Director’s Cut: Seimetz on ‘Sun Don’t Shine,’ ‘Upstream Color’ and Why Murder Is Bad

Right now, as you read this, Amy Seimetz is blowing up. Just now she got a little more famous. There, it happened again. There’s a good chance that by breakfast tomorrow there will even be a bit of a backlash. But for now – right now – this is her moment.

A veteran actress on the micro-indie stage (“Alexander the Last,” “Gabi on the Roof in July,”) she can currently be seen in the much ballyhooed “Upstream Color.” In addition to that, she has three major acting gigs in the can – Lionsgate’s horror/comedy “You’re Next,” Christopher Guest’s HBO show “Family Tree” and one of the new lead roles in AMC’s third season of “The Killing.”

Seimetz’s first feature as a director, the award-winning “Sun Don’t Shine,” is about to make its theatrical and VOD debut. It stars Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley as two lovers on the run with a dead body in their trunk. It is shot on 16mm film in the blazing Flordia sun and it is lyrical and elliptical and refuses to make excuses for its characters. It’s a remarkable vehicle for Sheil, who, by all rights, ought to be blowing up right alongside Seimetz.

This past Sunday the New York Times ran a profile that, no offense to the Grey Lady, was exciting for Ms. Seimetz’s scrapbook, but didn’t do much to tell us what made her tick. We had the good fortune to catch her via telephone very late on Sunday night, tuckered out from shooting and not beholden to any normal talking points. As such, this conversation is all over the place. However, it is just that – a conversation. We invite you to read along.

Jordan Hoffman: I first saw “Sun Don’t Shine” a little over one year ago when it played the festival circuit. At the end of last year the Indiewire Critics’ Poll named it the Best Undistributed Film. I imagine that is among the most strangely gratifying awards out there – a real rebuke to the world, like, hey, what the hell, you guys all screwed up!

Amy Seimetz: Of course. It’s a strange world, where I’m working on television shows and winning the “best film not distributed.” But only because I didn’t set out to make stuff that’s mainstream. I’ve always tried to make personal and, earlier on, aggressive films. So it’s interesting for me to come into a place where you’re not sure if you’re becoming more mainstream or if you are suddenly finding your voice.

Well, I wanted to talk about this later, but you are alluding to acting in HBO show “Family Tree” and the new season of “The Killing,” neither of which have debuted yet. Is this something that keeps you up nights? Are you, to say it like we did when we were in college, worried about “losing your cred?”

How do you lose your cred working for Christopher Guest?

Fair point.

And … have you watched “The Killing?”

Um, no, but …

Well, the way that they shoot – the way both shows shoot, actually – they are really pushing boundaries of story. “The Killing” is a slow burn and you are allowed to breathe with characters, and understand a world that is uncomfortable. It’s very punchy and entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but it goes to dark places.

And when the season finale happens everyone loses their s**t on the Internet. Like I said, I haven’t gotten to this show yet, but I know people freak the hell out about it. Are you prepared for that sort of feedback?

I don’t know. Truth is, I don’t know how Season Three ends. I know the trajectory, but not the ending. I try to stay away from the response to stuff as best I can, but someone asked me “are you ready for people to really hate you?” I was … “huh? What do you mean?”

These longform stories on cable, people get really tied up in them. So, yeah, you’ll be spat upon in the streets.

I’d rather that than play some woman who is easy to deal with.

So, let’s let you shill for a minute, Amy Seimetz. For idiots like me who have their heads in the sand, I would imagine that Season Three is the perfect place for a newcomer to jump in?

Yes, absolutely true.

It’s as if it were made for guys like me who have been meaning to catch “The Killing,” but haven’t, and now I can.

This is all totally true.

Elias Koteas is in the new cast.

I know, right? Isn’t he amazing? But it’s funny, most of my scenes are outside of Elias, but we’re all really excited to be with him. But I don’t have any fun set stories, I don’t have any scenes with him. He’s around, though, and I do get a little starstruck. Same as on “Family Tree.”

