Alex Cox - The Offcuts
For anyone who, like me, hangs on Mr Moviedrome's every film-related word.
Pottering through my interview archives the other day, I found the following offcuts from conversations with the great Alex Cox from 1996 and 2002. I decided to post them here as i) I hope they will be of interest, and ii) Substack seems a fitting place for them to reside.
1996
"Latin film gave me a chance to play with the vocabulary of cinema in ways Hollywood would never allow. People like Bunuel, Arturo Ripstein and Emilio Fernandez have prepared Mexican audiences for the extraordinary. Take the scene in my film where a ghost suddenly appears. In English-speaking cinema, you have to be a Nic Roeg or Ken Russell to get away with a trick like that. In Mexico, they just take it in their stride."
"All the great actors I have worked with - Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, Ed Harris - have said that Warren Oates was the finest ever American actor. You could take the essence of acting away from him and he was still capable of breathtaking performances. In Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, he wears those shades all the time so he can't act with his eyes. Then, in Monte Hellman's Cockfighter, he plays a guy who has taken a vow of silence. In those two films, he was denied the most fundamental tools of acting. It is remarkable that those performances should be as great as any others in American film."
"I heard that John Lydon had slagged me off in his autobiography, saying that I had never asked him for this side of the story when I was making Sid & Nancy. What he seems to forget is that Andrew Schofield, the actor who plays Lydon in the film, stayed with him in New York for a week to get his character down. That's Lydon's problem, he's got a really lousy memory. Most of No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish had to be written by friends of his because he didn't have a clue what he was up to."
2002
"For Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, I interviewed all manner of people. For Walker, myself and Rudy Wurlitzer ploughed through text books. For El Patrullero, Lorenzo O'Brien and I spent months interviewing old and retired cops, trying to find anecdotes to include in the script. One of the best came from an Mexican-Indian macho. He was on duty in Durango belting down the highway, listening to The Stones' ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ at full volume. Another car was weaving all over the road, so the cop pulled him over. The other driver stopped his car, got out, pulled a gun, blew the cop clean over the bonnet of his vehicle and then drove off. So there's this cop, lying in a pool of his own blood with Mick Jagger screaming in his ears. We couldn't get permission to use the actual song, but the story was so good, we just had to include it in the movie."
"When we began Moviedrome, we were able to show all manner of movies - spaghetti westerns, Italian horror films, '50s sci-fi flicks. The producer Nick Freand-Jones and I were given free fun of the BBC film library, together with a budget to buy up films we especially wanted to show. Over the years, the BBC developed a policy of showing fewer and fewer foreign films. Consequently the parameters of our programme narrowed. By the end of the last series, we were only able to show American films. I recorded an introduction for The Mattei Affair that was 15 minutes long. It's probably gathering dust somewhere, together with the print of the film."