I finally watched Primer yesterday after having it recommended to me constantly by multiple people, both here and In Real Life. Just wanted to get some other people's thoughts on it and process some of my reactions.
Overall I enjoyed it, and thought it was a good example of what can be done with limited resources and a small budget. I was surprised to see it was actually shot on film, as the overall aesthetic felt more like video - but it was also done just before the whole DSLR/big sensor video thing took off. I suspect they wouldn't have used film if it were shot a few years later (and I guess the directors latest is shot on a GH2, I'll have to try and check it out while it's in theaters). Overall budget was reported as $7,000 and wikipedia has the box office at over $400,000, and it seems to have done well on video as well so it's certainly been a success from that standpoint.
I thought the credits were great - I just watched a bunch of 48 hour films a couple days ago and almost every one had longer credit lists and bigger crews than Primer did. I think it had six crew, and about ten actors - although most of the crew were also in the acting credits, so it was ultimately about 12 people involved overall. It'll be interesting to see how much that has expanded in his latest film ('Upstream Color") - but looking at the info on wikipedia it looks like it's much the same approach. A lot of discussions around here involve finding specialists to work on your film rather than trying to do it all yourself, but both these films seem to be successful examples of the one man band/multi-disciplinarian approach. Upstream Color is even reportedly self-distributed, although I'm not sure exactly what that implies in terms of it's current theatrical release.
I do feel like it gets a lot more credit for how complex it is than the story really warrants. There were points where I got confused as to what was going on, but looking back it wasn't due to the complexity of the plot but more with the editing and presentation of the action. They certainly avoided exposition, and it's very jargon-heavy - I feel like that contributes to the complexity people attribute to it, but the plot itself seems fairly straightforward. It was both a risk - all the jargon early on could potentially turn people off - but also an effective tool to create the sense that there's something important going on that's maybe just out of reach as far as understanding it. I just came away feeling like they could have done more in the edit to move through the story in a way that helped make it clear what was going on without losing the mystery they created.
Overall I enjoyed it, and thought it was a good example of what can be done with limited resources and a small budget. I was surprised to see it was actually shot on film, as the overall aesthetic felt more like video - but it was also done just before the whole DSLR/big sensor video thing took off. I suspect they wouldn't have used film if it were shot a few years later (and I guess the directors latest is shot on a GH2, I'll have to try and check it out while it's in theaters). Overall budget was reported as $7,000 and wikipedia has the box office at over $400,000, and it seems to have done well on video as well so it's certainly been a success from that standpoint.
I thought the credits were great - I just watched a bunch of 48 hour films a couple days ago and almost every one had longer credit lists and bigger crews than Primer did. I think it had six crew, and about ten actors - although most of the crew were also in the acting credits, so it was ultimately about 12 people involved overall. It'll be interesting to see how much that has expanded in his latest film ('Upstream Color") - but looking at the info on wikipedia it looks like it's much the same approach. A lot of discussions around here involve finding specialists to work on your film rather than trying to do it all yourself, but both these films seem to be successful examples of the one man band/multi-disciplinarian approach. Upstream Color is even reportedly self-distributed, although I'm not sure exactly what that implies in terms of it's current theatrical release.
I do feel like it gets a lot more credit for how complex it is than the story really warrants. There were points where I got confused as to what was going on, but looking back it wasn't due to the complexity of the plot but more with the editing and presentation of the action. They certainly avoided exposition, and it's very jargon-heavy - I feel like that contributes to the complexity people attribute to it, but the plot itself seems fairly straightforward. It was both a risk - all the jargon early on could potentially turn people off - but also an effective tool to create the sense that there's something important going on that's maybe just out of reach as far as understanding it. I just came away feeling like they could have done more in the edit to move through the story in a way that helped make it clear what was going on without losing the mystery they created.
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