What is your favorite scene from a Christopher Guest movie?

In “Waiting For Guffman,” when he’s trying to sell that the community needs to give him $100,000 for him to put on his play. When he’s telling them how dreamy and wonderful the play will be. And they all say “it’s great! It’s wonderful!” and they are so supportive, then he says he wants $100,000 and the board says they have something like $15,000 for the entire arts funding. And he gets so mad and tells them that they are all awful people. [starts laughing.] It’s the reactions, really, and that’s what’s so great about his films. They are so human – it doesn’t just go to a funny level just to be funny – it’s human and it’s painful.

Guest’s films really did anticipate the proliferation of lot of the semi-scripted stuff that’s happening on TV, as well as the “comedy of embarrassment.”

He’s the beacon of a very specific format.

You have some scenes with Fred Willard?

Oh, yeah. He just turns on. He’s a beautifully eccentric man. In real life you just think “okay, he’s just this eccentric dude” then the camera comes on and this wild world comes out of his mouth. It’s just, “wow, he is holding all these beautiful ideas inside.” Same with Bob Balaban.

Another guy who has directed some great films.

Right? Everyone on this show is, in a way, writing and directing their own material outside of it.

You should bill them triple.

Huh.

Okay, enough chit-chat. Let’s talk about “Sun Don’t Shine.” This movie begins with an outstanding opening scene, and an outstanding opening shot. Woe be to anyone who comes to the theater a minute late and misses the opening shot. Was this in draft one?

Not draft one, but as I got a firmer grasp on the immediacy, then yes. By the time we shot I knew that was going to be the opening. Initially I had a prologue.

Was the prologue about the victim? Or about the off-screen child?

It was about the child. The prologue was going to set up the Mom telling a bedtime story to the daughter, then later you realize she’s telling the story as a rationalization of the actions she did – a fairy tale in a way that explains why someone would do something like this.

That’s interesting to me, because one of the things I find when watching this movie is wondering just what kind of mother is Kate Lyn Sheil. She is, if I can speak bluntly, she’s such a mess, that you think “I want to see her with her child.” “How does she behave as a mother?” is one of the big question marks.

Yes, and that is why I excluded it. I really wanted to extract a female character from the role of being a mom. You can decide if she’s a good mom or not, but extract her from the roles of motherhood or a professional setting or whether she’s ambitious, then you just have a person in an existential crisis.

We only see her in this pressure cooker environment. We never see her at rest.

Exactly, that’s my take on it. Your role as a mother or a professional person – it’s done and gone. You are doomed by the situation.

Right. You know, as a guy who writes movie reviews, I often think about how people would write about things. If you see the character before and she works, say, selling car insurance, the graf might read “Kate Lyn Sheil, a car insurance agent, is on the run with her boyfriend …” when it isn’t relevant.

It’s funny, when Kate and I talked when this first was shown and some people got angry at the movie, we noticed that people got really angry at her. No one got mad at him [Kentucker Audley.] But she shouldn’t be doing these things! People got angry. I loved that they were freaking out.

There should be more – usually that anger is reserved for male parts, for the Ray Liotta parts, you know? [laughs.] Which is funny because I just watched “Killing Them Softly” and for the first time I was like, “wow, I feel sad for this character.”

I love that movie.

I loved it! Andrew Dominik. It’s so great. It’s shot so gorgeously. Greig Fraser is a terrific DP.

I saw that with my chum Matt Patches of Hollywood.com at a screening room in New York City and when we got in the elevator he and I were over the moon about it, and a very well-put-together older woman audibly chuffed at us. “That movie was vile and despicable,” she said, and we were like “We know!”

