Punk director Alex Cox breaks his silence with a rare interview on his love for Western films and the making Sid and Nancy.
The first time I came across Alex Cox, I was watching his film Walker in a Parisian movie theatre, late in 1987. I had no idea that Alex would have to pay a huge price to make such a subversive film, as he would soon be blacklisted by the major US studios. In the mid-noughties, we met when he came to Caracas, Venezuela where I was then working as an adviser to President Chavez. We would meet late in the night to discuss our love for Spaghetti Westerns, Luis Buñuel’s films, long sequence plans, and Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie over a few beers. We have continued those conversations ever since. Contrary to what people think, Alex still makes movies. I was even involved in one of them, preserving the DIY spirit and attitude the punk movement instilled in us. He is usually described as a “radical filmmaker”. For me, he is simply one of the best directors of his generation. This is an example of one of those conversations—this time without the beer.
MAX ARVELAIZ
You always have this connection with South America and Latin America. As a filmmaker, you continued making movies there. Why?
ALEX COX
I’m a foreigner, that’s the interesting thing. Because although I came to UCLA as a young person to go with a Fulbright fellowship and study film, I was always a foreigner. And I was interested in America as this big thing that didn’t just include the United States—even though the United States was incredible—but there were other countries around it as well. I remember the first year that I was in the United States, I persuaded some guy that we should drive down to Sonora, Mexico in his little Toyota car and I never looked back. All the time I spent in Latin America was absolutely fascinating. Sometimes fun, sometimes difficult, always fascinating.
MA
Not many filmmakers of your generation shot in Latin America. You made Walker in Nicaragua, spending nearly a year there before production.
ALEX COX
It was more than a year just setting it up. And also scouting locations in Mexico to satisfy the executive producer who was afraid that we wouldn’t shoot in Nicaragua so we had to get alternative locations in Mexico. So we had to prepare alternative locations to Mexico even though we weren’t ready to shoot there. So that was in Nicaragua and the next thing I did after that was the story of The Highway Patrolman.
MA
You’ve even spent some time in Mexico, and you live and work there now I understand?
ALEX COX
Yes. I was asked by the BBC to direct one episode of the six part television episode strand called La muerte y la brújula.
MA
The Death and the Compass.
ALEX COX
In celebration of Cristobal Colon and his good deeds. I ended up directing La muerte y la brújula at Churubusco studios in Mexico city and many locations around there.
MA
This also connected you to Luis Buñuel, because you worked closely with Arturo Ripstein as well…
ALEX COX
I was very fortunate. I tried to cast Ripstein in El patruellero to play the police psychiatrist in the end but he didn’t want to do that because he didn’t want to get his haircut. He was very vain. But he cast me in his film La reina de la noche. I was an actor that played a German leftist who was eventually deported for his very political, subversive activities. After I acted for Ripstein, then I was cast by Luis Estrada in his film La ley de Herodes and that was my most successful acting job. Everyone saw it; it was the most popular film ever in Mexico. I got to be the gringo.
MA
You tend to play that a lot. Usually the gringos in Latin America are the bad ones.
ALEX COX
They should be.
MA
Walker has such an interesting soundtrack from Joe Strummer [The Clash]. I remember you told me you wanted it to be better than Bob Dylan’s score for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
ALEX COX
We would listen endlessly to the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack. We also had these two VHS tapes, Kurosawa’s Ran, and Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which Rudy Wurlitzer had written. When we were living in Nicaragua, we would sit after the shoot, and when Joe Strummer was working on the music, he would come by my house and we would watch these two movies over and over again. So he heard that Dylan score endlessly. But he also heard the Ran score as well. He was absorbing the two of them pretty much every night. The only two tapes that we had. I believe it’s the best soundtrack of all my films. It’s just wonderful. Joe Strummer composed everything and it’s extraordinary. His most amazing solo work.
MA
I wanted to ask because Ripstein worked with Luis Buñuel—who is very important to you.
ALEX COX
I love Buñuel. Ripstein was the assistant director on El ángel exterminador. Imagine that—what a thing! He got to be on the set with Buñuel and Gabrielle Figueroa. So Ripstein definitely has history with Mexican cinema and he knew that old part of Mexican cinema. The editor I used to work with Carlos Puente when he was a little boy, and he would go to the studio in Churubusco and go on the lot and he’d go the canteen and at the canteen would be sitting Emlio Fernandez—the very famous Mexican director and the guy who plays Mapache in The Wild Bunch. Emilio was always sitting in the canteen in the studio in that period, always drunk with a bottle of tequila, holding a pistol. Carlos Puente, the editor, a little boy of 10, would just go in there and sit at the table with Emilio Fernandez at lunchtime, when all these guys would come in and have tequila.
MA
You’re not drinking a beer right now, are you? As you sometimes like to.
ALEX COX
No, no. Unfortunately not. Just a cup of tea. Later, I’ll have a beer.
