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When Alex Cox hit the big screen with his debut feature Repo
Man back in 1984, it was almost immediately evident that a new
cult director had emerged - yet despite the fact that almost all of his
subsequent movies were of an equally high quality as his first one, to
this day fans do not hold him in the same high regard as John Carpenter
(who has long lost his bite), Wes Craven (whose filmography is terribly
uneven), Joe Dante (who has long become a part of the mainstream machine),
George A.Romero (whose valiant efforts to return to former greatness are
flawed to say the least) and Tobe Hooper (who hasn't made a half-decent
film since ... since his debut Texas
Chainsaw Massacre [1974] actually). This is quite a shame since
as a director, Alex Cox has remained fresh and unconventional despite over
20 years in the business, and as a writer he's as poignant as ever, and
all of his films seem remarkably timeless: His genre films, consisting of
witty dialogue, laconic plot twists and a tendency to turn genre
conventions on their head, seem like a blueprint for later Quentin
Tarantino flicks, only more entertaining and intelligent (and that's
coming from someone who likes Tarantin's output by and large), his
biopics are as entertaining as they are relevant, and stay true to their
subject matter - be it punk rock or politics - rather than just presenting
historical facts, and his literary adaptations are remarkably personal
films that manage to give decades- or even centuries-old texts a very
contemporary meaning without ever betraying their sources. And through all
of these films runs a non-conformist, at times even anarchic streak all
too rarely found in the works of above-mentioned directors ... or too many
other directors for that manner. Above all that, Cox is a
director who speaks up when other (Hollywood-)directors would prefer
to look away, something that eventually got him blacklisted in big budget
Hollywood (even though big budget Hollywood would never admit to a
blacklist, of course we all know there is one), when he spoke out against
the (deeply flawed) Nicaragua-policies of the Reagan-administration in his
film Walker (1987) - and
for whatever reason, he was not removed from the black list after the
whole Nicaragua-affair came crashing on its head later on. However, maybe
that is also a blessing in disguise (not financially though), since a
filmmaker as radical as Alex Cox is simply (and sadly) not compatible with
Hollywood's money-grabbing studio system. And despite being blacklisted,
Cox's films since Walker
have remained on a high quality level while the output of mainstream
Hollywood has been increasingly dumbed down the last 20+ years ...
Early Life, Early Career
Even though Alex Cox began his film career in America and later also
made films in Mexico, Spain and even Japan, he was born in the UK, and when you
look at his oeuvre, you will find a distinctive British strain running
through it, no matter if his films were made in Nicaragua, the Sonoran
Desert, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong ... or even Liverpool. Liverpool
is actually the town where Alex Cox was born in 1954, and though he
claimed to have grown up in a left wing enviroment, his early life/career
seems to follow very conservative guidelines, like completing a law degree in
Worcester College, Oxford in 1976, apparently studying alongside later
British prime minister Tony Blair (who despite belonging to the Labour
Party can't really be considered left-wing, either). Having completed his degree
in Oxford, Cox spent a year in Bristol, doing post-graduate Radio-, Film-
and Television Studies, before he received a Fulbright Fellowship to study
film at UCLA. Cox never liked Bristol, but he hated LA even more (and
when seeing Cox, one can't help but notice he's anything but LA),
however, he not only finished his studies there, he ultimately stayed in
the City of Angles for eight years (1977 - 1985), realizing this is the
best place to be for someone wanting to break into the film business. In
1980, Alex Cox completed his first film, the 40 minute Edge City/Sleep is for
Sissies, basically a student film. Though very
confusing (the film was made over the course of 2 years within which
actors and whole storylines simply disappeared, plus Cox himself cut about
one fourth out of the movie after he found it too intelligible),
this film about an artist (Cox himself) going mad in Edge City's (= LA,
presented as some sort of police state) society features many themes later
popping up again in Cox' later, professional films, like a criminal
repossessor, a demonstration in favour of the Sandinista revolution, and
Sid Vicious singing My Way. Plus, the film already showed Cox'
predilection for far-out characters, petty criminals and political satire.
