RES Vol. 1 #4 ·· Fall 98 ·· 'Chris Cunningham' ·· Peter Relic Chris Cunningham lies on his belly in a parking lot beside a derelict brown Chevy van with the words "Bare As You Dare" spray-painted on its side. His Polaroid is aimed at a luscious triumvirate of stacked chicks in cream-colored bikinis draped across the leather interior of a white Mustang GT 4.6l convertible. The Mustang's chrome rims are fashioned in the stylized alpha logo of the Aphex Twin, a.k.a. Richard James, who reclines amidst the female talent with his feet splayed across white bucket seats, the toes of his black Adidas worn through to reveal the toes of his neon green socks. The Polaroid keeps ejaculating prints - momentos of three days of sun, sex and rump-shaking filmmaking at Santa Monica Beach for Windowlicker, the second collaboration between Aphex Twin, techno's chief re-engineer, and Chris Cunningham, a.k.a. "The World's Hottest Director" (thanks, Saatchi & Saatchi). Cunningham's reel is a mind-fuck. He debuted professionally in 1992 at age seventeen, creating special effects for David Fincher's Alien 3, and directed his first video - an Autechre clip populated by arachnid androids - just three years later. He shot a mendicant Madonna in her Frozen desert, personified paralyzing obsession with a boy doing back flips in a floatation tank for Portishead's Only You, and slapped viewers silly with the horrorcore farce of Squarepusher's Come On My Selector, which featured an orphaned Japanese cutie who swaps the brains of her fatso warder with those of a dog. He worked as a creature designer on Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien Resurrection and designed robots for Stanley Kubrick's forthcoming AI. In 1997 he made the seven-minute Come To Daddy, a savage depiction of life in a British housing estate held hostage by a posse of club-wielding kids - all wearing masks of a grinning Aphex Twin, whose shock-hawking beats were synced meticulously to Cunningham's frenzied frames. "Chris is the only person I can be bothered to work with," Aphex Twin declares as the final day of shooting wraps, but what sounds like faint praise is actually the bottom line of a strong bond between the two lank-haired Brits. For Windowlicker, a sort of sequel to Come To Daddy, Cunningham will use Photoshop to replace the faces of the champagne-showering booty girls with the Twin's grinning visage. The bizarre contrast created by the merging of James' face with the bodies of young children and voluptuous women is both disturbing and hilarious simultaneously. How much of the sexiness of the girls will be retained once Aphex Twin's face has been morphed on? The twin calculates his answer with the now-insidious grin: "Zero." Later, at the pair's LA lair, one of Cunningham's ink drawings of coital grotesquery sits on the coffee table. Above it hangs a color-coded wall chart marking out every moment of the 5-minutes, 57-second long Windowlicker video, with directions like "erection rule twang sound!" and seemingly disparate mentions of "Gene Kelly" and "ABBA movie" pencilled in. A French voice speaking over the in-room stereo sounds like something sampled for a classic rave track. "You'll have to ask the rave lieutenant about that," Cunningham says, nodding at Aphex Twin. "Rave colonel," the Twin corrects, setting up his magnetic chess set. "Gurning colonel," Cunningham counters. "Gurnel," concludes the Twin. It's just this sort of playful escalation that Cunningham has successfully transferred to the screen with Windowlicker, and once again he manages to be humorous, spooky, subversive and unforgettable, all in one clip. Shrugging off the notion that his work is groundbreaking, Cunningham says "The only thing new about this video is the Kodak film stock we used." The 28-year old director settled in to speak with RES recently about his work in motion pictures. RES: In your videos for Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy and Squarepusher's Come On My Selector you depict children who have a depraved type of fun within a very oppressive adult-created environment. Is this related to your entry into the professional world at such a young age? CC: When I first came into the film industry I was at least seven or eight years younger than most people I was working with. And because I was hyperactive I got a lot of people's backs up. I'd be paranoid that someone was trying to stop me from doing something, so I'd be like, "Fuck you, I'll show you." That's what used to motivate me. I definitely think that paranoia is my greatest quality [cackles]. There is a very fine line between being acutely sensitive and being paranoid. And I think that someone calling you paranoid [as opposed to] calling you sensitive depends on how they're feeling toward you at the time when they say it. There's a correlation in the chemical world as well. Drugs can be sensitizers but can also make you paranoid. I'd say that one of the main reasons I'm directing right now is acid. In '93-'94 I was taking a lot of acid and listening to a lot of music and that's basically when I conceived of the sound/image thing. I'd been working in 2-D and 3-D, building things and drawing things, and taking acid opened me up to sound and moving images. Acid, especially [while] listening to music, has got a lot to do with movement. I suddenly started seeing the limitations in doing sculpting and drawing. It just wasn't enough. I don't want to sound like some kind of fucking hippy, but acid made me care less about what other people were thinking and more [about] concentrating on expressing myself. Do you feel more freedom making videos for instrumental tracks or songs with lyrics? It depends on the track. I like having some limitations. Complete freedom for me personally isn't always the best situation. I'm not a conceptual person at all. The only part of music videos I am into is translating sound into pictures. I hear a song and I can see what the sound looks like. On a piece of sound edit software you can see the shape of the