Young tests boundaries of film in 'Greendale'
 
Steven Rosen
March 5, 2004
Denverpost

SANTA MONICA - Neil Young leans back in a sofa in his manager's office and laughs at the question. 

How did he have confidence that his D-I-Y, low-budget approach to filmmaking, on display in his new "Greendale," would result in anything worth watching?

"I didn't have that," he says, stretching out one leg. "I didn't have the confidence. I didn't know what I was doing, so it was OK. I just knew I was having fun and it was going to go really quickly and we were all having a good time.

"We were rolling, we were grooving, and it was easy," he continues. "We all just traveled together from place to place and whoever was in the scene would be in it and other people would stand around and wait. All day, no matter what the weather was, we kept going."

In a way, that sounds like a rock-band tour. Young, who has been making records since the late 1960s as both a solo artist and part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, was in Los Angeles (and nearby Santa Monica) recently as part of a tour for his latest album, "Greendale."

It's a suite of loosely connected songs about inter-generational Green family life in a fictional Northern California coastal town where environmentalism, political activism, media exploitation and crime are all concerns. The Canadian-born Young lives near Half Moon Bay, where much of "Greendale" was shot.

Young, 58, has been using the tour to also open the related film "Greendale" in the cities where he plays, as well as others. (It opens today at the Madstone Theaters at Tamarac Square.) It's not a concert film but not exactly a traditional drama, either.

There is no spoken dialogue, but occasionally the characters - many played by Young's friends and family, including wife Pegi - lip-synch snatches of lyrics while the recorded songs, featuring Young's plaintive vocals, play loudly on the sound track. Since the lyrics are like narrated conversations between the characters, it makes a certain sense.

And while the look is grungy to the extreme, there's a method to the madness. Young not only served as director (using the name Bernard Shakey), but also as cinematographer, using a hand-held German Super-8 underwater camera that a friend gave him. The film has been blown up to a grainy 35-millimeter for theatrical release.

Young is trying to create a mysterious mood - to cast a spell - with his impressionistic approach to depicting an imaginary community, just as he does in song with his wavering, reedy high-tenor voice. His eye becomes our eye, wandering about the locale to take in a tree, a passing bird, even the wind, itself, in a blurry, fleeting manner.

"This story is not 'Gone With the Wind' - you don't need 70-millimeter film," Young explains. "It's actually more important that the content appear to be more important than the technical side. It gives more validity to that content, gives the film more of a documentary or home-movie flavor. You almost expect the actors to turn around, look into the camera and say, 'Stop doing that, you're bugging me.' Like you would do with a home movie.

"Information is unfolding, and what you get is what you get," he says. "I'd shoot a scene until I knew I got it, and then I'd put that one in there, imperfect or not. We didn't try to hide we're making a movie."

Young in conversation is like a hard-working guy hanging out at home on the weekend. He looks at you straight-on with his blue eyes and does his best to make an interview as casual as his wardrobe - long-sleeve shirt hanging out and unbuttoned, a Vapor Records T-shirt underneath, sweatpants, and hiking shoes. His dark, longish hair is graying; his thick sideburns are even grayer. But if he's tired from having performed in concert the night before, it doesn't show. He's energized by "Greendale" and eager to talk positively about it in his surprisingly deep voice.

This is the fourth movie Young has directed, including 1973's "Journey Through the Past," 1979's "Rust Never Sleeps," and 1982's "Human Highway" (co-starring him and Devo).

"I've never had a great reaction to any of my films," Young says. "I have made few films and a lot of distance between them, but I think that's about to change because I've found a way to marry my music into film that's satisfying to me."

"Greendale" is an accidental concept album. Young had a general idea of what he and band Crazy Horse - drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot - were doing when they entered the studio. But he likes to let structure and meaning come to his songs, rather than imposing them at the start of the creative process.

"When I first started making the record, I thought I'll also make a long-form video here," he explains. "So I video-recorded the music with five cameras. We have all the masters on tape. I was going to add environmental scenes, atmospheres that went with the music and would be nice on DVD. But then as the songs developed, I didn't know they'd be like a story and that we'd have dialogue.

"So I shot dialogue (with) the actors, put it together with the music and it was terrible," he says. "It was a distraction. Nothing worked. The only thing that really worked was looking at the picture and just watching the Super-8. It was like another world. So I took the stuff with them lip-synching and that became the world of Greendale. And then I went further, exploring instrumentals and building a few characters."

Young, like his friend Bob Dylan, is a veteran roots-rock singer-songwriter still as interested in his future as his past. For instance, although he's been working for several years on a collection of rare and previously unreleased songs, he can't seem to complete it even though he knows he has a large fan base waiting for it.

"Whenever I get to point where I'm ready to put it out, I come up with other ideas," he says. "I constantly have to put it in on the back burner because of the things I'm doing now. I can't have it in the way of what I'm doing."

And he assumes whatever else he does, rock will be a part of it.

"It doesn't let go," he says. "When I was young, I couldn't possibly envision doing this when I was almost 60 years old. Now I'm aware of the physical changes, and of what I have to do to perform, but music is the driving force. As long as I'm writing new songs, I'll probably be performing. And at some point, I may stop performing and only write. But I don't see that yet."