Roger Ebert.com
By Matt Zoller Seitz
July 28, 2024
Alex Cox burst onto the film scene 40 years ago with
“Repo Man,” a science-fiction satire starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean
Stanton, with a theme by Iggy Pop and a soundtrack heavy on punk rock. He went
on to make the music biopic “Sid & Nancy,” the modernized spaghetti western
“Straight to Hell,” the political satire “Walker,” the minimalist character
study “Highway Patrolman,” the Jorge Luis Borges adaptation “Death and the
Compass,” and the Jacobean-styled “The Revengers Tragedy,” loosely adapted from
the same-named play. With each new project, Cox moved a bit further outside of
the mainstream. He hasn’t made a traditionally funded independent film since
“Revengers” in 2002.
Cox’s latest is a crowdfunded project that ends its
Kickstarter campaign July 29. Though puckishly titled “My Last Movie,” it’s “a
Western adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls which takes place in southern
Arizona and Texas in the 1890s and will be shot in Spain and Arizona, and it’s
a super low-budget film.” It’s his third crowdfunded feature in the last 20
years, the other two being “Bill, the Galactic Hero,” based on Harry Harrison’s
novel, and “Tombstone Rashomon,” which retells the story of the gunfight at the
O.K. Corral from multiple perspectives. I talked to Cox about the new movie,
the evolution of independent filmmaking during the last four decades, and his
definition of the word success.
So, how literally are we supposed to take the title
“My Last Movie”?
Well, I mean, it could be my last movie. I haven’t made a
movie for nearly 10 years, you know. In another 10 years’ time, I’m going to be
nearly 80. So there’s a possibility that it will be my last movie.
The original funding goal was $75,000. And you’ve
exceeded it, right?
Oh, yeah. That [budget] was to make the film with glove
puppets. If you have real actors, you have to pay them more.
What was it about this material that appealed to
you?
It’s just a great story. It fascinated me that Dead Souls
is the first part of what Gogol intended as a trilogy, but he could never even
complete the second book. He destroyed the second draft [of the second book]
multiple times and never even got into the third draft. There are fragments of
the second draft, including the miserable childhood experiences of the
protagonist, which are just great. and we’ve included those in the script as
well.
How do you transplant an 1842 Russian novel to the
United States and turn it into a Western?
The book is about a man who is acquiring the names of
dead serfs. The book was written during the [era of] serfdom, which I guess you
could say was equivalent to slavery and that still existed in Russia when Gogol
wrote the book. The year that the the American Civil War began, serfdom was
abolished in Russia. So Russia actually preceded the United States in
abolishing slavery by a few years. At the time that serfdom existed, it was
possible to acquire a large number of serfs, and if you acquired enough—I don’t
know exactly how many you had to have—you could be an aristocrat of sorts.
Maybe you’d even be a prince, who knows? And so the protagonist of Dead Souls,
Chichikov, is acquiring serfs. but because he’s doing it on the cheap, he’s
actually acquiring the names of dead serfs, who he then going to present to the
requisite authorities in order to acquire glory in Czarist Russia. My
protagonist is acquiring the names of dead Mexicans, because he has a way of
turning the names of dead Mexicans into money, or thinks he does.
Interesting. I can already see that this unmade
project has a lot of similarities with previous work that you’ve done,
including the sort of purgatorial aspect that some of your some of your films
have, and also the sense that morality is merely an abstract construct for a
lot of people.
When Gogol was trying to go about writing the three
books, the first one was supposed to be about bad people, the second one was
supposed to be about good people, and the third one was supposed to be about
paradise. But he couldn’t even get the second one completed, because it’s much
easier to write about bad people than good people. It’s also more entertaining
and much more dramatic. And imagine writing about heaven—how boring that would
be, you know?
Hell is definitely more cinematic.
And more literary as well. It’s more interesting and more
painterly. I mean, there are lots and lots of paintings from the Middle Ages
about Hell, but there aren’t as many paintings of heaven.
How long did it take for you to decide, ‘I’m going to
have to fund these movies some other way, because the system as it stands is
not giving me what I need”?
It used to be back in the olden days, 20 years ago or
more, you would fund a film from sales. You’d make a domestic sale and you’d
make foreign sales. You’d do this via a sales agency. Sometimes, you know, a
production company or a studio would fund the film and then distribute and then
and then sell it later to a distributor. But that model of funding films seemed
to become increasingly difficult and increasingly rare and also very anodyne.
The type of films that were getting made via that model. tended to be romantic
comedies, and romcoms didn’t seem like a very interesting possibility to me.
And then my friend Phil Tippett crowdfunded the first third of his film “Mad
God” and I thought, Wow. When Phil did that, I thought, This is the way to go.
You had a kind of a remarkable and in some ways
unlikely run in the’ 80s and’ 90s where you were able to get these really
uncompromising films funded and seen. What has changed to make it harder?
The early ‘80s was kind of the end of the ‘70s, and the
‘70s was the continuation of the ‘60s, and there was still a movement of
independent film then. In those days, there was what they called the New
American cinema, which included people like Monte Hellman and Dennis Hopper and
Bob Rafelson and Hal Ashby. There were these very, very interesting films being
made often by American directors and their equivalents in Europe, and also in
Britain, with people like Lindsay Anderson. It was a fantastic time to be
making films. And at the time, conventional entities like studios and
television companies were interested in making feature films.
