Anarchist At Heart: An Interview with Dennis Cooper

DG: Awesome, can’t wait to see it. Actually, regarding “Permanent Green Light”: You’ve talked a lot about Bresson’s influence on your writing. Would it be fair to say the same for your film output? I ask because when I saw the movie, I really felt like the character where almost like stand-ins for these very real feelings.

DC: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’m half of it, Zac has his own filmmaker heroes. For me, just like within my books, the characters often end up just being configurations and approaches to certain topics. They’re not real people to me. With film, it’s different because there’s an actual human person in front of you that wants you to direct them, so you can’t really turn them completely into, I don’t know, ciphers. Still, there’s a lot of neutral tones and the actors perform within a certain range. They don’t go to emotional extremes, except maybe the final scene in “Permanent Green Light”. There’s no music in the film that the characters can’t also hear, and they’re all non-actors. So there’s certainly some kind of Bressoninan thing happening there.

DG: Sure. I mean, the things one consumes – media and content wise – are bound to influence one’s own creative output, even if only subconsciously. 

DC: Right. I mean, I don’t really like what’s happening in current film, to be honest, outside of experimental films. I think we were, subconsciously, trying to sort of work against what is going on in most movie products, like this insane amount of color grading and the relentless score and everything else that is usually there to, well, I guess, “sell the thing”, to manipulate the viewer. We’re really against that and wealways try to make our films look very neutral. There’s no score. We are interested in making something that feels really odd and unique and kind of, I guess, pure and interesting. There’s certainly a bit of us wanting make something that doesn’t feel like other things. Otherwise, why would we want to do that? Because I don’t even really like “Anora” or “Oppenheimer” or whatever; I don’t really care about any of that shit. 

DG: Right. I also remember you talking about how you and Zac wanted “Permanent Green Light” to feel a little bit disorienting, to have no reference point to where it could take place in, like this in-between of place and non-place. I also, circling back to your book, got a similar feeling when I read “I Wished”, especially in the James Turrell-crater part of it, even if the description is a very specific one. It remained sort of ambiguous, which then underscores the emotional component of it.

DC: Yeah, I mean, we’re definitely interested in erasing as much as possible, so you really have to concentrate on the characters and their faces. We’re not really interested in the context giving any clues, maybe except for going “well, this is a really depressing place to live in” (laughs), or something. We really try to create this close engagement with the characters, and either you want to go with them or you don’t. 

And in the books, too, yeah. I mean the books are generally, if you really wannapinpoint it, set in Los Angeles. But still, I don’t know if you’ve ever been there; Los Angeles is very much a non-place; it doesn’t really have a physical identity. It’s just like a giant suburb, you know? And so it makes it easy to set things there. I like when the setting doesn’t really give you any clues.

DG: So the place always influences the writing?

DC: Yeah, definitely. And then there’s the fact that the books don’t really have strong plots, because I’m really not interested in any of that stuff. They exist in this kind of ineffable momentum. It’s never like there’s a plan to set something, for example, in Los Angeles. That’s just the world I grew up in and the world my imagination was built on. 

DG: So, I know you’ve been asked this a lot so I will refrain myself from becoming the boring interviewer, but – correct me if I’m wrong – you’ve mentioned that you basically write about fantasy (not the genre, of course). Do you still feel like that?

DC: Well, I mean, it’s fantasy because it’s all imagination, but there’s always a sense of it being grounded in something very recognizable. As you said, it never feels like you’re in a fantasy novel or something like that. 

DG: As you aptly pointed out, you’re not running around killing people (laughs). Still, does it ever get hard to actually live in the real world when much of your actual work is focused on imagination? Does it get hard to live a life beyond one’s own writing, beyond the confines of a computer and a digital Word file? 

DC: No. I don’t have any problem with it at all. I mean, I’ve always had a weird fantasy life, even when I was a kid. Back then, it took me forever to start writing those George Miles-novels and I did a lot of research for them. So I was always very clear about there being a strong dividing-line between my life and my writing. I have never had a problem mistaking something in the real world for what was going on in my writing, for example. I don’t ever feel lonely, or crazy, or whatever (laughs). 

