Going with the grain

Neil Young is notoriously hard to reach for an interview, but he's not hiding out this time. He has a new film, "Greendale," and he's going full speed ahead to make sure it gets seen, as if he were some kind of Hollywood super-agent.

"The film has only one chance, but that's the cool thing about it," says Young, speaking by telephone from Philadelphia, where he had a show the next night. "It gives me somewhere to go where people are talking about the film . . . and not talking about my place in musical history."

Young's place in musical history is pretty firm at this point -- he certainly needs no introduction -- but in the movie world, he's grappling to find some respect. "Greendale," which opens at the Kendall Cinema Friday, is an allegorical, post-hippie/new age message film based on the rock musical of the same name that Young has toured behind for the past year. He performed it twice in Boston last summer and repeats it tonight at the Mullins Center in Amherst with basically the same cast.

"This will be our 80th show, or something like that," Young says. "We're getting better at it."

"Greendale" is about a small northern California town where Earl and Edith Green live a cozy, close-to-nature life with their daughter Sun Green, who later stages a protest at a power company and then goes to Alaska to help preserve the environment. Her cousin, Jed, on the other hand, kills a police officer in Greendale after being caught with drugs in his car. That shocks the sleepy town, and Sun Green's grandfather suffers a heart attack when confronted by media hordes, including a news helicopter flying overhead.

The aerial prop is a surprising inclusion for such a low-budget production, one that came courtesy of a friend of Young's.

"Yeah, we knew a guy who had a helicopter," says Young, laughing. "He's kind of a cowboy helicopter operator, and he was based in the town of Half Moon Bay, where we got just about everything else we needed [for the film]. We just worked with what we had."

The film "just sort of developed from the songs," Young says with typical nonchalance. "When we finished the record, we had told a story, and then it seemed obvious that we could turn it into something more than that. So we just went for it."

Young filmed it with a Super 8 camera, which yields grainy footage that makes "Greendale" look like an old-school art-cinema flick. If you're looking for the latest technology, you won't find it here.

"It's a German underwater camera called a Eumig Nautica," Young explains. "My partner, Larry Johnson [who also co-produced the "Greendale" album], gave it to me."

So did Johnson create a monster?

"Yes, he did," says Young. "But if you really take your time and you got all the right situations and everything is good, then you can actually get a picture that's kind of half-clear."

Young jokes that the grainy pictures from the camera "look the way that my music sounds."

"Yes, the pictures are as distorted as the guitar is," he adds. "It's basically breaking up, but I like things that are on the edge of breaking up. So they do go together, though I wasn't thinking of that when we started. I was thinking that, first of all, Super 8 is portable and easy to use. And since I was doing a lot of the shooting myself [Young goes by the name of Bernard Shakey in the credits], that was important to me. I didn't want to be bogged down by having an assistant that had to tell me how to do everything."

There is no dialogue in the film. The actors lip-synch Young's lyrics -- and he never planned it otherwise.

"A whole soundtrack was finished before the first frame was shot. So at that point, you don't have to worry about what the actors are saying or whether they remember their lines. And you don't have to worry about the rhythm of the scene or how long should it be, because it has to be a certain length or it's not going to fit."

Young has been a tireless booster of the "Greendale" album, even during the making of the movie.

"We got to listen to it all the time when we were filming," he says. "And the music really held up. There was nothing that made you feel, `I'm getting tired of it already.' I think [this is because of] the music form that we were using. It's based on the blues and if you get immersed in it, you don't ever have to leave it."

To the untrained listener, the music may lack variation because much of it deals with improvisation on some basic riffs. Not everyone has Young's appreciation for subtlety.

Regardless, he put his heart into the project, working 12- to 16-hour days for close to three weeks. "We just kept rolling. I'd get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and go until 9 o'clock at night," he says.

When was the last time he put in such long hours?

"I'll put in 12 hours a day sometimes when I'm making a record, but this was just so much fun," Young says.

And, like Alfred Hitchcock, Young briefly put himself into the film. He's shown with the hand-held Super 8 camera taping the West Coast band EchoBrain, which is lip-synching one of his songs, and in a short scene in which he plays singer Wayne Newton getting into a limousine. "Wayne wasn't available on 10 minutes' notice when we decided to put him in the film," Young says with a laugh. It was also a way for Young to satirize pop idols: as Newton, he wears a huge dollar-sign necklace purchased in a novelty shop.

"Young never worries about taking a risk," says Terry Stewart, the president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. "He is all about expressing himself, and that's what a real artist does. It's not whether the public will accept it or not, but it's about getting his point across, which is why he has remained relevant to many generations."

Young definitely expresses his point about the out-of-control tabloid media in "Greendale"; the press stops at nothing to hound the family in the film. "Obviously, it reflects the things that I feel," he says. "I find it hard to watch TV without getting upset. You wonder, why are we hearing about Martha Stewart ad nauseum and not about Halliburton?"

Young isn't sure if he'd like to make a "Greendale" sequel, but he does hope to get behind the camera again.

"I would love to make other movies," he says. "but I have to have a subject. There are a lot of subjects out there, but I'm waiting for them to all coalesce and become something that I can put down on tape."

Steve Morse can be reached at morse@globe.com.