During that time, Cox also worked as assistant director and story
consultant on Rosemarie Turko's Scarred, a sort of female Midnight
Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger) with Jennifer Mayo in the lead, which
wasn't released until 1984. Cox also has a small part as porn stud who is
ultimately humiliated by his female partners in this one. After
having completed his film studies however, Cox found it hard to get work,
and one of his most promising projects, a screenplay for Adrian Lyne about the nuclear war called The Happy
Hour, came to naught when Lyne did Flashdance (1983) instead
... the nuclear war and a dancing movie - talk about a artistic integrity here, huh ?
Punk Movies
By the early/mid 1980's, Cox was in dire straits financially, but meeting his
old friends Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks from UCLA - where they took
the same production courses - proved a fortunate reunion indeed since the
two had since formed a production company of their own - Wacks-McCarthy
- that at time specialized in filming commercials. Somehow Cox managed to
persuade them to finance his first - low-budget - feature film, with him
acting as writer/director. Initially he planned to film a story by William
Burroughs, Exterminator, as The Hot Club, however that
project came to naught when it proved to be a tad too expensive for the
producers. Thus Cox came up with a second script about a young punk who
becomes a car repossessor in futuristic Los Angeles, which met the
approval of Wacks and McCarthy, who ultimately granted Cox a budget of $
1,5 million, and off Alex Cox went to direct what would become an instant
genre classic.
The film in question is of course Repo
Man (1984), on the surface just another science fiction/action
movie about several parties chasing a car with a trunk full of something
destined to change the world forever, including Emilio Estevez, the young
punk turned car repossessor. But what would have turned into a silly
spectacle in the hands of a lesser director was made into hilarious,
intelligent and decidedly leftfield social satire by Alex Cox, who at the
time was inspired by the worldwide punk movement and managed to give his
film a rather unique punk-feel - which is something that simply cannot be
overrated seeing most other directors of the time failing to capture the
punk spirit time and again.
But of course, Repo
Man didn't come to life only thanks to its punk spirit - actually
by 1984, the punk movement was already past its prime - but also thanks to
its witty script, its energetic direction, its fast pace, Robby Muller's
flowing camera work, and its perfect cast made up of many a great character
actor in his own right like Harry Dean Stanton and Sy Richardson.
With Repo
Man having become an instant punk cult favourite, it's hardly
surprising that Cox would do another movie with a punk theme, this time
though a bio-pic, the story of Sid Vicious of Sex Pistols-fame
and Nancy Spungen (as played by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb) called Sid
and Nancy (1986). Actually, Cox originally wasn't too interested in doing a
film on the Sex Pistols, but when he heard that a Hollywood-adaptation of the
Vicious-Spungen story was to be made, he decided to make his own version
of the events, dusted off an old script of his (which wasn't about Sid and
Nancy as such but inspired by the events) and got it into shape together
with his then-wife Abbe Wool, resulting not so much in a bio-pic as we
know it as a reinterpretation of the story full of cartoon-like
versions of real events, a fair share of fiction ... and a movie that
effortlessly mastered to combine the rather rigid rules of a film
biography and the traditionally anarchic punk spirit. The film tells the
story of Sid and Nancy, from meeting for the first time to her introducing
him to heroin, to the American tour of the Sex Pistols, to them splitting
up because of Sid's drug-excesses, to Sid and Nancy's attempts to stay
clean and build up Sid's solo career, to their decline in New York's
Chelsea Hotel, where Sid eventually slashes Nancy, is arrested for murder
and takes a fatal overdose within 24 hours of being released on bail.
With Sid
and Nancy, Alex Cox proved that Repo
Man wasn't just an accident, again he filled the film up with
social and political satire, a fair share of comedy, witty dialogue, and
all the while, he managed to keep things going at a steady pace - and he
didn't betray the punk movement as such one moment to make a more
consumer-friendly film (even though Cox tagged a happy ending onto the
very tragic story, but this is irony rather than audience-pleasing).
