With 2004’s Primer and 2013’s Upstream Colour, Shane Carruth has ploughed his own idiosyncratic cinematic furrow, keeping to his visions for the films. He’s tried to set other movies up since without success and has now signed with a big talent agency in the hopes of getting his next film, The Modern Ocean, funded.
Carruth has been working on the film for a few years and he’s now ready to give it the sort of budget he could only dream of previously, while also keeping the sort of control you might expect from a man known for writing, directing, producing, co-starring in and even distributing his work in cinemas. He told The Playlist about the film at the Berlin Film Festival a couple of years ago: "There’s no genre or otherworldly elements in it, it’s set in the modern day on shipping routes, with people who build routes to trade – you know, vanilla from Madagascar and then pick up crude oil and drop it off in India. They build up this intellectual property of a route that is profitable and they sell it off to a bigger corporation…They’re building up the proof that this route will work, and selling it off, dealing with tidal systems and routes and currents and weather. So there are these competing companies and these inner personal things happening. It’s pirates, repo men, bolt cutters and sniper rifles, but at the same time it’s the same emotional language as Upstream Colour, just magnified. I’m very excited by it."
With luck, all this will mean he’ll be able to start shooting the new film soon and we’ll see new work from him before too long. For more from Carruth, check out our podcast interview with him from the time of Upstream Colour’s UK release.