"As an audience member, I want an experience that lasts longer than the running time of the film,” says Shane Carruth. The 41-year-old has just made a film that, he hopes, lives up to these expectations: Upstream Color. To call the film a labour of love, or even to bill Carruth as mere 'auteur', probably sells short how involved he was in every aspect. He wrote, directed, edited, photographed, scored and starred in the movie; and, in the US, he even self-distributed it. He's probably more comparable to an indie musician than a filmmaker; and, like the best of albums, there's an elusive, interpretive quality to Upstream Color.
“If you make a film and everyone walks out of it knowing exactly what it is, and their knowledge after seeing it is the full extent of what anyone will ever need to know about the story, I find it hard to believe that the experience would be compelling for people in any way,” says Carruth
After showing at the recent Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, local audiences are getting in on the discussion. Which often begins with one question: WTF? Upstream Color essentially follows Amy Seimetz (herself another actor/filmmaker), who is drugged with a parasite harvested from an exotic orchard. From there, it's a flowing, sight/sound, vaguely-plotted portrait of the life-cycle of organisms on Earth, cycles of abuse, the dangers of bio-engineering, and the mysticism of field-recordings.
“I don't think anything I can say in conversation is particularly useful to understanding the film,” Carruth warns, early in our first interview. Across two conversations – first on a sketchy phone-line from Casablanca, then a week later in Paris – Carruth can seem evasive, confessedly “abrasive”. He refutes the notion that either Upstream Color or its 2004 predecessor Primer (a micro-budget time-travel chin-scratcher) has a single genesis-story about their beginnings, or can be interpreted a single way. “There's a lack of exposition,” he says, “[because] I didn't want to get bogged down in the specific minutia of the details.”
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Carruth doesn't believe that any 'misinterpretation' is a problem – “if you make something that's veiled, you're doing so operating under the understanding that it will, in the big picture, only be truly understand by a select few.” Just as Upstream Color is a film about the 'big picture', ecologically, the filmmaker takes a big picture approach to his work.
“The thing I'm most passionate about in filmmaking is that there's universal quality that can be relevant when seen in any era,” offers Carruth. “Hopefully you can make a film that touches on this shared understanding of what it feels like to be a human in the world.”
