FY: Happy 2021, Charlie.
CC: Thank you. Pleased to have made it through 2020!

FY: Where were you this time last year?
CC: On a beach in Bora-Bora. We did New Year's there, some friends and I and our families. Quite a big group in hindsight. It was paradise.

FY: Where are you going to go next time you can pull off a vacation like that?
CC: This summer we went to the Outback. Ayer's Rock and all that, which was excellent. I'd like to do a tour of all the old colonies.

FY: What were your favorite quarantine purchases?
CC: T-shirts from Jungmaven, I fell in love with their shirts in 2018 and I buy five in every color so I never run out. A painting by Guillaume Linard Osorio that hangs in my office-cum-editing room. Several of Joshua Paul's Formula 1 prints, I'm a motorhead so they're about as erotic to me as anything I've shot. Byredo candles because I'm basic. I buy the Cotton Poplin scent, it smells like what you wish those "fresh linen" scented detergents smelled like. Sort of like a clean bed, which to me is very sexy. I bought a cold-press juicer, but I only make sweet, sugary juices. I'm sure it's wasted on my orange juice. [laughs]

FY: Are you a homebody?
CC: In a way. I'm not unhappy being stuck at home. I have a big house. I don't mind being alone. I have my dog, my crossword puzzles, my television. But I like a club, I like a party. I'm a zero or one-hundred kind of man, I'm either a sloth or I'm that GIF of the guy with the glowsticks. I'm one of those introverts who likes people. Socialising tires me out, but I still need to interact with others. I think that's much, much more common than not.

FY: Needing time for yourself regardless of how outgoing you are.
CC: Exactly.

FY: What was that like when you were younger? Always filming or doing press, how did you find time to be alone?
CC: Well, I was a child. So I didn't find anything, really. I did what I was told. Not that I was ever made to do anything awful, and I did feel respected by my publicist. I could say "I need a rest" but I often didn't. I'm a workaholic. So if it was between alone time or working, I would pick work every time. I'm also very good at, I'd say, almost disassociating. Even when you're among quite a lot of people you can find quiet space in your own head. I could read a novel in the middle of a hurricane, I'm very good at blocking out noise and activity. You have to be to do your schoolwork on a set.

FY: What was your education like?
CC: As good an education as one can get remotely. I'd have gone to public school if I hadn't been working, and I doubt I'd have gotten a better education there than I did with tutoring. I am very task-oriented. So I was good at memorising things, good at doing anything that required execution. I just took it very seriously.

FY: But no university.
CC: Oh, Christ, no. You have to go through certain steps for university to be a meaningful experience for you. I didn't go through any of those steps. What do you learn at university, really? How to be a functioning adult. How to manage your time, how to write and speak in a professional setting. Well, I'd had all of those things by the time I was thirteen. I had to get out and learn the other stuff. How do you write and speak in a social setting? I didn't know that.

FY: What's the thing about you that always surprises people?
CC: I had some bloke tell me I could not have been [Harry Potter] because I've got light hair. He was just emphatic, arguing with his girlfriend.

FY: Do you mind when people stop you? It must happen all the time.
CC: Less than you'd think! No, no. I couldn't mind. Wherever I am, he [Harry] is paying for me. If I'm eating or travelling or walking my dog, you know... I owe my lifestyle to him. And for the most part people are respectful. It helps that the fan base is older. 30-somethings don't go in for mauling washed-up actors. Some of my younger friends are always getting harrnagued for a TikTok or whatever, but Harry's fans are sitting around with me like, "mate, how the fuck do you work TikTok?"

FY: It's so complicated.
CC: Okay, I'm glad you agree. I can't figure out how to use it. I feel legitimately elderly about it.

FY: So no TikTok films from you on the horizon?
CC: I don't know if it's the right platform to be promoting my kind of work...

FY: When did you decide to pivot to directing?
CC: It wasn't a pivot so much as it was a step after a long pause. I knew I didn't want to continue acting. I'm no fucking good at it! I'm so wooden in front of a camera and worse on stage.

FY: You were great in Drunk History!
CC: Oh, because it was a fucking lark. It was like, the most situational of comedies. I have an expressive face so-

FY: Big eyes-
CC: Big mouth [laughs]. But you're just miming, so as long as you can pull a good face you're alright. It's not about timing or like, subtlety or anything like that. I would not, under any circumstances, call that "acting."

FY: Sorry, go on. You didn't want to continue acting...?
CC: Yeah, so, I loved being on set. I loved the equipment, I loved the gear, I loved getting my call sheet. Until you've been on a film set like that, you just can't imagine the logistical challenges of it all. Our line producers were the most organized, professional, capable people I've ever met. I just gravitated towards the technical aspects of set life. And our DPs for the final films, Eduardo [Serra] and Bruno [Delbonnel], they were very excited to have me around the cameras. I owe my current career to them, lock stock and barrel. To have your lead just poking around the gear, asking questions. They were so patient. I learned a great deal from them.

