David LaChapelle: The Surreal Life
Stance Magazine June 2003
By J. Bennett

When he's not taking photos that look like scenes from that movie where J.Lo and Vince Vaughn fight crime inside a serial killer's brain, David LaChapelle directs music videos like The Vines' "Outtatheway," Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty," and that Elton John one where Justin Timberlake wears a prosthetic face. Oh, and he also has a knack for getting celebrities to take their clothes off.

How often do people confuse you with Dave Chappelle the comedian?
Oh, I know Dave Chappelle. It's funny, when I first started out we were both staying in the same hotel, and all the modeling portfolios would get sent to his room. He wrote me a funny note. Years later, I flew to Washington D.C., and took photos of him with his mom and grandma. Nice guy – I hear his show is funny.

What are you doing today?
I'm working with Jennifer Lopez, shooting a video for a song called "I'm Glad." We're taking the film Flashdance and recreating every single detail, frame-by-frame, with Jennifer Lopez in Jennifer Beals' place.

Why would you wanna do that?
It's like when Gus Van Sant redid Psycho frame-by-frame, you can't improve on perfection. Flashdance is perfection for that era – it changed the way film and video looked, so I just wanted to do a tribute to that. It's an iconic piece of film.

Your photos are considered highly original. It seems weird that you would want to copy something else.
A lot of directors and photographers reference other people or appropriate other people's work, and that's not what I'm about. I really believe in coming up with your own ideas. I think plagiarism exists in the visual world as well as the written world. People tend not to think that things are authored in visual mediums, but they are. Journalists lose their whole careers copying other people. This is completely different – it's conceptual, and it's a challenge to recreate this film detail by detail.

A lot of people have ripped you off.
Yeah. Robbed, raped, pillaged. I get ripped off, but if I wasn't having shows in museums and having books and stuff like that, I'd be bitter. When I first started out, it really bothered me when other photographers would sample my work, but now it's different. Now people – especially kids – tend to know who did what.

I feel like the music videos you've done lately - The Vines, Avril Lavigne, Christina Aguilera – aren't nearly as filthy as I'd like them to be, considering they're coming from you.
I know what you mean. A lot of the filth ends up on the cutting–room floor. I would have done [Christina Aguilera's] for people like you. There's hours of footage of the plushies in the mud mosh pit from the "Dirrty" video that you didn't even see. You never saw the pork scene.

You mean like Porky Pig. Or porking. The action. As in 'to pork'?
[To the tune of "Twelve Days Of Christmas"] As in "six pigs-a-porking, five golden cock rings!" [He laughs.]

What celebrity would you most like to take naked photos of?
Carnie Wilson. She just did Playboy, and I'm really jealous that she didn't ask me to shoot her. It could have been fun. I'd also like to take naked pictures of Jennifer Lopez.

Did you try to talk her into it?
No, because she's not wearing a lot anyway, and I want the video to look exactly like the film.

Have you ever asked anyone to get naked, and they wouldn't do it?
Yeah, Madonna wouldn't do it.

Really? I feel like she'd get naked for anyone.
Yeah, but I guess she felt like she'd done too much of it.

There's a rumor floating around the internet that you've charged a million dollars for a photo shoot.
[Laughs] We can charge 'em, but we're still waiting for those checks. It's been over 90 days, too. [Laughs] No, I do so many shoots for magazines with tiny budgets, but they have good printing and they have a following, so you wanna be in there. But I obviously work for magazines with big budgets and do advertising, because I'd rather rip myself off than watch somebody else do it. If that makes me a prostitute, that's fine – I've always been a prostitute. For me, it's all about getting published.

Do you prefer doing stuff for less-mainstream magazines because you can get away with more?
Actually, my biggest thrill was that I had pictures on the cover of the National Enquirer. One was of Jerry Springer that I shot years ago, of him all beat up, I blacked an eye and knocked one of his teeth out, and then I did a photo of Whitney Houston, for her records label, that somehow ended up on their cover.

What do you like best about your job?
I'm addicted to the pace; I'm addicted to the deadlines. It's the adrenaline – you get excited, do a shoot, get to press the day after, unless you're on a plane to go somewhere else and do it again, and you don't have time, the stress builds up again… there's a whole cycle. I've been doing it crazy like this for ten years now. When I was a kid, I wanted this insane life of traveling and hotels, seeing the whole world, shooting everything, eating everything and f-king everybody and I got it. Now I'd like to… well, not slow down, but I don't wanna f-k everybody anymore.

Who's been your favorite person to work with so far?
I always get crushes on the people I'm working with – it's inevitable. But sometimes you have to focus on one thing about the person to like – even if it's their shoes- just so you can stay interested. Not to keep blowing her horn, but Jennifer Lopez is so f-king cool. And so nice, and not in that fake, L.A., overly friendly way. And so beautiful – you could put a flashlight under her chin and she'd still be beautiful – you cannot light her badly. And talented – that bitch dances like there's no tomorrow. So who's shoe s have you had to look at?
[Laughs] You could fill a Foot Locker with the shoes I've had to focus on.