[laughs.] Yes, I know, I agree, it’s vile, it’s violent and brutal. What I loved about it was that I felt so bad for the criminals. I felt really sad for Ray Liotta. So, what I was thinking was, women don’t get to play these parts – roles that say “here I am, here’s where I exist in the world and you either hate me or you don’t, but I’ll give you all this baggage and this is how I’m dealing with this shit.”

Kate and I made a joke. I said “maybe when you go to the payphone” – there’s a big scene in “Sun Don’t Shine” where he sees her at a payphone – “maybe instead of it being ambiguous about whether you called your daughter or your mom or not, maybe we should have had you trading stocks. Shouting ‘buy buy buy! sell sell sell!’” Then people would say “well, at least she knows how to trade stocks.”

There’s a weird fake form of feminism that, in order to be a complete human being, you need to have a stronghold on your professional life in a cinematic sense. If I gave her some mundane knowledge, like knowing how to sell stocks, then people would think that she had some self-worth in the world, you know? People would say “this isn’t so bad, now.”

One could argue she’s been put upon her own life, and has never had an opportunity to quote unquote better herself.

That’s what I wanted to explore. What does it mean to be a victim? I didn’t want to shy away from the unhealthy aspects of victim status. Especially the participatory aspects of it. Why do women keep finding themselves in these positions? Or men, for that matter. The willingness to allow yourself in the position until it is too late. That’s a controversial stance to take – but I think it is empowering for victims to recognize that they are, in some way, allowing themselves to be victims.

Do you consider “Sun Don’t Shine” a cautionary tale?

It’s complicated. More of an exploration. There’s no message I’m trying to bring home.

Well, “crime doesn’t pay” is in there.

Well, right, but specifically, there’s no excuse for behavior. You can have all these things happen, but murder is not a good choice.

That’s the headline. Amy Seimetz: Murder is Not a Good Choice.

Yes.

This movie is set in Florida. Whenever someone sends you a tabloid story about some outlandish crime, it’s always in Florida. You’re from Florida. What the hell’s going on down there?

Always Florida, seriously. I’m born and raised, and that’s the feeling. I didn’t grow up with people who shoved bodies in trunks, but there is a feeling that this could happen to you at any moment. It’s a violent place and only when I moved away did I realize not everyone went to high schools were there were four violent fights a day. Or that violence was not the obvious way to end an argument.

Could it be the heat?

Yes, I think this is a huge aspect, seriously. Heat makes you crazy. If you are in the heat for long periods of time it changes the way you approach things. You are just “I don’t care, I just want this done” attitude, in the way you dress, the way you act. Statistically, crime increases as heat increases. It gets your atoms moving faster and more aggravated.

Also, Florida is a confused landscape. Like Australia, they sent criminals down there to dredge this inhabitable place into a vacation land. Who else would go down? They made a work program.

Ever seen John Sayles’ “Sunshine State?”

Oh, God, yes, I love that movie. And I told John Sayles that unabashedly when I was in Toronto with “A Horrible Way To Die.” I saw him and ran over and flipped out and everyone told me I was being really uncool.

It’s okay to be uncool around a guy like John Sayles, I mean, what the hell?

Right, that’s what I said. I said “you guys are being uncool!” Everyone was standing around saying that he was their hero and I’m the one who ran over!

There’s a brief moment at a low-rent Mermaid Show, with a woman breathing through a hose. . .

It’s real!

Yeah, I had a hunch.

I made a documentary about that place with James Ponsoldt. It’s a time-warp roadside attraction. It just felt right to go there, a place set for escape, right on the water. And mermaids, the transformation of women, these mythical creatures, is a theme in the whole film – I’d written them in as sirens, as a noir aspect.

Boy, I’m an idiot. That blazed right past me. Don’t tell anyone I said that, that’s embarrassing.

Eh, it’s fine.

Mermaids date back to sirens who would lure to men in the water. Now, the ones that fascinate me the most are the ones that just want to play. They lure men to come and play and they aren’t aware that men can’t breathe and they die. I like the idea of someone who is unaware of the consequences.