For Sid and Nancy, Alex Cox returned to Great Britain
(quite a logical step too, since this film, among other things, was also
about the British punk scene), and the whole thing was produced by British
producer Eric Fellner, a former video clip producer, most notably for then
incredibly popular Duran Duran. Sid and Nancy was his first
feature film, but many more would follow, most notably probably Cox' next,
Straight to Hell
(1987), a few films by the Coen-brothers including Fargo (1996) and
The Big Lebowski
(1998), the Brit-comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), the Bridget
Jones-films, and Shaun
of the Dead (2004) and
Hot Fuzz (2007) by Edgar Wright starring Simon Pegg - but this
list is just scratching the surface ... Sid and Nancy
was rather modestly budgeted (at least by Hollywood standards) with a mere 4 million
Dollars, but that doesn't mean that the film didn't pack a punch - quite
besides launching the career of Gary Oldman, one of the most intense
character actors of his time -, and I at least like to think that the
Hollywood version of the Sid and Nancy-story did not get made
because of the power of this film. And while Sid and Nancy
did not become a success of blockbuster proportions (which nobody expected
it to become), it did well enough with arthouse audiences, cinephiles of
all sorts and (rock-)music lovers to not only make its money back easily
but to become another cult-classic - and the second cult item within two
features is quite a feat, no matter which way you look at it.
By the way, I feel three things need to be noted: 1) Gary Oldman did not get
along with Alex Cox the director at all and now does not like to speak
about Sid
and Nancy anymore, even though that film launched his career. 2)
Among the actresses auditioning for Nancy was a young, inexperienced
and yet unknown Courtney Love, and while Cox felt that she lacked
experience to stand her own opposite Gary Oldman, he was impressed by her
enthusiasm and natural talent and wrote a small part, one of Nancy's
friends, especially for her.
Obviously, Cox was impressed enough by Courtney Love to give her a much
larger role (actually one of the leads) in his next film, Straight to Hell. When filming on Sid
and Nancy started though, Love still worked as a stripper. 3)
Other supporting appearances include two great character performances by 2
Cox-regulars: Sy Richardson as sympathetic counsellor at a drug clinic Sid
and Nancy are visiting, telling them about the importance of punk-anarchy,
and Miguel Sandoval as record company executive wanting to sell the Sex
Postols a song with the lyrics "I wanna job, I wanna job, I wanna
good job, I wanna job, I wanna job that pays, I wanna job, I wanna job, I
wanna real job, one that satisfies my artistic needs."
Western(ish) Movies
After
having had success with both Repo
Man and Sid
and Nancy, Alex Cox was adamant to split away from his punkrock
image, albeit without corrupting his artistic integrity, and to achieve
that, he rather interestingly decided to make a hommage to the Spaghetti
Western, one of his favourite (sub-)genres, which is an odd choice only at first. On second thought, the
excesses of the Spaghetti Western have much in common with the punk
spirit, without one cultural movement trying to replicate the other (and
it also has to be mentioned that the film in question starred many a
punkrock great nevertheless, including Joe Strummer, the Pogues and Elvis
Costello). But
this being an Alex Cox movie, the resulting film, Straight to Hell
(1987), isn't just a straight Western but a blend of motives from Westerns
to Samuel Beckett, mixed with some musical interludes, social satire and
cartoon-like craziness, all done in an incredible over-the-top way that's
very unique to this film ... and yet, the film became Cox's first
commercial failure (even though it bagged one award at an international
film festival, the Critics' Prize at the 1987 Madrid Film
Festival).
Why the film - the story of four gangsters on
the run (Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, Dick Rude, Joe
Strummer) hiding out in coffee-addicted desert town and releasing hell in
the process - failed to attract audiences at its initial release and has
not yet become the cult classic it deserves to be is hard to tell, as Straight to Hell
is not only incredibly entertaining, fast moving and self-consciously
silly, it also anticipates the witty dialogue and pop culture references
of later arthouse crowd darling Quentin Tarantino and the mad but fun
action sequences of part time arthouse crowd darling Robert Rodriguez
(especially hix Mariachi-films)
by quite some years - only neither Tarantino nor Rodriguez ever dared to
take their excesses as far, while Cox as a director comes out of it
unscathed.
Alex Cox's next film was many things all at one, his most
overtly political film, his most ambitious film, his (arguably) most
important film - but also his fall-out with Hollywood, his downfall as a
possible mainstream director, and his biggest desaster career-wise. And
apart for all that the film is also a masterpiece - neither the first nor
the last in Cox's career. The film in question is of course Walker
(1987), another bio-pic, this time about soldier of fortune William Walker
(as played by Ed Harris), who started a revolution in Nicaragua in the
1850's and later
became the country's president - but in the process he betrayed each and
every ideal, each and every friend he once had - until he in the end faces
execution himself. Walker
however is - just like Sid
and Nancy - no bone-dry depiction of historical events, but a film
full of social and political satire, done - just like Straight to Hell
- Spaghetti Western-style, and the outcome is a film that is as
(intentionally) silly as it is intelligent, and as thought provoking as it
is entertaining - and it turned into a major financial failure.
