Alex Cox: Dedicated to the Struggle

Alex Cox on the set of The Searchers 2.0

Alex Cox: Dedicated to the Struggle
By Richard T. Kelly


Alex Cox's reputation as a radical-minded maverick could easily rest on Repo Man alone, but over a 25-year directorial career he has never ceased to innovate and agitate, as his latest movie (Searchers 2.0) and a just-published book (X Films) make clear. Here he talks to Richard T. Kelly about his body of work, its latest entries, and the value of the struggle to make movies against the grain.

A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations, rather than looking to flee them like the rest of us. We owe this understanding of the "repo code" to Alex Cox's brilliant, endlessly quotable Repo Man (1984), his debut feature but only the start of a bold career that has taken Cox on radical missions to Nicaragua and Mexico, and through adaptations of Borges and Jacobean tragedy, always with a point to make — both in the movies themselves, and the manner in which he has made them. Most filmmakers play it safer and drop by the bank a little more often, but Cox has been near-recklessly buccaneer. "I've never worried about the future," he told me during a recent visit to London. "This is the moment we're in."

This year Cox has two fine new productions to promote: his latest movie, the digital micro-feature Searchers 2.0, and a book entitled X Films (I.B. Tauris) — not quite a memoir so much as a highly detailed, hugely compelling tour through the making of each of the entries in his body of work, beginning with Edge City, his graduation project at UCLA, through Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker and so on, right up to Searchers 2.0. As such X Films is a workbook for any would-be cineaste of the independent/"guerrilla" stripe, and also a vital contribution to film history, insofar as it records with honesty and exactitude what were the creative and logistical decisions that went into making these bravely unclassifiable movies.

The book, like the new film, reflects Cox's own generous, passionate, instinctively polemical nature: he makes a great teacher both of film production and film history. In the late 1980s he did British movie-lovers a great service by presenting several seasons of classic cult films on TV under the banner of Moviedrome, speaking frankly and informatively about the work in question. His own love of cinema was kindled during his boyhood on the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool, where movie theatres abounded. "I saw 2001 in Cinerama," he recalls fondly. "It doesn't get better than that." Cox is nostalgic about the pre-multiplex world of double features seen in theatres hazy with cigarette smoke: this was how he first discovered Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), an epiphany of sorts.

An intelligent lad from a working-class background, Cox nonetheless thinks himself lucky to have earned a state-subsidized place to study Law at Oxford University in the mid-1970s. In fact the richness of Oxford's environment and facilities were such that he spent most of his time directing plays, with the extra incentive of access to the city's professional Playhouse theatre. In this way he acquired an early experience of acting that would come in handy when he soon had to manage such complicated talents as Harry Dean Stanton and Gary Oldman. "If you're going to be a director, it's a good idea to learn to act," Cox proposes, "even if you're not very good, because then you understand the actor's position, and you see that filmmaking is not only a technical process."

Cox's subsequent training at Bristol and UCLA film school are fairly well-known items on his CV, but scholars may also wish to know if any of his Oxford stage output had a bearing on the later filmic oeuvre. They won't be disappointed. "I did the first theatrical production of Geography of a Horse Dreamer by Sam Shepard," Cox recalls. "I did Cabaret, and Brecht's Arturo Ui. And it's interesting how Brecht is being erased from the historical and artistic record now, for the crime of being a Communist, even though he was probably the greatest theatrical artist of the 20th Century."

Cox's clear interest in the famous Brechtian verfremdungseffekt of encouraging the audience's critical awareness is still observable in Searchers2.0 (with its interrogation of the Western genre, and its casual attitude to the "fourth wall.") And Brecht was all over Walker (1987), Cox's vision of the 19th-century Nashville-born mercenary who tried to secure Nicaragua for Cornelius Vanderbilt. Intended as a parable in the era of Iran-Contra, Walker is the film of which Cox is most proud, but it found precious few sympathizers in its day, as he well remembers: "I took Walker to Berlin and the film was so hated by all the critics — it offended, it broke with genre, it was funny about a serious subject. I met Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisquatsi) afterward, and he said, 'You and I are the only people at this festival who think that our film could be improved. Everyone else thinks they've done a masterpiece. Me? I could have done mine better, but time ran out…' He and I were such different filmmakers, but we shared that understanding: you can only work in the circumstances you find yourself."

