ADAM

DESIGNING ADAM'S WORLD
ADAM is not just an offbeat love story. It's also very much a New York love story. For Max Mayer, part of the fun was creating two different views of New York – the bustling city of struggle and opportunity that Beth lives in; and the secret city of hidden nooks and urban wilderness that Adam inhabits. The overall result is a quieter, greener, more elegant Manhattan where love blossoms out of view.

"I grew up in New York and I knew that if you shoot in New York it becomes a character in the movie because the city always encroaches in its own way on the story and you never get perfect conditions,” Mayer notes. "To add to that we have a character who tries to live in a glass bubble in the middle of the city, so it was quite a challenge.”

To capture all this, Mayer worked closely with a talented production team, including director of photography Seamus Tierney and production designer Tamar Gadish. Both Tierney and Gadish worked to create sense of intimacy that enlarges the characters through detail – Gadish with strikingly contrasting interiors for Adam, Beth and Beth's parents and Tierney with a warm, understated visual style that puts the spotlight on each character.

"I would say that about 75% of making this movie was simply working with Hugh and Rose and Seamus and Tamar figuring out the relationships and how to have the camera reflect them,” says Mayer. "It was all done very moment to moment.”

Throughout those moments, the city provided its own inspiration. "Shooting in New York in the winter isn't all glamour,” laughs Leslie Urdang, "but the city's energy becomes part of your filmmaking and that's very exciting.”

She summarizes: "Ultimately, the biggest challenge of ADAM, in the production, the performances and the editing process, was trying to create a world in which you can imagine these two people coming together, and where you can laugh and recognize our own relationships. We had a great team who believed in Max, and who especially believed in Beth and Adam.”

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