These are sirens who are in no way malicious, just joyous and playful and killing men unbeknownst to themselves?

Yes, this is much more interesting to me than the typical femme fatale. Someone with no control over their emotions, who aren’t self-aware about why they need someone else.

THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES ON PAGE 2.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Amy seimetz, Christopher guest, Director's cut, Interview, Sun Don't Shine, The killing, Upstream Color

Director’s Cut: Shane Carruth (‘Upstream Color’)

Much like a Shane Carruth film, there are different ways to approach a Shane Carruth interview.

Do you focus on the technical aspects of this remarkable polymath? For 2004's time-traveling “Primer” he is credited as writer, director, producer, star, composer, production designer, casting director and editor. For “Upstream Color,” his newest emotional tour-de-force about free will, manipulation and the drive to find the source of the unexplainable, he is the writer, director, star, co-producer, composer, cinematographer, co-camera operator, co-editor and sound designer. Oh yeah, he’s the film’s distributor, too.

Or do you focus on Carruth’s stature in the independent film world? After 2004 he seemed like the Sundance equivalent of Harper Lee – a “one and done” filmmaker content to recede into legend.

Perhaps you focus on the nitty gritty of his stories? The quantum mechanics aspect of his films, replete with unanswered questions due to his intentionally elliptical style?

Despite my intentions to break the conversation into these three delineated acts I ended up on an unpredictable path in need of its own Wikipedia flowchart. Carruth’s demeanor is very warm, and open to just the sort of “heavy” conversation you may not have had since your college dorm. Despite a near-pointillist style of filmmaking, he speaks in stammers, half-phrases and questions to himself. (I left a few in where I thought they felt most poetic.) Considering Carruth has made one of the most vibrant and sharp pictures in quite some time (here is my review at ScreenCrush, here is Film.com’s review by Will Goss) I’m of the belief that he is a soaring genius who, for the sake of economics, lowered himself to spend time responding to my questions.

With that, then, here is the bulk of a conversation held unceremoniously in the hallway of a cozy Lower Manhattan publicist’s office. You’ll see that I open with a typically professional and unbiased salvo.

Jordan Hoffman: For selfish reasons, I thank you for making this movie. It’s refreshing to discuss a movie and not necessarily know the answer. I’ve been in two bar fights about it already – not fisticuffs, of course.

Shane Carruth: Sure.

JH: Conversations. I have one friend who can’t stand the film. I’m sure you can handle that.

SC: Understood, yeah.

JH: We got in a nice tussle and it’s exciting.

SC: It’s great to hear.

JH: There are some people who get hung up on the “what the hell is this” and need some handholding with the very plot. We saw this at the Sundance Q&A. Your movie is, for lack of a better term, a little weird, but, my gosh, you show the worm go out of the lady and into the pig … what more can you show?!?

SC: Exactly.

JH: Is it frustrating? Were you expecting that?

SC: I was expecting that. Whatever frustration I would have with that is a known quantity, going back to the writing. That’s just part of it. It necessarily has to be divisive because it is trying something new. Whether it is “good” or “bad” at doing what it is trying to do – at fulfilling its intentions – that’s almost not part of this because the intention is new. Or, hopefully new. Whatever. The ambition is not typical, let’s say. Because of that there will be people who come to it immediately, and they’ll judge it that way, or there will be people whose expectations haven’t been lined up properly, if I haven’t prepared them.

From the get go, it won’t give those people what they’re expecting. I’m somewhat amazed – well, not amazed – happy that the response has been as positive.

JH: You expected more people to say “Worm-pigs? I’m not buying it!”

SC: More or less.

JH: Or more people put off by the structure? The third act being almost entirely dialogue-free.

SC: Yeah, the number one thing I was worried about was, in the same way that “Primer” – and this is not a complaint at all, because I’m lucky anyone wants to watch that movie – but in the same way that “Primer” is sometimes reduced to being only a puzzle. It’s a puzzle to solve without anything underneath it, to some. And I was worried that this would become that – that people would only see the mechanical, or the weird genre elements.

