Given that Chris Cunningham has just been announced as one of the artists for this year's Vivid festival in Sydney, I thought it'd be an appropriate one to pull from the extensive Clark Nova archives.
I'm not in the habit of re-reading my old interviews so I was surprised at how great my Chris Cunningham interview seemed to go. The only thing I can remember from the time is that I was drunk and in a hurry to get to some sort of unimportant gathering at a pub two blocks away. I also vaguely remember him getting annoyed at me at some point, some point after the long discussion involving Pavement!
It seems strange a significant amount of the interview was discussion of the DVD format given in the few years since, broadband internet has rendered most of the conversation irrelevant.
Probably one of the more interesting interviews I've done (at least until I re-discover another gem)… especially because we talked a lot about Pavement!
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| Chris Cunningham (stolen from vividsydney.com) |
You’re best known for doing music videos, does it make things easier when you’ve already got the sound to put visuals to?
It’s quite enjoyable doing it that way because you’ve got set parameters, you know?
How does it work differently to doing things the other way around?
It’s just different; you just end up with something with a different feel to it. When the music’s driving the images it has a different feel.
When you hear the music do you have images in your head of what you want to do?
Yeah. You hear the music and it puts something in your head and you try to figure out how to film it.
It seems like quite an abstract process. Is it that simple, you just see it an do it?
Yeah. And then you sit down I guess and you are suddenly faced with a thousand practical problems and you start adjusting the idea to suit the technical problems you come up against. Along the way you try to stay as true to the original [idea] as you can.
What sort of music creates these ideas for you? Obviously it’s worked well with the music from Warp.
I like loads of different music. It just happens that if you want to be experimental with the form, there’s not a lot of music that allows you to do that so, obviously, the main reason I’ve worked with people like Richard [James - Aphex Twin] or Squarepusher is because their music is experimental. In order for me to be experimental I need to work with experimental music, it doesn’t mean that’s all I listen to, that’s just what suits my ideas best. I’d much rather sit down and listen to Led Zeppelin.
Do you wish you could work with people like that?
Yeah, I’d love to.
Are there opportunities for working with people more in that style?
Yeah, I guess so. There’s not many bands around as good as Led Zeppelin though, is there?
They’re not my favourite.
[Laughs] What do you like then?
I like a lot of stuff, just not a Zeppelin fan.
You don’t like rock music?
I like rock music.
You just don’t like them?
They’re just not a band I’ve ever been into.
What rock music do you like, then?
I like a lot of lo-fi stuff and Kraut-rock.
Like Neu?
Yeah.
Yeah, they’re brilliant. Do you like Pavement?
I absolutely love Pavement.
Yeah, they were my favourite band in the '90s.
What did you think of their videos?
I nearly did a video for Pavement actually. I met Stephen Malkmus when he was in Camden when they were recording their last album and I came very close to doing a video for them. But, the same kind of thing happened. As far as the kind of ideas I have and things I want to try out, Slanted & Enchanted would have been a better album for me to have done a track from. Their later music was less and less experimental to me.
What track were you going to do for them?
Do you know what, I can’t remember because I went to meet them in the studio and I don’t think they’d decided at that point what they were going to release as a single but I think they were pretty much going to let me pick a track.
Most of the stuff you do is quite dark, I can’t see how that would work with a band like Pavement.
Yeah but just because what you’ve seen of mine is dark doesn’t mean I couldn’t do something light.
Does that sense of darkness come naturally?
I don’t think the Bjork video is dark.
It’s very melancholy, though.
I guess so. The funny thing is, I think there’s something quite mysterious about Pavement’s music. A lot of their music has a very ethereal quality to it.
So, what did you think of their videos?
The ones I saw I wasn’t very keen on. I’ve seen most of them because they were on their Slow Century DVD and I didn’t see anything I really liked. The thing is, It would be a lot harder to a video for something like that because it’s very much about the band and I would find that more difficult. If someone said to me you could make a video for Pavement, I think I would be more inclined to do something like a performance video because I’d wanna see the band. It’s different when you’re working with anonymous techno people because you can go off on a tangent.
The editing seems to be very important to what you do. How would you do something like that for Pavement?
