The work of British-Born, Berlin-based Collins has long engaged with the notion of a heterogeneous public. Through video and installation, the 2006 Turner Prize nominee has addressed a variety of communities and subcultures at home and abroad, often taking a collaborative, rather than an ethnographic, approach to working with the narratives
he encounters. A year after its premiere, his 2014 feature-length homage to Glasgow, Tomorrow Is Always Too Long, returns to the Scottish city on July 10 as the centerpiece
 of an exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art. The ebullient documentary/musical
 will be accompanied by previously unseen footage for viewers to parse between screenings. Modern Painters senior editor Thea Ballard spoke with Collins about working with Glaswegians and tapping the emotional authenticity of pop music.

THEA BALLARD: What are the origins of the Tomorrow Is Always Too Long project?

PHIL COLLINS:It came out of the conversations I had with the Common Guild, an arts organization in Glasgow. They asked me to make a work about the city. My family comes from the East End, and I lived in Glasgow at various points in my life, the last time about seven years ago. We had a conversation about the idea of public art, what could it be, especially in relation to an “immaterial,” time-based medium such 
as film and video, whether and how this could function in a public space. As a specific location, we concentrated on Queen’s Park, a big open space on the South Side with 
a long and sometimes savage, sometimes illustrious history, from the defeat of Mary, Queen of Scots in the Battle of Langside to
 a great tradition of public gatherings and demonstrations. I started with this beautiful footage of Paul Robeson visiting the Clydeside workers on a May Day march there in the ’60s. It somehow felt right to express a sense of community and solidarity — which, to me, is characteristic of the city itself on the whole. As an idea for the project began to develop, I became interested in exploring the spaces around and in between the usual cinematic representations of Glasgow, which often relate to its history and architecture or the long-standing issues connected with poverty, drugs, and drug-related crime. Rather than focusing on any of these, I wanted to make a film with and about the people 
of Glasgow, hoping to capture a sense of place and a specific moment in time through a kaleidoscope of everyday experience.

TB: Tell me about the collaborative process of working on the film.

PC:It’s been a real adventure, from start to finish. After the initial development, the production period took about a year. I relocated to Glasgow for the last eight months so I could have regular contact with people who ended up in the film. I was interested in looking at institutions — such as maternity hospitals; schools; Barlinnie, Scotland’s largest prison; retirement homes and social clubs for the elderly—which are very much part of the social fabric but remain largely invisible; semipublic spaces which you might be aware of but don’t necessarily visit, or even know what they look like, if you don’t have the immediate need for them or aren’t forced into using them. I wanted to engage with a range of institutions responding to different life stages, from newborns to pensioners.

TB: How do these varied communities emerge in the film?

PC:I worked with people whom I met in each of these environments to develop a scene, which begins as a documentary but then turns into a musical, sung by the participants with the backing of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. That was one part of the project. The second part consisted of an improvised public access-style channel, which we set up in a disused 1960s TV studio. There I invited people from every walk of
life whom I met along the way — from socially engaged pensioners, burlesque animal rights activists, and street poets to market traders, Elvis impersonators, club kids, and elderly star-crossed lovers — to come and make short programs with me. The third element was a series of silhouette animations, which follow
 a group of characters during a night out on the town — eating chips, loitering in the streets, disco dancing, taking drugs, and engaging in nocturnal free-style sexual acrobatics 
at the local park. I scripted these scenes in collaboration with Ewan Morrison, a brilliant Scottish author; they were then designed
 and beautifully animated by Matthew Robins.

TB: How does this compare to or fit along-side your process for previous works?

PC:The process corresponds to that in previous works in its engagement with communities and people. That’s always a crucial and the most time-consuming aspect: to gradually find and cast the subjects, not in the conventional sense of auditions, but through continuity, dialogue, and spending time together. It was also a collaborative process in the sense of working with other artists on different elements (musicians, an orchestra, an animation artist, a writer, designers, and stylists, etc.), but on a larger scale than in any of my previous works.

TB: What does incorporating — and emphasizing — pop music in your work activate?

PC:The music was always going to be an essential part of the film about Glasgow — it’s one of those places where music seems to
 run in the water, like Manchester or Berlin — switch on a tap and it sings. My friend Cate Le Bon gave us six songs from her most recent album, Mug Museum, a precious psych-folk gem that we arranged for a 50-piece orchestra and re-recorded with participants who sang Cate’s original lyrics. Her songs are formulated in a very specific, really intimate, mysterious, abstract language, that felt right for the scope of emotions and experiences I wanted to address. Another good mate, Barry Burns from Mogwai, wrote the pulsing electronic soundtrack for the animation sequences. It was pretty much a labor of love for everyone involved. For the last few projects, I collaborated with musicians such
 as Lætitia Sadier, Gruff Rhys, Scritti Politti, David Sylvian, and Demdike Stare, among others. Working on music is always one of the most exciting and joyous parts of the process. Dialogues with musicians tend to open up 
the work in an unexpected direction or give another form to the initial premise, especially when it comes to recording new material or developing original compositions.

TB: Your work seems to emphasize the
 social aspects of music.

PC:There’s an undeniable transformative power in a pop song, an ability to tilt even the most mundane situation into the realm of the extraordinary and of heartbreak. It’s a form of artifice in some ways more authentic than “real” emotion. I guess this lies at the heart
 of certain forms of cinematic representation as well, especially in genres such as the musical.

So with the musical sequences in the
 film, I wanted to imagine the real through the frame of music, and make something where song emerges from a living, breathing, working space. It was important that the people I met sang the songs themselves, not mime them, which took a lot of time and patience — and trust, dedication, and bravery on their part — to get to the point at which they sound like they do, but I think you 
can feel their exhilaration and joy in giving these extraordinary performances. And
 if the film can be described to function, like some have suggested, as an update on the idea of city symphony, it does very literally so, through the voices of its inhabitants.