Newsgroups: alt.tv.liquid-tv From: ed@cwis.unomaha.edu (Ed Stastny) Subject: AEON FLUX: Plop! An Interview with Peter Chung Message-ID: Keywords: aeon flux peter chung Organization: University of Nebraska at Omaha Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 07:40:55 GMT Lines: 369 SOUND Interview with Peter Chung by Ed Stastny (ed@cwis.unomaha.edu) 11-92 (print version, with picture of Chung and 12 pictures from the production sketches for Aeon Flux is available for $2 (to cover postage, packing and issue 10 of SOUND) from: Ed Stastny/ 9018 Westridge Dr./ Omaha, NE 68124 USA) note: The final interview came out slightly different than this earlier draft, but it's basically the same. I changed a few of my own wordings and corrected some spelling. note: I will be scanning some of the pictures from the batch that Peter sent me into GIF files. I will announce when I have some, I will then post them to WUARCHIVE and perhaps this newsgroup (if there are no objections to having small binary files posted). Please be patient, I have sketchy use of a scanner...and it might be the end of the week before I have many. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Plop" When I first saw a commercial for LIQUID TELEVISION's premiere back in May of 1991, I fell in love with a particular 10 second clip...that of a dark haired, scantily clad, agile goddess soaring down the corridor of some megalithic structure dodging bullets and mowing down guards in robotish masks. It was an absurd display of extreme violence interplayed with an obvious appeal to carnal lick-chops of the "young male" demographic by way of the more-flesh-than-not outfit of a viscious Rambette. That, though, was only PART of it's appeal. The artwork was like no other I'd seen in any animated short, a very "European" look to it. Thin, sinewy characters rather than the musclebound look so common to most animated heroes. LIQUID TELEVISION (LTV) premiered on MTV in June of 1991, it's first season featuring six half-hour episodes. It's second season, consisting of ten episodes, began in September of 1992. Created by Colossal Pictures and sold to MTV and BBC-2, LTV features animated short films from all over the world. Eleven of the 16 episodes featured that hellfire assassin, her leather straps, clacking boots, rumbling guns, pointy hair and her drastic spin on the wheel of fate. Her name, as well as the title of the short, Aeon Flux. If you haven't seen it, do. If you have, you're probably pretty sick of my gratuitous lip-service by now. Without further a-do-do, we'll get to it...the interview with Aeon Flux's creator, writer, designer, director and manacurist...Peter Chung. BIOLOGICANIACAL INFO Chung, 31, was born in Korea but attended high school in Virginia. He studied animation at Cal Arts in Valencia, California. From there, he went to work at Disney for two and a half years doing live action projects. For the past decade, he's been working all over the Los Angeles animation industry for places like Ralph Bakshi Studios, Marvel and Colossal, the producers of LTV. His credits include: directing the pilot of Nickelodeon's Rugrats, character design for C.O.P.S., Transformers work and a commercial for Levis. He started to work on a project called "Secret Agent X9" for Colossal, but it's now dead in the water. Ed: "How did this Aeon Flux thing come about?" Peter: "Originally I had the idea of doing something like Aeon Flux for quite a long time. It's basically my reaction to seeing Hollywood action/adventure movies and wanting to do something that kind of showed viewers what was always implicit but what those films never really delivered. Which was basically having the main character doing all the standard heroic things, but doing so in what I would call a 'moral vacuum' in which you don't really know why she's doing the things she's doing but you're kind of caught up in the action. And seeing how viewers would, how far along you could lead them on (laugh) until the point where she dies in a very ridiculous manner and it's been interesting to see what people think of that. I mean some people hate to see her die and other people think it's funny. The intention was to make you wonder about whether she was a good person or a bad person to begin with...and I don't know what YOU thought..." Ed: "I never really made a decision as to whether she was good or bad. I thought of it as more a barrage of imagery, violent and strange, to stimulate the viewer to pay attention..." Peter: "Well, that was an attempt to get it to tie into the whole Liquid TV concept which was to, basically, do a show that was satire and spoofed various genres of things that were out there. The thing that I chose was heroic action/adventure movies. I don't think it's that far from what you actually see in say, an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie where the exaggerated level of the one-against-all battle scenes is pretty absurd." Ed: "Some people took it more seriously, I thought it had a different level, that it