Shane Carruth

For his independent film Primer, Carruth wrote, directed, produced, and performed one of the two main roles; he also composed the score. The film 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 mathematics,[3] used his technical knowledge extensively on the project.

On January 21, 2013, Carruth premiered his film Upstream Color at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category.[5] Carruth, Johnny Marshall, and Pete Horner won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Sound Design for the film.[6] 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".[7] The film was released via VHX on April 5, 2013.[7] Some of Carruth's music from Upstream Color was featured in the 2016 documentary Tickled.

In 2009, 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".[8] Filmmaker Rian Johnson tweeted that it would feature a "mind-blowing sci-fi script."[9] 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[10] 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."[11] 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."[3] Carruth no longer pursues the project; some VFX test footage of the film is visible in Upstream Color in a scene when a character is examining the video for technical flaws.[12]

In 2014, Carruth announced a new film, The Modern Ocean, based on international shipping and the lives of those involved.[13] On August 12, 2015, it was reported that the film was in pre-production,[14] and its ensemble cast was announced in November 2015; it would include Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves, Tom Holland and Daniel Radcliffe.[15] In an interview in 2018, Carruth noted that the film is "not gonna happen anytime soon".[16] On June 17, 2020, Carruth posted the entire script for The Modern Ocean on Twitter, along with some of the original score.[17][18]

In 2019, in an interview Carruth claimed he was working on "a massive thing" and would leave the film industry once that project concludes.[19][20]

Carruth was rumored to have consulted on time-travel sequences for filmmaker Rian Johnson's Looper, though it was later revealed that those sequences were deemed too expensive to shoot.[21][22] 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."[23]

In 2018, Carruth starred in the psychological thriller The Dead Center about a hospital psychiatrist whose own sanity is pushed to the edge when a frightened amnesiac patient insists that he has died and brought something terrible back from the other side.