JH: There is the fear of the gimmick aspect. Not that gimmick is always a bad thing, but, you know, you go to this guy’s movies to go “huh?”

SC: Yep.

JH: The most subversive thing David Lynch ever did was making “The Straight Story.” Great title, because it’s about a guy named Alvin Straight traveling in a straight line – but it is also a straightforward film from a man you never expected to make one. Do you see yourself ever wanting to “go straight” as it were?

SC: If I did, it wouldn’t be to subvert other things I’ve done. I do my best to never, ever think about a body of work or a career. This film is not a reaction to the last one. It’s the story in front of me now and I need to serve that.

JH: Well, despite the fact that we’ve never met and I don’t know much about you personally, that hasn’t stopped me from trying to psychoanalyze you.

I know you did work on a lengthy screenplay called “A Topiary,” you worked on it for years, did a lot of the design work, and you’ve commented that the movie is done in your head but you are the only one who can see it. “Upstream Color” is, at least in my opinion, all about breaking out of a cycle that is perpetuated by outside forces. So, is this your way of fighting the forces that prevented that film from happening?

SC: Huh. I never thought of that. Well. [long pause. and then quickly] I mean, who knows? It probably was informed by that. Maybe. It didn’t feel like that, I thought it was just a universal thing of. . .the way we build up our own narratives and identity and ways of thinking about everything. Whether religious or cosmic or whatever – that was the narrative that she [Amy Seimetz' character] was meant to be stuck in, then letting her grow a new one and letting her live that out, that was always the core of the idea. But. . .yeah. . . being affected by offscreen forces, the two ideas seem intertwined to me. That’s what I think personal identity is.

JH: Are you familiar with the author and neuroscientist Sam Harris?

SC: No.

JH: He recently wrote a book called “Free Will,” which, if my understanding is correct, argues that man does not have free will, but not because of any theological reasons. He looks at chemical reactions in the brain, the synapses either fire or don’t fire, and the result of all this is a chemical reaction, therefore humans may not be responsible for their actions, it is all chemical, all a result of environment, etc.

SC: Yes. Okay, I was just talking about this. This is, see, this is – not that, not that, not that – wow – what’s interesting about that, with non-linear dynamics and a swath of math you can start from order to chaos. You can get to unpredictably. So if that is true – even if we are the sum of physical neurons, something that can be reduced to math, even that math may not necessarily be predictable. You can make a case that there is a way for the math to work so that nobody but a God or a quantum computer could ever predict.

JH: A ghost in the machine, even in the numbers themselves.

SC: Yes, there we go.

JH: Some look at the first third of the “Upstream Color,” the most tactile part, and you can reduce it to a science fiction or horror story if you want. “The worms go in, they go in the pig, etc.” But it’s not that far out! Do you know about toxo –

SC: Toxoplasmosis, yes. I know about it, but from interviews. Though I definitely read a little about it. There’s a lot of things I realize that I accumulated in my head. I wasn’t trying to use them as plot devices, but I know they informed me – just knowing that there can be a process in the natural world, just outside our experience, that is counterintuitive in some way. Like the parasites who burrow in wasps and ants.

JH: There are many examples. The best one is the cat and mouse one because it conjures “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. The parasite that breeds and wants to return to the intestines of a cat, but is excreted and picked up and inside a mouse, which is able to tell mice not to be afraid of cat urine, the thing mice are most afraid of, so the mouse is now hanging out in the kitchen and is just “hey, what’s up, cat?” and now the cat eats him.

SC: Yes. And to the mouse, he’s, I don’t imagine he’s. . .hmnnn. . .

JH: There’s probably a pleasure center being stroked. He’s probably the happiest mouse in town. He’s fulfilling his goal, right?

