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1. ART & INDUSTRY
by Amy Taubin
PRIMER: THE NEW WHIZ KID ON THE BLOCK: PART 2
Maybe you did what some avant-garde filmmakers did, which was to think through for yourself from the beginning what films could be. Let's talk a bit more about the preproduction. You used still photos for the storyboard.
I'm not good at drawing. But from the stills I knew the composition, the lighting, the exposure. So when I went to the processing houses to strike a deal, I think that had a lot to do with why they thought they could work with me. They knew it wasn't just going to be something like a student film that wouldn't go anywhere. At the very least they knew it was going to look like something. Maybe the story wouldn't be any good, but it would look like this, and that helped.
What made you decide to shoot in Super 16mm?
I knew from early on that I didn't want to go digital. It's not something that, aesthetically, I think is there yet. It works for a lot of subjects, and perhaps it could have worked for the story of Primer, but what I wanted, in terms of how the images looked, was pretty straightforward. Because the story gets so fantastical, I didn't want to be experimental when it came to the medium itself.
Most people, I think, would have decided that, since what the characters are doing in the garage is the equivalent of a garage band, it's okay to have a garage-band aesthetic in the filmmaking. But you don't do that. It gives the film a certain distance.
Cool. I also think that when you don't have elaborate lighting set-ups, you're going to inevitably introduce some grain, and that's just an aesthetic I like.
I've been avoiding asking you about the narrative itself, because I don't want to give away too much. But I thought it used a lot of coded language, the way TV shows like ER and CSI do. After a while, you kind of understand what they're talking about, so it's not completely mysterious. I'm curious about those kinds of truncated scenes, where someone leaps onto an idea and then the idea gets cut off. The ideas come in bursts.
Are you talking about the way the scenes cut? I think I've stolen that from films that interest me. I have this idea that if you take the best 10 minutes of someone's life over the past year, that would be better than any narrative you could write. That's why documentaries work so well sometimes. You're only seeing the interesting bits. I wanted to show where the ideas come from and the conclusions, but I didn't care about the middle part - the drawn-out-how-we-get-from-A-to-B thing. I don't know where the cutting style comes from exactly. And it's not only the cutting style. It's the way the film is written. I know I've seen it before, but I don't know exactly where. The way I enjoy a story to be told is without a lot of exposition. Let's just get to it and see what happens next. I also don't want to see a story where I'm a half hour into it and I don't understand what's going on. But there's a window of five or six minutes when I'll go with it without knowing exactly what I'm looking at, as long as eventually I can say, okay, now I get it. It keeps me occupied while I'm watching it.
Did you calculate how many times people would have to see the film before they got it? At the Sundance screening I went to, in the post-screening discussion, you made a joke about how you were sure that on a second viewing, everything would be clear.
I never set out to write something where every detail would be summed up for the audience. But I did set out so that the core of it would be comprehensible. It's hard to explain without talking about percentages. I think I set out to make something where people got 70 percent of the material in the film, and I think I just missed the mark, partly because of technical problems. It's a little bit more confusing than I'd intended, but the information is still in there. A lot of people come up to me and they've gotten every little detail. It's just a matter of knowing where it's going, and then all these bits fall into place.
I think people should be surprised when they see it, so let's move on to something else. When I talked to you briefly after the screening and I asked you about Chris Marker's La Jetée, I was so surprised when you said you'd never seen it. It's shown here with an English voiceover, and the bits of voiceover in your film sound just like that. The sound has been used subsequently, and probably before, in a lot of sci-fi Twilight Zone-styled films, so it's part of popular film culture too.
When [Sundance Film Festival Director] Geoff Gilmore called me, not to tell me I'd gotten in but just that he and his programmers were talking abut the film, he asked me about La Jetée, and, unfortunately, I'd never even heard of it. I'd heard that Twelve Monkeys was taken from a short film, but I'd never seen it. So, after he called me, of course, I went out and got a copy. I kind of see what people are talking about, but I think I was probably ripping off The Limey - the aesthetic of having the sound of one scene play over 10 or so others while a voiceover also happens.
That's interesting, but I was really talking about the sound of the voice itself and the way the text is written.
Oh, I think I know where that comes from. Probably Days of Heaven. I think that's one of the best voiceovers I've ever heard. It's so natural and so authentic, and it's not about a punch line. It's just about delivering an experience.
But please continue about sound. And tell me how you created the vaguely ominous audio effect of the mysterious machine.
It's a combination of a bunch of things - mostly a mechanical grinder and a car. I knew whatever it was, it couldn't be a digital sound made in a computer. It had to be something that sounded very analog and realistic and felt like it might explode.
I thought the sound design was what tied all these different elliptical scenes together. The sound keeps it from becoming chaotic. So, to go back, how does The Limey come into it.
One example is a moment where Abe and Aaron [the two protagonists] are having a conversation. They're sitting outside at an airport, talking about what they did that day, and over the course of the next eight minutes, we see the two of them as they go through their day, but the sound of the jets is still behind them. What gave me permission to do that are these scenes in
The Limey. There's one where he gets in from the airport and he's about to take a shower and he's looking at a picture of his daughter, but we're still hearing airport because, in the next scene, we're going to be right back at the airport. Using sound design to keep us asking where exactly we are and why the sound doesn't seem to match - that aesthetic is great and keeps you into the story.
Now that it's clear Primer is going to get out into the world [THINKfilm has tentatively scheduled an October opening], are you working on something else?
I'm writing a script right now.
Is it also science-based?
Not at all. It's a coming-of-age romance between an oceanography prodigy and the daughter of a commodities trader. It's set against trade routes in East Africa and Southern Asia.
(Note: The website for Primer is
www.primermovie.com. It has a trailer, some beautiful still frames from the film and production stills taken by Carruth's brother, musician Caleb Carruth.)
© 2004 by Amy Taubin