was more than JUST a spoof." Peter: "I had arguments with MTV about...they didn't understand it and the only way I was able to sell it to them, to sell them on the idea of doing it or letting me do it was to tell them that it was a spoof. My intentions were much more...I guess you'd say academic. I was interested in experimenting with visual narrative, telling a story without dialogue and also trying to create a style of telling a story with animation that wasn't influenced by the usual kinds of things that you see. For me there is a solid storyline going on under all the action. It's not really that important to me whether or not everybody agrees on what that story is. There were very specific demands that had to be met working for that format. One thing that was very important to me was doing something that could be watched more than once and that you could look at again and still read other things into it. Because the fact that MTV's been running that show over and over and over again and is still going to do that. And so, I think a way to do that is to get people involved and thinking about it and talking about it." Ed: "And they are. I've heard people sit around at parties discussing it and people on the computer network are putting forth their own theories. There are a few people I know who watch tapes of Aeon Flux over and over...in slow motion..." Peter: "Who are these people!?" Peter went on to tell me about how he's having some difficulties getting MTV to fund more episodes of Aeon Flux. Apparently, also, MTV is entertaining the idea of creating a Liquid Television spin-off series and is unsure which segment would bring in the most money. They've yet to offer Chung an "acceptable budget" for more episodes, offering him less than even the "cheapest" Saturday Morning cartoons. Ed: "Well, we could just have a huge letter-writing campaign and bombard MTV's offices with pro-Flux propaganda..." Peter: "That would be great!" You can write to: MTV/ Liquid Television: Abby Terkuhle/ 1515 Broadway/ 24th Floor/ NY, NY 10036 OR Colossal Pictures/ LTV/ Amy Capen/ 101 15th St./ San Francisco, CA 94103. Ed: "Here's one of the big questions that rose up around Aeon Flux's seemingly superhuman abilities and her rejuvenations in the second season....What is she, a robot, cyborg, clone?" Peter: "Well, um...originally she died at the end of the first season. My idea was not to bring her back...but they (MTV) wanted to bring her back. I couldn't really find a credible way to (bring her back), I mean I didn't want to pull something where you say 'she fell down but she didn't really die' or 'they put her back together' or something like that so. I just said 'the hell with it', I'm just going to bring her back, I'm not going to explain it and she's going to die in every episode." Ed: "That makes sense." Peter: "Let people fill in the blanks the way they want. I hope people aren't thinking she's a robot, I prefer that they didn't think that because she's much more interesting if she's a real person." Ed: "I've always subscribed to the clone theory and someday we'd arrive in some huge cryonic sleep chamber with a bunch of Aeon Fluxes (fluxi?)..." Peter: "The idea that I was really going to pursue if I were really to try to explain it is that she was somebody that was able to reproduce asexually...which meant that she's able to split and become parallel selves. But I didn't really pursue that but that would have been my position. There aren't a whole lot of them...during the lapses between episodes when you don't see it happen...it's like 'sysparis' reproduction. Cell splitting. I was going to do a think where part of the body gets cut off...like if you cut off her arm she'd grow a new arm and the arm would grow a new body." Ed: "By the way...is the main female's name Aeon Flux, or is that just the name of the short?" Peter: "It started out just being the name of the cartoon and then eventually it stuck, so that's her name." Ed: "What exactly was your intended plot for the first season's episodes?" Peter: "She was entering the fortress to assassinate the person who's picture she carries around on the map. Her objective is to reach the top of the fortress, where he is. Along the way she kills everybody in her path. She comes across two people fighting over a briefcase...and assuming that there's something of value in there she takes the briefcase away from them. Opens it up and finds a bottle, doesn't know what it is and throws out the contents. And puts a grenade in the bottle and kills the other guy who we show is dying of a disease which is also afflicting all the other soldiers that are her victims. Along the way she encounters the man, whose name is Trevor Goodchild in the script but of course the names are never mentioned. You get a sense that they know each other, or that was the idea. She doesn't attack him, in fact she's kind of aroused by watching him lick his girlfriend's ear in the elevator. So what happens is that she reaches the top of the building and she looks