Nowadays the Internet has sort of killed the possibility of not knowing about something that is in the works. With its noodly like appendages reaching far and wide, the Internet and its various fan sites routinely throttle wish fulfillment into oblivion on a daily basis. This seems to be especially true of movies, as the blogosphere seems hell bent on revealing every single minute plot detail, script revisions, green lit projects and on set photos that it can find. To them whether or not a movie will ever be made doesn’t matter, but revealing details about a rumored Chutes & Ladders film is just too enticing to dismiss.
So when a director who is ridiculously talented goes more than half a decade without making a new film you’d think they’d be asking questions about just what the heck he is doing. To be fair the director in question, Chris Cunningham, has never made a feature length film, but he’s tempted audiences with his music videos, commercials and short films for years, of which he hasn’t made any since his epic 6 minute opus Rubber Johnny way back in 2005. Oh sure you may think Irreversible or Antichrist is disturbing, but you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Rubber Johnny.
Besides being a noted director, Cunningham also is a noteworthy effects creator. After garnering attention for designing the ABC Robot and Mean Machine for Judge Dredd, Cunningham began catching the eye of the likes of Clive Barker, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and David Fincher, and even swooning Stanley Kubrick with his creations, so much so that Cunningham was kept on A.I. even after Kubrick’s untimely death. But even his effects career has effectively vanished into thin air since A.I.
So what has he been doing? Primarily getting his projects killed, as Cunningham has been at work adapting both A Scanner Darkly and William Gibson’s Neuromancer to the big screen only to have the projects killed, and in the case of A Scanner Darkly, picked up and made by another director.
But earlier this year Cunningham finally released a new work, this a music video remix of the Gil Scott-Heron song New York is Killing Me, which recently opened at the Museum of Modern Art. Even better? Cunningham is claiming to be working on an audio visual album to be released sometime soon. So while it looks like the possibility of Cunningham ever turning his attention to feature filmmaking is quickly passing by, it looks like his exploits in the music industry are just getting started.
I can live with that.
Chris is back! I’m excited to say there is a new Chris Cunningham project in the works that will be unveiled on July 16th at Audi City in London.
Always driven forward by its ethos of Vorsprung durch Technik, Audi City is a new venture that uses technology to create space in the city centre. For five days in Mayfair, Audi reveals a site-specific installation of Chris Cunningham’s latest work. Enormous industrial robots veer around one another in a mysterious room. Their motors are syncopated with the room’s metronome and they embark on a frenetic interchange over a mechanical ‘brain’.
We will also be giving away tickets to the public to see this mind-blowing immersive experience on July 19th & 20th via our Twitter @audicity