Adam Green is the quintessential alternative artist. With 18 years experience already under his belt at 35, his creative outputs are perpetually expanding and evolving. A singer-songwriter turned artist turned filmmaker, Green likes to keep busy. His excitement towards all of these endeavours is refreshing, and his psychedelic work makes for a great conversation topic.
His latest project – a feature length film called Aladdin – is a papier maché interpretation of the story with the same name. Do not be fooled, however, because there are many layers to the telling of this story. Here, Aladdin is a singer songwriter with some existential qualms, Jasmine is a reality TV star, and the magic lamp is a 3D printer.
I sat down with Adam Green before his concert and screening of the film at BARTS Barcelona to discuss the world of Aladdin and beyond:
You are involved in so many projects. Is there a medium that you feel you can express yourself with better, or is your work more of a total body of work?
Yes, I aspired to make a complete artwork and that is what Aladdin is my attempt to do; to create a sort of interior landscape that mixes my music and writing and visual art together into one kind of world. And unless you can get something that plugs into your brain and reads your thoughts, this is for me the closest thing that I can get to a complete artwork. I guess it’s the world in which my art and my music exist in.
Everything informs everything else.
Exactly, like sounds that seem fibrous. You start considering things that way and the more you go down that path, you don’t want to go back again. I want to continue to go this way and try and expand into these different horizons.
This isn’t your first film, you did The Wrong Ferrari in 2011.
Yeah, it was made on an iPhone.
Whereas Aladdin is a lot more high tech, even though there are all of these hand made elements. Was that progression deliberate?
It’s hard to tell effect from cause sometimes, but I think that The Wrong Ferrari was especially made on a phone because a lot of it is about the feeling of getting a smart phone and feeling that you’re inside a video game. It it was also the most accessible means that I had for making a movie. The brain is used to seeing this iPhone footage and thinking that it’s more of a documentary, but I wasn’t invested in that for this movie and I wanted to use a real movie camera. It was deserved, because we spent 4 months just building the sets. We had to build 30 rooms and 500 props. I feel that for a musician it was very planned out. And probably for a Hollywood movie it was a little bit loose.
I wanted to ask how much and to what extent the film was planned prior to filming.
Everything was scheduled, and there was a shot list. Everything was pre-made and everything had been built. On the first day of shooting we already had everything.
So you had a clear framework.
Yes, it was like in Ancient Egypt when you had a tomb and you gave somebody everything that they would need for the after life. We had to make one of everything. Because in a way, the movie takes place in another dimension, so we had to make something for everything in this other dimension. And that is the way I approach making artwork. I want people to feel like they’re going into another dimension when they’re hearing a song of mine or seeing a movie and I wanted it have an alien quality. So I overdubbed all the sound in the movie. Everything. And that’s something that I like to do, and I did it with The Wrong Ferrari as well because I feel there is something unnerving about it, and the movie becomes like a foreign film even to a native English speaker.
It does have that quality
Exactly: like a foreign film. I like that feeling. That is something I learned from watching Fellini movies, he used that technique a lot.
In terms of music and storyline, did they develop at the same time?
Yeah, they were all from the same pool of writing. The script of the movie is semi-lyrical. I don’t think people really talk that way, it is not an attempt to mimic the way people speak to each other. In a way, I am trying to have people speak in a symbolic way. I imagine people’s souls communicating with each other. Its as if in my fantasy there is a subconscious world where people aren’t even really in their bodies any more and their souls are just speaking to each other outside their bodies and they’re having their own symbolic dialogues. This is the kind of dialogue that my movies are made of. It’s almost an excuse to make some sort of entertaining version of an art film where people are tricked into listening to 90 minutes of a poem without really realising it. Because it is very hard to actually get people to listen to 90 minutes of lyrics otherwise.
It feels like there is a lot of symbolism in your film. Some symbols are more obvious than others – such as the lamp for example.
The use of the myth (of Aladdin) was helpful because it gives people something to hold on to when they are watching. Otherwise everything is very abstract. People go into the movie knowing that I am Aladdin, there is going to be a princess…so it helps them to understand the movie. I don’t want to tell people the story of Aladdin, people know that. I am trying to tell people my own story – which is semi-autobiographical. It’s kind of about the love that I found on planet Earth with my wife. And my wife, Yasmin, co-produced the movie with me. So we made the movie together in a way, and it is about us. So it is actually kind of funny to make a movie about something that is real but in actuality everything is hand made so it is all artificial in a way. It’s also about technology, but everything is hand made. So I think there are a bunch of opposites at play which make the movie slightly strange.
The story of Aladdin offers a framework that people can recognise more than anything else, is that right?
Yes. I feel you can use any basic story of basic symbol set, whether it’s Aladdin or Jack and the Beanstalk. If I was going to do Jack and the Beanstalk I’d have to find out what the beanstalk is and who the giant symbolises for me. So it was easy for me to plug it into Aladdin because I already had ideas about what a princess and a genie are. I’ve often written about the concept of a prince in my songs. Some of these symbols are from past songs of mine. I positioned Emily as Aladdin’s twin – but actually it was the name that my parents were going to name me if I was a girl. All the different characters are just different aspects of my subconscious and they’re all just spokes and cogs in a machine. I explore my own interior spiritual landscape and give it roles in the story of Aladdin.
You have toured with this all over the world. You have stops in Zaragoza and Madrid next.
This is how I wanted to present the movie from the beginning, and it was always this way. I wanted people to see it in a theatre and do a concert after, and then do a tour, and I am really getting the chance to do it. The Wrong Ferrari was training wheels for Aladdin so I am really happy to tour it. And people don’t need to actually come to the shows. You can see the movie on youtube. A few weeks ago I uploaded it, with Spanish subtitles, so you can watch it for free. I want everyone to watch it. That is the most important thing for me.
It is really a piece of work for the people.
Yes. The spirit in which it was made was a huge group of friends all working together in a warehouse to make it happen over a really really hot summer. So I think that it makes sense for it to be more of a word of mouth thing. It’s not part of the commercial film world at all, and it couldn’t be more of an indie movie. It has no distributer – it is a total DIY project. There is no advertising for it, nothing.
Last question. What’s next? Another film in the works?
I want to make one. I want it to be fully funded before I start it though, and I have some ideas. I just need to find someone who wants me to make it. My idea would be a war film. Papier maché.
You can see Adam Green ’s Aladdin here.
