Carruth Quotes & Sayings

Some part of me broke in prayer that morning, and some part of me was reborn as I gave myself fully and completely to prayer and to God in that moment. — Ariana Carruth

I'm interested in making something that moves quickly, that hopefully is compelling minute-by-minute but really packed densely with exploration. I'm very interested in how re-visitable we can make films. If we can get them closer to a music album, then it's not such an arduous process to revisit, and exploration can be a bit more cryptic. — Shane Carruth

One thing in our favor: some of this "becoming kinder" happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish - how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we're not separate, and don't want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was "mostly Love, now. — George Saunders

I've heard stories about movies that are really maybe difficult and really dramatic and good, but they are being sold as romantic comedies. All it's going to do is just ... that's hurting the work, because that just makes it impossible for anyone to see it correctly. — Shane Carruth

I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itself. — Shane Carruth

As a viewer, that's work I respond to - work that I know is singular in some way. If I'm being challenged by something on screen, if I don't quite know why it's happening, I want to know I can do the work of pulling it apart and that there'll be something satisfactory about it. If the architecture is sound, you can be lyrical in execution. — Shane Carruth

I had a really generic upbringing, I think, when it comes to viewing movies as a kid. I didn't really know what was out there or what was being tried. I was, like, 'E.T.' and 'Indiana Jones.' Those were the only things I knew existed. — Shane Carruth

I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other - that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again. — Shane Carruth

I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem. — Shane Carruth

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us. — Hayden Carruth

It's interesting because I don't ever want to ask a better question than I can answer, if that makes sense. I find that frustrating as a viewer. Compelling questions, while not easy, are easier than compelling answers. — Shane Carruth

I am a control freak but it's important to feel strongly about the material you're working on. — Shane Carruth

Cinematography was incredibly foreign to me, so I read as much as I could about it. Once I figured out that it was just photography with a set shutter speed, I got some slide film and I just went about storyboarding the script and taking snapshots. I took a ton of time doing it just to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing. By the end of it I knew what the film was going to look like - my exposure and the composition and everything. I wasn't scared of cinematography anymore. — Shane Carruth

I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth. — Shane Carruth

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down. — Shane Carruth

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up. — Shane Carruth

I will be making films, and I'm going to keep working, no matter what I have to do. And I don't plan to ever ask for permission from anybody. — Shane Carruth

Any film that exists that is thorough, you can't give it to an audience of one and have that be effective communication. Communication involves an audience of many that have a conversation, put it through the ringer, filter it and then a sense of it coalesces. — Shane Carruth

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film. — Shane Carruth

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas. — Shane Carruth

Editing is very satisfying process. You spend hours working on something and then you get to watch it. It's immediately satisfying where everything else is just kind of waiting and waiting and waiting. — Shane Carruth

I have a really, really hard time sitting down and watching a TV show, except I'm apparently willing to watch the same episode of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' like, seven times. — Shane Carruth

The thing that is most important is to feel like you're at the front of the line, to be prime or primer. I definitely never wanted to say that in the films, but that's where it comes from. — Shane Carruth

A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful. — Hayden Carruth

In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have - not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in. — Shane Carruth

I stole a ton of film language from Steven Soderbergh and 'The Limey.' It's the definition of elliptical. It was the first movie I remember that introduced me to storytelling that isn't just one scene after another, and that things can be mixed up in the way that real experiences can. — Shane Carruth

Everybody's saying we've got to go 3D or virtual reality or choose your own adventure. But there are other ways forward. I don't think we're done with film by a long shot. — Shane Carruth

When we start rating each other's lives and afflictions, we lose a bit of our humanity, compassion and perspective. — Ariana Carruth

I love the concept of the romance that exists when people are broken. Like, the promise of a romance when you're at the bottom. I think that's infinitely compelling and romantic. — Shane Carruth

I don't spend a lot of time in nature. Probably less than most people that live in urban Texas. — Shane Carruth

Why is it so easy to abandon ourselves, and why do we so easily fall into the illusion that this self-abandonment is the only way people will like us? — Ariana Carruth

'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for. — Shane Carruth

Going to grocery stores is almost my favorite thing to do to calm myself down. There's something about just walking aisle after aisle making mundane choices. 'Do I want that? No, I want the one that has the low sodium.' And that feels like a good exercise to be doing when there isn't anything to be doing. It's like a kick-starter in some way. — Shane Carruth

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan county

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then like a child
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing. — Hayden Carruth

The biggest mistake I made was not having a full-time producer. I was securing locations and wardrobe and making sure people get called to show up on time and getting the film to the lab and getting the camera, and all this stuff that I'm happy to do, but if I'm doing every little thing, I'm not concentrating on my story. So it never gets any better than the script. — Shane Carruth

