Written Interview: Shane Carruth (“Upstream Color”)

An interview with screenwriter-director Shane Carruth whose films Primer and the newly released Upstream Color have created quite a stir. Here are some excerpts from a /Film interview with Carruth:

/Film: Could you talk about the film’s title? What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Upstream Color’?

Shane Carruth: Well, so much of the story is about being effective at a distance. The main thrust of it is the breaking down and building up of a personal identity and where that comes from, but when we get into the next… the “closer to text” layer, which would be… you know, we’ve got central characters that are being affected by things they are not aware of, things they can’t speak to or name.

Then we’ve got our three points on the triangle of the sampler, and the thief, and the orchid harvesters. None of them know about each other either, they are just fulfilling their role, and what they are doing is continuing to… travel. The pigs decay, the spore shoots out of the blue material that gets into the orchid in the nursery… the thief harvests that and gets the worm. It’s all just a big swarm and the idea that none of them know that the others are there, that everything seems to be coming from upstream, that was the idea; that even though it’s a circle, from any one person’s perspective it just seems to come down and so I thought that was appropriate and sonically interesting enough.

The word I keep returning to in order to encapsulate the film is “resonance.” There’s the sampler, the relationship between sound and image, and the resonance between the two characters as they meet… Is that a word that you would use?

I think so… yeah. We are constantly talking about things that are intangible and echoing a bit. I mean there’s a duplicate for everything that’s happening in this story. Every time one character experiences something, another will eventually as well. So yeah, I think that’s a decent word. I know… I don’t know. I might need some more context.

Here is a trailer for the movie Upstream Color:

For the rest of the /Film interview, go here.