In just a handful of months, San Jose micro-budget philoso-filmmaker Alejandro Adams has made quite a loud name for himself. Though his first two features, Around the Bay and Canary (read my review here), have only screened at a handful of smaller regional festivals, Adams has become one of the more prominent voices on the independent film scene. This can be largely attributed to two things: a stimulating interview with Karina Longworth at Spout, and the explosion of Twitter, where Adams is a relentless, tireless presence. Fortunately, this can also be attributed to the films themselves, in which Adams brings his furious intellectual energy to his challenging dissections of modern life. In Around the Bay, it’s fatherhood, or the lack thereof. In Canary, it’s just about everything else. The term I’ve come up with to describe Adams’ style is psycho-naturalism, as both of his films contain an arresting blend of effortlessly natural performances with a far more calculated and blunt ideological approach. On the heels of Canary’s screening at Rooftop Films on Friday, August 7th, I got on the phone with Adams to discuss his films, his unexpectedly fortuitous connection to Twitter, and his natural concern with regards to the film festival scene.
H2N: When did you realize that movies were actually made by human beings and didn’t just appear out of thin air?
AA: My stepfather took me to see a lot of films starting when I was nine, and I hadn’t really seen any prior to that. He realized that my interest sort of paralleled his own. He had what I would call a near obsessive interest in movie going. And when I started to replicate that interest, he then traveled to various larger cities with universities that had film departments, and would bring me home these college level film school textbooks. So, I suppose I was twelve or thirteen when I was reading about, you know, where Ozu placed the camera, or what was daring about Bergman’s film Summer With Monika. It was probably around that time that I realized films were not only made by human beings, as you said, but were much more complicated, interesting, and fascinating than I had originally thought. At that age, I probably wouldn’t have realized that without some sort of academic help.
H2N: With a lot of people that I’ve been talking to in these conversations, it all seems to really begin with Die Hard.
AA: I do love pop cinema. I was a projectionist for a handful of years. I saw everything indiscriminately. I think there’s a lot of value in doing that. I’m not a film snob at all. It just so happens that I was introduced to foreign films younger than some people are. But I still go out of my way for trash.
H2N: Which leads to the personal spark of wanting to make your own films. When did that happen?
AA: Well, actually this is kind of a circuitous route to being a filmmaker, and I am not particularly even comfortable with that label yet, but I got a degree in Creative Writing and wrote novels and short stories for several years, many years—a decade, probably. And then got married and we had our first child. When my wife was pregnant with our second child, I started to panic and realized, through some accommodation of various factors, but one of them was that I’d always wanted to make films despite my primary love of literature, and realizing the publishing industry was tanking pretty hard. I decided to give it a go with basically no resources. And that was when I made Around the Bay, out of nowhere, really. We had the cameras on hand because we’d been dabbling, my wife had been in film school in New York, just a sort of crash course program, and had made a couple of short films. But otherwise it was diving in cold. It was just one of those times in your life when it’s do or die. We were about to have a second child. (AA laughs)
H2N: That ties directly into my next question, which deals with Around the Bay. Many exceptional works have been borne out of the fear associated with impending fatherhood, like Eraserhead or The Road. (AA laughs) For you, was the idea for Around the Bay directly connected to your becoming a father? Or was it totally separate?
AA: It was totally separate, actually. In trying to figure out what I would be particularly passionate about and have the most dedicated follow-through on, I searched through old short stories that I’d written and tried to find something I felt attached to and felt also that I could pull off with no resources. And this one story I actually never finished involved this incredibly neglectful father—not benign neglect at all, but malignant neglect. I couldn’t really see him in the piece of fiction. He was so one-dimensional that he had not come to life, which is why I hadn’t finished the story. And I thought, “Well, hey, this is something that would actually work better in cinema, because he would inevitably come to life, at least in terms of someone embodying the role on screen, and I could hope to milk nuances out of that actor’s performance.” So I took the seed of that particular story and translated that into Around the Bay. It was largely improvised, but all those elements were there: the five-year-old child, and a college-age girl who has no idea where her life is going and comes to live with her estranged father who’s already not left her as much as betrayed her.
