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Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung Interview
 Peter Chung became very popular with the stoners back in 1991 when MTV’s Liquid Television premiered the animated Aeon Flux shorts. Since then Chung created the half hour Aeon Flux show, directed the Matriculated segment of The Animatrix and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury.For the past year Chung has spent his time collecting and remastering all the animated Aeon Flux material into one amazing DVD box set.
How long have you been working on the DVD box set?
Peter Chung: It took about four months of work to do all the remastering and that started with having to track down all the materials. They were all over the place in bits and pieces.
I read that some of it you had in your house.
Peter Chung: Yeah, some of it was in my closet and the rest of it was in a warehouse somewhere in New Jersey. The people at MTV who had been handling it were all gone and the new people who were there had no idea how to find all this stuff. So they spent a long time just going through boxes and boxes of stuff trying to find everything.
That’s amazing the stuff was just sitting somewhere in New Jersey [laughs]. Was the idea to put out the box set in conjunction with the release of the live action Aeon Flux movie?
Peter Chung: Yeah, I don’t think it would have come about unless the movie was being released.
What was the original inspiration for Aeon Flux?
Peter Chung: There are a lot of things that I was trying to get done through this character. One was just trying to point out the absurdity in Hollywood action movies. I’ve always enjoyed them but I felt there was something obviously nonsensical and absurd about them. At the same time I wanted to find a way of taking that genre and combine the things I enjoy, meaning to try and inject some art into it, for lack of a better word. I like art films, action films and films that are hard to understand. What I hate the most are the typical Hollywood serious message movies.
A lot of anime, which was an obvious influence on Aeon Flux, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Was that something you were trying to do with the early shorts?
Peter Chung: Film doesn’t really work unless you shift your consciousness from your daily everyday consciousness to another way of looking at things. I went to art school, so every work of art should be an opportunity to shift your consciousness from the everyday to the moments of something new. I really wanted to invent another way of telling the story through images and that’s why I think maybe people were confused or they thought that it didn’t tell a story.
How did you come up with the design for the main character?
Peter Chung: There are a lot of things which were purely decided on the needs of production. I was a character designer for a long time and you need to create characteristics that are unique to your character especially with animation because it’s very difficult to just use the face alone to make the character recognizable. So it all comes out of academic concerns like those. But it is like a musician trying to explain why he moves a finger a certain way. It’s just to produce a certain sound at a particular moment. There is a certain practicality that drives it.
Was the first Aeon Flux short created specifically for Liquid Television or did you do it independently?
Peter Chung: It was done specifically for Liquid Television.
How did you come to create the first short?
Peter Chung: I was directing commercials for a studio called Colossal Pictures where Liquid Television had been created. They were asking their directors if they had ideas to submit to a half hour animated anthology program and this is what I submitted it.
How big was the team that did those first shorts?
Peter Chung: It was very small because the budgets were tiny. I wrote the script, I designed the characters, I did the storyboards, I did all the layouts and then I took the whole thing to Korea. There I called up all the good Korean animators I knew.
How was it re-watching all of Aeon Flux for the DVD set?
Peter Chung: There’s some episodes, in particular the half-hour episodes, that I hadn’t seen since they were first on the air because I had never been that happy with the way they had turned out. When I watched them again, I really felt like I had to do a little work to improve these before they became etched in stone because with the release of the DVD set a lot of people are going to own it for the first time. So I approached MTV about making changes and apparently some of the fans of the shows were upset by what I did.
You George Lucased it.
Peter Chung: But I can completely understand George Lucas’s impulse to do that. When you deliver a film you’re not really done with it and I find it strange that people don’t think that. A film has to be done by the deadline to make the airdate so I would have kept working on them if I had been given the time.
I think when the half hour series of Aeon Flux came out in 1995 a lot of people were shocked that the main characters spoke much as they did. Was that decision just necessary?
