Shane Carruth made an astonishing debut in 2004 with Primer, a fine DIY example of hard (and I mean hard) science fiction.  He wrote, directed, starred, edited, and even composed the film for a reported $7000 budget.  Sadly, he doesn't have a credit in the seven years since.  Carruth has another film in the works -- rumored to be called A Topiary -- but the funding hasn't come together yet.  Director and lucky bastard Rian Johnson (The Brothers Bloom) read the script then tweeted: "Shane is alive and well and has a mind-blowing sci-fi script. Let's all pray to the movie-gods that he gets it made soon."  (Amen.)Johnson is working with on his next film Looper, a time travel thriller starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paul Dano, and Emily Blunt.  Also working on the film?  Shane Carruth.  The Looper blog posted a new photo of Carruth on the set with the message "Shane Carruth is working on Looper. If you haven’t seen his film Primer, run don’t walk."  Hit the jump for details on his role in production, plus more info on Looper.Badass Digest was understandably excited by this tidbit, and got in touch with Johnson to find out what Carruth is doing for the film.  Johnson responded that Carruth is working on some effects for the time travel sequences.  Makes sense.  Carruth is more than a bit of a computer whiz, and has probably conceived of cinema's most realistic depiction of time travel in Primer.  And Looper sounds like a film that could use some good time travel effects.  Here's how Johnson describes the film:

Looper is a time travel movie, set in a near future where time travel doesn’t exist but will be invented in a few decades. It’s pretty dark in tone, much different from Bloom, and involves a group of killers (called Loopers) who work for a crime syndicate in the future. Their bosses send their targets hogtied and blindfolded back in time to the Loopers, and their job is to simply shoot them in the head and dispose of the body. So the target vanishes from the future and the Loopers dispose of a corpse that doesn’t technically exist, a very clean system. Complications set in from there.

I am so very excited for Looper, which should hit theaters sometime in 2012.  Now, does any Collider reader happen to have $5 million or so lying around to fund A Topiary?