H2N: I have to ask about the kid’s performance. How did you find him and how did you get him to act like that? Was it a question of finding someone who already had that in him, or was it about having fun and getting him all riled up through direction?
AA: It was a combination of things. The story was originally about the effect of the father’s neglect on the child, who was incredibly introspective and embodied loneliness in a much more alienated way, and not at all aggressive. I saw a variety of kids and I had a choice essentially between two. One was more or less already a professional actor. He was non-union so he would have worked for free no problem. He’d done a lot of commercials and scripted film work, and he was a pro. He actually showed up at the audition having memorized his own dialogue and that of the father character, and was kind of coaching the actors who were auditioning for the father role through their dialogue. It was incredibly funny.
The other kid I really liked was Connor Maselli, who ended up in the film. He had everything the other kid didn’t have. He had no notion of what a script was and was totally dynamic and alive. He inhabited every scene I put him in on stage with a variety of actors who were auditioning for these parts. And he didn’t seem to know there were cameras there, or lights on. He just didn’t seem to be aware of any of that. So I shot a camera test with him privately at his home after that audition and it was the same effect. I had a camera like, I don’t know, five inches from his face and he was killing a bee or something, he was totally unaware. So I took that, knowing he was gonna be okay in that regard, and then on set we did various kinds of, essentially, manipulation, to get the rest of the performance. But I should give Katherine Celio an A.D. credit or something, because she played the sister, she very much got him worked up and made it so that once we rolled cameras they were already in the middle of something.
But also, to be fair to both Connor and myself, I did coach him through really specific dialogue. I could hear myself on the soundtrack when I was editing and didn’t realize exactly how many times I would tell him to inflect and re-inflect some particular line until we got it right. So there was definitely performance on his part and directing on my part but most of what you see is just a kid being a kid.
H2N: Since this was something that just happened for you and it was your first time doing it, did you feel like you were learning along the way or was it something that came naturally to you, with regards to the process of the shoot itself?
AA: It’s tough. Like I said a few minutes ago, literature was my first love and what I was naturally drawn toward. I think I still don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t learned “lessons.” There’s a bullheadedness about the way I’ve approached each film. I should have learned X, Y, or Z on the first one and didn’t, and can continue to be sort of in a trance, I guess. So, no, I don’t. It didn’t feel natural, it still doesn’t feel natural, I don’t have the necessary people skills. (H2N laughs) I don’t have what would be considered traditional leadership skills, and that’s one reason I just finished shooting two films simultaneously, because when I edit I go so deep into the solitude mentality that I don’t come out of it very easily in order to interact with people, so I wanted to be able to knock a couple out while my personality had already been adjusted for production.
H2N: How about the editing style in Around the Bay? Is that something you conceived before you sat down to edit or did that happen when you were playing with the footage?
AA: Again, I would call the entire process organic in the sense that I didn’t know what I was doing in pre-production, I didn’t know what I was doing in production, and I certainly didn’t in post, which took a year. It was several different films along the way. We had like a really moving twenty-minute scene between the father and his daughter in this tea house with no light, and her eyes were big and watery and vulnerable. And the twenty-minute scene worked as a thing in itself, but it obviously wouldn’t have worked in the film that way. And eventually, eight or nine months into editing, that becomes a four-minute scene and you hope that somehow that cursory approach conveys emotion.
H2N: How about inspiration? As someone who dabbles in making stuff, I realize it’s perhaps a silly question to ask, but it still intrigues me. When you’re embroiled in your own work, do you embrace the idea of studying other work or do you consciously try to block out your influences and let them work on a subconscious, organic level that way as well?
