Skip to content
Premieres

See Macauley Culkin in Adam Green’s Comic Movie

110407-adam-green.png

New York City singer-songwriter Adam Green charmed the pants off America with “Anyone Else but You,” the so-cute-it-hurts theme song for Juno that he cowrote with Kimya Dawson, his partner in the Moldy Peaches; it helped rocket the film’s platinum-selling soundtrack to No. 1 on the charts. But now he’s moving behind the camera as the writer, director, and star of a new 70-minute movie, The Wrong Ferarri, which stars Macauley Culkin, along with an eccentric cast of actors and musicians. And it was all shot on an iPhone!

The film, a “screwball tragedy” loosely based on the animal tranquilizer drug Ketamine, debuted online Thursday and features Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development), Aleksa Palladino (Exitmusic, Boardwalk Empire), singer Devendra Banhart, Dev Hynes (Lightspeed Champion), Har Mar Superstar, Irish DJ BP Fallon, vocal work from Evan Dando (The Lemonheads), and more.

“It all started eight months ago, when Macaulay came on my European tour,” Green tells SPIN. “I had an iPhone and just started shooting scenes, for fun. By the third scene it started to develop into a movie.”

Green shot scenes in a French forest, Prague, and Venice, and finished the rest in New York City. Influenced by Woody Allen’s Bananas, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s John Lennon-funded cult film Holy Mountain, Weird Al’s comedy UHF, and Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 satire Putney Swope,The Wrong Ferarri is a collection of oddball scenes and dialogue — “it’s the night your penis turned into the devil!” — and characters in costume, including a Jewish Native American with a bagel necklace, colonial soldiers, and Super Mario Bros. The loose plot focuses on Green, who plays himself “the same way that Jerry Seinfeld plays himself in Seinfeld.”

“It’s a movie without a commercial motive, but for an art film it’s definitely interesting,” he says. “It has direction… but it wasn’t until two-thirds of the way through that I started using a script. It’s a really personal movie… about turning 30 and entering into the next phase of life. I’m preparing for turning 30 so when I actually do it won’t freak me out.”

And about that Ketamine subject? “It’s pet medicine and I was [snorting] it a lot of the time. I wouldn’t recommend it.”