The
reasons for this are as simple as they are saddening: Initially, Walker
was intended as Alex Cox's film to get a major release, backed by Universal,
but when the film made a few too many unfavourable references to the USA's
then current war against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime (and Cox had always
been pro-Sandinista), Universal
did not only feel uncomfy with the finished film and gave it as little
exposure as possible (at least in the USA, in Nicaragua it became a box
office success), mainstream Hollywood also saw to it that Alex Cox as a
director was blacklisted from then on. This of course was a major blow
to Alex Cox's Hollywood career, yet the sad thing is the light it sheds on
big budget Hollywood, revealing what should be an artistic melting pot as
a conglomeration of turncoats unwilling to express a political opinion of
their own - especially if it is not in tune with the respective regime. And
if you look at the various subtle and not so subtle methods of censorship
that have flourished under George W.Bush, one can't but note that the
state of free speech has even worsened in the 20+ years since Cox has been
blacklisted ...
Filming in Mexico
As important as Walker
was for Alex Cox peronally, and as much of a masterpiece it is
regarded now, as devastating it was for his Hollywood career - as
mentioned above: In 1986/87, he was also offered direction of
blockbusters Three Amigos (1986, John Landis) and the Stephen King
adaptation The Running Man (1987, Paul Michael Glaser), the latter
film at least containing a rudimentary political message, but he had to turn both
films down in favour of Walker
- and one can only fathom what Cox would have made out of these films. After Walker, such offers
simply did no longer materialize, and a film he was already developing for
TriStar, Mars
Attacks, based on a series of bubblegum cards, did not even go into
production after the failure of Walker
(only to be filmed in 1996 by Tim Burton for Warner
Brothers). For a time after Walker
it seemed as if Alex Cox had given up
directing altogether, instead turning his attention to hosting a movie
program on BBC
called Moviedrome in which he presented all sorts of movies
(according to his own account from the terrific to the terrible) and had a
chance to talk about international cinema on a regular basis too.
Eventually, the program ran from 1987 to 1994. Of course, it
has to be stressed that during this time, Cox worked on quite a number of
film projects too, some of them even had his name as a director attached
to them, but most of the projects simply did not come to fruition for one
reason or the other. One film that came into being during that
time though was Dennis Hopper's Backtrack/Catchfire (1989),
starring Hopper himself (who also had a small part in Cox's Straight to Hell),
Jodie Foster, Dean Stockwell, Vincent Price, John Turturro, Fred Ward, Sy
Richardson, and, in an uncredited role, Alex Cox as the spirit of
D.H.Lawrence. Cox rewrote the script of this film together with his later
wife Tod Davies, though neither did receive credit for it - which might be all the
same, since pretty much everybody on board seemed to be unhappy with the
movie and director Dennis Hopper insisted the film to be released as an Alan
Smithee-movie. Alex Cox's acting scene, by the way, didn't even make it into
the final cut of the film. Another (yet) unrealized script deserves
special mention as well, Doctor Strange, a script based on the
famous Marvel
Comics-character co-written with Marvel-head
honcho Stan Lee, about whose writing abilities Cox was full of praise,
even if Cox's anarchic tendencies and the very mainstream world of Marvel
Comics seem to have little in common on first sight.
Alex Cox found his way back to the director's chair in 1991 for El
Patrullero/Highway
Patrolman, a comparatively small film shot in Mexico and written
and produced by Lorenzo O'Brien, who had also produced Walker
and turned out to be one of the people sticking with Cox for quite a few
years, no matter what. Working on a smaller budget than he was used to
didn't in the least limit Cox as a filmmaker though, he merely proved he
could also direct a slower, more unexcited film than his previous efforts
(especially when compared to Straight to Hell)
with the same kind of enthusiasm, the same kind of insight, and the same
kind of inventiveness. And thus, with Highway
Patrolman, an only seemingly unexciting and realistic film about
the life of a young and innocent highway patrolman (hence the title), Alex
Cox delivered yet another masterpiece, a film that effortlessly combined
drama and comedy, social satire and stark realism. Unfortunately though,
the film did not receive the same
attention and the same distribution as his earlier features and is now a
little bit of a forgotten film (a fate that unfortunately many of his
subsequent films shared).