Actually, I remember, back in the eighties, there was a time where I was trying to figure out my writing and I would find myself trying stuff to see how far I could go in my real life. I realized very quickly that I wasn’t able to go very far with it. I would try these different experiments, trying to be in the presence of things that I was writing about and then try to imagine, you know, what do I do now and how could I deal with this situation? I used to hire a lot of prostitutes when I was young as an experiment; I’d adopt a sort of persona with them and sort of study the situation to see what would happen. I, of course, never did anything terrible with them at all, but it was this sort of mental thing of trying to imagine how I could be one of these men who do this? So yeah, I did do stuff like that, but I never got lost in it. It was always, if you can call it that, research. 

DG: Interesting. I remember you saying something about „Guide“, of it being this in-between place, between anchoring yourself down to what’s actually happening and then, simultaneously, to what is happening in the writing, so that’s where I came from with my previous question, because I would’ve thought it to be difficult – also speaking for myself – to navigate these things, these fantasies and desires and then, sort of, cap it all off, turn off the computer and be like “of, now I can go to dinner”, or whatever. 

DC: No, no. It’s all just in the writing itself. It’s interesting; I don’t really have any compulsions to act things out. I would actually venture to say that I’m a relatively moral, ethical person (laughs). I mean, I’m an anarchist, I’ve been one my whole life; there are these principles by which I live my life but I would never impose anything on anybody else. 

DG: Definitely. I think it also gets easier when you treat the writing as work, which it really is, sitting down at your computer and writing for multiple hours. I feel like that sometimes gets lost in that conversation. It’s the same as somebody that works in an office eight hours a day, just with a different outcome. Do you know what I mean?

DC: Yeah, well, because of my stuff being constructed through enormous amounts of re-writings, it really is never like I can spew out some kind of fancy shit or something and call it a day. It really takes me a long time to do it (work). Restructuring things is very much like work. It’s really not like I’m sitting in a bougee café and drinking my expensive coffee while writing the next novel. 

DG: It’s not masturbatory, let’s put it that way?

DC: No, definitely not. 

DG: And how does this long editing process of your books translate to your films, as I would image it’s a totally different way of working? Is it pleasurable to edit the film in the same way it is, for you, pleasurable to re-edit novels?

DC: Oh, no. I mean, what I really like about doing movies is that they’re layered; when you write a novel, you write it and it’s done. It’s relatively linear. You write, edit, and it’s finished. In films, you can go layer by layer, you know, you write the script and then you don’t really know who’s going to be in it, you might not know where you’re going to shoot it. There are a lot more variables, so you start filling in the blanks, finding locations, scouting actors and such. Then you might rewrite certain things for them to fit better with the actors chosen. Then you start to shoot it and you inevitably change some things, depending on the conditions at hand. I mean, we change things all the time, because you might find that certain things work better than others. We are very collaborative and we always like to work with the performers to try different things. You get to do more revising and stylizing, for sure. 

DG: Especially since a movie, unlike a novel, also has the visual component of it, right?

DC: Oh yeah, it’s totally different. I sometimes think of my books as being drugs, like a substance you sort of give people, they take it and then they make up the rest in their minds. The reader builds the novel. Because I don’t really give many details about the looks of my characters, people have a million different opinions as to how a given person might look to them. The same, as I was saying earlier, goes for the setting. They construct the world. That’s what excites me about fiction; you give people these characters and this world and they build the rest and have to take responsibility for that. The novel is just the formula, you make the decision of either taking and going with it or not.

