Mad Worlds: Dennis Cooper interviewed
by Max Restaino
Today marks the US publication date of “Flunker” by Dennis Cooper. AS author Max Restaino sat down with Dennis for a deeper look into the world of “Flunker” …
MR: There was a very excited reaction when AS announced they were publishing a book by you. Like the perfect marriage of author and press. Was this something Philip approached you about or vice versa?
DC: I had all these sort of unfinished things that I’d written over, like, the last 10 or 12 years. I’ve been working on this film, and it’s been so consuming, and there was little bit of a lull in the works. So I just thought, maybe I can go back and finish enough of these to make a really tiny, little book.
Immediately when I was working on them, I thought, ‘I wonder if this would be a book Philip would like for Amphetamine Sulphate?’ because I obviously really like that press. I had a hope that I could get it into an okay enough shape to make it a little book. So I wrote to him and was like, ‘hey Philip, I don’t know if you still do those really small books, but I have a really small book are you interested?’ and he said sure and he liked it.
I’m really excited to be published by them. It’s a little bit of a dream or something.
MR: That’s pretty much how I feel too, cuz, ya know, Philip published my first book. My book is only 70 pages.
DC: Yeah, he’s really good at that the big typeset. Mine, how he got it to 124 pages, I’ll never know.
MR: In reading these stories, I felt like there was a lot of correlation to your other work.
DC: 3 of them, specifically, were originally gonna be parts of novels I was working on.
MR: There were 2 in particular, that felt to me like I Wished outtakes.
DC: Yeah. In I Wished there’s this section at the beginning where I kind of mutate George through all these personas. The first one was about this Russian dad who killed his mom, and I just continued that for quite a while just because I was interested to see what would happen. When I did the book, I realized it needed to be a really short thing, but I still had that stuff. So I went back and changed it so it wasn’t about George, altered it a bit.
Then the second story, which is called From Here On, was definitely part of I Wished. Then there’s one section called Trou Francais, which was stuff that was gonna be in Marbled Swarm.
MR: While reading that I was thinking, ‘this is a sequel to Marbled Swarm,” and then I got to the end and saw it was what Kiddiepunk published as French Hole, so I’d actually read it before.
DC: Yeah, it was in fragments before and I wedded them together into, kind of, a continuing narrative, and focused it a little bit more.
MR: Gold was a particular stand out for me in this collection, aside from recognizing that it felt like an extension of that early part in I Wished.
DC: It’s the most Amphetamine Sulphate one.
MR: It is, and it also feels like quote/unquote Classic Dennis Cooper. Like, there’s a moment of violence in that story that knocked the wind out of me.
DC: *laughing* Sorry about that.
MR: You’re fantastic at that! In watching interviews you’ve done and reading you discussing your work... It’s not what its reputation makes it out to be. There’s so much emotion within every violent action in your work that it just, kind of, transcends.
I remember, before I’d read anything by you... The closest equivalent I can think of to say what I thought your work would be like... I’m about 80 pages into Hogg.
DC: Nobody can top that one.
MR: Hogg is vile
DC: Yeah, the coprophilia is really, even for me who’s pretty unshakable, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can take much more of this.’
MR: Anyway, the first novel of yours I read was The Sluts, and immediately I was like, ‘oh, there is so much more going on here than just violence.’
DC: Hopefully.
MR: From Here On, for anyone familiar with your other work, is immediately recognizable as a story about George Miles. Something that I thought was really fascinating about this story is that you seem to go out your way to not use his name.
DC: I didn’t want it to be so tied to I Wished. I didn’t want people to think, ‘oh, I have to read the other one to get this one.’ I wanted it to stand on its own.
MR: I think you’ve done a consistently good job of that. Even all of the novels in the George Miles Cycle stand on their own. I have friends who have read I Wished, but haven’t read the George Miles Cycle and they still get plenty out of it.
DC: Good. I wanted it to stand on its own. Originally, I wasn’t even going to reference the Cycle but it ended being ridiculous to write that book and not talk about the Cycle, so I did, but I wanted it to be the first part you could read or whatever.
MR: I absolutely think that it can. To me it doesn’t feel so much like a part of the cycle as an epilogue. So, when you decided to include From Here On in the collection you changed it...
