What was primer shot on

It was way too guerrilla. Carruth had gleaned bits of advice from haunting local video production companies and pestering the assistants with technical questions. He arrived at the conclusion that the cheapest way to shoot would be to transfer his 16mm footage to mini-digital video film and then edit on his home computer. I spent the first two months syncing audio to video.

They took on Carruth as a client. Sloan Prize for science and technology in film. In the same way he taught himself how to make a film, he taught himself how to make a deal. Sign In. Drama Sci-Fi Thriller. Director Shane Carruth. Shane Carruth. Top credits Director Shane Carruth. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Photos Top cast Edit. Shane Carruth Aaron as Aaron. David Sullivan Abe as Abe. Casey Gooden Robert as Robert. Anand Upadhyaya Phillip as Phillip.

Carrie Crawford Kara as Kara. Ashley Warren Hostess as Hostess. Delaney Price Laney as Laney. Brandon Blagg Will as Will. More like this. What he really wanted to do was make movies. But an early attempt at a script turned out terribly, and his first real job on a movie set, doing sound work for a local indie, proved unfulfilling.

So Carruth stuck with the engineering jobs, never fully satisfied. He puts a hand to his head, feels around, and pulls back a finger covered with blood. The year-old Carruth has just woken up in a hospital. But seeing himself now, the fear is gone. He realizes how quickly humans adjust to their situation, how easily we acclimate.

They are films in which information is a weapon, something the characters—and the filmmakers—can withhold or deploy to their advantage. Inspired, Carruth begins writing a new script. Ten years after he finished Primer , Carruth is surprised that people still want to talk about it.

Much of his preparations, though, simply consisted of him talking for hours on end with his costar, a former software company employee and substitute teacher named David Sullivan. He and Sullivan drilled themselves on their parts, sometimes meeting at a local library to recite dialog.

After shooting, the editing process devoured weeks, then months, and finally two whole years. Some members of the cast and crew lost contact with Carruth entirely. Finally, in January , the movie screened at Sundance and quickly became the talk of the festival. The film is thick with rapidly overlapping dialog, much of it delivered at a low murmur—Altman audio at Sorkin speed. Many of the story clues are small, almost subliminal: a sideways glance, a seemingly tossed-off line, a minuscule wardrobe change.

Though only 77 minutes long, Primer is packed with so many details that you want to revisit it immediately. Everyone in Hollywood wanted to talk to Carruth.

From time to time he thinks about his religious upbringing. In this clip, Aaron demonstrates this remarkable discovery:. As they continue experimenting, they find that time works differently in the machine than it does on the outside. When they put a watch in the machine for one minute, it registers the equivalent of 1, minutes in the box.

They perform tests on wristwatches and fungi, but before long, they resolve to build an even bigger box for human use. And they do it with full knowledge of their recklessness: "I can think of no way in which this thing can be considered remotely safe," says one.

A larger machine is constructed and housed in a U-Haul storage garage. This box lets users go backward in time, but they have to spend as much time in the machine as they want to go back, so when they want to go back six hours, they have to stay in the box with oxygen tanks for six.

In essence, the experience lets them extend their days by however many hours they spend in the machine. What's more, the process creates clone-like doubles: the person who originally lived through the time is separate from the one who has gone back to that time.

This means that many different Aarons and Abes are running around, and perhaps operating independent of each other. At first, the men are careful to tread lightly, because as anyone who's seen Back To The Future and read other time-travel stories knows, how you behave in the past can have a potentially cataclysmic effect on the future. They initially resolve to check into a hotel room out of town—they wouldn't want to bump into themselves, after all—and wait it out quietly, without so much as turning on the TV.

But soon enough, they're keen to manipulate their dreadful power to maximum advantage: first financially, by playing the stock market and betting on college basketball games, and later personally, when one of them tries to reverse-engineer the events at a party in order to make himself the hero.

In this clip, Abe and Aaron are in the hotel room watching a basketball game—a scene that ends with a line that's simultaneously mind-blowing and hilarious:.