A TOPIARY: Shane Carruth's Cinematic Pipe Dream
shane carruthEver since his auspicious debut, Primer, Shane Carruth has been an elusive cult figure of American independent cinema. Even though to this day, he has made a grand total of two films, Carruth has become a bit of a darling in the critical community and also cultivated a following of die-hard fans obsessing over his movies, deconstructing their meanings and waiting for his next project, a science-fiction epic called A Topiary, to come to fruition.
In fact, A Topiary was originally envisioned as Carruth’s follow up to Primer. Teased as enormous in scope and harbouring potential to redefine cinema, it was going to be a grand meditative opus using the language of science-fiction to raise fundamental philosophical questions and stir with its cerebral tone. It was supposed to be the next 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead, it shared the fate of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, which is widely regarded as the greatest movie never made. What is truly fascinating about Carruth’s doomed journey towards making A Topiary is not the alleged assertion the world was somehow robbed of a masterpiece, but rather that perhaps it shouldn’t have been a film to begin with.
Without a shadow of a doubt, A Topiary must have been Shane Carruth’s lifelong passion project, slowly gestating and evolving in his mind over a period of many years. When Primer took the indie scene by storm and generated considerable buzz around him, Carruth attempted to use his newly acquired clout to convince film financiers to trust him with twenty million dollars to produce A Topiary. Despite earning the backing of Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, the money never came. Given that Hollywood blockbusters at the time would frequently run budgets in excess of one hundred million dollars, Carruth’s requirement seems like pocket change in comparison. What is more, the example of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 showed unequivocally that, when handled correctly, a budget of thirty million dollars could easily deliver a movie looking as though it cost at least seven times more.
The most easily identifiable reasons which could potentially explain why Blomkamp got his lucky break and Carruth didn’t are two-fold. Firstly, with its scale, complexity and artistic ambition, A Topiary was not exactly screaming blockbuster and was likely seen as a financial liability rather than an investment one could expect a return on. Although, in the filmmaking business, twenty million dollars (later revised down to fourteen) doesn’t seem like much, it is still a considerable sum of money someone would have to trust the filmmaker with. District 9 earned its budget back many times over thanks to its combination of innate accessibility, an entertaining perspective and a cutting socio-political undertone.
This is where the second reason comes into play which is Shane Carruth’s insistence on doing everything himself. While a DIY approach to filmmaking is fundamentally laudable and prevalent in the independent world, producing A Topiary required a different filmmaking mindset to match the scale of this undertaking. Carruth would have to cede some of his responsibilities onto other people; he would not be able to singlehandedly write, direct, shoot, light, edit, score and create special effects for a movie this big. He would have to let other people in on his vision, articulate it to them and trust they would do a good job. Apparently this was a bridge too far. He wanted to execute the production of a big studio movie from his shed.
However, there is one more reason as to why A Topiary was a pie in the sky. It is more intrinsic to the actual story and script and not directly related to Shane Carruth’s personal idiosyncrasies or his filmmaking process. Funnily enough, it is picked up on by everyone who ever attempted to read the leaked script for this unmade opus. It is a 250-page-long tome. For comparison’s sake, the shooting script for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather ran for only 163 pages! It is unevenly divided into a prologue, a short first act and a massive second part completely disjoint from the rest of the film. Moreover, the bulk of the story centres around a cast of ten children interacting with abstract concepts and using obscure objects with quirky names to generate seemingly sentient pieces of matter. The most common observation made about this script is that it is extremely difficult to read and comprehend. It perhaps even requires multiple attempts for the reader to grasp what’s truly going on in the story and even then, it is ambiguous enough to leave the reader gobsmacked. While card-carrying Carruth Zealots see this impenetrability as an asset, it is likely the reason why nobody ever dared to finance this project. A Topiary is unfilmable in its current format.
This doesn’t mean A Topiary must never materialise as a story only because it was erroneously forced to fit within the confines of a movie: a square peg through a round hole. Prose has always been the most accommodating medium in this regard. A great novel can easily fit a zillion characters (Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day), abstract concepts and temporalities (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), complex and inventive narrative structures (David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest), or magnificent scope and world building (J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). This is because the nature of an interaction between a book and its reader is completely different to that between a viewer and a film. The latter is fleeting, visceral and immediate, while the former is a more organic and slower-paced experience. It trusts the reader to engage their imagination more profoundly than any film would, and for a considerably longer period of time. The time investment which is inherent to the process of reading a novel naturally gives the reader room to process complex elements of plot, to comprehend abstract concepts and keep abreast of multiple characters or storylines. Crucially, writing a book does not cost twenty million dollars.
This is exactly what A Topiary needs: a literary treatment. As much as Shane Carruth and his stalwart fans would love for this story to become a movie, it is highly unlikely it would be a cinema-defining masterpiece if tackled like an indie puzzle box. Instead, it could become a great book, maybe even just as pivotal and groundbreaking as Neuromancer, A Clockwork Orange or Brave New World were in their respective times. However, it would require Shane Carruth to abandon his dream of becoming the next Stanley Kubrick, lock himself in a room for a few months and rework this unwieldy brick of a script into the amazing novel A Topiary should have been in the first place. It may still be unadaptable when handled verbatim, but it will open up a possibility that someone else could come along one day and tinker with it similarly to what Kubrick did with 2001: A Space Odyssey. It could be shaped it into a different kind of cinema-redefining masterpiece. Continuing this analogy, this would – to tickle Carruth’s ego – turn him into the equivalent of Arthur C. Clarke instead.
