Original subtitles

This is Peter Chung, the creator of Aeon Flux.

And this is Drew Neumann, the hired lackey for music and sound effects.

This is the first episode of Aeon Flux...

the first time she ever appeared on television...

in 1991, I think, on Liquid Television.

It was divided up into a series of six episodes of two minutes each...

which ran weekly...

and was then compiled into a 12-minute film...

which you see here.

My first viewings of it were completely silent.

I had no idea what was going on.

But you had read the script and saw the storyboard, I think.

Yeah, although they weren't always readily apparent...

from just looking at storyboard to script.

I think a lot of it had to play out in motion...

before you understood what was going on.

Yes, and maybe even then...

But I have to say that...

watching the film, initially without sound, and then seeing it...

with the music and sound that Drew had provided...

was just an incredible difference.

He added so much scale...

and depth and richness to it.

Whereas my approach to the animation was very spare...

and almost minimal...

in terms of design and shadow.

I was deliberately going for a very, kind of, graphic, descriptive look.

But amazing angles.

It seemed to me that each section of this...

when I originally saw it...

played out two minutes at a time...

needed a completely different flavour.

And I really actually got in trouble with MTV.

The first section of this, which was supposed to be a deception...

kind of a Raiders of the Lost Ark, over-the-top, action-adventure thing...

they thought was too orchestral-sounding, and I said:

"Just hold on, trust me. It's going somewhere else."

And just about the time that she finishes this run, shooting everybody...

we shift gears...

and, suddenly, where are we? In Bugland...

which sounds like some weird old Italian melodrama...

setting up expectations and then shattering them...

'cause I was always frustrated in watching action movies...

that they would only show one side of the action...

and what I really was doing here in this episode...

was doing a completely 180 reversal and starting to see...

And occasionally she comes through, and it's more of a psycho approach...

that she's just a mass murderer...

instead of the hero from that first bit.

Yeah, 'cause at this point you have no idea who she is...

or what she's after.

You just know that she's cool...

and she's good at what she does.

And here's where we get the first hints...

that, well, hey, all these people were gonna die anyway.

Well, it was an important thing that they all wear masks...

as a way of dehumanizing them...

and then, in this episode, they take off their masks...

and we do see that they're all individual people.

This was particularly challenging to write...

this part right here...

trying to come up with something that would indicate this person's...

'Cause he's smiling even as he's about to die.

And giving him some individuality...

without resorting to things like...

pictures of his family and stuff like that...

because the idea...

that anybody's life is precious...

or anybody's life, as an individual...

is worth anybody else's...

I think is true...

regardless of whether or not they have ties to other people.

I think...

that the inherent value of the individual...

It's a theme that I played with a lot throughout the series...

and, actually, it eventually became...

the defining characteristic of Aeon herself...

because she herself is somebody who has no ties...

either familial or societal.

Musically, this is my favourite section of the pilot...

a very radical shift in direction...

much more industrial, banging metal pipes...

and processed piano sounds.

From a sound effects standpoint...

this was the first really odd thing that I got to do.

And I think it was actually in the storyboards...

where, as a character is being shot...

we hear a, sort of, machine-gun version of the laughter...

from a point-of-view perspective, rather than... Ah, here it is.

You see a point of view and sort of rapid-fire laughter...

as we cut back to the other guy who is actually laughing.

That's as though the psychological effect...

of the person's perception as they're dying.

And then, of course, that person's knocked off as well.

Well, temporarily.

But it's apparent at this point that he's got the virus...

and his only hope is to get what's in that case.

Yeah, the contents of the case is still unknown...

and in fact, Aeon...

obviously, not knowing what's inside it...

but assuming that it has great importance...

because people are willing to fight and die over it...

decides that it must be worth stealing. But then...

What calls us to that distant goal...

Oh, I'm actually talking about the virus.

We'll get back to the...

Actually, I'm analysing this too much. Make up your own story.

I don't want to tell you what this about, because that's the whole point...

is to find out what it means to you.

Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about the costume...

because that's something that a lot of people bring up.