In 1992, Alex Cox returned to Mexico
for Death and the
Compass, a film that was originally a 55 minute assignement for the BBC,
but after a successful television run it was extended to feature length -
even if the feature version did not see the light of day until 1996, as
the whole thing ran into trouble at the post-production stage. Shot with
pretty much the same crew as Highway
Patrolman and with most of the same cast (though Peter Boyle and
Christopher Eccelston in the leads were worthy additions), Death and the
Compass couldn't differ more from the earlier film: While Highway
Patrolman was pretty much a piece of realism, Death and the
Compass is an allegoric, labyrinthine thriller full of conspiracy
theories and comicbook elements. Basically, the film, a murder mystery
based on a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, is about a
police detective (Boyle) assigned to a murder case he desperately tries to
solve using methology the fails to realize that his loyal sidekick
(Eccleston) is actually the (masked) killer himself - not until it is too
late, anyways. But while that might sound only remotely interesting in
writing, the film is actually filled up with subtle humour and elements of
satire that it easily qualifies as one of the most unusual crime comedies
out there. And almost needless to say, the film is another must-see.
Going Global
Years have passed since Walker,
but Cox still hasn't been taken off big buck Hollywood's black list (nor
is it likely he will ever be). Still, he went on directing films undaunted,
and on a global basis too, going pretty much wherever someone is willing
to finance one of his films - and I mean not just any odd film but an Alex
Cox movie. So the years following his Mexican stint took him pretty much
to everywhere, be it Rotterdam, Tokyo, his native Liverpool ... or even
the USA.
In 1995, Cox was hired to make a film based on the
play A Darker Purpose by Wendy Riss, a movie set in the gambling
world of Las Vegas, about a guy who can't lose at the gambling table, and
who eventually attracts the attention of several less than pleasent
characters. The lead in the film was played by Vincent D'Onofrio, but the
cast also boasted Rebecca De Mornay (who also had her hands in
production), Michael Madsen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cox regulars Sy
Richardson and Biff Yeager.
Somehow, the film, titled The Winner
when it came out in 1996, sounds like something quite exciting - but
it turned out to be Cox's first artistic failure ... and interestingly,
it's not his own fault: After delivering a rough cut for The Winner,
Cox went to Mexico to finish the extended cut of Death and the
Compass, using the money he had gotten from this directing
assignment,
which was when the production company drastically recut his film behind
his back, tossed out the film's original score by Pray for Rain (=
Dan Wool, Cox's favourite soundtrack musician), replaced it with what Cox
described as "a porno score", and sold it directly to cable TV. Nowadays,
Cox disowns The Winner and calls it "my Alan
Smithee-film", and probably the best to be said about the movie is
that if gave Cox the opportunity to finish Death and the
Compass.
Cox's next film, from 1998, saw him going
global in a big way: Three
Businessmen was filmed in Liverpool, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Tokyo,
and Spain - and despite the incredible variety of locations, the film
manages to look very homogenous (at least on an aesthetic level) as it
tells the story of two businessmen, played by Cox himself and his frequent
collaborator Miguel Sandoval, as they lose their way in Liverpool and,
using nothing but public transport, make a trip around the world without
even noticing they have ever left Liverpool in the first place, while
talking about everything and nothing, from the internet and mobile phones
to credit cards and the real estate business ... and rather surprisingly,
the whole thing is pretty funny, not despite but because of its inherent
seriousness. Admittedly, Three
Businessmen is not Cox's best film, but judging by the
competition, that's really not saying much, and despite everything, it is
still good entertainment.
Three
Businessmen was scripted by frequent Cox-collaborator (and wife) Tod Davies,
with whom Cox previously also co-scripted an adaptation of Hunter S.
Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was intended to
be made into a low budget feature film to be directed by Cox himself,
starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro - but soon, all kinds of
problems arose, big budget Hollywood in the form of Universal
stepped in, and Cox and Davies had the feeling they were used by the
producers as scapegoats - so eventually they walked away from the project.