AA: I’m a historicist, and this may come from literary training as well, but I don’t believe anything exists out of time, I don’t believe anything exists without influence. If we write a novel, it’s because we’ve been reading novels, it’s because the novel form has existed for hundreds of years. So I very much believe I go into everything with all my influences there. And frankly, I think people who reject the idea of influence, or have anxiety about influence—for instance, the way most people would say that is, “I’m original,” or, “This is original,” or, “I want it to be original”—anyone who approaches their own art with that mentality has not assimilated their influences very well and will probably be more derivative than someone who is totally aware that everything is influenced, everything comes from somewhere. I would like to think that what I call “organic”—when I go into a trance—I’m bringing all those influences with me. I don’t at all feel sui generis, I don’t at all feel unique. I think it’s the whole baggage of cinema. I mean, every cut. Even if I reject Godard or feel that he is not a great filmmaker or an influence, I still feel that somewhere in there he has influenced the course of cinema history and probably influenced a cut of mine without my knowing it.
H2N: How about conscious influence? Like, with Around the Bay. Did you ever say, “Okay, I have a scene this weekend, we’re on the train,” and you did literal viewing to prepare or study for a specific scene?
AA: As you know, I have this notion that we can make films by ourselves and I feel like, to a great extent, my first two—Around the Bay, almost entirely—are auteur works. Not that I want it that way, but it’s just, that’s what it is. I had no choice. I mean, I had no resources or backup or creative collaborators. My wife was pregnant and indisposed. In the more recent films I collaborated extensively. I was glad, it was a relief, but I actually did turn on My Night At Maud’s, the beginning, to see how Rohmer had handled it. I remember specifically, he had, I think the character was unnamed, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the role, he goes to church in the beginning. It’s actually a really long scene. My recent film, Child of God, is set almost entirely in a church building, not in the sanctuary itself. But I wanted to see how he handled depicting the crowd, pulling the protagonist out of the crowd, et cetera. So there was research there, but it wasn’t self-motivated. It came from an argument with someone I was collaborating with. And then I said, “Well look, here’s something that someone else did.” But, no, that isn’t really natural to me at all. I don’t know why.
H2N: Let’s move on to the film that really has the kids talking and is screening Friday night at Rooftop Films: Canary! It’s a shame you won’t be here. I wrote you after watching Around the Bay and said that it felt far more thematically myopic to me than Canary, which covers an almost dauntingly wide gamut of modern concerns: consumerism, corporations, health care, media. Before getting specifically into that, I wanted to ask about your production process. You have referred to yourself as a “weekend filmmaker.” Were both Around the Bay and Canary shot that way, on weekends as opposed to one big burst?
AA: Oh, no, no, I could never do that. It’s weekends only. I would just say that that makes it possible. I can’t imagine shooting daily.
H2N: Canary is teeming with ideas and self-contained scenes. Had you conceived of the film from A-Z, whether in script or outline form, before you started shooting that first weekend?
AA: There was more or less a treatment for each scene, rather than a treatment for the whole. I don’t really conceive in terms of a whole, I conceive scene-by-scene. But, yeah, it wasn’t as if I shot five scenes and thought, “Now I realize we need this other scene.” It was all planned in advance. And some of the stuff was scripted, but when I say scripted I just mean written out. My background is prose and I have a lot of trouble conceptually with properly formatted screenplays. I don’t know why, but I can’t do that. So I hand actors essentially a prose manuscript and they can do what they want with that.
H2N: Do you edit along the way, or do you wait ‘til you’ve shot everything?
AA: I wait ‘til I’ve shot everything. I’ve never, ever looked at anything while shooting. I know that’s one of the advantages of digital, to look at what’s just been shot. I’ve never done that. I go home—we’re still on tape at this point—so for each of the films I’ve made so far, I go home and capture, which is a word that’s not gonna exist much longer. I look at it to check that it’s okay, but, no, I’ve almost never tampered with or put it in a timeline or anything like that until I’m totally done. Unless there’s some real big technical concern and then I have to look at it in detail.