With film, all of that is already visualized. There are so many decisions already made for you. Like this is how the character looks, this is what the house he lives in looks like, and so on. All that substance is already there. You can’t expect the viewer to take responsibility for what’s happening because you are manipulating them. You are feeding them these things, these stories, these people. We always, as I mentioned, try to give the audience a lot of neutrality, a lot of space and a lot of mystery as well, so that it does, still, to some degree, activate the imagination and the viewer does still have to sort of work to get something out of them because our movies don’t spell everything out for you. It’s not like “let’s go to the store… Ok, now I’m pissed at you”, or whatever. It’s really different than writing fiction, it’s definitely a different kind of challenge.

DG: And has the movie-making process affected the way you write novels at all? 

DC: I don’t really know. I don’t think it has. I think it’s possible that maybe in “I Wished” something like that was happening because when you’re writing a script, it’s all dialogue. You have to do everything in the dialogue, and then you sort of end up saying things like “they’re sitting there, they’re walking there” and so on. It’s very different because in a novel you have to build the world they are doing the dialogue in. So, I don’t know actually. But I’ve definitely gotten better at dialogue. I used to write theater pieces as well, which were mostly dialogue, so maybe that plays into it too. I think I’ve gotten to a point where I know how to make things more complicated because of how I use dialogue, and that might show up in some of the newer novels. 

DG: Speaking of „I Wished”, could you talk a little bit about how all those various scenarios – Santa Claus, James Turrel, John Wayne Gacy, George (Miles) – intersect with each other, if at all? Would it be fair to call them all thought experiments within the same universe?

DC: Well, it depends. You know, firstly, it’s a book about George. A lot of is based on real events, though it’s not like a transcript of real world scenarios. I’m talking about my life in relationship to George. At the time I knew George I was really fascinated by serial killers so I guess that sort of intersected itself into the book as well. The James Turrell crater.. I don’t exactly remember how that happened. I was doing these fairy tales for another project, based on Hans Christian Andersen and I had been interested in the fairy-tale form for a while. I guess, in a very odd way, the crater and George effectively blowing his brains out in real life seemed connected, in a metaphorical way. I don’t know if you’ve even seen a crater, but the mental image should suffice. 

DG: Did you ever visit the (James Turrell) crater?

DC: You can’t. I’ve tried, but you can’t visit it unless you’re someone who has donated millions of dollars to the project. It’s supposed to open at some point but it still hasn’t, so nobody can go, unless you’re like, Kanye West, or something.

Going back to the book, you know, it’s always hard for me to remember why I made the decisions I made (laughs). I remember thinking that the figure of Santa Claus could, in theory, provide George some happiness because of how depressed he had been and I guess I thought about what would happen if Santa Claus could give George anything? What would he give him? It was a very personal book. I had never really written a personal book and I wanted to try to do it, in my own way. I planned it for a long time and changed it many times until the final form eventually started taking the shape the way it did, which is certainly different than all the other books I wrote. I had to be true to the feeling to George, to some degree. 

DG: And did “I Wished”, in hindsight, influence how you view the George Miles cycle of books as a whole?

DC: No. I thought of it as being a completely separate book and I originally wasn’t even going to mention the cycle in it, but then it became obvious that I really had to mention it at least once. So, I guess I did, naturally, remember the cycle but I wasn’t really thinking about the cycle at all, if that makes sense. 

DG: You mentioned the theatre pieces you did, most notably with Gisèle Vienne, Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg. How did those come about? I remember sort of seeing them peripherally and, being a fan of everyone’s work individually, audibly going “holy shit”!

DC: I got invited to do a lecture about my work in Lyon and Gisèle heard about this. She was familiar with my work because my books were being published in France. She basically just wrote to me saying “I really like your work. Do you wannastay five extra days and try to make a piece with me?”. She sent me some DVD’s of what she had been doing and she sent me some of Peter’s work, which I already liked prior to her sending it to me. Stephen wasn’t involved at that time. I then decided to stay and we made our first piece together in, like, five days, which is hard to believe because it took years to make our other pieces. It was really exciting. So then we ended up keeping in touch and wanting to work together. At a certain point we were making this piece called “Kindertotenlieder”, which is my favorite out of the ones we made, and Gisèle talked to Stephen and he joined. I don’t really remember how she met Stephen, but she likes Sunn O))) a lot, of course. Stephen was involved in all the work for a really long time after that. He’s a good friend and I’d love to do something with him in the future, so we’ll see. So, yeah, it was great, it was really amazing to work with them. It was very, very hard when Peter died, of course.

