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Adam Goldberg as composer Adrian Jacobs in the contemporary art spoof (Untitled).

Oct 30, 2009 By Chris Tinkham Web Exclusive

In his latest film, the satirically titled comedy (Untitled), Adam Goldberg plays Adrian Jacobs, a brooding avant-garde composer with an unorthodox, oftentimes ridiculous, approach to music performance. Adrian, a self-important sound artist with barely a following, incorporates sounds from a potpourri of objects into his compositions, and in one scene, his musicians rehearse a piece that involves a tin bucket hanging from a string, for kicking purposes. The film, directed and co-written by Jonathan Parker, is a parody of New York’s contemporary art scene and lampoons the sometimes baffling and laughable subjectivity of modern art taste. Alongside Goldberg, Marley Shelton plays Madeleine Gray, a tightly wound Chelsea gallery owner, and Eion Bailey plays Adrian’s brother, a commercial painter who can’t get his work displayed by Madeleine, even though his sales fund her gallery.

Although Adrian’s pieces were written by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, Goldberg was able to bring his own musical insights to the role. A songwriter and musician, Goldberg released his debut album Eros and Omissions under the moniker LANDy this summer. Unlike the music of his character in (Untitled), Goldberg’s songs are dreamy and instrumentally rich, with a pop sensibility that at times brings to mind John Lennon or Elliott Smith. I spoke to Goldberg earlier this month about (Untitled) and his follow-up music project.

How did the script for (Untitled) come to your attention?

I believe my manager was sent the script. It’s oftentimes unclear whether a small movie is as financed as they say it is. So you always read these things with a grain of salt, but it was my understanding that it was a film that was financed and ready to go. And, at the time, I believe there was another actor attached to play my brother. Anyway, I read it and responded to it and I said, “Sure.” And, as it turns out, there were some scheduling issues with this other cast member, so, after a bit of time, I was the only one attached to it, and then my manager and I sort of got more involved in moving the production forward and helping out with some of the casting ideas, and that kind of thing. And, some months later, we were shooting it.

How would you describe your character Adrian?

Indignant, self-righteous, but clearly as a cover for his own feelings of commercial inadequacy. Although he sort of justifies his commercial inadequacy or his commercial shortcomings by owning them and saying, “These are the audiences of real artists.” He kind of hides behind this veil of austere artistry. He’s definitely a pretty insecure guy. I think he’s really just grappling with his identity, not just as a person but as an artist, as a composer, has very heady ideas about what music is, sort of eschewing the more classical or emotionally rooted ways of composing music for these bizarre, intellectual notions of what it means to be a new musician. The thing I like about this movie is that everybody’s clearly got a personality beneath the persona, and the layers kind of get stripped away a bit, or some of their armor gets holes poked into it, so you can take a peek, and they can take a peek out from beneath it, but without being too didactic about it, which is definitely one of the things I liked about this film.

When you’re playing a serious-minded character in a comedy, how much earnestness is required? Is there the temptation to exaggerate the comedy?

For sure. And there’s also a temptation to rely on things that I have done prior to that, that are maybe more intuitive ways of being funny, and I really put it upon Jonathan to make sure that I was kept in check in many ways. That was something I was keenly aware of while we were doing it, and also trying to make sure that you’re not commenting too much on these characters. Marley and I would talk about that a lot. On the one hand, in a way, it is our responsibility, although it is a director’s responsibility, but, it is our responsibility as actors to make the characters identifiable in some way, because you had no real good guy or bad guy, you had no clear protagonist in the film. There are aspects of it that are subjective in the scenes that I’m in, but it is a film about this group and the scene, and so we would have to try and find a balance between making the characters identifiable and somewhat sympathetic, so you didn’t feel completely alienated, but at the same time really not commenting on them and just taking it all very seriously, which, in many ways, is actually pretty easy, I think.

Everything was sort of there. You just had to be there and be that guy, and it was very clearly defined to me how this guy was going about his business, just by how he spoke and how his dialogue was written. So one of the limitations I tried to place on myself was to not improvise too much; there’s very little of that, whereas in some of the other films that I’ve done, there’d be far more of it because I felt that it was real important to try my best any way to adapt to the material. Although there are certain things I could absolutely relate to in the character, he definitely spoke and acted in a way that is far stranger than how I sound.