H2N: This sounds like an insult, but I feel like bestowing upon you the title “King of Twittercore.” At least with me, it felt like your emergence, or my awareness of you, coincided like directly with the explosion of Twitter. You’re a regional filmmaker who hasn’t played very many festivals, and right now you’re as prominent a presence on the “scene” as anyone. Even more impressive is that your films are getting in the hands of people whose voices are taken quite seriously. What is your take on these past few months?
AA: I’m in conversations that stem from this question, and the conversations don’t resemble each other at all. The most recent conversation is: is Canary really that much better than Around the Bay? Why the buzz? Why didn’t Around the Bay play more festivals? Some of “us” in this conversation attribute it all to Twitter, some of “us” say—and now this will sound like I’m throwing an insult back on you—it’s easier for certain kinds of cinephiles to embrace Canary than it is Around the Bay, which has more conventional elements in it, it’s not as daring in some ways, so it’s “easier to champion” Canary or get excited about it. But in terms of why now, I really believe Twitter’s about 90% of it.
For whatever reason, I’m not gonna blame festival corruption, but I’ve said this before, it starts to sound bitter, I had really great reviews for Around the Bay. I got a Variety review coming out of Cinequest, which is where we premiered, Philip Lopate said very glowing things about it, and there were a couple of others. There was a film that played that year called Dear Zachary, which I think many people have heard of, and the indieWIRE critic said Dear Zachary and Around the Bay were the best films at the festival, the true discoveries. Dear Zachary went on to do great things and Around the Bay didn’t get into another festival. That’s all very baffling to me. Twitter certainly wasn’t invented for me, but I have managed to bypass some of that inadvertently. I mean, I certainly didn’t think Twitter was gonna have this effect. I was talking to Mike D’Angelo the other day and he said that. He said, “There’s no way you could have known that this would have this effect.” And it’s true. It’s just like working on the films themselves. I’m totally winging it. I have no clue.
H2N: I don’t think it ever comes off that you’re premeditated about that stuff, or at the very least that you planned it from the beginning. How did that Karina interview, specifically, open things up for you? Like, did you start getting a lot more festival requests based on that alone?
AA: It’s out of control the number of festivals who have requested screeners. Or even critics. I don’t know that I should name names, but critics who write for major publications and are paid to write weekly about “real” releases are writing me and saying, “I have never asked anyone for a screener ever—I absolutely have to see your film.” James Rocchi has asked me several times in DM, to use Twitter ergo, where Canary is playing next, can he have a screener, and then, of course, he’s very busy, he forgets. Tonight, he said, out and out, “Look, forget Canary itself. I’m writing a piece about you as the new social media exploiting indie filmmaker.” I was like, “Okay.” This is a guy who’s incredibly busy, he’s writing about Hollywood releases, but has however many times been compelled to DM me about seeing my film and now finally is just going to write something regardless of the film itself. So I think there’s obviously something at work that’s over and above the quality of the film. And hopefully—in this case, the film being Canary—hopefully it’s good, but in some ways it seems to be incidental.
H2N: I don’t know if I’d go that far, man. If the film hadn’t really triggered a genuine reaction in me, I wouldn’t be having a conversation with you for this site. I hope James’s piece doesn’t sell you as having been premeditated with your approach to Twitter. Then again, I don’t know you so I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
AA: Unfortunately, it’s a cynical world and I’ve been un-followed by people who either say, “Hey, you’re Tweeting too much,” which is a legitimate gripe. Some people see Twitter as use it once a week, once a day, whatever, don’t use it like a chat room. Even I have that sensation: don’t use it like a chat room. Some people get tipsy late at night and go nuts and… okay. I think some people do see it as inorganic, that I’m machinating, and it’s baffling to me. I was a Twitter detractor for a very long time (H2N laughs) and was talked into it and was very hesitant and it’s really paid off. Again, I would not wag my finger at festivals, I’ve had very good experiences with every festival I’ve been at, and I know there are internal problems and things are not ideal. My films are not in any way being discriminated against. I don’t believe that. I know some filmmakers who feel that way. But at the same time, independent filmmakers who want to succeed now have to find their own way. Twitter definitely made that possible.