MA
In the 80s, and early 90s, you hosted the BBC Two film series Moviedrome. I knew you already as a filmmaker by then. Whenever I watched Moviedrome, I discovered a variety of directors and films that maybe I would not have paid attention to. People still talk about it. Even if a movie was not so good, you would champion it as something interesting to watch…
ALEX COX
I thought that was the best thing. We could show The Long Hair of Death and these Italian films and some of them weren’t perfect and some of them were bad—but they all had something interesting to talk about. Because it was so late in the evening and no one was really paying attention, I could say bad things about the film, call it rubbish but say then say it had this aspect which is worth paying attention to. Or highlight a particular scene. There were films like Zardo or Excalibur, and we would say we don’t understand anything about the plot, but it’s still so impressive because it’s fun to watch.
MA
I discovered a lot of Western spaghetti movies through the show. Sergio Corbucci’s films, or A Bullet for the General by Damiano Damiani.
ALEX COX
We actually licensed two Corbucci films for the first time in England: Django and Il grande silenzio. We also licensed for the first time in England Requiescant, a film by Carlo Mizanni, which is a really, really good Italian western.
MA
And of course you wrote 10,000 Ways to Die. It’s compulsory reading for anyone who wants to make a Western film.
ALEX COX
It has this massive telephone directory book…I think I probably talk about 200 or so Westerns, but there are about 500 Italian Westerns in total. Maybe.
MA
What would be your personal top five Western spaghetti films for someone to watch?
ALEX COX
Let’s assume they’ve seen the Dollars films. So Django, Misorencio, Requiestan, Silvestio, Bullet for the General, A Thousand Dollars on the Black. But there are so many good ones…
MA
I’m still surprised by your first job. You can watch movies all around the world in Paris.
ALEX COX
When we made the film Sid and Nancy about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen we shot a day in Paris just to do a few little exteriors. Everyone else in the world when you’re shooting acts like it’s a problem. But in Paris it was like “Ah! Film montres!”
Everyone was like “Come into our store and film here!” “Film outside our restaurant.” “Do you want a glass of wine?” That day was the best part of the whole shoot.
MA
I’m not sure if that would be the same now…
ALEX COX
It’s like when they shot The Prisoner in England. There’s that last scene when they go to the House of Parliament and just knock on the door. It was a different time. So much easier to film.
MA
It’s interesting about Sid and Nancy too. I know many people love this film but I understand it was your producer’s idea?
ALEX COX
Not really. There was another producer who was going to make a film about Sid Vicious that was going to star Rupert Everett and Madonna. I was a real punk rocker then and I was like: “No, no, this cannot be, it cannot be allowed. You cannot make this film with Madonna and Rupert ever!” And so that really is what inspired me—I just wanted to stop all this and make it myself.
MA
You came on with this amazing cast. Gary Oldman, Chloe Webb, Drue Stofield, David Hayman…
ALEX COX
I was very lucky. And Roger Deakins shot the film! It was only his second feature. And of course we had music by Joe Strummer and The Pogues and Dan Wall ‘Pray for Rain’. All the guys I would keep on doing music with.
MA
You knew all these amazing musicians. You managed to convince Elvis Costello and Strummer to go back to Nicaragua, but for some reason MTV didn’t want to film it…
ALEX COX
The producer was sure that somebody would pony up $20,000 for all of these musicians to go to Nicaragua and perform a rock and roll concert.
I was gonna have a guy dressed up as one of the actors from the film and go with the rock and roll show and dressed as William Walker and have it be like William Walker’s Rock and Roll Show with Joe Strummer, and the Pogues and Elvis Costello. But we couldn’t raise the money and so that’s why Straight to Hell happened.
Because we had all the musicians who had given us a month free; they’d arranged to be available the month of August 1986 to be on the rock and roll tour of Nicraragua. And when that didn’t happen the producer suggested let’s do a feature film instead. We wrote the script very quickly and made that film.
MA
Incredible. So you have enough money to make a film but not do a tour?
ALEX COX
Yeah it was really weird. But that was the thing, the Island Records had a subsidiary at that time: Island Films. This was one of the first, probably one of the only films that they made.
MA
That’s a film you revisited a couple of years ago: Straight to Hell Returns.
ALEX COX
We put in extra blood and violence and extra skeletons and extra music and restored some scenes that had been cut out of the original version. Visually it’s better because the cinematographer came up with a different visual look for the film. It’s very high-contrast. It’s got a kind of pumpkin coloured texture—it looks really intense. I really love the way Tom revisited his film.
MA
And then another Western you made was Tombstone Rashomon. It’s interesting as in the movie it was a homage to Kurosawa to an extent.
ALEX COX
Yes it is, isn’t it? In the sense of telling a story from five different perspectives.
An interesting anecdote about Kurosawa’s original film is that the movie is based on two stories by the same author. One of them is called Rashomon Gate and one of them is called Inner Grove. But Inner Grove is the story where the five different versions of the same event are narrated. Ironically Rashomon Gate has nothing to do with Inner Grove at all but because Kurosawa adapted the two stories into one, Rashomon is the term we use for multiple contradictory narratives…
MA
That brings us onto the ‘Rashomon Effect’. You also made a very good Kurosawa documentary.
ALEX COX
Oh thank you. Well we made that right after he had died. It was the first documentary that Toho would approve of after his death. We went out there while they were making a film based on one of his screenplays, and so we shot there and were able to interview the producer of Ran: Masata Hara. He was an amazing character—a very strong Japanese guy.
