Inventor, architect, and environmentalist Buckminster Fuller lived his life in a fully multidimensional way, so when filmmaker Sam Green was asked to develop a documentary on the inventor of the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car, he knew he didn’t want to wind up with something best suited to the flat screen of a laptop or tablet.

When he presents The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Vogue Theatre, he’ll be on-stage, narrating the film while manipulating its flow in real time—with live accompaniment by the ultimate indie-rock band, Yo La Tengo.

“One of the very interesting things about Fuller, to me, is that he was a performer,” Green explains in a telephone interview from Brooklyn, New York. “And I don’t mean that in the sense that he was disingenuous, I just mean that a huge part of his work was being up in front of people talking. He lectured all over the world for years and years and years. Even when he was older he was travelling in this kind of, like, gruelling, relentless way, and he’d talk. One thing that was great about him is that he was an incredible talker; he’d talk for five hours straight with no notes. So in that sense, so much of what he was about was performative—and this idea of communicating through live performance is echoed in our piece, obviously.”

Green is no stranger to the idea of toying with the documentary form. But if he was influenced by Fuller’s penchant for modular structures, it was on the subconscious level: when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art first approached him in conjunction with a show of Fuller’s designs, he had little idea of what he was getting into.

“I had known just sort of what everybody knows about Buckminster Fuller: he was that dome guy from the ’70s,” Green admits. “That’s all I knew. The people at the museum mentioned that his archive was at Stanford, and that they were doing this project in conjunction with the archive, and that I could go look around. So, out of curiosity, I went, ‘Yeah, I’m interested in checking that out.’ I expected it to be four or five boxes in a room, but when I got there it was this enormous trove of stuff. His archive is, in some ways, his greatest work: it’s this enormous thing that every day he put stuff into. So, in going through it, I was hooked. At first I saw him just as an utterly fascinating character, but the more I learned about his ideas, the more relevant they seemed—strikingly relevant.”

Fuller, who died in 1983, was often dismissed as a mad scientist during his life: after all, the efficient use of energy was hardly a hot topic during the oil-fuelled boom years of the 1950s and ’60s. Now, though, he’s become an icon of both environmentalism and urbanism.

“He started his project in the late 1920s and lived into the early ’80s, so it was 50 years that he was doing this,” Green says. “And he was remarkably consistent. He said the same thing over and over and over again, the same set of ideas about using design for social change, and using resources wisely. His idea was that we have more than enough resources for everybody on the planet to have a comfortable life; we just don’t distribute them well. He was saying that in the ’40s and ’50s, but in some sense the situation wasn’t as dire as it is now. Now, it feels like his ideas are more relevant than they’ve ever been—to me, at least.”

Fuller also loved to surprise his audiences, and Green’s not above incorporating some of that into his live shows. Expect Vancouver to make a cameo appearance in The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller—but as for how or when, that’s something the filmmaker is keeping strictly under wraps.

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Vogue Theatre next Wednesday (November 12).