Shane Car­ruth releas­es con­cept trail­er for his lost pas­sion project

Ear­li­er this month, Shane Car­ruth gave a mem­o­rable inter­view in which the not­ed indie direc­tor declared that he has had it with Hol­ly­wood and the craft of film­mak­ing at large. Describ­ing the indus­try in harsh­ly cyn­i­cal, vague­ly Kurtz-ian terms (“We hire mod­els to say words they don’t even under­stand and then light them well. Only one per­cent of that is worth watch­ing,”) he seemed con­tent to leave it all behind.

Which makes today’s unveil­ing of a proof-of-con­cept trail­er for Carruth’s long-ges­tat­ing, unre­alised third fea­ture all the more sur­pris­ing. Mur­murs and rumors have long swirled around the project pre­vi­ous­ly announced under the title A Top­i­ary, but for the first time, the gen­er­al pub­lic can get a par­tial impres­sion of what that impos­si­ble dream might have looked like.

Car­ruth has post­ed a two-minute ​“siz­zle reel” (an indus­try term that would like­ly dis­gust Car­ruth with its crass reduc­tion of art to a sales tool gussied up by the snap­py ver­nac­u­lar of Tin­sel­town) that sug­gests the out­line and visu­al pro­file of his fol­low-up to debut Primer and the well-fet­ed Upstream Col­or. Like those two films, A Top­i­ary has been designed as a dense­ly cere­bral sci-fi pic­ture, its premise hing­ing on the advent of man’s abil­i­ty to 3D-print organ­ic life.

With whis­pery Mal­ick­ian voiceover from a then-much-younger Zoe Locke, the clip details the evo­lu­tion of new ani­malia that look like some­thing out of Black Mir­ror, their cubic bod­ies gal­lop­ing along on cylin­dri­cal legs. Car­ruth com­mu­ni­cates his vision by splic­ing in shots from oth­er movies, in one moment cut­ting to a winged beast from Har­ry Pot­ter, a tech­nique that he pre­dicts will get the video below tak­en down in short order.

So, watch while you can, though per­haps this won’t be the last we see of A Top­i­ary. Between the pub­lic­i­ty gen­er­at­ed by his sound­bite-filled inter­view and now this, Car­ruth has got­ten his name back out there. Just look at how many respon­dents to Carruth’s tweet have start­ed call­ing on Net­flix to get this guy the funds he needs; it may only be a mat­ter of time until Hol­ly­wood comes a‑calling.