- Aeon's, or... - Yes...

Aeon's costumes, why she's dressed like that.

It has a lot to do with the fact that she doesn't talk...

and she really has to use her body...

to express what she's thinking and feeling.

I did try, initially, to design costumes...

which were more realistic or more practical...

but what you find out is that...

to draw realistic costuming...

requires a lot of attention paid to things like folds in the clothing...

the way that the clothes hang on the body...

and you end up wasting a lot of time just trying to figure that out...

which, in the end, isn't important...

and, in the end, actually works against what you're trying to do...

which is, use as much of the body's expressive qualities as possible.

It's the reason why...

artists have always preferred to portray the nude.

Because to portray a clothed figure, again...

it becomes more about the costume and less about the person.

And I think that's one of the reasons also...

why comic-book artists...

draw their characters in skin-tight outfits...

is to reveal different forms...

that the anatomy takes.

And it's also true of dancers, actually.

The reason why dancers wear...

skin-tight costumes, or very revealing costumes.

It's because they have to use their bodies.

And I was really thinking of Aeon as a dancer...

and choreographing her movements in that way.

Here we build up to a key plot point...

which, actually, sound effects-wise, was a nail into Styrofoam...

which is a nasty sound, here we go...

which doesn't play out again until the very final bit.

In the background, we're hearing a source cue...

that is kind of like a broken version...

of something that Antonio Carlos Jobim might have done...

had he just wanted to do something wrong.

The idea was to try to create a world, using the music and sound...

that was a little bit more real, gave it another dimension...

that there's some other cultural aspect to it besides what we're seeing.

So in the background we see this guy playing a piano.

You know, we were left up to our own devices.

I just, sort of, wrote something that felt like...

strange lounge music, and then peppered that throughout.

In front of that is the sound effect of this massage chair...

and closer up, the strange noises of whatever it is...

that Trevor's doing to his finger...

which eventually becomes a tasty snack.

Yeah, apart from the music having different styles for each episode...

actually, the...

This is me.

Yeah, Drew was doing multiple duties...

doing sound design, recording gunfire, music, voices...

I was in a panic when I saw that.

I said, "So do we have a recorded dialogue track for that lip flap there?"

I was told, "No." I have to make something up.

But this episode, this two-minute segment...

is made up entirely of one continuous shot, with no cuts.

And I wanted to give you the feeling...

Well, the camera, apart from the pan at the beginning, is just fixed...

and zooming very, very slowly...

closer and closer in to a particular detail...

which, I felt... I wanted to experiment with the idea of...

conveying, subliminally at least, the idea that...

the outcome is inevitable.

And I think you can do that...

with carefully controlled camera work...

in the sense that the camera already knows...

where somebody is gonna be...

before the character does it. So...

I felt it was important to stay out of the way of the visuals...

and leave this the ability to play anywhere.

The reason for the announcer not to be in English, obviously, was so that...

you could play it anywhere in the world...

and somebody would still get, visually, what's going on.

Ouch!

She steps on it and falls to her death.

The first of many deaths for Aeon.

Yeah, as it turned out, and when I first did this, of course, I didn't know...

that we were ever gonna do any more.

So, I really wanted...

to have the ending...

that would have the maximum impact.

Really, this story is...

No, I'm not gonna go into what that's about.

Unlike the later episodes...

this one, we do get, clearly, a sense...

that she's on a mission and belongs to a group...

which was an idea which I later abandoned...

because I thought it was much more...

It made her a stronger character...

if she wasn't taking orders and was always...

motivated by her own personal motives, as opposed to some kind of directive.

Would you like to explain the blue guy to us?

I know that this...

I can't say that I have any explanation...

except that that is the afterlife, in her mind.

This last bit...

A lot of the segments were running so far behind schedule...

they were coming in on flights, United Airline flights into Burbank...

that I would have to run, grab the tapes, and come back.

The producer and the editor were sitting there...

while I did this last two-minute segment...

and insisted that I had to make a specific deadline.

And I made it, I think, within five minutes.