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.

Alex Cox on the set of The Searchers 2.0

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."

Ed Harris in Walker

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."