DC: I took his name out and made it just that he was the younger brother of my friend, which is also true. Otherwise, I didn’t change anything. It’s all exactly the same. There was all this stuff that was gonna be in I Wished... Some of it’s absolutely true and some of it’s not true. That story is absolutely, completely true. I wanted to keep it exactly that, I didn’t want to fuck with it.
MR: Do you feel like you’re looking for something different when you write about George now? Obviously you learned quite a bit when you were writing Period that changed a lot for you. In reading I Wished and reading From Here On, which references being an adult and looking back on their youth. It feels like it went from trying write these stories that were an homage to this person you loved, to kind of try and figure out what exactly it is you are looking for in writing about him.
DC: The thing is, because of the cycle, George Miles the name... people have this idea attached to him. But George is nothing like the characters in those Cycle novels. Except for looking like him and having some of the same psychological problems as him. I always wanted to do something that would say, ‘here, this is actually who George was.’ And it ended up being more about me than about him because it’s been a long time, because he’s extremely complicated and hard to understand, even if you knew him well.
Also I’d never written a novel that was an emotional novel before. I’d never written a novel that was really about my life and my feelings. When I start a novel I always try to do something completely different than I’ve written before. People think they’re all the same, but I try to something stylistically and formally different, and also try to go to a new place.
So I thought, I’d never written a novel that’s like that. I never wanted to write autobiographically. It was all that, and if I’m gonna write about my emotional life, George is the one gets to me the most, is the hardest for me to think about and the hardest for me to write about.
MR: So, we were talking about Trou Francais. Something that I’ve long wanted to know, because The Marbled Swarm is, stylistically so far away from anything else you’ve done. And your novels are all already so stylistically different... but the prose in The Marbled Swarm is fucking bananas.
DC *laughing* It was really difficult to do.
MR: Was it fun though?
DC: Yeah. When I was first writing fiction I wanted to write a book like that. I was really ambitious and I was extremely untalented at that point. That book has like... if you wanna get into it, it’s so fucking complicated. More than it seems. I always had wanted to do that, and when I was writing God Jr, the last section of that book is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. Something happened with the voice there and it got kind of dense, and I thought, ‘oh this is really interesting, maybe I can push this.’ So I started there.
I had to find this voice that would do all these tricks I wanted to, and that’s the voice I ended up with. People say it’s like Sade, but I didn’t wanna write like Sade. That’s just what happened when I wanted to make this language that was English based in French. It was extremely difficult. It was, like, the hardest novel ever to write but it was extremely interesting and fun. It drove me crazy, but yeah. It was a treat.
MR: It’s a treat to try and figure out the language, and you have to keep reminding yourself, ‘okay, this is a made-up French that is translated into English.’
DC: The problem with that book is that you can’t translate it. All of my books are translated into other languages, but this one... countries bought it but ended up cancelling it because it’s impossible to translate this book. It was translated into French, and my whole idea was, ‘oh, I’m gonna have a French novel published in France,’ and I was so excited.
They went through three translators. The first one was terrible and they rejected it, and then the second one, and they finally found this person to do the one that exists. They were like, ‘this is as good as it’s gonna get,’ and it just doesn’t work at all. It’s my least liked and least respected work here because it just ‘reads like a Sade novel.’ You just can’t take English, even when it’s all fancied up like that, and translate it into French and have those sentences do that. It’s just impossible. And I should’ve thought about that, but I didn’t.
MR: Well it was an experiment! And was successful in the US as far as I’m concerned.
DC: Oh yeah, it’s my favorite of my books. I’m very happy with it. I just wish I had thought it through.
MR: It’s really cool to hear how fond you are of the last part of God Jr though. That’s a book that I don’t think people talk about enough when they talk about your work. I think you’ve talked about how that was your attempt at a normal novel.
DC: No, it was just... Everyone had always said to me, ‘if you only wrote about something nice and didn’t write about these things, people would come around to your work and respect it.’ and I was always like, ‘I don’t care!’
I really love video games, and I learned a huge amount about writing from video games. So I had this idea that would have no gay characters or sex in it. It really was just, like, a challenge to myself. It wasn’t really to try and normalize what I was doing or anything. I think it’s kind of funny that that’s what they were all pushing me to do and it’s my least talked about novel.
MR: You’re the only author I know of who can get away with ending a sentence with ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘whatever.’
DC: *laughing* I’m from Los Angeles. That’s the way we talk, you know?