DG: I’m sure. 

Rest in peace Peter Rehberg.

DG: On a totally tangential topic, just because I have it on a shelf in front of me and I just read it: I know you’ve praised “Castle Faggot” a lot (and even wrote an afterword for it), going as far as saying it’s one of the best novels ever. What is it that appeals to you so much? I, too, love it, but I’m not really sure I could explain why. I keep asking myself, what is this thing even?

DC: I mean, my favorite things in the world are things that totally confuse me but are, still, artistically so obviously deserving of one’s own attention. I love things that create this sort of hallucination for me, if that makes sense. I remember reading it and feeling like everything about it excited me, where it was formally and everything. I really love Derek’s work and I really thought this was a big breakthrough for him. I don’t understand how he did it. It’s something that utterly confounds me in the best way, where you’re just like, what the fuck? You know? It’s like that, and that is so rare, especially nowadays. 

DG: Definitely. I feel like Derek is also a part of this generation of writers and these flourishing smaller presses that do that type of literature. I keep asking myself, why is this renaissance of independent publishing happening now? On the one hand, the digital age has made it easier for people to find an audience, which is great. On the other hand, much of that content, which we might tentatively define as “transgressive”, feels like it goes against so much of our current political correctness-era. Like how does this stuff even get made? It’s awesome.

DC: Well, I mean, all of the most interesting artists are always rebels, you know? I think, maybe, because of the fact that novels and fiction are, relatively, so unimportant nowadays, except for, like, when Ocean Voung becomes a superstar or whatever, and I think, maybe, that excites people that are working in this way because it becomes almost as if they can work in secret because no one – generally speaking – is really paying attention? You know, most of these really great books aren’t getting any attention in the mainstream at all. In a world where there is very little actual “underground” stuff happening, this certainly feels underground. I saw it all rise up when the whole alt-lit movement started and it kind of branched off from that, I guess. It’s pretty exciting. I’ve said this before, but: I’ve never seen so much amazing new work by young, new writers. I just can’t even keep up with it. There’s so much, it’s great. 

DG: I always compare it the same feeling I got when I was younger and going to punk shows in some kind of decrepit venue with like twenty people in the audience, in the middle of nowhere. At the end, you’re like, “this was amazing, I want more of this”. I feel like it scratches that same itch.

DC: Yeah, sure. For me, because I’m a little bit older, I always think back to that fucked up, psychedelic, experimental stuff. Or even early rave culture was like that. It was pretty unbelievable. I don’t know what I would compare it do now. Maybe noise, because of it being so niche. I love noise concerts and I always try to go whenever there’s one. It’s so exciting because everything else is so fucked. It’s nice that there’s this whole kind of scene of people who believe in their fucking art. They might not change the world, you know; they’re people like me, but it’s so refreshing. 

DG: Definitely. Plus I think it’s nice to have a physical thing that, even if you wanted to post excerpts on Instagram or wherever, you’d probably get banned for the content of the books often violating just about every guideline. I feel like noise is a good example, yeah. Going back to your own work, I was wondering: is there a difference, for you, between writing prose and writing poetry? Does the process vary at all?

DC: I haven’t written poetry in so long. I mean, initially, when I was 15, I wanted to be a “serious writer”. I originally wanted to write fiction, but I was always writing poems when I was a kid. I think because I set my ambitions so extremely high for myself in fiction, I ended up writing a lot of poetry because that was what I could do better. It eventually kind of cross-faded into my fiction-writing, but I stopped writing poetry a long time ago. In hindisight, I think it was a good thing for me to come to fiction through poetry rather than, you know, a Columbia University writing program, but I don’t know. I mean, poetry was very emotional for me; it was very much emotion-based, and fiction is much more of a kind of calculated thing, of trying to create something, almost like a chemistry experiment. 

