able to maintain a level of commitment from that core group. How
difficult was that? Did you come to a head with people that you were—
SC: I'm surprised that they stayed because—yeah. 'Cause they'd started off—I mean, there were maybe twelve people that showed up for the first time, and it was, you know—maybe by day three or four, we were down to our core group. And they stuck it out through the end of the month. But, um, yeah, it was not a fun place to be, and especially not to be giving up your free time. Because, you know, everybody's working part-time jobs through this.
G: Right.
SC: I don't know why they stayed, to be honest. I mean, I know David Sullivan: he's an actor, and he wants to be an actor, so—and his face is all over, so he's got some definite investment in the film getting completed. But as far as everyone else, I think—I don't know. I don't know what it was exactly.
G: Hm. You were, of course, self-taught as a filmmaker. Can you talk about how you became familiar with or comfortable with the technology to shoot the film and also the process of storyboarding the film, knowing what you wanted to shoot?
SC: Right. Yeah, I didn't know anything about it, so I just tried to piece it apart the best as I could. You know, I got paranoid about cinematography...'cause I had been told that it's very difficult to get an image on film—and it is. And so I read as much as I could, and when I finally realized that it was just photography with a set shutter speed, then that meant that I could experiment with it cheaply. I had an old 35mm still camera, and I bought some tungsten slide film to mimic the tungsten motion picture film. And I just—I went about storyboarding the script, shot by shot, the way that I imagined it. And so I could really just take my time picking compositions and experimenting with depth-of-field and color temperature and different lighting set-ups. So yeah, by the end of it, by the time we were shooting, we had the script and we had these slides, and y'know, you put the two together, and you've got an idea of what the film's gonna look like.
G: Now, did you have to train somebody else to be—were you your own cinematographer? Were you lighting all the set ups, or how did that work?
SC: Umm, yeah. There were—I mean, there was very little lighting equipment there. Most of it is practicals and available light. I bought some daylight-balanced fluorescent bulbs from Wal-Mart that cost me thirty bucks. And I would use those—like the general principal in the garage was to flood the room with this blue light and then isolate different areas with tungsten practical—(gestures at the lights) well, these are fluorescent, but a normal light bulb would tend to go yellow on the tungsten film. And that, to me, seemed—you know, it seemed to be interesting, and it looked real, so that's kind of the two things I was hoping for. And, I don't know, most locations—it's mainly just available light that we tried to use in the best way possible. Yeah, I mean, it was all—it was pretty much pre-set-up with the storyboards.
G: Huh. Both you and David Sullivan give terrific, subtle performances. You're the casting director. Explain how you two ended up in the leads.
SC: Um, I tried out, um, a hundred guys. I added five casting calls. And I was very frustrated with the process. I couldn't—you know, I wasn't offering to pay anybody, and, y'know, they were showing up, and they wouldn't look at the material. I was so worried. I made sure to give it to 'em. I emailed everybody. There were a few people, I actually went by their house to deliver it to them—the page or so—and it was only—it was a small paragraph at the top of a page that they were trying out with. But I couldn't get them to prepare it. So I would ask everybody back for a second time, or at least the guys that kinda fit the rough description of what these guys were supposed to be, and again, it was just—y'know, they wouldn't look at the material. So by the third time, David Sullivan memorized the paragraph. And that was just it. That was the end of it. I—immediately, he was cast. But it was so frustrating, and I realized through that process that if I cast somebody and they work out for, like, three weeks, but then they leave, I can't recover from that with this budget. So I tried to limit the number of people that could break this thing. And so I figured I was roughly the same age, and I'd memorized a good portion of the script by that time, just kind of showing these guys what I was looking for, so I just tried to—I stepped into it.
G: Despite their intellect, Aaron and Abe are essentially childish. Where does Aaron's need to prove himself heroic come from?
SC: I just assumed that that was universal. Y'know, I just—I've
set this premise up and I'm trying to watch these guys follow their
baser instincts, and I guess just—you know, money is the obvious one,
and I was trying to figure out, you know, what is next? What is—once you
have that money, what do you want? And I guess—maybe I'm just giving
myself away there, because I think, y'know, that's what I would want, is
to be considered a hero or noble or something good by other people.