MR: But it does this wonderful thing where you’re not claiming to have words for everything. There aren’t words for everything. I think that’s something really interesting in the last story in Flunker, Start; non-English speakers trying to express themselves in English. Talking to people online who live in other countries—and I’m sure you get this through interacting with people on your blog. They use very interesting phrases in English that you wouldn’t think of as an English speaker.
DC: The absences and the mistakes. I love that stuff. Actually, that and the first piece, Face Eraser. It was that, and when I was writing Marbled Swarm and got really interested in Emo. So I was looking at all these Emo message boards and things, and the Emo kids, even in the United States, would write these insane sentences. The way they talked, it drove me crazy, I just thought it was so fantastic and beautiful. Saying something and trying to hide something at the same time. My goal is to write something that says something but is afraid of saying something, then hides it, accidentally says it and sneaks in what he really wants to say. These kids were actually doing that without trying. That was really where I started thinking, ‘I wanna study this.’ So that’s really where those two pieces came from.
MR: Have you ever written anything that you think is horror-adjacent?
DC: I see horror people talk about my work, usually The Sluts. I’ve never deliberately done that. There’s a little bit in Period with the satanic stuff. I never really read horror books either, horror movies, I know. But I was really into Slayer at that point, so I was kind of fishing around in the world around that.
I should do that because I’m always looking for things I haven’t done before. That would actually be really interesting. Maybe I’ll do that. You may have saved me—you may have found me a new novel idea.
I live for Halloween. I’m absolutely the world’s biggest obsessive of haunted house attractions. Our new movie that’s coming out is about a haunted house attraction, so I’m really interested in the subject. For some reason I’ve never thought about making fiction around it.
MR: Are you guys about done with Room Temperature?
DC: Yeah, it’s finished except for maybe four days of “special effects,” which sounds really exciting, but it’s just erasing the camera crew in the window. Aside from that it’s done, it’s been submitted to festivals. It almost got into Cannes Film Festival, which shocked the hell out of us. It’s a pretty odd movie.
The racket with films is “you have to have your film born through a festival,” or that’s what your producers say. So you have to sit there and wait and try to find a festival that has the guts and the daring to put a strange film like ours in their festival. Right now we’re just waiting to see if any of these festivals will take it. If not, we’re probably gonna put it out on streaming and do some screenings of it, but we’re hoping it’ll be in a festival this fall.
MR: Was that transition a long time coming for you? Like, a gradual shift to filmmaker?
DC: I wanted to make films when I was in high school. When I went to college, I took film classes, but I was just terrible. I had no talent for it. I really love film, I’ve always been a big film guy. So then I met my friend, Zac Farley. He wasn’t a filmmaker but he made videos, and he’s good at that. When we met, it became possible because he has a very strong visual sense. I’m more of a ‘words’ guy, but we have exactly the same kind of interests, and same kind of goals and stuff. It was perfect.
It just came out of someone offering us a chance to make this little film for $40,000 and we took that chance like, “what the fuck, what can we lose?” and it went well enough for us where we’ve now started making films. But it’s because Zac knows how to visualize things and I have a lot of input, but I do the texts and the scripts, and then he has a lot of ideas: “oh, this won’t look that interesting when it’s filmed, we should change it so it has more a visual aspect.”
I’m really excited. I’m more interested in making films right now than anything else. Cuz it’s extremely challenging. It reminds me of when I first started writing novels and I didn’t know how to write a novel. It’s like that cuz we’re just finding our way, and the new film is such a big leap for us, I think. It’s so much better, it’s like, “ooh, lets keep going,” because we learned how to do these things it’s like, let’s go to the next.
MR: Do you think that you guys tried to do something more ambitious than Permanent Green Light with Room Temperature?
DC: It is more ambitious. It cost more money, which it took us 4 years to raise. I’m not gonna do that again. But it is more ambitious. Permanent Green Light is sort of serene and closed in, and it drifts and there’s not a lot going on. This has much more going on: they’re building a haunted house, there’s murder, and all this stuff. It’s much more active.
It’s all non-actors, because we only like to work with non-actors but the performances are much more... kind of funny, very openly funny and very weird and stuff. I’m sure most people will say, “that’s a leap forward?” We don’t want to make ‘indie films,’ we don’t want to go there at all. We just want to keep doing what we’re doing and make it better. I think it’s a really big leap for us. People who’ve seen it seem to like it a lot so we’ll see.
