Chris Knox: in conversation with Roger Shepherd - part one

Interview – 2009

Chris Knox's music career began with legendary Dunedin punk band The Enemy, followed by post-punk heroes Toy Love, then Tall Dwarfs and his own solo work. As a singer-songwriter and music video director, he is known as a pioneer of lo-tech, DIY classics.

In this two-part ScreenTalk interview, Knox chatted with Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd about his life and career. In this first part, Knox concentrates on his early love of films and filmmaking, and footage shot of his bands The Enemy and Toy Love. Knox touches on:

Being a lover of horror films at a young age
How he first got into filmmaking
The first footage of The Enemy, shot by music-mad cameraman Peter Janes
Making Toy Love video Squeeze
Later Toy Love videos Rebel and Don't Ask Me

Part two of this interview can be found here, where Knox talks about directing his own music videos, being a film reviewer and TV presenter, and his comic strip Max Media.

This video was first uploaded on 25 May 2009, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview - Roger Shepherd. Direction - Clare O’Leary. Camera and Editing - Leo Guerchmann

The first piece of film I took, I couldn't afford 8mm film really, so I thought 'what's the best way to eek this three minutes of movie out? Oh I'll do some animation'. And that consisted of our wooden elephant with ivory tusks with a plastic skeleton on top of it, just advancing frame by frame. And I think I got bored of that after about ten seconds of animation. That's was the end of my animation career for a while.
– Chris Knox on his early filmmaking experiments

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