Do you correct people? No matter what, won’t people take away from "Primer" their own interpretation? Or do you try and set them straight?
Well, I just feel like it’s the kind of thing where if they did happen to see it again or if they end up talking to their friends afterwards, I think they’ll come to realize that okay, that just couldn’t possibly be. It’s just that the way the narrative is constructed, I can see how when the story asks you to pull the threads together that’s probably going to happen where threads are pulled together wrong. I definitely didn’t set up this narrative to be open to interpretation. I mean, except for a few things. For the most part, the information is in there to have a very concrete answer as to what is happening in the narrative.
Somewhere in the narrative tells us how many copies there definitely are?
Yes.
Okay, I feel stupid. Why didn't I get the answer to that?
It’s brief, but it’s in there. That’s the kind of thing – someone will come out of a first screening and they’ll already know. I’ll be like, “I don’t understand because everyone else is claiming that they have to see it a second time.” So the only thing I can possibly understand is that it has something to do with how you walk into the theater. Or maybe whether I’m a long-lost cousin of these people (laughing).
So the answer’s right in front of my face?
Well, it’s in the narrative. It happens very briefly but the narrator gives away who he is right at the end. When he’s talking about the Aarons that are reliving that one day where he’s perfecting the moment at the party. He comes back once, knocks himself out, stores his former self in the attic so he can step back into his life. Then that doesn’t work out so he comes back again and it’s at this point where the second and the third Aaron have a struggle. The second Aaron wins but sees the exhaustion in the third Aaron’s face and so he decides to leave. And as he’s leaving the narrator says, “So I left.” So it kind of pins the narrator to be that second Aaron. It’s very briefly, but it is in there.
How different was your first draft of “Primer” from the final shooting script?
It’s very close. It’s so hard with a Word Processor to know what a revision is. I guess with the amount of writing that continued to go on, it probably went through about three or four revisions before it was the actual thing that we shot.
That’s not very many.
No? Well, it seemed like it was. But maybe not.
Did you make any major changes or was it more just minor fine-tuning?
Minor stuff. There’s a scene in there where I took one location and split it off into three, but it’s basically the same dialogue. The thing is the way that I wrote it, I didn’t really have a lot of experience writing these things so I was just kind of making it up. But I kept 30 or 40 pages of notes before I ever wrote in any kind of screenplay format. So I knew, like with diagrams, I knew the story. I knew everything up until right when I actually started writing in the format.
It seems this is one movie that begs for a director to do a commentary track on the DVD. Are you planning on doing one?
I definitely am. As far as what is in the commentary… I don’t know, I’ve been going back and forth.
What are you going back and forth between?
I don’t know if it’s doing a disservice to people to spell out the script plot point by plot point. I don’t know if I’m ready to say that it needs it.
Maybe it doesn’t so much need it as people will be interested in learning what you were going through during production.
I definitely want to talk about how it was made and what the process was and all of that. But you know, at PrimerMovie.com there’s a forum up and people are putting up theories as to how different events happened. The thing is, it’s coming together. The information’s there, so it is coming together. So it’s like, “Well, should I show up at the end of this and kind of be some kind of teacher with an answer key?” It seems odd.
That’s a tough choice. What are you leaning toward?
I’m leaning away from it. I think that the information is there. I don’t want to frustrate people. I don’t want to make people angry. If they see it and it’s just keeping them awake at nights because all they really want is just to know that there is an answer… I don’t know. I’m not looking to frustrate people but on the other side of that, if people are interested enough I don’t want to spoil it, I guess. I don’t know. It’s a tough deal. I try to think back to some of my favorite movies that are not easily summed up in the narrative.
