EXCLUSIVE: Shane Carruth, who directed the celebrated Sundance Festival films Primer and Upstream Color, has signed with WME. The agency will help him put together The Modern Ocean, which Carruth plans to direct next. Lawrence Inglee’s Blackbird will produce it alongside Carruth, in partnership with financier Gideon Tadmor. It’s a nautical action adventure that will be Carruth’s first big-budget effort.

The former software engineer has made two films with a disruptive style, and Carruth is one of those filmmakers who does it all. On his first two films, Carruth not only wrote, directed, produced, directed, co-starred in them and composed the music, he distributed them theatrically through his company erpbFilm. An artist worth watching.