About Chris Cunningham

WARP interview with Chris Cunningham:

WARP: This film originally started as a promo for the Afx. 237 v.7 track on Aphex Twin's album druqks. How did the idea for the promo change from its original incarnation to the form we see it in now?

CHRIS CUNNINGHAM: It started out as a 30 second TV commercial for Druqks. I listened to the track a lot and got carried away. I suggested to Steve Beckett that I should expand it into a full video and that I could knock it out in a few weeks, as it was just shot on a DV camera and it featured me and not much else.

I ended up getting heavily into animation experimentation and started to learn After FX and other bits of software and before I knew it a year had passed and it seemed less and less relevant as a music video. Then I went off for a year to develop a feature project and worked on this whenever I had free time, like a weekend hobby. I would get my friends to help me shoot a shot here and there, whenever they were up for it. The first day of shooting was actually September 11, 2001. I remember being strapped into that fucking wheelchair when I heard about the World Trade centre.

Rubber Johnny is your fifth collaboration with Richard D James. What is it about his music that inspires you?

Well, most of my ideas just wouldn't work with the majority of music I get sent. I listen to a lot of very varied music, but if I am going to make a video or short and possibly spend months on it, I would rather do it to music which allows me to experiment. My style is about seamlessly fusing the sound and picture together so I have to look for music that can support dynamics and tangents.

Rubber Johnny is synched masterfully. Can you talk about your editing and labour process on this project?

The primary objective with this video and the collaboration with Squarepusher, was to try and push the synchronisation aspects of my work to the limit, before I did a feature. When I look at older videos, like Come on My Selector or Come to Daddy they look slow to me, even though they seemed fast at the time.

I wanted to see how fast you can go before it becomes nonsensical, a mess. The editing style in Rubber Johnny is actually very old fashioned and simple. If you were to watch it at half speed you would see that.

It was incredibly difficult to edit this video and find that line, where it seems breakneck, but still flows and makes sense as a sequence. I would have to redo each shot about twenty times in order to find something that worked. It involved a lot of experimentation. It was closer to animation than editing and I had to create the video 2 frames at a time. Sometimes spending a day on just getting two frames to work to the music.

The sketchbook/art book is your first to date. Can you talk about the images and the ideas contained within them?

The images in the book are all based around the character in the video, who I imagined as a hyperactive, shape-shifting child who has to find ways of amusing himself in the dark. They range from character sketches and re-modified video stills to portraits and drawings made specifically for the book. It is pretty much a book of self portraits, just not the kind that my mum would put in a family album.

I am too restless to just make videos and I want my work to be a bit more multi-media from now on. Rubber Johnny is the first release where I have tried to cover an idea in multiple mediums. I was actually going to make a series of sculptures too, but ran out of energy.

What projects are you currently working on? Are you making a feature?

This book and video is the first in a series of experimental works that I will be releasing through Warp. There is a collaboration with Squarepusher coming up and then I will be concentrating on non collaborative projects and a feature.

The character is called Rubber Johnny, which is the colloquial term for a condom in the UK. How is this character like a condom?

The bass line in the track sounded like an elastic band to me and so I got the idea of someone shapeshifting like a piece of chewing gum, whilst raving. The title Rubber Johnny just seemed to fit the character and shapeshifting idea really well. It has nothing whatsoever to do with condoms, although it is a bonus that Rubber Johnny is a term that we used in the playground. It is very English, I suppose.

Some of your work challenges conventional views of the body (flex, windowlicker, leftfield). Do you think that Rubber Johnny can be viewed in that context?

Rubber Johnny is definitely a continuation of my fascination with anatomy and the body. I think virtually everything I have done is figurative in some way.