SC: Right. Well – heh, I can’t believe we’re talking about this, this is fun stuff – but I would think that that mouse, in the same way we would, he would feel that he is being affected from a distance. I think, anyway. 95% of him is telling him “danger, danger!” yet 5% of him is compelling him to do this thing. He would have to be conflicted. That’s why I go to this outside force.

JH: I have a friend who reads “Upstream Color” as a story about drug addiction. How do you react when people come to you with interpretations that seem viable but you may be thinking “well, hell, I was somewhere else.”

SC: That’s part of it. Viewing work, now, is a communal experience. Any film that exists that is thorough, you can’t give it to an audience of one and have that be effective communication. Communication involves an audience of many that have a conversation, put it through the ringer, filter it and then a sense of it coalesces. So if I am an author, my success is that end result.

JH: But you are the author with a capital A on this one. You are director, writer, cinematographer, star, composer, co-editor, etc. Film is a collaborative process, but on your films a little less so.

SC: Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak. I need to make sure that all the ways that we can inform are pointed in the same direction.

JH: I read you don’t play any instruments, but music is so important in this film. If I may ask a basic question, how the heck to do you compose the score?

SC: Some of it is hunting and pecking. I have a MIDI keyboard, which I couldn’t, like, play you a song on, but. . .

JH: Could you find Middle C?

SC: I can. I know my chords, I know where I live, I know my neighborhoods. But I couldn’t perform for you.

JH: I hand you sheet music for J.S. Bach and it’s no way.

SC: When I was a kid I took piano lessons for a month or two and she would have me do my scales. When I went home I learned Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” And I taught it to myself, and I was so proud that it was something I could play. I remember coming into class and I played it for her, and I was expecting praise – but she was unhappy. My technique was wrong. I wasn’t raising my wrists the right way. She said that I shouldn’t go learn a piece of music “wrong” because I would have bad habits. She was right, but it felt like, “hey, I was really liking that.”

JH: You reached the ends but you did it by your own means and The Man came and cracked down on you. It’s like self-distributing your own film, you aren’t allowed to do that.

SC: This is perfect. Patterns everywhere.

JH: Let me ask you a bold question, Shane, and this is the question that everyone asks behind your back but no one has the guts to ask. But I do.

SC: All right.

JH: You make “Primer” in Two-thousand and blah-blah-blah. You work hard on “A Topiary,” I don’t know if you are doing it with some sort of studio deal in place.

SC: Hey, this is the question people ask. “How were you living?”

JH: Well, people are nosy. Were you approached to do studio work? Or commercials? Or music videos? Have you done any of that?

SC: I haven’t done any of that.

JH: Approached to act in any films?

SC: No.

JH: But you act in both your films and you’re a handsome boy. You could probably get acting work.

SC: Oh, well. . .thank . . .well, I don’t even know if that’s true. No. No one’s ever – well, actually, that’s not true. . .

JH: Approached by other indie filmmakers looking to include you for some cred, maybe?

SC: Uh. Sometimes. . .yeah. . .and then there’s. . .look. . .here’s the thing. I don’t live in a world where things get offered to me. But you know, I don’t know anybody who does. And I know famous and well-to-do filmmakers and they don’t just get an email saying “hey, here’s an offer.” You have to put yourself out there to get the offer and that is a conversation that I didn’t really want to have.

JH: I would imagine Chrysler would want you to do an ad if you told them you were game.

SC: Sure. Why not? Well, they’d be worried that it would come back and there wouldn’t be a car in it.

JH: Hey, at the end of the day, you didn’t sell out. Good for you. Whether you stayed fed by living on a commune. . .

SC: More or less, I actually have. I don’t have a family to support. If I did, some other choice would have to’ve been made.

JH: If digital video existed when “Primer” was made, how different would it be? The story, not so much the aesthetics.

SC: The story would not be different. The rough edges would be less rough.

