By I am an unabashed fan of writer/director Shane Carruth. Primer is one of the great lo-fi science fiction films, and the ethereal and existential Upstream Color is my favorite movie of the last decade. I love Upstream Color to a point of absurd obsession. (I wrote a three-part, 8,000 word analysis of it years ago.)
Back in 2015, it seemed like Carruth’s next film, a big-budget seafaring epic called The Modern Ocean, was starting to get off the ground. It attracted an all-star cast, which includes Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Radcliffe, Chloë Grace Moretz, Tom Holland, Asa Butterfield, Abraham Attah, and Jeff Goldblum. Yet so far, The Modern Ocean is at a standstill.
While promoting The Lost City of Z, Holland gushed about the script for The Modern Ocean. He told Collider the following:
I love Shane’s movies, I think he’s a great director; Primer and Upstream Color are awesome. [The Modern Ocean] is I think the best script I’ve ever read. It’s the craziest idea for a movie ever; it’s so cool. I actually keep meaning to get my agents on the phone to talk about it, to try and see if we can kick it up again. But not I’m still attached to it I guess, but I hope we get to make it in the future.
Carruth’s made appearances in a handful of projects in the last few years, including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it supporting role in Swiss Army Man. He’s also composed the score for The Girlfriend Experience, a Starz TV series adapted from the Steven Soderbergh movie of the same name. The show was co-written and co-directed by Upstream Color co-star Amy Seimetz. (Soderbergh namechecked Carruth, Seimetz, and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins in a San Francisco International Film Festival speech a few years ago.)
But really, someone give Carruth all the money already so he can make this thing.
[Collider via The Playlist]