The former Moldy Peaches man Adam Green is best known as a charmingly scuzzy singer-songwriter with a curiously large following in Germany. But his latest labour of love is a warped, feature-length version of Aladdin, made on the cheap in a Brooklyn warehouse, and starring Macaulay Culkin and Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat. It’s a follow-up of sorts to a baffling film he made in 2011, The Wrong Ferrari, which was shot on iPhone and written on ketamine. Suffice to say that Green has his own hallucinogenic take on the Aladdin fable in which the princess is a reality TV star, the Sultan is a pot-bellied pervert and the lamp is a 3D printer that upsets the karmic balance of the universe by printing out an analogue version of the internet. How does a film as whacked-out as this get from drug-addled fever dream to the arthouse cinema screen? Let the man himself explain.
Naivety can be an asset
“I think everybody grows up with a fantasy of making a movie. In my case, I just did it. Not knowing any of the rules kind of helped. I approached Aladdin like a community project, inviting people to help me create this papier-mache world inside of a warehouse with a bunch of actors and musicians. The film was just a container for a fun experience, a crazy way to spend the summer in New York City.”
Build on an existing mythology
“I have a tendency to be pretty abstract in my thinking, so to be anchored by a myth was helpful. I could look at the Aladdin story and think: ‘What would a modern-day princess look like?’ The answer was: like a Kardashian. Then the lamp could be a 3D printer and the genie could be like Siri. Aladdin is based on me, so I made him an indie rock singer whose label is dissatisfied with him, which isn’t dissimilar to my story with Rough Trade, who told me to cut half the songs on my seventh album. The script is based on a lot of my own real-life experiences, and certainly the feelings and the journey of the character is real. But everything else around Aladdin is totally insane.”
Turn on, tune in and type up
“A lot of the dialogue for The Wrong Ferrari was written under the influence of ketamine. I’d put all these things on scraps of paper and give them to the cast on the day of the shoot. Each scene was basically last night’s trip. I was making up the movie from day to day. Aladdin was a lot more organised, but sometimes I’d get stoned and write a bit. The way I write is very free-associative. I’d type for two hours and give myself permission to write anything that I wanted. As it progressed, I started to assign the lines to the Princess or the Sultan or the Genie. But they’re all part of my subconcious.”
Prepare to be flexible
“Obviously there were no contracts. People would oversleep and not show up. One key actor pulled out at the last minute, so there was some radical recasting the day before the shoot. I didn’t even really want to be Aladdin! I asked a bunch of other people but ultimately I ended up being the most famous person I could find to be Aladdin.”
Create a party atmosphere on-set
“The warehouse was 25 minutes from the train, so once you were there you couldn’t leave, you had to hang out! We did everything we could to make it not feel like work. I made everyone in the movie wear bell-bottoms. I honestly feel that if everyone wore bell-bottoms, the world would be maybe 10 or 15% better and more groovy.”
Stay focused
“On the first day of filming, I thought I’d loosen up by having a beer like I do before a concert. Man, it was a total mistake. I forgot my lines and everyone was looking at me. Being an actor-director was a lot of pressure, so I had to stay sober. I’d walk home for two hours every night just to unwind. I told myself that even if it all fell apart, it could be this great ill-fated movie, like Jodorowsky’s Dune.”
Auteurs don’t compromise
“What I’m most proud of about Aladdin is that it was a very unique vision that I got to execute how I wanted. That’s how it should be as an artist: you have something inside of you that you push out through your skin. I’m writing another movie about the afterlife and it’s kind of a war movie. I always wanted to tell the story of Hanukkah, like a Biblical epic. Imagine making Noah’s ark out of papier-mache, that would be fun. And somehow it feels like life would not be complete unless I got to design a videogame or an amusement park or something. It would be an adult amusement park – educational too!”
Adam Green’s Aladdin (the album) is out Friday 29 April; Adam Green’s Aladdin (the film) premieres at Prince Charles Cinema, WC2, 12 May and is out on iTunes and Amazon the same day