This is a common misunderstanding. I don’t play around with editing, in the classical sense of what editing is. If you were to actually watch Rubber Johnny or Come To Daddy at half speed, the editing is very old fashioned and simple. It’s like watching the film; it’s the action that drives the edit. It’s what happens in front of the camera that’s fast. It just depends on the tempo. I think that because it’s 190BPM people think I’m doing all sorts of weird things with the editing and I’m not. The editing is extremely basic, it’s what’s happening in the frame that’s off the wall. I guess what I’m saying is, if I suddenly had a track that was 120BPM, like a Pavement track, the editing wouldn’t change at all, there’d just be less of them.
You obviously use a lot of technology, how does that impact on what you do?
To do something like Rubber Johnny I guess it’s easier because I can shoot it all with a DV camera and edit it all on a laptop. Which means you can test things out. If you’re shooting normally, you have to make do with what you’ve got a lot of the time. This way you can try things out and see what works and then shoot it properly. I’m still into doing something like Pavement. I still haven’t figured out what the optimum video for a band like that would be. It’s probably one of the reasons why I didn’t do it because I couldn’t figure out something to do that was special enough.
Are there any bands around at the moment you’d be interested in trying it out with?
No. The problem is, I make my own music now and for the last five years I’ve been studying music and working on my own music project so most of my ideas I want to save for my own project.
How do you approach making music? Is it a similar process to making videos?
Very similar… Over the years I’ve had loads of ideas for videos but the tracks don’t exist.
Does that disappoint you at all?
No because it means I can make those tracks myself and then make the video.
What sort of music are you making?
I dunno really. Rock music, I guess.
Do you think that will surprise people?
Yeah I do. Because people just assume that, because I made videos for Aphex and that’s where I made my name, I think people will just assume I’d be dumb enough to go and make music like him.
Do you think the fact that rock videos are performance based is the reason no one is too imaginative with them?
Yeah I do. I do think it’s very tough. I think with electronic music becoming quite popular in the '90s, there’s something more cinematic about doing videos for electronic music because it’s closer to being film music, soundtracks. As soon as you have a band, it feels more like a music video. I suppose it’s just easier for people to do things that are cinematic with instrumental music.
Are you interested in doing live visuals?
Very interested. In fact, the reason I’ve declined doing it is because I’ve got a lot of plans for that sort of thing and I want to do it properly. When I see a lot of live visuals, I hate them. I really hate them. They’re such cheap crap. The truth of the matter is, when you go and see a band or you go and see live musicians, I think if you can make the visuals do the music justice, then you shouldn’t have them at all. You don’t need it. It just seems like something people do for the sake of it, just because the technology is there. As a result, you listen to some amazing music and have to watch some awful, cheap and nasty student collages.
That sort of thing has been going on for a long time.
I know. I feel like if I was going to do a live show I would want to put as much work into that live show… If you’re going to put visuals into a live show I’d want to put as much work into that as a video. I never saw U2’s Zooropa thing in the '90s but from what I understand, they put a lot of effort into the live aspect.
Are you influenced by EBN, who did the visuals for the Zoo TV tour?
Who’s EBN?
They were the guys who did the visuals for the tour, they’re called Emergency Broadcast Network.
I’ve never actually seen it and I’m being completely presumptuous that the visuals were taken as serious as the music.
Have you heard of Negativeland?
Are they another live visual thing?
Not visuals, they did audio based collage work and U2 ended up suing them for an album they released and they knew the EBN guys… But they’re very political and sort of working at another end of the spectrum.
I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff. I know that my plans are to learn my craft making videos for other people and, in the meantime I’m just scheming making plans for combining live stuff and music all into one thing; I’m kinda on the verge of doing that now.
Is that restrained by technology at all?
I don’t know, I guess I’ll find out
… I suppose the people who make the live visuals, the justification is that they’re performing live and it’s meant to be a fun thing. But the actual results you get, I still think there’s something really disappointing about it. When a band goes on stage and has rehearsed so many times, then they go out and perform it, then people have to watch these cheap collages whilst hearing the music.
How did the idea for Rubber Johnny come about?
It’s based on a character I used to draw in my school books as a kid.
Did you always want to do what you’re now doing? Were you into comics?
When I was a kid I was… It was just my little character I used to draw.
Are you surprised by how your work turns out when it makes it to screen?
No, I mean, I find it exciting the fact that I’m still doing the same thing; I was probably eleven or twelve when I was drawing this character. Now I’m 34 and obviously still haven’t grown up… You’re still kind of exploring things from your childhood, but in a different medium.