MA
You also managed to interview some Western American filmmakers on what Kurosawa meant for them…
ALEX COX
Yes, and also Andrei Konchalovsky because he had directed a film based on the script from Kurosawa called Runaway Train. I find him fascinating. He’s a Russian director, he lives in Russia again now, but when he was in the United States, it was the first American film he did with Eric Roberts and Rebecca de Mornay. It was based on Kurosawa script. And so he had very interesting stories about how it worked out. How they would argue and argue…
MA
I read Kurosawa’s memoir Something Like an Autobiography. His brother killed himself when he was young.
ALEX COX
What we learned when we did our documentary is we talked to a friend of Kurosawa when he was a boy, who had also become a filmmaker, but without the same great success. And this guy told us that it wasn’t just his brother that committed suicide. It was a double suicide and the woman with whom his brother was living with also killed herself. It’s doubly tragic and it’s interesting that Kurosawa doesn’t mention her in his book but only mentions his brother.
Of course, Kurosawa had a lot of psychological issues: he was a prisoner of his own fame. And I think that was what was interesting about Joe Strummer too; he was in an extremely high position as one of The Clash, part of one of the most important rock and roll bands in all history. And he had broken it up, you know, and so imagine what he must have experienced in those The Clash years. It’s very difficult to put yourself in that place. Imagine how these people felt when they were at the peak of their career; admired by all, my God.
MA
Was Joe Strummer a good actor?
ALEX COX
He could be a very good actor. He’s very good in Straight to Hell. He had a really charismatic aspect to him; a little bit like a young Michael Caine. He came over that way in Straight to Hell. I thought he could be good.
MA
Another documentary you did was about the 1974 erotic film Emmanuelle.
ALEX COX
Yes, we did a doc on the Emmanuelle movies with Sylvia Kristel and also Laura Gemser, who was the other principal in the film—and also the director of the original movies too.
MA
Was it a command to you, or did you want to explore that genre?
ALEX COX
I wanted to do it. I like the Emmanuelle movies. Just like for a Few Dollars More or The Godfather, the second is better than the first. So it’s really worth watching. It’s good. But I called the director Francis Giacobetti and I wanted to interview him about it, and wouldn’t talk to me about it, he said “no, no this film is rubbish, I’ve made much more interesting films.”
MA
After your last feature film Tombstone Rashomon, we’re waiting for the next one. But you always keep that spiritual reinvention, you find a way to make movies and you keep this punk spirit with a do-it-yourself kind of energy. It’s great.
ALEX COX
Well film directors never die—do they? Every film director has got another project they want to make. Francis Coppola is supposedly funding his own film from all his money, like his winery, on a giant home movie called Megalopolis.
MA
Your book I AM [NOT] A NUMBER invites us to rediscover The Prisoner…
ALEX COX
Yes. My thesis is that to understand The Prisoner they should watch the series in the order in which it was made. Because The Prisoner developed as it went along, it began as one thing and ended up as something quite different.
It helps to see the process of discovery for Patrick McGoohan and his collaborators. If we watched the episodes in the order in which they were filmed—which isn’t entirely easy as they were filmed in fragments—then they shot first in North Wales, in Port Maryon, and then went down to London and started filming at the studio.
The wonderful aspect of this filming process was the studio they were filming at had two projects going simultaneously in London. One of them was The Prisoner and one of them was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Just imagine that canteen!
MA
Do you think McGoohan would have met Stanley Kubrick?
ALEX COX
I’m sure they must have passed in the corridor. They must have met. But I think they were probably quite different. Kubrick would have been in his office having a little something brought to him and on the phone to New York. They might have passed in the corridor.
MA
It’s a pity that McGoohan went to the US. I think we lost him there.
ALEX COX
What he did with The Prisoner is so extraordinary. He had more autonomy over US television series than anybody before since he was a star. He was the producer. He essentially directed most of the episodes; he wrote several of the episodes himself. It was his idea and his idea developed as it went along. It wasn’t the same at the beginning…So how do you follow that? It’s like Citizen Kane. What are you working on now Mr. Welles? It’s tough to beat something so impressive. Even to get the opportunity to do that again. The autonomy. The freedom. As an actor, a director, a writer, a producer. It was incredible.
MA
Perhaps we’re missing this punk spirit today. Because that’s the beauty with your body of work—you manage to make movies and write and you’re still there.
ALEX COX
The punk thing is also kind of about being an outsider as well. You can’t be an authentic punk and be in the establishment. Everybody wants a home though! It’s hard to be in the rain all the time; being this marginal. I remember once when I was in Paris I saw a police film with Belmondo in it called Le Marginal. It wasn’t that good! But I liked the idea of it. The idea of le marginal, he’s never gonna be the prefect of police because he’s too ‘Dirty Harry’ and he smokes too much and all the rest of it. But at the same time, being ‘marginal’ keeps you honest—it gives others something to strive for.
Enjoyed this confessional interview? Why not see Oliver Stone’s own view on his status as an outsider filmmaker here.