G: Yeah. I suppose it might also be a function of having this great deed that he has to sit on, too, of having discovered what he's discovered and can't share.
SC: Right. I hadn't thought about that.
G: So the title refers in part to a moral initiation—is that right?
SC: Yeah, I mean that's where—I picked it for a couple different reasons, but yeah. Just the idea: this beginning lesson plan for these guys. But yeah, I mean, y'know, later on when they are actually talking about this—using this machine and going through the day over and over and over again, or what—they have to plan for the idea that it's been going through over and over again—y'know, where the experience of the first is the same as the second is the same as the third: that power position is always the first [sent] through. He's always the guy you want to pretend to be. You don't want to think you're in someone else's past, and that you're just one of an infinite number. So yeah, to be prime, or primer, seemed appropriate.
G: So the story—it plays like a cautionary tale. I think it is one, in moral terms. In terms of scientific inquiry, do you think there are some discoveries better left undiscovered?
SC: That's the thing, is I think any story that has science fiction in it, if it ends badly, it can be called a cautionary tale. And, I mean, yeah, there's definitely like—I was definitely thinking about those things in the story, but if it wasn't universal and about how relationships can be corrupted because of power, then I don't think I would have done it. Because there's definitely—I mean, it is interesting: I have the same worries, I guess, as anybody that—you know, my mom always says there's nothing new under the sun, but we're rapidly getting to the point where I don't think that's true anymore. I mean, the innovation is turning exponential. I mean, everybody knows that. It just—yeah, I don't know—you know, who knows if it's going to be a kid with his own home virus kit or a kid with his own home atomic bomb kit, but it's like, at one point, how do we police all these ideas that exist that are out there? So yeah, I mean, there's—I guess there was a little of that in the fact—I don't know. Maybe they're the same, to be honest. They kind of feel the same.
G: Let's talk a little bit about the issue of confusion arising from the film.
SC: Okay.
G: You designed a complete picture puzzle, I think, and then removed some of the pieces—and the audience's journey through the film is partly trying to connect those pieces that they watch, I think. Do you think it is any more confusing than is necessary or is that—it seems kind of integral to telling a time-travel tale.
SC: See, that's the thing is, yeah, I think the device dictates that it's going to be complicated. Like, you know, we're talking about causality and paradoxes and, y'know, looping, and it just—I know that there's a way to sum it up, and to have that nice tidy ending—
G: Right.
SC: But it seems like it just does the subject matter a disservice to do that. And, you know, I was worried about it as I was writing, trying to make sure "Okay, is there enough information here?" and I guess the thing is is I'm confident that there is. I mean, the information is in there. And there are people that walk out of it and, you know, for the most part, they know every little thing, and if they see it a second time, then it's just—now it's a done deal. It's just I think the thing is is it's such a different film—it's, I think—I guess my opinion is that it has a lot to do with expectations. If people know what they're getting into, it seems like it's a much different experience. But, um, yeah, I mean, it's not summed up.
G: Right. Certainly there is something to be said for ambiguity.
It makes the film a more intense experience. I think every person
probably has a few things that they leave questioning or unsure about.
But, as you said, I think a lot of people—they know more than they think
they do.
SC: See, that's what I've kind of found, is, yeah, someone will ask a question, and I'll say, "What do you think it is?" and nine times out of ten, they're—it's what I intended. And I think—like in the Q&A's and stuff—what happens is—like especially at Sundance, I was very worried about the Q&A's turning into, y'know, plot-by-plot synopsis. And, yeah, at first, y'know, a bunch of hands would go up, and I could—you can kinda just get that vibe that all these are all, like, plot-related questions. And I would answer, like, the first or second, and then that would really be kinda the end of it. And, from talking to people, my understanding was that—it's that people want to know that there are answers. They want to know that it does make sense. They don't necessarily want to know what those answers are. They just want to know that there's a method to it and that it's not some random assemblage of plot points, that there's—there's some—there's a reason why these things are happening.
