"Here's what's going to happen: In a few minutes, Shane Carruth will walk into this dauntingly cavernous auditorium, look out on nearly 1,300 people, and let go of a secret. It's a late-January afternoon in Park City, Utah, and Carruth is at the Sundance Film Festival to premiere Upstream Color, his second film. Few in Hollywood have seen it. Until a few months ago, barely anyone even knew it existed. Yet today's screening at the Eccles Theatre has been sold out for days, prompting forlorn fanboys to wander the theater's parking lot, hoping for a miracle ticket. Like the people already inside, they have no idea what Upstream is about. They just know they've been waiting for it for nearly a decade.
The last time Carruth brought a movie here, it was 2004's Primer, a mind-fogging, barely budgeted thriller that he wrote, directed, scored, produced, and starred in. It's about two garage-tinkering engineers who create a device that manipulates time. The machine they build is a ramshackle box, one that's both inscrutably complex and endearingly low-end, kind of like the movie itself. Carruth, a former engineer, crammed Primer with submerged plot points, tech-spackled dialog, and snakelike timelines, little of which make sense until the second viewing—or even the 10th. And because he shot it for a mere $7,000 USD in suburban Dallas, Primer lacks the garish CGI or carb-starved goon-hunks that make most modern sci-fi movies so depressingly juvenile. The awkward geniuses look real, and so does their invention. Carruth reclaimed sci-fi for the scientists, and even those who were baffled by the film couldn't wait to see what he'd do next.
And then he disappeared.
Months passed, then years, without a new movie. Carruth's single-entry IMDb page began to look less like the résumé of a promising upstart and more like the larky one-note legacy of a guy who'd left filmmaking for good. His disappearance made Primer's found-object oddness all the more pronounced: In the final scene of the film, Carruth's character signs off with an ominous voice recording, one that now seems almost comically on-the-nose. "You will not be contacted by me again," he says. "And if you look, you will not find me."
But last winter, seemingly out of nowhere, Carruth resurfaced with word of a new movie, sending film blogs and Twitter feeds into a holy-crapturous fit, the kind usually reserved for superhero sequels. Like Primer, Upstream Color was shot around Dallas in near secrecy, with Carruth again taking on most of the duties himself, serving as writer, director, composer, producer, costar, and main investor. (He won't disclose the budget, feeling that such talk unduly dominated discussions of Primer, but he allows that it was "pretty thrifty.") Carruth also announced plans to release the film to theaters himself, meaning that he'll control the marketing and rollout—and that he'll get to avoid the cavalcade of preening and promotion that most filmmakers must endure at Sundance. Until this afternoon, he's managed to keep the film pretty much to himself.
Which is why, in the days before the festival, he began hearing the rumors going around Hollywood agencies: that Upstream was three and a half hours long, with no scene lasting more than a second. Or that Upstream was actually two movies…"
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