H2N: About festivals, I know you’ve written about your distaste with regards to seeing the pictures and photo blogs from a festival, in which everyone appears to be having a back-patting good ol’ time. Does any of that stem from the fact that the way your life is set up, you couldn’t even do that if you wanted to?
AA: On one level, I wrote this to someone the other day, it’s telling that I had kids before I even made a film. Because I essentially set it up subconsciously, or totally unintentionally, that I wouldn’t be able to live that lifestyle. At the same time, I think instinctively I reject a lot of the baggage. I love going to film festivals. I love watching films in that way. A lot of people don’t. A lot of people think it’s a necessary evil. I actually like them conceptually. What I don’t like is being a filmmaker at a festival. It has nothing to do with festival hospitality, nothing to do with the people that run them. And this will sound really horrible, but for all of my provocation and for all of the people that think I’m surly, I’ve gotten the impression that people think I’m there to push buttons. When actually, I’m probably too open and enthusiastic, and have had some really bad experiences, limited as they may be, with other filmmakers. And I drink, but it’s never been a focal point of my lifestyle, even in my twenties, even in college, and so it would never occur to me to want to go to a festival to drink or even emphasize which festival has the great parties. It’s like talking about which college has the best parties. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Like, the institution to me seems at odds with the idea of partying.
H2N: But you even alluded to this earlier. You seem like an affable guy, but when you were talking about making films, perhaps it comes down to an issue of social comfort—or discomfort—on a more base level. I think that’s why so many people get into the pattern of drinking, whether it’s at a film festival party or a law firm holiday party or anywhere. It’s just a childish feeling of insecurity or paranoia that helps numb one into a comfort zone.
AA: I certainly do not object at all to having a drink in my hand. I don’t object to being in a room with other people where music is being played and we’re all talking about film and are ostensibly there to celebrate film. There’s no way conceptually that I object to that. But you mentioned the photographs, and I think I’ve said something about the photographs, everybody clapping each other’s backs and having a good time. The schmoozing factor, whether it’s networking with peers or an attempt to get a distribution deal, I absolutely reject. It probably has to do with being an only child, but I am an intensely one-on-one person, in group settings I almost always smell fraud, or get a good look at a handful of people having a conversation and think to myself, self-righteously I admit (H2N laughs), “Just be real. Just be real.” If it takes booze, fine, but don’t use the booze to be less real than you would be without it. I have such enormous baggage about that, that it would be difficult for me to play along, I guess. And it’s a horrible thing to admit, ‘cause it sounds like a judgment of everybody on Earth, and it really isn’t. I long for sincere connections, maybe because I’m an only child and didn’t have them. I could get pop psyche about it and say it’s because I really just want to connect, and that setting to me seems to be counterproductive in terms of real connection.
H2N: In New York there are festivals that I won’t name, where you go to a party or go to the festival itself and you’re like, “What planet am I on?” Like you find yourself talking to someone and they look at you like you’re not even speaking English. But then there are others where right away you have automatic genuine connections and forge lasting friendships. I think the less experience you have, the more natural the instinct is to cast them in a more dismissive, negative light. But to defend your point another way, the fact remains that when you’re at a festival, you aren’t making a film, and that seems to be the whole point when it comes to filmmaking: film making.
AA: You mentioned the idea that you could go to a festival and it would be a paradigm buster, like you just said, it would be the one where you made great friendships. My other fear is actually that. My other fear is if you successfully network and you find peers that you actually like, how hard would it be if those peers said, “Hey, let’s make a movie together,” how big of an asshole would you be to say, “No thanks, I’m doing it my own way.” And that’s my other fear, because that’s a huge thing in me. I didn’t need to make a film to tell you that. So why get in a situation where you’re faced with that? And it may be arrogant to think that’s gonna happen every time, but I’m sure you can understand how recent Amer-indie history would lead me to believe that kind of thing was a constant. (H2N laughs)
— Michael Tully