FY: Still, your directing is nothing like...
CC: Yeah. Truly couldn't be more different [laughs]. It was one-hundred-percent just the understanding of, like, technical aspects of image capture. And I learned how to handle the gear and take a shot. I've got an eye for it, I think you've got to naturally have an eye, you can't learn that. But it wasn't until I started to understand what I wanted to capture that I, you know, properly began to generate work of any meaning.

FY: How did you come to identify what stories you wanted to tell?
CC: Seeing them unfold in real life and finding them so utterly beautiful that I wanted to capture them. Seeing youth and sex and intimacy, especially queer youth and sex and intimacy. I honestly consider that my "university" experience. Being in my early twenties, making friends, having sex. I saw all these young people like me exploring the world and their bodies. And there are people who are having a bad time of it, I did at some points. Los Angeles can be a really unsafe place for a young gay man. But when I started to find the moments of safety and exploration I was like, this is heaven. This is happiness. There is so much fucking beauty in intimacy. Confidence and joy and pleasure. To me it's like, the purest thing in the world. Fuck flowers. I want to shoot someone young, in love, having a gut-wrenching orgasm. That's nature, that's love, that's beauty. And it's a humanity that we're weirdly robbed of in 99% of modern media. You're not getting it in traditional features, you're certainly not getting it in mainstream porn.

FY: What's work been like for you through the pandemic?
CC: We were meant to start filming on my feature last spring. We're only just now finally starting to actually move forward. It's not a money project, not financed by a studio or anything, so we didn't have any pressure to shoot before we were good and ready. But filming's been delayed almost an entire year now, and frankly if you look at the storyboards from last December and what they are now, it's a different film entirely. So that's a blessing, I suppose. We were able to finish up Pleasure Park through stay-at-home, so that wasn't too bad. And obviously we wouldn't have even made Moan Together if we hadn't all been stuck alone at home. My home office is an editing room, I've got a really lovely setup in there, and I put in a dark room in my house as well since for a while I couldn't get film developed anywhere in the city. I think people forget that New York was like, properly apocalyptic for several months. I genuinely only left my house to walk my dog. I've lived in this spot for about six, seven years now, but I had a chance to really settle in this past year. You get forced to look at your home as your work space and your play space, as well.

FY: How much of what you photograph is self-reflective?
CC: Well I'm queer, obviously. I mean I'm gay, I'm a cisgender gay man, but there's still queerness there to me. The things I like, the things I find sensual and sexual, the things that turn me on or just evoke a reaction in me: they run the gamut. So I hope to be less a director projecting myself onto my subjects and more a cheerleader in my subjects' self-expression, but is there stuff I shoot that I find personally really erotic? Of course. There's also quite a lot I shoot that is about as sexually exciting to me as shooting, I don't know... Ikea glassware. Might be someone's kink, but I just think it's fine. I'm not shooting things that offend me, though.

FY: It's not the kink, then, but the subject's interest in it?
CC: Exactly that. When someone lights up because they're doing something they love-especially when it's something they love in private and so rarely feel the freedom to share it with others-that's what I'm trying to capture.

FY: You've done several collaborations with the Tom of Finland Foundation. How did that relationship materialize?
CC: I don't know, mate. I was lucky to grow up in a time when gay erotic imagery was easy to find. I had a laptop, one of those candy-coloured Macs, I could just, you know, Lycos "cocks" or whatever. And still when I saw my first Tom artwork I was like, "this is my fantasy." And it's not that I'm into bikers or leather daddies or butch sailors, but I think there's this really transcendent kind of primal connection that a lot of gay men have to Tom's work. Even if it's not your first exposure to gay erotic art, you almost feel as though it is, and you feel really seen.?"

And I just think that's so important, not just to preserve that moment of identity but to preserve erotic art. It's visibility, it's meaningful.

FY: And it's just plain fun. It's fun to look at these sexual caricatures, it's fun to watch your work. I remember a moment in Pleasure Park where a bloke is on his knees licking his partner's dirty sock foot. It wasn't hot to me but I felt the kind of thrill of watching something naughty, and it was fun!
CC: Yes! [laughs] I covet that moment of naughtiness. I think you can appreciate the freedom of embracing something better once you've felt for a moment that it's a bit of a dirty secret. Shame sucks, I never want to feel that or cause a viewer or subject to feel shame. But there's a really lovely, delicious tension that comes from a sprinkling of embarrassment. It's like calling a lover "Daddy": it's harmless but that residue of it being "wrong" makes it all the hotter.

FY: Do you call your lovers "Daddy?"
CC: Funny story, I had a partner once who was four or five years older than I was. He was like, "if either of us is going to be called Daddy it has to be you, because you're such an old soul." I was like, 28 going on 78. But no, I'm...

FY: You're Daddy.
CC: [laughs] I'm Daddy, I guess, yeah.