DG: I was just going over my notes and I remembered that I had written “Wikipedia bullshit”. I guess I’m referring to a sentence that stuck out to me on your page there – which already says a lot about it – that went something along the lines of you “questioning normality”. And I was like, are you? Is that ever the point of your work? (Knowing the answer is most probably “no”)

DC: I mean, I haven’t looked at my Wikipedia page in ages (laughs). I don’t know. I think often times it’s more about having a sense of what the normal thing is and trying to do something that is not normal or compromised in any way based on knowing what normal is.  

DG: Quoting Bataille; „Obscenity is always relative”. I’m sure you know this better than anyone, some stuff might appeal to people more than other things, simply put, right? Like that moment when you show someone what you’re reading and they might have a different life altogether and go like “Why the fuck would you ever want to read that?”

DC: Yeah, sure. Different interests, different life stories. Also, I don’t ever want to harass anyone. I don’t want to be like Artaud it’s not a didactic kind of thing for me.

DG: So, what are you working on currently? 

DC: The next film. I’m honestly mostly interested in film. I don’t wanna say that I won’t write another novel; I’m sure I probably will, eventually, but, yeah. Right now, I’m really excited about film. It’s super challenging, it’s so new and it feels like trying to move into something uncharted, which I like. It feels huge and I still feel like we could go even further. I’ve almost finished writing the new film so then we’ll have to go through the bad thing about making movies which is having to raise the movie for them (laughs). It took us four years to raise the money for the last one, and we’re not going to do that again because that was just a nightmare. And they’re cheap films, comparatively. It’s not like they cost a lot of money. But yeah, I just hate that so much, all that waiting and you basically do nothing in between. You can’t do anything creative on the film until the money is raised. You can fiddle with it, but you can’t really make anything worthwhile. You’re stuck, while the money is being raised. It’s terrible. 

In France, there’s different grants. “Permanent Green Light” was made with a regional grant. We got a grant from Normandy, so we had to shoot it in there and employ people from Normandy, which really was secondary to the story, given how, again, neutral all of it had to look. Our whole task was to erase the ocean because we didn’t want to have that identity in the movie. We had many, many hours of erasing seagulls and seagull cries, and we actually even missed one (laughs). You would never see it, but there’s a seagull we missed. I’m just like “Oh fuck, there’s a seagull”. Anyway, it’s really a racket. Then again, if you choose to shoot a film in the US, there are no grants. There’s nothing. You can’t get any help. Here, at least, they have that system. The only problem here in France – I don’t know what it’s like in Germany – is that it’s all very restrictive. I understand that they want to make sure everybody gets paid and nobody gets exploited, which is good, but then you have to shoot it twelve days and we really had to rush. I mean, “Permanent Green Light” cost around 135,000€ to make. In the US, you could say “Hey, wanna work on this film project? We can’t really pay you, but it will be fun”. Here, you can’t because that’s illegal. 

DG: I know you said at the beginning that you’re not particularly interested in modern film culture. Still, are there some, any, films you recently watched that stuck with you?

DC: Sure, but, I mean, I don’t really know how you’re going to be able to see them (laughs). There are a lot and I don’t really remember the individual names, but I recently saw one film, this documentary about a woman who lives in France and her obsession with fireworks. She makes these fireworks herself, like these very elaborate ones. It was really good. There’s this other young guy named Julian Castronovo and his movie is called “Debut”; it cost 900 dollars to make, he made it all on his computer and it’s super interesting, very smart. On the other hand, I always love James Benning. So yeah, I do see interesting stuff, it just never really gets released (laughs). In Paris (where I live), you can see just about anything because there’s always a venue or a museum that shows these weird things. 

DG: Paris for the win.

DC: I wouldn’t disagree with you.