Dazed and Confused ·· 'In Full Effect' ·· Callum McGeoch Chris Cunningham is curled on the floor of his Soho office surrounded by the paraphernalia of a decade spent realizing his imagination. Lying prostrate at his side like an eroticised Storm Trooper is the latest addition to his hall of curiosities. She is the svelte, robot embodiment of Björk from the video for her forthcoming single, "All Is Full Of Love." A video conceived, designed, directed and currently being edited by Chris himself. "It's perfect. I get to play around with the two things I was into as a teenager: robots and porn." In the 18 months since making the seminal, multi award-winning promo for The Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy," Cunningham has been swamped with largely unwanted attention from every major record label, ad agency and Hollywood studio who make it their business to feed on the originality and credibility of talented youth. His choice of directorial projects, from Portishead's "Only You" to Madonna's "Frozen," has shown a level-headed astuteness that belies his age but not his experience. You see the story started way back, in a garage in Lakenheath, Suffolk, where a paranoid 14-year-old began sculpting fantastic grotesques. In the subsequent years, from working in film special effects and comic illustration, to directing forthcoming videos for Squarepusher, Leftfield, and Aphex Twin, Cunningham has learned the inestimable value of not doing as you are told. Dazed & Confused: How did you go about turning your hobby into a career? Chris Cunningham: I was always being told that I was wasting my time, that I should just get a job at the garden centre. Then halfway through my A-levels I thought, 'Fuck it. Why am I bothering?' I took the day off school and went to Pinewood Studios with my portfolio. Clive Barker was there making a horror film with a really young crew and they took me on the design the effects. I stayed with the company for two years. Then you left films for a while, didn't you? I worked for Spitting Image for a few months making puppets of people like Mick Jagger and Thora Hird. Then I got an illustrating job with 2000AD which I did for a couple of years before I realised I wasn't cut out for it. It was good though, because I got a lot better at drawing. At the end of '93 I went for an interview to work on the Judge Dredd film. They'd seen my comic work and hired me to design stuff. When I told them I used to be an effects person they thought I was bullshitting. It took a bit of persuading, but I ended up building the effects. Some people might look at your work and think that it is the product of a slightly disturbed imagination. Well, I had the most idyllic, liberal upbringing you could ask for. Maybe it stems from the fact that I had no restrictions. I would be drawing some strange, sexual, comic scene and mum would be like, 'That's nice dear.' You just couldn't upset them. Were you trying to be rebellious? Not really, I was very paranoid as a kid, really paranoid. My earliest memories of being in primary school were of sitting there thinking, 'the teacher thinks I'm a wanker,' so I would always try really hard to do good work. I assumed that people thought I was rubbish, you know. I suppose it's just old-fashioned insecurity, a classic case of 'I'll fucking show you.' Both 'Come To Daddy' and 'Frozen' have shots of rippling back bones and there are a lot of creatures in your work. Was biology something that interested you? I was really interested in anatomy. It's a total fascination. I can remember the first time I saw a porn film, it was such a massive... well, it was just such a physical experience. It definitely had a lot to do with me drawing and sculpting bodies. Sex is probably the strongest element of my work. Someone asked me recently whether I get turned on when I'm doing my sexual illustrations and I realised that it's completely non-sexual. It's literally the visceral effect you get, the thrill you get from drawing skin and bones. I get excited by the sight of bodies moving. There's something amazing about seeing lots of people doing exactly the same moves in perfect synchrony. Yeah, it gives you a buzz. I can't stand it when people aren't perfectly in time with the music. I spend hours pushing people into sync when I'm at my editing desk. I'm incredibly anal about it - you have to be - because peoples' brains are becoming more and more finely tuned to these things. Something that you thought was in time ten years ago, if you look now, seems really sloppy. You worked on Stanley Kubrick's unreleased film, A.I. How did that come about? He heard what I was doing on Judge Dredd. The art director had worked with Kubrick for years, like on The Shining. It was actually a really depressing period. I felt that I had the best, creamiest job that someone like me could have, but it wasn't what I thought it would be. I wasn't happy. That's when I started getting totally obsessed with Aphex Twin's music. I was listening to the music and taking a load of acid. I reckon acid and techno were the two things that made me have a shift in direction. It lead to me finding new interested in photography and fashion (and less preoccupied with the boys own things). It was realising that I'd grown up. Wasn't it quite late to start getting into acid and techno? Well, I had taken acid when I was 20, listening to the Pixies or something, but listening to Aphex it really started to put pictures in my head. I started reading a lot as well, like Trainspotting, and William Gibson's Neuromancer. It all fitted together perfectly. The books, the music... So was 'Come to Daddy' the result of all that? 'Come to Daddy' was about giving up. By that time I had already been making music videos for a year and a half, one every six weeks, and I couldn't get what I wanted out of it. I was taking every 'cock-rock' video I was offered just to learn how to film stuff, and I just thought, 'Fuck. This is no good.' Things weren't working out. When the Aphex Twin track came in I just thought, 'Right, I'll make one last video and I'll make it completely over the top, just do something for myself.' When I came into music videos I didn't have a direction, I was just aimlessly picking up the camera and trying to work out what people wanted to see. Now I thought, 'This one's for my own entertainment.' It was the most important lesson I've ever learned. Now I make it my top priority not to let anyone make me do things I don't want to do. It means I'm skint all the time. Skint but happy. What was it like going to the desert for the Madonna shoot? To be honest it was a nightmare. When I went on to the set for the first day of shooting, there were helicopters flying around and security guards with guns. Doing the simplest thing was made into an ordeal. If you wanted to give an instruction to the cameraman, you had to go through about six different people. It was all official lines of communication only. Guys would be saying, 'Oh yeah, I worked with Oliver Stone on Natural Born Killers,' and I was really impressed, but when I asked them to do a basic task they didn't know what I was on about. Has that experience put you off doing feature films? Well, I've been sent lots of scripts from Hollywood which I haven't even looked at. I'm not being arrogant about it, I'm just not interested at the moment. I am actually signed to work on the film adaptation of Neuromancer, but I don't want it to be my first film. Right now I want to make a small, esoteric film. I've got a script that I started writing when I was working with Stanley Kubrick. It's a small-scale sex drama with talking-heads and stuff. Richard [Aphex Twin] is really up for doing the music. I'm looking forward to having someone making music to fit my film for once, rather than the other way around. That's why I'm beginning to think this [Björk] might be my last video for a while. It's difficult though, especially when you're skint. It's very tempting to go to the Bahamas and shoot cheesy ads. I just can't get my head around the idea of doing some dark predator-style short film and then having to put a bottle of HP sauce on at the end.