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CHRIS CUNNINGHAM - PART 2

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER

Chris Cunningham’s favorite magazine.

I can definitely remember sexual experiences that have involved brightly lit English front rooms and something really shocking happening in them.

Ha ha ha. I mean it’s usually quite shocking for me, the whole experience. I don’t know about you. That’s just reminded me about one of the most shocking things I saw in my teenage years. It was finding a copy of Whitehouse magazine behind the scout hut.

Yeah. Whitehouse was really gynecological. It was like the first hardcore porn you could get in Britain. I remember walking across a park near my home and finding a bunch of issues that somebody had thrown away in a fit of guilt or something. The images were made more shocking by the way they were all drenched by the rain in this public place. They had slugs and stuff crawling in between the pages.

When I first moved to London my front room flooded and it drenched my stack of old Razzles. Ha ha, that reminds me—an old flatmate of mine had a huge stack of porn mags and his tastes were a lot more gynecological than mine. They were almost like snuff. I mean, I didn’t like to look at them. Anyway, one day he asked me if I could look after them for him because his girlfriend was coming around. He had a pile of 100 or so and I didn’t know where to hide them so I had to spread them out in piles of around 15 all around my room. Well, my own girlfriend came around later but I went out to the shops for a while and when I was gone she accidentally found a stack underneath the phone table or something.

What happened?

When I got back from the shops she was gone.

No way.

Ha ha ha. She’d totally left. I couldn’t get hold of her for days and then when I did I found out what had happened. She’d dropped something on the floor, then gone to pick it up and her hand brushed against a big wodge of these magazines. I told her what the story was and I actually said to her that if she had found the porn mags that had belonged to me then I would have been in less trouble because his were like something that Fred West would have had.

Ha ha ha. Ugh.

They were a bit too wrong for me. I always thought her being there and finding them would have been like that scene in The Shining where she’s going through his papers.

And she’s walking out of your front door with terror in her eyes, bawling.

And I’m walking the other way back from the shop, all nonchalant with no idea of what’s happening.

Amazing.

Yeah, well, I got dumped over that. I got chucked for a couple of weeks at least but we got back together.

Tell me that story again about the cokehead guy who came around your flat once.

Ha ha ha, well, the only problem with that story is trying to think of a way of saying it without incriminating the guy. OK, well, this guy came round my house and me and my friend were there. This guy had been doing coke. He’d got the coke horn and after a while of being there he asked me if I had any porn mags.

So creepy.

Ha ha. So I gave some to him, and me and my friend were talking but we were kind of looking at the guy and he was staring at the mags really serious—like he was trying to work out how to do a really difficult equation. Then after about ten minutes he looked at me all serious and asked if me and my mate could go upstairs for a while because he wanted to have a wank.

And you actually went upstairs.

Ha ha ha, I know. We did. We were so shocked that he’d asked us that we just went. And so we were upstairs trying to not think about it and we looked at the clock and realized he’d been down there for more than ten minutes. And it dawned on us that he was maybe taking the piss a bit.

Maybe...

And the thing is that the longer you leave it the harder it is to go downstairs and ask him what’s going on.

I suppose it’s harder and harder to be shocked by anything you could label as “porn” these days because of the way it’s so omnipresent. What was the last thing you saw that made an impression on you? Is it that film of the dog wanking itself off that you’re always showing people on your phone?

That dog wanking itself off is literally my favorite thing I’ve seen in the last decade. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve watched it. To me, it’s like when the monkey throws the bone up in the air in 2001. In that movie, it symbolizes the monkey moving onto the next stage of evolution or something. I feel the same way about the dog wanking itself off.

What do you like about it so much?

I love the fact that the person filming it is having the same reaction as I do when I watch it.

Which is what?

Ha ha ha. “I can’t believe this is happening.” I love the way animals have absolutely no dignity about things. The wanking dog is an organism that’s completely out of control.

When did you last watch it?

I watched it again last week. I’m hoping people will forget about it actually because I’ve based a scene in my new film on it.

Click here to watch the wanking dog movie in all its glory. 


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