Their script was rewritten and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was
eventually brought to the screen in 1998 by Terry Gilliam, with Depp and
Del Toro in their intended roles. Reportedly, Cox was especially
disappointed that the film, intended as a low budget feature, in the end
cost tens of millions Dollars to make and market, putting the high budget rather
at odds with its source novel's anti-consumerist message. And as if that
wasn't enough, Cox and Davies had to fight for their names even appearing
in the credits of the film, despite clearly having written the first draft
of the screenplay and helped with pre-production. After
Three
Businessmen and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Alex Cox
said feature filmmaking good bye for a while and made 2 doctumentaries,
both with movie themes. The first one was Kurosawa: The Last Emperor
(1999), a documentary on , you guessed it, Japanese master-filmmaker Akira
Kurosawa, one of Cox's favourite directors, while the second one was Emmanuelle:
A Hard Look (2000), one of the first intelligent documentaries about
the Emmanuelle-series
of erotic films of the 1970's and the (more enjoyable) Black
Emanuelle rip-off series, featuring interviews with both
Silvia Kristel (the original series) and Laura Gemser (the rip-off) [Laura
Gemser bio - click here]. And if nothing else, these two films
proved that Alex Cox knew his way around both high- and lowbrow filmmaking
- as he would also prove with Ten Thousand Ways To Die, a
book on the Spaghetti Western, one of Cox's favourite genres, orignially
written in 1978 but revised in 2008, as well
as an ever growing number of film-related articles in newspapers and
magazines.
In 2002, Alex Cox returned to the big screen with Revengers
Tragedy, a literary adaptation based on a play attributed to
Thomas Middleton (after it was believed to have been written Cyril
Tourneur for decades) which was first staged back in the Jacobean Age,
1606 (!). Yet despite the fact that the source was already almost 400
years old, Revengers
Tragedy the film was pure Alex Cox, a story about social outcasts,
lowlives, the corrupt upper class, violence and death, and Cox's very own
brand of social satire fits into the Jacobean play quite perfectly.
But it wouldn't be Alex Cox, had he brought a Jacobean play to
the big screen just like that - rather than making a period romp, he
transposed the story as such to a post-apocalyptic Liverpool in the
not-too-far future, a depressing industrial town populated by punks and
lowlives - which is somewhat reminiscent of Repo
Man's LA -, and despite the quite naturally rather old-fashioned
language of the whole thing, the combination of Jacobean and sci-fi
elements works like a charm, and Cox made an extremely tense film out of a
very unlikely play - also helped of course by a terrific cast led by a
very intense Christopher Eccleston as the revenger and an unusually
restrained Eddie Izzard as his nemesis. And finally, with Revengers
Tragedy - which unfortunately never went into wide release on an
international basis - Cox proved that he was still a force to be reckoned
with, and still fresher as many a younger, more hyped director.
In Japan, Alex Cox, who had shot parts of his
Three
Businessmen there, Alex Cox was still held in high regard, so it
didn't come as a big surprise that he was eventually invited to do a
television movie there, Mike Hama Must Die, epside 11 of the Mike
Hama-series, a series of hardboiled thrillers about private eye
Mike Yokohama (as played by Masatoshi Nagase) - whose name doesn't sound
more than a little like Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer
character by accident. Despite not speaking any Japanese, Cox liked the
experience of filming in Japan (again), especially since the producers
respected him as a filmmaker rather than a hired hand, which is highly
unusual for what is essentially a television series, and they would let
him get away with his Spaghetti Western-like excesses, a bit in the vein
of Straight to Hell,
and let him get his favourite cameraman, Tom Richmond (who also worked on Edge
City and Straight to Hell,
and, in secondary poritions, on Repo
Man and The Winner), and favourite filmscore musician, Dan
Wool aka Pray for Rain. Plus, it gave Cox the opportunity to work with his
friend Tomorowo Taguchi, whom he knew from Three
Businessmen, and cult-filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto (the Tetsuo-films
etc.). From Japan, it was right back to Great Britain, more
accurately his hometown Liverpool for his next film, I'm A Juvenile
Delinquent - Jail Me! (2004), a TV-movie for the BBC
about, you guessed it,juvenile delinquents plus reality TV - but seen
the Alex Cox-way, in whose mind nothing is as easy or as apparent as it
seems on the outside, and so his brand social satire creeps in every step
along the way. Interestingly, I'm A Juvenile Delinquent - Jail Me!