sound, and I see what an image that would match that would look like. A snare sound would be a hard slap, for example. The problem with the way I'm working is it's so labor intensive. In a lot of music videos people come up with a concept for a video and they can just shoot the film and lay it over the top like wallpaper. But working with people like Squarepusher of Aphex Twin or Autechre - the more complex the music is, the more work I've got to do. And once you start showing someone a picture that's really well-synced to sound, their brain gets into the right gear. Is there a part of your brain that maintains a post-production mentality while you're shooting? Yeah, especially now that I'm editing. The editing is where my brain is most active. I'm more creative from an editing point of view than in any other part of the process. When I'm on a shoot I'm always thinking about being in the edit room and trying to make my life as easy as possible. Editing is the only part I enjoy; working on the Avid is brilliant. In your teenage sketchbooks, what kind of stuff were you drawing? Pornography mainly. I used to draw robots and pornography, and now I don't even draw robots anymore. Do your pornographic drawings turn you on? Not at all! I like drawing genitalia because it's really interesting to draw; it's got loads of form and wrinkles and stuff. From a sculptural point of view it's really beautiful. When I draw I'm certainly not in a sexual state of mind. People look at my drawings and go "What's going on in your head?" My mind is completely blank, apart from getting a visceral thrill out of the pen and the paper and drawing shapes. My reasoning for doing things is so crude. With this Aphex Twin video I loved the idea of seeing white metal against blue sky and bodies. With the Madonna video someone said to me "Why is there so much death imagery?" The truth of the matter is that I just wanted to use black elements against white, and a raven has an amazingly black glistening body, and so does the Doberman. I thought the black dog was a visual pun on the production company! No! But yeah, I see it. You shot the Madonna video in the Mojave, and then you went and worked with Kubrick out in the desert as well? It was amazing, working on this film in Namibia out in the dunes, off the Swakopmund. Working with Kubrick is something that I'm definitely proud of having done, but at the same time I know he wants to keep his film quite secret. He asked me to design the robots for this film. I used to build robot arms, and I really got into doing the engineering side as well. Industrial robotics was the thing that I was most interested in. I ended up working for Kubrick for a year and a half. Was it a good experience as far as learning how effects best serve a film? I developed that state of mind on my own. Working for Stanley Kubrick, I realized that I wasn't into just special effects. I've actually got a healthy contempt for special effects. I can't believe I was ever an effects person. It's almost like someone who used to be a murderer and has turned to religion. I speak from experience. When I used to work on effects all I could think about was how good the thing's gonna look in my portfolio, whereas now the shoe's on the other foot. It's very hard to say to the effects guy, "Look, do it with a piece of cling film and cellotape it, it'll be fine, it doesn't need to be sculpted for two weeks." The thing with Kubrick is that he's always looking for the simplest way of doing things. And the simplest way of doing things is normally the way that's going to stand the test of time. How does that relate to the videos you've made? I think that what I do is standard filmmaking. It might seem different because the images themselves might seem odd, but as far as the technical side of it is concerned, I've got a really, really old-fashioned way of working. I'm actually trying to simplify even more each time I do it, trying to keep it down to shooting, editing, and no effects. With the Aphex Twin video we're doing at the moment, originally I was going to use post-production to copy all the dancers to make them seem like millions of dancers in the street. But I looked at it and just thought,  Oh bollocks, I don't need it.' But you've used effects effectively, like the homage to Videodrome in your Come To Daddy video, with the TV screen morphing into a human body. I reckon Videodrome is a comedy. James Woods was brilliant in it, one of the best roles he's ever done. I met David Cronenberg actually, really nice bloke. First job I ever had was working on this horror film with Clive Barker, and Cronenberg played a part in it. What other films influenced your visual style? Star Wars is such a fucking fundamental influence in my work. It's all white costumes against black walls - everything's very classy. But what they did to the new version was a crime. That Jabba the Hut just looked like a lump of plaster. What freaked me out was hearing George Lucas saying, "I've now managed to make it what I wanted it to be." And I thought, "If that's how you wanted it to be, thank God effects weren't up to scratch back then.' Luc Besson's early films have amazing graphic simplicity, like Nikita. But there was no design continuity in The Fifth Element at all. What are your plans for a debut feature? I'm doing Neuromancer, the William Gibson book. The problem with that book is that it's been picked clean over the past ten years, and every concept in it is almost outmoded now. But I still think that there's a brilliant film in there, so I'm gonna have a crack at it. Doing Neuromancer will require finding a new angle on it, that's all. Film shouldn't be about technology, that should be the background. Neuromancer is a thrilling story. It's also about loads of ideas that Gibson had. I reckon the ideas wouldn't be interesting enough to hold a film together, but there are other things in the book that are. It's like a detective story where you don't know what's going on. I love things like that that unfold.