He has some unique approaches to music performance. Being a musician yourself, were there ideas that you brought to this or the character?

Not really. David Lang, the composer of both the score and the music that you hear us performing in the movie, had recorded this music. We came to the studio and sort of watched them record the stuff to which we were going to perform. There were little things, like the pianist would do something, and I would say, “I thought it should get quieter here or louder here” or something like that, because I would imagine how I would be performing that scene. The only other thing was that it was really difficult to try and authentically reproduce the stuff visually without hours and hours and hours of rehearsal because it’s just totally structure-less.

So, for instance, the first performance is kind of an amalgam of stuff that I was actually doing mixed with these initial recordings. There’s a lot of cross-hitting going on, I’m guessing. And then there was another one that we perform in the gallery, the first time, the bubble wrap and I’m blowing into glasses, and that actually is something that I said, “Look, this playback thing isn’t really working. Why don’t we all take a break and figure something out?” So that performance was live. I sort of took it upon myself to direct what that performance would be. Again, just based on the character, not based on anything I would do myself. So it was a cross-section and definitely very collaborative. Although, there are some things, like sampling sounds and hitting the insides, the strings of the piano, which I’ve done [laughs] and actually just did on this last record. There’s definitely certain elements I could relate to, and I actually had brought a bunch of my pedals that I’d set up in my apartment, and had taken pictures of my music room and the way that I had things organized, which, at the time, was rather fastidiously organized as a template for the production designer. So we sort of used a little of my personal mode of organization just for the aesthetic aspect of it.

Did you have any impromptu jam sessions with the other cast members between takes?

Yeah, you give a group of bored people—standing around waiting for the next shot—a bunch of mallets and strange percussion devices, there’s definitely a lot of clanking and banging going on [laughs], for sure. And I would hang out and play piano between takes.

Have you had real-life experiences with the crowd that the film lampoons?

Not really. I kind of grew up around a lot of art and going to galleries and to a lot of museums, but I haven’t had any firsthand experience with whole kind of Damien Hirst scene and all that. But there’s definitely a real familiarity just being around these kind of galleries and gallery sets; I spent a lot of time as a kid hanging around there. As far as the music stuff, there are frames of reference I was familiar with musically, but not the scene itself, not the audience of four of five people. And I think there’s a timeless/anachronistic element to the music he’s doing. It’s meant to be very modern, but it was modern really in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

What can you tell me about the album you’re working on now?

I’m just sort of emerging from the k hole that’s been the last month and just taking a couple weeks with these mixes, and then we’ll probably get back together in a couple weeks for some revisions. And then it will be really done. I had planned on making a ground-up record. This thing I did last time was compiled over many years and many different locales and many different people. So this is just a group of people, and studio time became available at Aaron Espinosa’s, where I had done some of the additional recording and the final mixes for our record last year. Some time came up much earlier than I expected, so I just went with it and got a bunch of stuff into shape and wrote some new stuff. And we just started a few weeks ago and finished late Friday night. There’s gonna be a built-in sense of cohesion just by the fact that it’s all done in the same place and with the same five or six people the whole time there.

So the opportunity for studio time compelled you to write new material?

I had a minor backlog of things from stuff that didn’t make it on the last record that hadn’t really been recorded properly. So there were about four older songs, and about three other songs I had written just in the course of the last year. And then, three songs that were written—one as recently as a couple days before I went in the studio, which, interestingly, I think is the most fully realized piece on the thing, and another one I had written maybe a week or two before that, and another sort of more quiet solo-ish type of thing that I wrote in the studio. So, I just used it as an opportunity to jumpstart my writing. I was just excited to have the studio time, so it definitely seemed to spawn some good ideas.

I’m not sure what this record will be called, if I’ll be using the same moniker or not. I might change it every go around just for the hell of it.

http://untitled-themovie.com

http://landytheband.com

www.myspace.com/landytheband