Q: How did you come up with a character as risque and mysterious as Aeon Flux?

This is the question I get asked the most and it's a very hard one to answer. What drives a lot of my creativity is an evolving set of theories about how the experience of art affects the viewer. There is the other side of me which is driven by aesthetic instinct, spontaneous expression and the subconscious. I wanted a character that would satisfy both needs at once.

Creating Aeon was very much a process of elimination. I set myself a rigorous set of restrictions-- of things I'd disallow: not an ideologue, a patriot or a crimefighter; no one giving her orders; no family; no assumptions. I tried to eliminate anything that would allow you to predict her actions. Aeon has no family, or ties to anyone. Any dramatic points a screenwriter can score by holding family members hostage (or killing!) reveal nothing about her as a unique individual. Too easy. It's shorthand. We assume anyone is going to feel an emotional attachment to their sibling. That tells me nothing about her. Her worth (to us) is her responsibility and hers alone. The point is, we all define our own worth. It's the main point of the series, actually.

The outcome in any work of fiction is arbitrary. It's at the whim of the author. What is not arbitrary is the form. You cannot cheat form. Form is not a vehicle for content. It is the content. The point is in the structure, the relationship of parts, the endowment of meaning to events through context. It is not the role of the author to moralize or to pronounce judgment.

That is the deliberate aversion to provide backstory. Because backstory is a trap. Ambiguous? A character in a film is not someone whose background we need to know in order to consider proceeding in a relationship with him/her. The process of discovery IS the relationship. Explain nothing. What matters is not the names of families, how many years in the future or past. What matters is the structure, the relationship of events, the thread which allows us to accept an unlikely outcome through the carefully delineated (and orchestrated) sequence of causal progression driven by character. You can transpose a good story on any setting, any era. (Shakespeare)

What makes a story compelling is that it: 1.has coherence and 2. corresponds to personal experience. The more unlikely the conclusion, the more compelling the tale. We want to learn how an event that seems to make no sense actually does when you know the details. That's how headlines hook you and what keeps you reading till the end of the newspaper article.

Aeon, unlike the revolutionaries in so much science fiction, is not struggling to win her freedom. The typical rebel heroes (Luke, Logan, THX1138, Neo, John Conner, and Catherine Goodchild) are fighting to free themselves from oppression. When their struggle succeeds, their stories end. But what happens after they attain their long-sought freedom? That is where Aeon's story begins. She isn't striving to be free. She IS free. When rebellions win, they are likely to replace one form of control with another. Aeon doesn't take orders from anyone. Everything she does is self-motivated. That is why each episode must create a new motive for her. There is no ideological template to follow.

[monican_spies: The Peter Chung Interview!!!!]