JH: I’m wondering if you would have scenes in there that you didn’t have because of budget or time – scenes like the girlfriend’s father offscreen, would you want to include them?

SC: No, those choices were made. It wasn’t “let’s not shoot that because film is expensive” or “we don’t have enough film.”

JH: Your writing process: you have the themes and then they become manifested in concrete ideas. What sort of self-censorship do you have? When you are playing with the idea and “well, it’s a pig” there’s got to be something of an internal dialogue. What’s that like?

SC: It’s tough. It’s one that continues to hit you. There were a few times when I had the camera and we were doing the pig surgery and I’m thinking “what are they letting me do? This is nuts!” And this is meant to be an emotional story but right now this is the weirdest thing imaginable. The only thing I can ever do is make a film that I can respond to. I could not make a romantic comedy for college girls. I wouldn’t know how that works. This is an aesthetic that I’m comfortable with.

JH: Are you the type of guy who gorges on films? On Blu-rays? Going to festivals?

SC: No. I used to be.

JH: Did that change when you started making films?

SC: No. A couple of years ago. It’s just decreased. I’m far less likely to hunt around. For me personally, it hasn’t been satisfying. I’ll watch every movie P.T. Anderson ever makes religiously, but I’m not in the game of hunting anymore. Of course, I say that and now I’ll probably get back into hunting some more.

JH: Is there something you would want people to see to “prepare,” in a way, for “Upstream Color?”

SC: I have never thought of this. [whispering to himself] What is this? [long pause] What is this? To prepare, or to find a similar ambition…? There’s gotta’ be something.

JH: Perhaps a non-narrative or experimental film?

SC: No, not at all. That’s the thing.

JH: Some B-movie sci-fi? For thought-control worms? I don’t really see you as a B-movie or “Mystery Science Theater” guy.

SC: No. Well, I enjoy those things. [on the question] I can’t get to this. I’m sorry.

JH: Some movies they say “you gotta see it more than once.” I saw “Upstream Color” twice and there was nothing in it plot-wise that I “got” more the second time. A few very minor things I caught.

SC: What was it?

JH: Somehow I spaced out on how they got the CDs of the sound effects. I think I just didn’t see the name on the mailbox.

SC: Oh, okay. Right.

JH: Hey, that one was on me, I just didn’t look, then when I saw it the second time it was right in my face. Do you want people to see it more than once?

SC: Yes. But I want them to want it.

JH: Not a chore.

SC: The experience you had is the experience I’m hoping for. I want the meaning to be veiled in some way, but I want there to be an emotional experience that happens in one viewing that is satisfying, and for the narrative to be satisfying. As far as the meaning, I’m hoping that it is thrifty enough and compelling enough and lyrical and musical enough that it isn’t a horrifying concept to revisit. My hope is that it’s another captive audience to engage with the exploration.

If I watch a story and I’m challenged by it – like “The Master” – if I’m challenged by the way it works I spend more time thinking about it. Why does it work? What’s happening? Why is that phone being delivered in the middle of the theater? There are naked dancers?

JH: Hey, listen man, we’re out of time, but those are the questions I have for you. I “get” this movie, but I can’t quite figure out the rocks in the pool. I have a vague sense, but I don’t know that I’ll ever really know them unless I hold a gun to your head.

SC: I’ll tell you.

JH: Do you want me to turn this recorder off?

SC: Yeah, turn it off and I’ll tell you. First you tell me what you think.

What followed was me giving Shane a halfway-there interpretation, then his definitive, concrete answer. After my, “oh, no shit!” response I commenced to pummel him with other little questions (was the early shot of her in the pool a flashforward? did the Thief and the Sampler and the Gardeners know one another?) until I was pulled out of the room.

“Upstream Color” starts its theatrical run on April 5th, followed by VOD and Blu-ray, then a life on the shelf of every true cineaste in the world.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Director's cut, Interview, Jordan hoffman, Primer, Shane Carruth, The master, Upstream Color, Worms