Shane Carruth - Life and Career

Life and Career

Carruth was born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He attended Stephen F. Austin State University as a math major. Before becoming a filmmaker, he used to be a developer of flight simulation software.

Carruth wrote, directed, produced, and performed one of the two main roles, and composed the music for his independent film Primer, which was honored at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival with the Grand Jury Prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Award. Carruth, a former software engineer with an undergraduate degree in math, utilized his technical knowledge on the project.

David Sullivan, one of the leads in Primer, tweeted that "Shane Carruth's next project, A Topiary, is in the early stages of pre-production". Filmmaker Rian Johnson tweeted that it would feature a "mind-blowing sci-fi script". In 2010, several news sources reported that A Topiary was in the works, and that the script had been written. There was already a website for the movie which, according to Carruth in an interview to io9, "The website for now is just a place mark as financing has yet to be completed. I'm cautiously optimistic that this can happen soon and couldn't be happier with the filmmakers that have committed to the project so far." However, the film (which Entertainment Weekly described as "a sci-fi epic about a group of kids who build a giant, animal-like creature") stalled, and in early 2013, Carruth told EW that it was "the thing I basically wasted my whole life on".

Carruth was credited as having consulted on time-travel sequences for filmmaker Rian Johnson's science fiction film Looper, though it was later revealed that those sequences were too expensive to shoot. In an "Ask Me Anything" session on the site Reddit, Johnson said "He gave some notes on the script but wasn't involved beyond that, sadly."

On January 21, 2013, Carruth premiered his film Upstream Color at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category. Carruth, Johnny Marshall, and Pete Horner won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Sound Design for the film. Keith Kimbell wrote that it was the "most anticipated (and most difficult to describe) film in competition", and "most critics couldn't stop talking about it". Carruth is set to self-distribute the film with a slated release date of April 5, 2013.

He is currently in pre-production for his next film, The Modern Ocean, to be shot in the summer of 2013.