A Topiary: Shane Carruth Releases His Pitch Trailer For The Unproduced Sci-Fi Epic

If you’re a fan of Shane Carruth‘s directorial efforts, then you’re probably one of the many diehards that love every frame of his features. He’s the type of filmmaker, even with only a relatively small filmography featuring two feature films, that is able to engender such fanatical support. And that’s not a bad thing. Well, it’s not always a bad thing, as it also means that his fans are forever discussing films that may or may not ever get made, such as “A Topiary.”

We’ve been talking about “A Topiary” for nearly a decade now, after the release of his second (and most recent) feature film, “Upstream Color” back in 2013. And in that time, Carruth has teased what his sci-fi film would be about, but the years passed and talk of “A Topiary” fell by the wayside.

However, last night, Carruth took to the “Upstream Color” Twitter feed to release a link to an old pitch teaser trailer that was made for “A Topiary” that has previously never been released to the public. Obviously, this was made for studios, investors and potential interested parties. His only statement accompanying the teaser reads, “This will probably get taken down because I lifted a bunch of shots from films.”

And he’s not wrong.

The video, which you can watch below, does take scenes from quite a number of incredible films of the past and that’s how all pitch teasers are done (remember the famous “Daredevil” one from Joe Carnahan several years back when he was going to take another crack at the character?). However, the narration and bits from the end of the teaser give fans their first real idea of what “A Topiary” could have potentially looked and felt like. As shown in the video, the film would have explored a special machine with incredible shape-shifting powers and a mysterious origin that falls into the hands of a group of young boys. The film also includes mention of how it would have been executive produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, two men that, like Carruth, elicit strong responses from cinephiles.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing new to say about “A Topiary,” in regards to the feature actually getting made. Is Carruth releasing this as a way to build buzz and land funding? Or is this just a way for him to clean house and give fans a look at something they’ve been wanting to watch for a decade now?

In a recent interview we conducted with Carruth, the filmmaker minced no words and talked about “A Topiary” as something that won’t ever get made.

“It’s hard to explain what ‘A Topiary’ and ‘The Modern Ocean’ mean to me,” he said. “It would be like saying that I have a daughter or two daughters and now I don’t have them anymore. So, the question is, ‘Hey, do you want to revive your daughter?’ Of course, I do. Of course, I do. I love her. I love [them]. But… I don’t know what I would do with a reanimated corpse.”

You can watch the pitch teaser below: