Shane Carruth: Signs with WME for The Modern Ocean

     The exceedingly talented Shane Carruth has officially signed with talent agency WME for his new project. All that is known about the project so far is that the film will be titled The Modern Ocean and is considered to be "nautical action-adventure."

     It will be very interesting to see how he handles his first real big budget film. His previous works, the very mind-bending and experimental Upstream Color and the made with a threadbare budget of $7,000 Primer, were unbelievably well done. Primer is easily one of the greatest time travel films ever made, if not the best itself.
     What he did is even more amazing when you think of the fact that he wrote, directed, starred, and produced them among other things. He pretty much makes the films by himself. His films are made with a distinct style, and have a special something about them that makes them stand apart from the typical low budget fare. This is a cinematic artist of the highest caliber, and whatever he does will likely be amazing.

     If this project goes well I wonder if he'll ever find a producer for the film he had in the works years ago A Topiary? The film once had the backing of Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher. Despite great excitement for the ideas, no studio would help with the 20 million he was asking to make it. Even after dropping the asking price to 14 million, nothing came- so he had to drop the project and move to something else.
     As Tom Bond of One Room with a View put it:

     "To put it as bluntly as possible, A Topiary is the most mind-blowingly ambitious screenplay I have ever read. Working my way through its 245 pages I found myself shaking my head in disbelief every few minutes at the staggering vision on display. A Topiary is at once so complicated it dwarfs anything Primer or Upstream Color attempted and so simple it makes you look at the world around you with new eyes."

     And a similar sentiment is also shown by Carson Reeves over at ScriptShadow:

     "The script can be frustrating and it can feel long at times and it can lose you at others, but it also feels like it was written by someone who knows exactly what they want to do with it and have a clear vision on what it should look like in the end. It’s an original work and boy do we need more of those right now."

     For those of you that are curious to read Carruth's 245 page tome of a script it can be found through a search engine quite easily. I don't know if it is ok to post a link directly to it or not so I must refrain from doing so.

     Source [ Deadline ]