Shane Carruth shares A Topiary sizzle reel, teasing the lost potential of his unproduced sci-fi epic
Last week, Primer and Upstream Color auteur Shane Carruth gave an incendiary interview to Indiewire in which he doubled down on his long-standing critiques of the studio system and asserted that he is “not in the same business as Hollywood.”
“This is not arts and literature in early Greece,” he continued. “This town is what everybody says it is. We hire models to say words they don’t even understand and then light them well. Only one percent of that is worth watching. The confusion is, we get to go to the same building to watch a fucking Garfield cartoon and Phantom Thread, as if those two are the same things.”
“I would sort of love it if all the studios died in the next five years,” he went on to say.
Carruth more or less declared his impending retirement last year, and confirmed as much in the interview, though he says he’s got “one last project in front of me.” That project, unfortunately, likely won’t be A Topiary, a long-gestating epic that, despite having Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher signed on as executive producers, was never able to secure funding.
Until now, our only look at it existed on a computer monitor in Upstream Color—something he discussed with The A.V. Club in 2013—but that changed on Thursday night when a link to its sizzle reel was fired off via the Upstream Color Twitter account.
“This will probably get taken down because I lifted a bunch of shots from films,” reads the post, presumably written by Carruth.
He’s not wrong, either. Clips from Jurassic Park, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Explorers, Days Of Heaven, and Raiders Of The Lost Ark unfold against a child’s narration, imbuing the project with Amblin-esque coming-of-age adventure vibes and a Malickian sense of awe at nature and the cosmos.