The mainstream movie business is rarely so forgiving, and Walker nearly spelled the end of Cox's career. His comeback was the Spanish-language El Patrullero (1991), in which his thinking about mise-en-scene, influenced by Mexican master Arturo Ripstein, led him to work in the manner of the plano secuencia, trying to shoot always in long moving masters without montage. "It's more demanding for the viewer," Cox admits, "but I'd become frustrated at sitting in a cinema and being able to predict the cuts back and forth between Meryl Streep and Mel Gibson… In fact I was very interested when the Dogme rules came out, supposedly against 'manipulation', because they seemed completely happy with the conventional editing of film, which seems to me the most manipulative technique of all." Cox put plano secuencia behind him when he made Revengers Tragedy (2002), reluctantly accepting that contemporary audiences are too much accustomed to "what Peter Watkins calls 'The Monoform,' a style of rapid-edited music-aided filmmaking which applies whether it's a commercial or a rock video or whatever."

With Searchers 2.0, Cox revisits the abiding theme of movie love, from both a personal and film-historical perspective: "In 2005, I went to a screening of Once Upon A Time In The West on an inflatable screen in Monument Valley. The organizers were coming back in 2006 to show The Searchers on its 50th anniversary. So I thought, 'What about a film involving a road trip to Monument Valley to catch a screening…?'" In Cox's story his protagonists, Fred (Ed Pansullo) and Mel (Del Zamora), are former child-actors on a mission — not merely to catch Buffalo Bill vs. Doc Holliday, in which they appeared, but to kick the ass of its ornery screenwriter Fritz Frobisher (Sy Richardson), who sorely mistreated them on set.

Torture, then, is a key theme in the picture — "as it was in Repo Man," Cox quickly points out. Most movie buffs are aware of how the chain of command can be abused on a film set, and how badly, for instance, "Pappy" Ford used to treat "Duke" Wayne. "I think sadists are drawn to be directors, definitely," Cox proposes with a wry grin, "and maybe masochists are drawn to be actors…" Searchers 2.0 is a revenge tale but also a Brechtian rumination on the price of revenge; also a fundamentally humanist and humorous piece, the jokes arising mainly from its distinctive ambiance which Cox describes as like "being trapped in a car with two actors for ninety minutes" — in other words, having to listen to endless arguments about the worth of other actors and other movies.

Searchers 2.0 is a running-and-gunning micro-feature, made, Cox claims, "the way we'd originally wanted to make Repo Man before Universal got involved." It took "two or three weeks to write," fifteen days to shoot (on Sony Z1s, lensed by Steve Fierberg, DP on Sid & Nancy and Walker), and it was edited with Avid Xpress Pro on a Mac laptop. The budget was $200,000, and Cox is passionate about the idea of a production model that can squeeze ten films out of $2 million. But he appreciates the implications for quality control, and the difficulties posed by the distribution mainstream. "The only way we can deal with that," he is adamant, "is by struggling. We need to get together as independent filmmakers to build a communality and an alternative structure." He speaks with approval of John Ford's abortive indie experiment, Argosy, undertaken with King Kong producer Merian Cooper in the 1940s: "They struggled for nearly ten years because they felt constrained and financially ripped off. But what busted them was distribution, then as now." Since Cox wants to uphold the principle of theatrical exhibition in front of an audience — rather than the reduction of cinema to some individual download experience — he is arguing (as have other venturesome filmmakers such as Mike Figgis) for "an alternative distribution network." But he acknowledges that the scale of the effort would surely require the kind of governmental patronage that is normally in short supply when it comes to film policy.

Interestingly, Cox is quite prepared to argue in a self-critical mode that the independent sector doesn't always properly extend itself to the audience, indeed that it neglects certain obvious core constituencies. "The only films made for families," he points out, "are studio films. We as hipster indie film artists tend to pitch our stuff toward adult audiences: we can compete with the studios when it comes to violence, say, and we can make imitation Hollywood genre movies. But if you're a parent wanting to take your kids to the pictures, you're going to see Kung Fu Panda. Cartoons are so expensive to make, so that plays into the studios. But this is a challenge to us independents. How do we come up with an independent film that parents want to take young children to? How do we compete with the studios on that turf?"

Perhaps that will be a worthy Cox project for the year ahead. In the meantime, he has recently completed a screenplay with the evocative title of Repo Chick, and is now seeking finance. Universal — who showed little interest in their original negative pick-up of Repo Man until it began to generate remarkable ancillary revenues — will naturally get a look at this new property. It is conceived as a sequel in a very loose sense. Self-evidently, its protagonist is female. But certainly the time is ripe for Repo Man to ride again: as the US stares into the maw of recession, repossession could soon be the only game in town. Cox, as usual, is smartly ahead of the game in his big-picture thinking, and one can safely bet that whatever he does next will be worth the ticket.