From a completely financial standpoint, digital is starting to crack as far as an independent filmmaker's access to getting your story out there - Amazon, iTunes, all of those. It makes the prospect of doing it yourself - not easy by any means - but possible, maybe for the first time. — Shane Carruth

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information. — Shane Carruth

Finding her meant that I could move forward unabashedly, without fear of rejection, without the endless need for acceptance from my husband or from anyone else. My worth was decided by me, now. — Ariana Carruth

If something can be explored or illuminated that would have been difficult to verbalize, that to me is what a film should be. It's like trying to explain what a piece of music is like. You can't do it. — Shane Carruth

I find 'Fatal Attraction' really romantic. I really like the seduction. Almost every time I see it, I'm surprised when it goes dark. I know that's the claim to fame, but I key into how genuinely romantic it is. — Shane Carruth

I think I'll always want to write and direct. I'm interested in producing and helping other people tell stories. But I'm still in love with writing and directing. — Shane Carruth

As I was wheeled into the operating room I pleaded with
God for one more day, one more week, one more month with her. — Ariana Carruth

I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things. — Shane Carruth

In the dim light of today are the shadows of yesterday's affliction and the hope of tomorrow's gifts. — Ariana Carruth

All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater. — Shane Carruth

In that moment, I welcomed back the light and let go of the fear, the feelings of unworthiness, the past, the loss, the wallowing, the grief and the anger. I let go of the illusion of control in our losses, of our afflictions. — Ariana Carruth

My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. — Hayden Carruth

The only thing I can ever do is make a film that I can respond to. I could not make a romantic comedy for college girls. I wouldn't know how that works. — Shane Carruth

I never got into 'MacGyver,' but 'All the President's Men' and 'The Conversation' were big for me. — Shane Carruth

My curiosity, alas, is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation. But melancholy [men] from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this. — Hayden Carruth

When something is beautiful in math, everything is just perfectly lined up, and you see through sheer thought that something really beautiful can take place. — Shane Carruth

I don't want to be thought of as somebody who's spiritually ambiguous, but the reality is there's unknown things happening. I'm not ready to point at what they are or what the reason is, but I know they exist. — Shane Carruth

Now I am almost entirely love. — Hayden Carruth

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud. — Shane Carruth

Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time. — Hayden Carruth

I came to filmmaking because it's my passion. I decided I can't have it distorted or marred by someone else deciding what it should be. — Shane Carruth

Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable news channel, and now they know what they are supposed to think, and they repeat that. — Shane Carruth

My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story. — Shane Carruth

Beauty was worth
Its every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending,
As darkness covered the garden that is the earth. — Hayden Carruth

Film is a collaborative process, absolutely, but I am a control freak. — Shane Carruth

I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up. — Shane Carruth

Filmmaking is a thousand choices a day, and it's important to just let those choices potentially be informed by something deeper. — Shane Carruth

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything. — Shane Carruth

I've always been anxious about 'Primer.' There's good things about it, but all I've seen for a long time is the flaws. — Shane Carruth

Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film. — Shane Carruth

I'm constantly surprised by ... an orange will roll off a table, and I'll catch it before I knew it was falling. Something happens there. We could write it off and say, 'Subconsciously I knew that was happening,' but there's so many things every day - I'm amazed by how little we know. — Shane Carruth

I don't typically have a social life, I don't have a family, and I will stay up all night, every night, for days on end, to solve something that I think is solvable. And it's very frustrating sometimes, because I know that I'm like that, and it's not always a positive result. — Shane Carruth

I can honestly say, there was a moment when I was writing 'Upstream Color' where I fell so hard for what it was becoming that I couldn't think of anything else. I was absolutely secure in this story in the way I'm rarely secure about anything else in my life. — Shane Carruth

It was all about release, about letting go of the unknowns.
I was having a disabled child and that was that. There were no hidden truths to discover. I would not know anything about her birth, her survivability odds, all her ailments, until her life actually unfolded. — Ariana Carruth

Probably the TV show I've watched the most is 'How It's Made' on the History Channel. I could watch 24 hours of 'How It's Made' and never get bored. — Shane Carruth

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay. — Shane Carruth

'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well. — Shane Carruth

'The Master,' it was really important to me to go see that in the theater, but that's a very rare occurrence for me. I typically enjoy things on my laptop. I'm in bed; I can be able to pause them. — Shane Carruth

I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all. — Shane Carruth

I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. Existence had no use. It was without end or reason. The most beautfiul things in it, a flower or a song, as well as the most compelling, a desire or a thought, were pointless. So great a sorrow. And I knew that the only rest from my anxiety - for I had been trembling even in infancy - lay in acknowledging and absorbing this sadness. — Hayden Carruth