MR: That’s awesome, I commend you. I went to film school, it was what I wanted to do forever. I think a big part of why I started writing fiction is because I realized: “alright, this doesn’t cost any money, and I can do it by myself.” I mean, up until a point. I really do rely on editors to tell me, “hey, these words don’t fucking work in this order.”
DC: I love making films, but oh my god. The shit you have to go through and the time it takes and the people you have to deal with to make it... I mean, it’s worth it to me right now. We went through hell making this film and we’re still going through hell. I think it’s worth it but, my god, it’s so difficult. And the money thing... this is a really low budget film. It cost $430,000 to shoot, but that was so much more than the last one! I can’t even believe we ended up spending that much money on something, it’s just shocking. No we’re like, “let’s get cheaper,” cuz it’s just too much! We needed every penny! It turns out building a haunted house is a very expensive thing to do.
MR: I worked at a haunted house attraction when I was in high school. It was a very interesting experience.
DC: Cool, very cool. I admire that. I just love haunted houses.
MR: Has that always been a thing for you?
DC: I made them in our basement when I was a kid—invited the neighborhood kids to come and go through them. It’s a lifelong obsession.
MR: Do you think that you’ll write another novel at some point?
DC: I really want to... I had originally had this idea that I would write 10: I would write 5 cycle novels, 5 non-cycle novels. When I was starting I Wished, I thought, “this is the last one,” but you know what it’s like. It’s such a fucking pleasure to write fiction. I put it aside and worked on films for a while, then I went back to it and finished it and thought, “this is so fucking fun. Why should I fucking stop when this is such an enormous pleasure?” So I’d like to, but right now I don’t have any ideas. I have to get this obsessive idea, like, “oh my God, I have to write this book, no one’s ever written this book.” It just hasn’t happened yet. Of course, I’m a writer, that’s what I do. I hope to write another novel. I’m certainly going to keep writing.
MR: When you were doing press a few months ago for the repress of Closer. Someone asked you about your poetry in an interview and you said that you felt like making films has kind of replaced that...
DC: I don’t know why I said that. I don’t write poetry, really, anymore. I mean, I suppose I could someday. That was something I did a lot, but it was basically killing time until my fiction got better, but I did really like doing it. I have no inclination to do it anymore, so in some ways... I don’t know. I honestly don’t know why I said that or what that even means.
I mean, I got really obsessed with making novels out of animated GIFs for a while. I think I’ve passed that now. I think I did whatever I was gonna do with it, so in a way, film is also replacing the GIF fiction. So anyway, yeah, people ask me about that, and I literally don’t know what I was thinking when I said that. Except that now, my primary thing is writing fiction and making films, and at one point it was writing fiction and writing poetry.
MR: Do you feel like, when you’re working on scripts, you have to restrain yourself in terms of getting too wordy in descriptions?
DC: A description is just a stand-in because when you actually cast the characters, and actually find the location, until then, you don’t know what anything’s gonna look like. We had no idea who was gonna play the parts when we wrote it. We had no idea where the house was gonna be. We originally thought we were gonna shoot it in some suburb, but ending up being in the middle of the desert, which we never even thought about.
The big difference is that, when you write a novel it’s like a drug. The reader makes everything, every visualization, and it’s like this collaboration. You don’t know what their reference points are, and you don’t know what they’re going to imagine. I love that about it. With a film, you’re gonna have a visual image, and the visual image is the dictator. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s always going to be the dominant thing and you have to play inside it. You can’t fight it.
In fiction, you can fuck with anything, fight with it, have the narrative go away. With film, its always the visual image, and if you have characters—because we’re doing a narrative film— you have to be interested in the characters, you need a kind of consistency to the characters. It’s more about that. Having those rules in place and then trying to be as creative as possible while understanding that that’s actually what you have to be in service of.
I really, really like doing it, and you learn things while you’re making them. Now that Zac and I understand editing, cuz we edited Room Temperature for 6 months, we really know editing now. Like, “if I write this, we can edit it so it’s like that.”
MR: Kevin Smith referred to editing as writing another draft, and I always thought that was kind of interesting. Cuz it is, ya know, that’s when you’re really figuring out what the movie is.