Do you think it’s important to have that imagination of a child?
I think it’s very important, I think it’s essential. From a work point of view it’s my priority, to keep myself in a similar state of mind to when I was eleven. It’s obviously difficult as you get older but you have to try.
How do you resist being corrupted by what you see in the media, especially when so much of it’s so mediocre?
To be perfectly honest I think it’s a day-by-day thing where I avoid looking at crap. I very rarely watch TV and I don’t keep an eye on what the trends are. I really try to keep my sources of inspiration the same as when I was a kid. I think you can get quite wrapped up in the stuff that’s around you and a lot of the stuff around is really bad. In this day and age it’s really hard, you’re bombarded by it. I mean you walk into a shop and they’re playing MTV, you can’t get a way from it.
You’ve done commercial work, can you see how people end up taking that road?
Absolutely. At the end of the day, in order to do the things I want to do and make the little shorts like [Rubber Johnny] and indulge this childhood thing you need the money, so every now and then you have to do something to earn the money. My Granddad said to me Clint Eastwood would do a Hollywood film to earn some money and then he would go off and direct one of his pet projects the following year.
Is that how it works for you?
Yeah. Although I think ad agencies should be bombed, every now and then, if I’m skint, I’ll do an ad to earn some money.
Outside the obvious reasons, why do you think the commercial media has this perception that something different or experimental won’t attract an audience?
Because there’s so much money at stake. With commercials there’s so much money at stake and people’s jobs on the line that people are so careful they won’t take risks. Creativity is a weird act of fate, you just throw yourself in and trust your instincts, you hope something will work itself out. When there’s a lot of money at stake things end up being made by a committee. If I ever see a commercial that’s got some spark of genius in it, you know it’s an accident or maybe a rare occurrence because usually the creative process gets strangled by committee.
In that sense, where do you see the market for releasing a short film on a record label? It seems like an unusual concept, especially because you have it available for download?
I see bands putting out backstage footage, bands I’ve hardly heard of, putting out backstage footage on DVD. I’m pretty certain you couldn’t be bothered asking that question because there’ll be so many different things coming out on DVD. The question is, if I make 6-minute short with Aphex Twin, I’ve got two choices I can either not release it or release it; which do you think is the best thing to do? You might as well release it, right?
But it’s being released as your video rather than an Aphex Twin single, it seems like a very different prospect.
But what does that really mean at the end of the day?
I’m not sure.
Well, you tell me. It’s interesting. I suppose, if it’s put out and nobody buys it, I might be able to answer that question and say there’s no point putting that sort of thing out unless it’s a release for another artist but I think the Directors Label thing I did with Michel [Gondry] and Spike [Jonze] proved that people are interested in work done by film makers as well as musicians.
…Do you really think it’s that strange to put a 6-minute short out?
It seems like releasing a single but it’s a video not a song, it’s not something people are doing.
That’s a good analogy. Hopefully, because of DVD, it means that you can put things out that don’t have to be a feature film, you can put small things out on DVD. A DVD can be 6 minutes long and cheaper.
DVD I can see being something where people aren’t experimenting with the format, is that something you can see? I mean, it seems like there’s a lot of potential for DVD that hasn’t been realised by most people.
I don’t really know, it’s the kind of question you should be asking Warp marketing people. I just make stuff and Warp tell me what they’re going to do with it.
If you’re releasing a [short film] video as a DVD through Warp – say, for example, originally they had hidden tracks a short time after music CDs came out – is DVD a format you can mess with in that way?
I’ve got to admit it really dumbfounds me how much people are really interested in aspects of [DVD] I haven’t thought about. Really, there are lots of different people who do lots of different work, for example, people in the art world who just make stuff whether it be an installation or a short video or something or other; the difference with me is I don’t want to put things in art galleries, that’s the problem: I make stuff like an artist would and then find a way of getting it financed. But I don’t wanna put it in art galleries. I did that once and I don’t really like it. I feel like putting stuff out that doesn’t have that chin-stroking perception that art has. For me the only option available is to put it out on DVD.
You’re also working on a feature film, is that right?
Yeah.
I believe you’ve tried to work on a couple before?
Yeah I have, I’ve worked on them for two or three years.
How different is it working on a feature to short films and music videos?
It’s something you’ve gotta feel excited about for three years or more. It’s a whole different proposition.