The Director of PRIMER Shane Carruth Shares a Pitch Trailer For His Unproduced Sci-Fi Film A TOPIARY
In the past sixteen years, Shane Carruth has only directed two films, his 2004 time-travel movie Primer and his 2013 film Upstream Color. Over the years he has talked about other projects that never really materialized. One of those projects was for a cool sounding sci-fi thriller titled A Topiary.
This is a film project that Carruth was teasing over ten years ago and he recently shared a pitch trailer for it giving us an idea of what he was going for. Before you watch it, though, here are the details that were previously revealed for it:
The script begins with a head-scratching thirty minute prologue involving Acre Stowe, a municipal worker of an undisclosed city in the 1980s … investigating strange starbursts he sees in the sky and eventually meets up with a group of people who are also researching this phenomenon and its consequences, amongst other scientific projects ranging in subject from thermochemistry to archaeology. The main story … revolves around ten boys aged seven to eleven living in a small rural town (Carruth is ambiguous in both location and time here) and takes up the remaining two hours of the film. The boys are in possession of a mysterious black box called a “Maker,” which in turn creates mysterious white discs called “funnels.” The group of kids are at once puzzled and fascinated by the nature of the box, and eventually manipulate the discs into other peculiarly named artifacts (petals, arcs, fronds, etc.). Their creations and constructions lead up to their manufacturing of seemingly sentient quasi-mechanical beings dubbed “Choruses.” Almost as if ‘Topiary’ were an abstract arthouse take on Pokémon, you can imagine the competition and troubles the beings create amongst the children.
Carruth shared the following video from the Upstream Color Twitter account, along with the following note: “This will probably get taken down because I lifted a bunch of shots from films.” It looks like this could have been a great film and you’ll notice that he was trying to capture that classic magical Amblin movie vibe.
The movie combines a mix of footage from other films with footage that Carruth actually shot for the trailer. Check it out and tell us what you think. I’d totally watch this movie!