Peter Chung: I was completely behind it and it was necessary for a lot of reasons. For one thing, I was tired of people watching the shorts and saying “There’s no story here” and it was just a lot of eye candy. One of the reasons I didn’t have dialogue in the original shorts was because, always having been a visual artist, I felt very uncomfortable about writing dialogue. The other thing was that I wanted to use dialogue in a really new way.
People assume that the dialogue diminishes the level of mystery in the stories but to me it adds another layer. Nothing at this stage is taken at face value. For example, the very first episode, when she comes out and she says, “My name is Aeon Flux, I’m on a mission to assassinate Trevor Goodchild.” A lot of people took that at face value. If you watch the episode you see that killing Trevor is actually the exact opposite of what she’s trying to do. You’re not supposed to trust what people are saying.
I read that back in the day MTV was not helpful when you were putting together the shorts or the episodes.
Peter Chung: Actually they pretty much left me alone when we were doing the shorts. That was because the budgets were very low and since they were mixed in with a lot of other shorts, there was less to do. When it became a half hour show and they had to have sponsors there was more money at stake so they did start to change things.
So when you redid some stuff for the DVD set, did you make changes to some of the things that they made you do?
Peter Chung: Yes. I took it back to what we had first wanted and a lot of that involved making things less clearly defined and more ambiguous. MTV always wanted everything as clear as possible.
What’s a good example of something that was changed?
Peter Chung: I think the biggest change was in an episode called The Demiurge. In the old version Aeon kept saying things like, “I don’t want to be changed” and she sounded very whiny. Also in the original ten year old version she was arguing a lot more with Trevor so I cut out a lot of that dialogue because it seemed out of character. I think it’s just best if people just forgot about the ten year old version of the episodes.
What do you think of the rise in Anime and Manga in recent years especially since it has helped you out too with things like The Animatrix and the animated Riddick?
Peter Chung: To me it is kind of a mixed blessing. I don’t really think of Japanese animation as a single type of animation. I think that people make the mistake of doing that. I really think of it in terms of individual studios, individual directors, and individual titles. I don’t try to put it all in a single category.
Like how you can’t place Miyazaki and Pokemon in the same category.
Peter Chung: Yeah, it just doesn’t make any sense to do that.
I saw a picture of you at the premiere of the Aeon Flux movie. How was that?
Peter Chung: It was a very awkward situation. I had already seen the movie at an earlier screening that week.
You looked pretty happy in that picture with Charlize [Theron].
Peter Chung: Well of course I want the movie to do well because a lot of people are seeing the character for the first time and inevitably it’s tied to my name. I’m glad that exposure to the character is getting out there but I’m a little bit mixed about the exposure occurring with a movie which is very different from the show. It resembles the original character only in a certain way.
I was not involved in the movie. In writing it or visualizations or anything and it is very different from what I would have done. It’s ironic that it’s exactly the type of movie I was trying to make fun of. We were talking about doing animated Aeon Flux movie the way Riddick and Animatrix came out but because I had spent so much time on remastering the original I didn’t do it.
How have you liked your experiences doing the Riddick and the Matrix straight to DVD movies?
Peter Chung: The Matrix one I enjoyed very much. I had a lot of freedom to work on that in my own way. The Riddick one was less of a personal project. The script was handed to me and I was told to direct it.
I read you are developing a new animated movie based on another live action.
Peter Chung: Yeah, but I can’t talk about that yet.
Would you be interested in directing a live action movie in the future?
Peter Chung: Yeah I would be. It’s funny though; it seems like a lot of live action directors now want to do animation. Many live action movies are practically animation with these fully CG characters. I think the lines between animation and live action are being blurred.
Have you ever seen any Aeon Flux tattoos on anybody?
Peter Chung: If someone asked me to design a tattoo for them I’d just have to decline. I honestly don’t think that there is anything that I could draw that would be good enough. I find the natural human body hard to improve on. If I owned Michelangelo’s statue of David I wouldn’t draw on it either.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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