But another thing is, when I was doing them back then,
they were negative pickups for the studios, and the studios didn’t have
anything to do with the production of the film, and that was part of the appeal
as well: it was a way for the studios to get certain kinds of films made but
avoid working with the unions. I mean, we didn’t think of ourselves as union
busters when we were making “Rep Man,” but we were. The negative pickup deal
was also a way for [studios] to learn how to make ‘independent films.’ Universal
would then go on to invent a thing that
was like an independent film company—called Focus Features, say—which was
totally studio-owned but made ‘independent films.’
Then the industry changed, because once the studios
figured out the mechanics of making a lower budget independent film, the last
thing they wanted to do was work with independent filmmakers, you know, because
they much prefer to work with dependent filmmakers. Then independent filmmakers
went off on a different route, and for a little while films were funded by
record companies or by TV companies. Then we went the route of trying to divide
the cost of the production between the domestic production company or
distributor and foreign sales. When that dried up, then came crowdfunding.
I’ve seen a lot of really interesting super low-budget
films in the last decade or so, but it seems like their problem is always
getting seen. How do you break through the noise?
I wonder as well. The means of production are within the
hands of the filmmaker now that we can shoot on video rather than on celluloid.
It’s much cheaper to make a film in that sense. But distribution is another
matter. You know, I made a film for Roger Corman called “Searchers 2.0” and
Corman had plenty of money, but he didn’t have a distribution company.
Distribution of the finished film was dependent on who Corman could find to
distribute it.
I remember that one. It was made for, maybe not
used-car prices, but trailer home prices.
Yeah, yeah—I think that one was done for about $200,000.
That is because $200,000 was the [Screen Actors’ Guild] super-low budget level.
If you wanted to get SAG actors at the lowest possible rate, then your budget
couldn’t exceed $200,000, and so that became the top level for super low-budget
films.
What are you doing at the moment, just as your regular
gig?
Oh, I don’t have a regular gig anymore! I mean, I never
really had a regular gig at all. Except when I was teaching at Colorado
University-Boulder—that was a regular gig. I taught at CU Boulder for four
years. That was the only full time job that I’ve ever had. Everything else has
been project by project. Sometimes I do commentaries for DVDs or make little
videos to present DVDs. For a while, I was introducing films on the BBC in
England. But I’ve never really had a proper job. My wife made me get a job at CU
Boulder because she said we needed to make money, we needed to have a regular
income, and I could only think of two jobs that I was capable of doing. One was
a gas station attendant and the other was a university professor.
What’s happening with the “Repo Man” sequel that we
heard about earlier this year?
Oh, I’ve been doing that for a long time. Every 10 years
I write a new script because every 10 years things are different. This is like
the fourth “Repo Man 2” that I’ve written in the last four decades. And I’m
still trying to raise money for it. The producer is Lorenzo O’Brien, who
produced “Walker” and who wrote and produced “Highway Patrolman.” He was also
the producer of the series “Narcos.” The lead actor, if we’re able to get him,
is Kiowa Gordon, who I like very much. We are constrained by only having the
domestic rights to the United States “Repo Man” sequels. Remakes and series
[rights] reverted to me about four years ago, but we don’t have foreign. So [to
make a sequel] we have to find an investor who will go for a US-only
distribution [deal]. In theory, that would be a good deal, because the US is by
far the biggest market for the ‘Repo Man” phenomenon.
So do the terms of the original contract mean you
could make a “Repo Man” sequel but you couldn’t show it outside of the United
States?
We [could, but we] would have to sell it to Universal
[first], because they own the foreign rights to a “Repo Man” sequel.
In theory, could Universal do a “Repo Man” sequel with
some other director and only show it internationally, not within the United
States?
Ironically, because of my contract, the only person who
can direct a “Repo Man” sequel is me, so they’d [still] have to buy the foreign
rights!
It all sounds very complicated!
It is complicated, isn’t it? But we are pursuing some
interesting possibilities of finding some way that we can fund it, just from
the US distribution [rights]. But the thing does not exist yet, except as a
screenplay.
How many people need to see a movie for you to feel as
if you succeeded overall, in whatever sense? Is there any number of viewers
under which you would conclude, “Oh, well, that didn’t work out”?
No. Just making it is success enough. I mean, you can’t
control how many people see it. How many people have seen ‘Repo Man’? How many
people have seen ‘Tombstone Rashomon”? Pretty much everybody has seen “Repo
Man,” yeah? Comparatively few people have seen “Tombstone Rashomon.” But I like
them both equally, so that doesn’t make any difference. If you’re a film
artist, if you’re actually a creative, artistic, independent filmmaker, you
make films for yourself, and the pleasure is in the making of them, and in the
collaborative process. And then, in the distribution, well— whatever happens
happens.
That sounds like a healthy attitude.
It’s the only attitude you can take at the end, because
you can’t really control distribution. And if you worry about how many people
saw it, you’re not going to have any fun. You’re going to be filled with
regret, and you’re going to value things that maybe aren’t so valuable.
But you know, the theater experience hasn’t gone away.
There are still art cinemas, you know. There are still repertory theaters. It
all still exists. People like to go to the cinema and they like to see things
that aren’t just Marvel Comics movies. There is definitely hope.