in the window and the guy, Trevor, you see him with the same liquid that you saw earlier (that the two men were fighting over)...then we see on tv, a news report comes on showing that all these people that are laying dead that we'd previously seen killed by Aeon Flux are revealed to have had this disease where green lines appear on their skin. The virus is shown to have been spread by these little insects that we saw the Trevor character put into his finger. So the woman (watching tv) makes the connection and Trevor goes after her and gives her a shot of the vaccine. The idea there was that I wanted the news report to contradict what the viewer had already seen. Suggesting some kind of....well you can interpret it either way you want....but it could be seen as a cover up because she'd gone around killing all these people but no mention was made of the fact that they'd been shot to death, it's all attributed to the virus. In a way, rendering everything she'd done up to that point futile. When she looks in the window, I don't know if a lot of people see this...but...the guy in the photograph (on her map) is laying dead on the bed of the bedroom. Some people picked that up. There's a picture of the old man on the wall...right next to the picture is the old man laying dead on the bed. That's one case where, after the fact, I kind of regretted that I didn't linger there longer...or truck in some more to emphasise it more. That was actually a pretty important plot point that kind of got buried." Ed: "After that, people were supposed to see Aeon Flux's mission was futile?" Peter: "Yeah, that was really the whole point. Basically about the futility of violence, that kind of heroic violence. She falls off the ledge and they, the mission control people, get rid of her body by blowing it up and get rid of where she lives and the only thing that's left of her after she's dead is the picture of her on a foot fetishist's magazine cover." Ed: "I thought that might have been part of her 'heaven' or 'dream'." Peter: "Oh no...see, you've got to understand that the production process toward the end of the series was really rushed and I was running out of money and kind of had to slap it together. I'm not really satisfied with how the ending came out. There were some things that were in the original storyboard that didn't make it in the film. There's a bed in her apartment and a camera pointing at her bed....the view through the camera is the same view that we see on the magazine cover, of her tickling her foot. There was supposed to be a feather on the bed but that got lost along the way...would have helped it." Chung had a few problems selling MTV on some of the imagery and actions in Aeon Flux. Several things were cut from the original script he'd made for the short, mostly due to financial and schedule limitations. There were a few philisophical differences, though. He fought MTV over a few little things, but ended up getting mainly what he wanted. For instance, MTV had a problem with the scene where Goodchild slits open his finger to release the bug and then scoops it's eggs from the wound and eats them on a cracker, but that scene made it to the final aired version. In that same scene there was a woman scrubbing the back of another woman in a bathtub. It was suggestive, but not explicit. Chung's original plans were to have those women naked together in the bathtub massaging one another. There was another scene of sexual explicity that was toned down. In the large elevator where Aeon watched Goodchild as he licked the ear of the Breen woman, that scene started out as being far more erotic. Interestingly enough, despite MTV's objection to overt sexuality in Aeon Flux, they had no complaints about the extreme level of violence depicted in the gunfights and slaughters. What does that say to Chung? "This is America, is what that says." Ed: "Does the plot from the first season carry over to season two?" Peter: "The character relations do, but not the actual plot...What's interesting to me about filmmaking is that it's not a literal, linear medium...that's not to say that books necessarily are, but the psychological dimension of a story told in film is something you have to provide yourself. Because you can't really get inside a characters mind the way you can in a book....it's all external imagery, it's all physical. When you start to feel really intimate with what's happening in a film...is when a film is really working. What that is is a process of the viewer creating meaning, basically, out of connecting images that are on the film. That's basically what drives my motive to make films...all the films are mainly driven by that need." Ed: "To create meaning in the sense that you dictate what the meaning is or to create a MEANS by which people can extract meaning?" Peter: "I think to provide for the viewer to sit down and use his faculties for getting meaning out of something which, basically, could just be images flickering on a screen. It's as much what the viewer does in