DC: It’s the best part. It’s really, really amazing.
MR: It is. And seeing it come together, and you lose, like 6 hours—
DC: or 15 hours. And you can move things around, like, you imagine one scene before another, but then you’re like, what if we put that scene later. It’ll seem strange but it’ll work.
MR: There’s a really fun magic to filmmaking. When things work out on set, and you see what you wrote happening.
DC: It’s incredible. Yeah, I was, like, crying. There were times when it’s like, the circumstances and the performers were amazing, they so completely understood what I wanted and found it in themselves. Literally, tears were streaming down my face. It’s amazing, an amazing thing to see that happen.
MR: Room Temperature is the third film that you and Zac have done together, right? When you’re working as a director... do you leave the visuals to Zac or have you found yourself becoming more interested in creating some of the images?
DC: For all intents and purposes, on the set, Zac is the director. He’s the one sitting in the director’s chair and working with the DP, and all that stuff, and I let him do that. We discuss everything. I’m there the whole time, I’ll make suggestions, but I let him decide those things. I know what he’s gonna do, he doesn’t suddenly spring something that I don’t know about.
My thing is mostly working with the actors, just making sure the performance is exactly what we want them to be, that’s kind of what I end up doing primarily. Zac is a lot more savvy to what works, visually, than I am.
MR: If I had to guess, I would imagine you are the director working with the actors. In reading your work it’s clear that you have an intimate understanding of what you want to express.
DC: And the text in Room Temperature is very important. That’s true in Permanent Green Light too. Most of the film happens in what the characters are saying, and in this film, even though there’s a lot more going on, everything they say is very important. I like to play with really strange tones, I like things to be sincere and yet kind of scary and kind of sad and funny all at the same time, and it’s not easy to do that. So it’s like, “when you say that line next time, put something a little fragile in your voice and see what happens.”
MR: You mentioned that you really love films in general. Do you approach filmmaking thinking of directors you were influenced by?
DC: We try really hard not to. I think we’ve got our own style, especially now with the third one, I think it’s clear what we’re doing. We certainly have our favorite filmmakers. I mean, Robert Bresson kind of influences everything I do, so that’s always gonna be there. Then there are other filmmakers. Zac and I both really like this filmmaker, James Benning. Zac really likes Chantal Akerman, and I do too. There are all those things that are there, but we never talk about that. We never say, “oh, let’s do this a little more Chantal Akerman-like.” There’s definitely influence, but we’re trying really hard to get something that’s original.
Whether we are or not... Non-actors is a very Bresson thing. Also, all the music in the film has to be played inside the film so the characters can hear it. There’s no score because it creates a distance between the viewer and the characters. Those are all Bressonian kind of rules, but they’re rules we pretty much stick to.
MR: I think that’s a great way to keep the scene immersive, help the actors kind of exist in that world.
DC: It’s also, you’re kind of really close with them. You’re really in kind of a intimate relationship with them because they’re really unfiltered. There’s kind of a purity in watching those characters when there’s nothing telling you what you should think. If it looks like there’s a certain emotion happening, it’s there. There’s nothing telling the audience, “this is a sad moment, this is a dramatic moment,” it has to be right there. In that sense, it’s maybe a little more like fiction. It tries very hard so that the viewer is doing a lot of work. I like films where you have to do a lot of work while you’re watching them. Same with filters. We don’t use any of that shit. I want it to look very pure and real. I don’t want it to have, like, a little purple tint over here. It’s fun in horror movies, but for this it just wouldn’t have worked.
MR: You can do something so small that will take the audience out of the story and remind them that they’re watching a movie in the wrong way. It can really ruin it.
DC: Yeah, in our movies that would be a problem.
MR: So, I’m curious about where the title for Flunker comes from.
DC: When I was in, like, 5th grade, I was really, really, really obsessed with MAD Magazine.
MR: Ok, cool.
DC: Which, back then, MAD Magazine was a big fucking deal, at least in 5th grade. It was so smart and so ironic and all these great things. So, I was really obsessed, and I started my own magazine. I made every issue myself by hand, and I sold it to kids at school, and it was called Flunker.
MR: Fantastic!
DC: Someone reminded me not too long ago about that, and I thought, “that’s such a good title! I should use it.”
©Amphetamine Sulphate ©Max Restaino 2024
Excellent interview
so good