VOGUE
This 18-Year-Old Filmmaker and Gucci Model Has Reinvented the Concept of “Home Movies”
January 31, 2022
Photo: John Adams
There’s a changing of the guard in fashion and culture. Gen Z creators are pushing the conversation forward in ways both awe-inspiring and audacious. Our latest project, Youthquake, invites you to discover how these artists, musicians, actors, designers, and models are radically reimagining the future.
So much about the current pandemic-lingering moment can feel so painfully static that it’s a little hard to clock just how much can still happen in the life of a teenager. The pandemic, in fact, has been a moment of artistic development and professional blossoming for
Zelda Adams, an 18-year-old filmmaker and model who has been crafting films with her family—and we’re not talking reunion reels—since she was a child. It has even made it more convenient: “When Covid hit at the end of tenth grade it was really good timing, actually,” she tells me. “It’s when I started making my second horror film, so it’s been a good fit for me, to do my schoolwork online.” The freedom allowed the family to travel, too. “We bought a truck and a trailer and went all around America—to Maine, Texas, the coast of Washington, Oregon.”
When I speak with Zelda, she’s momentarily camping out at her grandparents’ house in the Catskills, which is just three miles away from her own home. (The grandparents have better WiFi.) The walls behind her are painted a peachy pink; a light fixture that looks like something Schoolhouse Electric would crib hangs from the ceiling; and at one point she has to pause our conversation to allow a grandfather clock to finish its chiming. It’s a cozy scene. Adam’s great-grandparents moved to this part of upstate New York as immigrants from Ireland, and the family has maintained what Zelda called “a little monopoly in one corner” of the surrounding landscape ever since. It’s early in the new year, a time when many second-semester seniors might still be shaking off the holiday torpor, but Adams has been busy working on her college applications; she’d like to attend an art school, hopefully in New York City.
Among the accomplishments she might outline in these applications are the seven feature films she has made with her family: her mother, the actor Toby Poser; her father, John Adams, a former model (he appeared in ad campaigns for Gucci, Giorgio Armani, and Calvin Klein in the ‘90s); and her 23-year-old sister Lulu, who lives in Hawaii but remains an active member of the creative crew. (Her parents met in New York City in the late 80s. “My dad invited my mom to a punk rock show,” Zelda says. “It piqued her interest.”) The initial motivation to form their family production unit, which took shape as
Wonder Wheel Productions, occurred about a decade ago, when the family was living in L.A. John was working on a reality T.V. show, but parts were sparse for Toby, and so the family hatched an idea to make their own film. Zelda had just seen
Twilight, and was into the idea of becoming a famous movie star a la Kristen Stewart.
The family made four features: “dramas that mainly dealt with the theme of love and loss in broken families, and the glue that holds them together,” Zelda says, though she assures me that her family is “very, very happy.” Then Zelda asked the family if they might be interested in trying their hand at horror. Her parents, she says, were horror buffs, and Zelda names
Carrie as the first film that had a profound effect on her.
Their latest,
Hellbender, which was filmed mostly during the pandemic, has Zelda playing a 16-year-old living on a remote mountain top with her witchy mother. The mother (played by Toby) has told her daughter that she suffers from a rare illness and that they need to keep away from other people to remain safe. An encounter with a bubbly blonde (played by real life sister Lulu—socially distanced from the rest of the family in all the shots since she was not in their pod at the time) makes her question this logic. For the most part Zelda, her sister and her parents
made up the entirety of the cast and crew—aided only by a tripod and some drones. The film screened at Telluride last summer and was acquired by AMC’s horror streaming service
Shudder, which plans to release the film on February 24.
Meanwhile, a parallel track was unfolding when, back in March of 2021, Zelda caught the attention of an agent at Elite models and was signed shortly thereafter. Since then her modeling career has been a brief but powerful rocket-ride. Just after she turned 18, she was cast in last fall’s
Gucci Love Parade—it was her first casting, and her first job. “Alessandro Michele is a genius,” she says, “and I’m just grateful for everyone that helped me be a part of it.” (She cites a photo in which she posed with Phoebe Bridgers and Macauley Culkin as a particular highlight.) Having her father as something of a role model and mentor has helped keep her grounded. “He always tries to advise me that I’m going to be the best model just by being myself,” she says. “I’m really lucky to have that.”
For
Vogue’s
Youthquake series, Zelda created a short film that she describes as a “exploration of the duality” associated with love. Two characters, Eve—a more refined, lighthearted, seraphic figure—and Eville—the dark, sly counterpart to Eve’s lightness—are fighting for a necklace, a conflict that symbolizes, Zelda says, “the struggle to find love.” Both characters “are equal in their inner beauty,” she continues, but explore “opposite sides of the spectrum.” The necklace, in this case, was sourced by an enterprising
Vogue editor who was particularly inspired by Zelda’s vision, but for the most part, Zelda obtains her props and costumes from thrift and antique stores, and her mother’s closet. “She’s always asking me, ‘Where are my red shoes …?’” The film melds an animated vision with real-life footage, and is tied together by a soundtrack created by Zelda and her father. At its heart, Zelda says the film is an examination of the universal and complex desire to find love. “If you can find love, you can find your true self,” she says.