G: Right. I think that comes across in the film. I think people sense that. Though I think people also want to be able to stand next to you, in the room where you have the charts on the wall and be able to follow that a little more clearly. Let me toss at you a few...and feel free to deflect or refuse to answer, but maybe some of these might be useful for people. The earpieces that are used to realign conversations: how do those function?
SC: Umm, well, y'know, Aaron has gone through the day, and he's recorded this conversation in case he needs to do it again. And so when he comes back, he is listening to each of these conversations in his earpiece. So that he can perform verbatim, the way he did the day before, so that he can—he can only tweak the things he needs to tweak, and everything else he knows will play the same. So that he can kind of get the people he needs to to that party and, y'know, load or unload the shotgun depending on what he wants the outcome to be.
G: Right. Mr. Granger is a fleeting character in the story and remains on the periphery. He's the father of Abe's girlfriend, right?
SC: Yeah.
G: To me, it was somewhat unclear how he enters into their story.
SC: See, yeah, that's the thing—I—.
G: Maybe that's best left unsaid.
SC: Well, see, that's the thing is, y'know, the story is very complicated, but that's the one thing where there is—the information is purposefully not there. I mean, Abe and Aaron, for the most part, y'know, for this film, we're with Abe and Aaron, I think, and we're only learning the things that they know about. And they find themselves in a point where clearly this guy has used the machine. He's used it from some point in the future, and they know one of them must have told him, but they don't have any way of finding out any of those answers. And so, y'know, since it's the kind of the impetus for getting Abe to reboot everything—it's the first time he finds himself in someone else's past—it seemed wrong to tell the audience something that Abe and Aaron didn't have the ability to figure out themselves, at that point in time. And so it's left out because its so important that he feel like he's in an unknowable space, to explain why he would reboot everything.
G: Right.
SC: I mean, I know what he—I mean, I made sure that there was a way for it to go, and I—there's actually just little bits of stuff here and there, but yeah, it's just—that's information that's not in the film.
G: And when one Aaron confronts another Aaron, what is he trying to prevent himself from doing?
SC: Umm, what do you mean "prevent"?
G: Well, he restrains himself so that he won't be somewhere at a certain time.
SC: Well, I mean, when Aaron—see, the thing—when Abe and Aaron are using it to trade stocks, they're being very cautious, and they're maintaining symmetry with the hotel room, and they come back, they kind of free-reign, but this is a way they kind of contain the infinite number of doubles in that time-space, for that 9 to 3pm. And so, yeah, if you make it past then, everything's okay: there's only one of you because everything is contained there, and the experience of all of them is the same.
G: Right.
SC: What Aaron's doing—what we see that he's doing on that Monday—is not being cautious. He's just going back, y'know, knocking himself out so he can step into his life and re-perform all those things. So, yeah, so he does it once, and he does it again, and it's—you know, the narrator only knows about three possible loops.
G: Okay, enough quibbling about the plot.
SC: Cool. G: In a stylistic sense, which filmmakers do you respond to, or have you responded to, and did you in any way emulate them with your first film?
SC: I really try not to. I mean, I—you know, Kubrick, P.T. Anderson, Soderbergh with—The Limey, I think, is this amazing film that, y'know, will probably take twenty years for people to realize that that was the one, I think—I don't know, I just think it's amazing. But, um, not, uh—Wong Kar-Wai. Wong Kar-Wai is amazing. I don't know, I try not to be too inspired. If I ever find myself, y'know, copying or ripping stuff off or, worse, paying homage...
G: (Laughs.)
SC: ...um, I'll try to change what I'm doing.
G: So now that you are primed as a filmmaker, what do you see in your future? Where do you want to take this?
SC: I've got four story ideas. And what I usually do is I collect about thirty or forty pages of notes before I start writing. And those are all properly notated. And I can't wait to see if I can get them made.
G: Alright, great. Well, thank you for talking to me.
SC: Thank you. Thanks for coming. - Groucho Reviews
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