putting those images together in his head, using his analytical interpretive faculties. When that happens, that, to me, is when the process is complete. What I do is I just spew the images out there. It's why I think filmmaking is interactive and why I'm not such a big fan of all this new media that seems to be coming out....interactive cd-rom and stuff." Ed: "Too limiting in choice, is that what you're saying?" Peter: "Well, it's presuming the wrong thing. To say that 'we're now going to do interactive movies using this new technology, cd-rom', I think is presuming that movies aren't interactive already. To me they are...a good movie is. It doesn't...what's the word....isn't declamatory, doesn't announce it's ideas. Lets the viewer...evokes an experience in the viewer in an honest way." GESTATION How long does it take to make something like Aeon Flux? For Chung, it's broken down into a fairly modular process. He spent about a month writing and revising the script. Another month he took designing the characters and backgrounds. For about a month after that, he was working on the storyboard, a sort of preliminary layout and blueprint of how the actual film would finally look. The following month encompassed the actual laying out of the scenes and the process ended with two months in Korea doing the actual production. This six month process resulted in the first season's short that was broken down into six shorter episodes. WHAT ELSE? Chung has a project outside of Aeon Flux that he's being pretty secretive about. He did give me a few tidbits to chew on, though. He tells me it will be more "provocative" than Aeon Flux. He describes this "secret project" as "surreal, sci-fi, sorta political and perverse". Keep your ears pricked. WORDS TO THE ASPIRING "Self teaching is the best kind", claims Chung of learning to animate. He attended Cal-Arts and studied animation, but says it only "teaches you how to work in a studio" and not really create your own films. He advises upstarts to merely practice animation techniques and experiment with drawn motion, like he did while in high-school, rather than jump into any huge projects. If one does opt to tackle a complete film..."Plan everything thoroughly," he says, "nail it down in storyboards and layout first." STATIC IMAGE For those of you wondering if there is, or ever will be, an Aeon Flux comic book, Chung offers a firm "no". "I did a two-page comic once, animation's far more satisfying to me." he explains. He emphasises that Aeon Flux is purely cinematic and wouldn't translate well to comics. Not writing off comics altogether, Chung does accept the possibility of doing some other story in comic form. We tossed around the concept of an "art of Aeon Flux" type of book, he was interested. The actual publication, of course, would depend on if he could get it funded. Chung did mention a comic called Hard Boiled, which he describes as the closest comic book equivelant to Aeon Flux. THEATRE OF THE MIND Much of the architecture and imagery in Aeon Flux reminds me of those within my nocturnal dreams, so I asked Chung if dreams influenced the creation of his film. Not only did his dreams influence Aeon Flux, they built it. Most, if not all, of the film is based on Chung's dreamstate. He cited the whole grappling-hook-gun- climb-to-the-catwalk-while-being-shot-at scene was straight out of a dream. The "erotic elevator" scene, though toned down substancially, and the megalithic structures were dream inspired as well. He doesn't keep a dream diary because he believes that writing things down destroys your actual memory of the event adding, "I remember what I need to." If the hallucinations of his subconscious can influence him so much, the logical progression in my mind was to hallucinagenic drugs. Regarding that, Chung stated, "Drugs have very little influence on what I actually end up doing, but they can be inspirational during the development process." THEOLOGY, SOFTDRINKS AND CONCLUSION Ed: "If you could say three words to God, what would they be?" Peter: "'Thanks for nothing'...or, if God really existed and I were to actually see him (instead of just addressing the 'idea' of God)...of course I'd say something a little different, like, 'try harder, God'." Ed: "What is your favorite softdrink?" Peter: "Aquarius Neo (available in Japan and Korea, similar to Pocari Sweat but less salty - an ion-supply drink). Stateside, Jolt Cola. Grab your Jolt and settle down on the couch for some passive ingestion of some LTV on MTV, that's an order. LTV plays on Tuesdays at 9pm, Sundays at 4:30pm and various other times on the rarely predictable MTV schedule. Plop. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- (special thanks to Mr.Stone, sound editor on AF, who made this interview possible) -- || Ed Stastny......... editor/archiver qing bu-yao ba zhe-ke ye! || ed@cwis.unomaha.edu SOUND Magazine ke-yi qing ni ba zhe-zhang |||||||||||||||||||||| PO BX 31104 fang-da ma? x||||||||||||||||||||| Omaha, NE 68132 zhe bu-shi wo-de xie-zi...