was made for schoolkids, because - according to Cox - the plot's
undercurrents, like American media conglomerates buying out British
TV-stations and the like, were too sensitive for the BBC's
drama department to touch. Alex Cox's last feature so far is 2007's Searchers 2.0 (2007), a road movie about two aging cowboy
actors (Del Zamora, Ed Pansullo), who go from Venice, California to
Monument Valley, Arizona, to see a screening of John Ford's The
Searchers (1956) - and to have their revenge on a movie producer
(Cox-regular Sy Richardson) who they think has wronged them. The film also
stars B-movie legend Roger Corman [Roger
Corman bio - click here], legendary film critic Leonard Maltin,
and newcomer Jaclyn Jonet playing the daughter of one of the leads - who
has to drive them to their destination. Though all of this might sound a
bit boring, like the travelogue of two old men, the film actually plenty
of quirky piece of comedy and (you guessed it) social satire, plus many
references to Western filmmakers like John Ford (naturally, regarding the
title) and Sergio Leone - which is where Cox the filmfan shines through. The film was
commissioned by the BBC
and produced by Jon Davison - a retired film producer who in his time
produced such big budget spectacles like Robocop (1987, Paul
Verhoeven), Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven) and the Arnold
Schwarzenegger starrer The Sixth Day (2000, Roger Spottiswoode) and
who was lured out of retirement by Searchers 2.0 -, with Roger
Corman acting as executive producer, and even though major studios showed
interest in production, Alex Cox is proud to have turned all offers down
and has instead done it on a micro budget (costing roughly $ 200.000)
shot on video cam - which doesn't say so much about the quality of this
film but about how over-budgeted Hollywood flicks really are ... and as if
to mock big budget Hollywood, Searchers 2.0 works just fine the way
it is !!!
Alex Cox Today
Despite all the problems Alex Cox has run into over the years getting a film off
the ground, he keeps pushing onwards undaunted, and tries new ways of
letting his projects see the light of day. For example, when an attempt to
make a semi-sequel to Repo
Man came to nothing, he made the script available on the internet
and encouraged comicbook artists to make their own versions of it in the
form of a graphic novel, and if one such graphic novel gets published, he
and the artist would split 50/50. The result of this experiment is Waldo's
Hawaiian Holiday, drawn by Chris Bones and Justin Randall and published
by Gestalt Comics in 2008.
Apart from that, Cox also tries to raise $ 1 million to make 4
(count them, four) micro budget films, as he seems to have fallen in love
with this kind of unpretentious moviemaking. The four projected films
are Ropewalk, a horror comedy to be shot in one take, Ten
Murders and a Dog, a very British murder mystery, Emmmanuelle in
Winnemucca, Cox's take on the Emmanuelle-
and the Black
Emanuelle-series (and the three m in the title are no accident
I'm sure), and the docu drama Northwoods. Cox tries to make these 4
movies as a package as he figures a package of four movies is easier to
sell than just one to DVD companies and TV-stations alike. Whoever knows
Alex Cox will also know that these films need to be made, and if you want
to learn more about the project as a whole, please visit http://www.alexcox.com/future_prod.htm,
and should you have enough money to get involved, do, as Cox doesn't ask
for a donation but for an investment you might even get money and tax cuts
out of ... Apart from directing and writing, Alex Cox has also
acted in several movies by other directors, including Perdita Durango
(1997, Alex de la Iglesia), La Reina de la Noche/The Queen of
the Night (1994, Arturo Ripstein) and La Ley de Herodes/Herod's
Law (1999, Luis Estrada), though usually he only plays supporting
parts. He has also written four Godzilla
comicbooks, and, with his frequent collaborator and wife Tod Davies, has become co-artist-in-residence at St Johns College,
Oxford, in 2003. Plus, in 2004-2005, he directed several national election
broadcasts for the Green Party in England, Wales, and Scotland. For more on Alex
Cox, go visit his website, conveniently called http://www.alexcox.com,
where you can not only find plenty of information about Cox and his films, written
by himself, but also his other projects, and where you can download many
of his screenplays for free, even a few unfilmed ones. But more
importantly, buy his films and watch them, and demand he makes more,
because he is one of the rare filmmakers who hasn't lost his edge in his
25+ years of filmmaking, something all too rare in today's movie business.
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