Go West

Former CU professor and current filmmaker Alex Cox is gearing up to make his final feature.

“I don’t want it to be my last movie,” Cox says. “It’s just that it very well may be the case. It’s been seven or eight years since I’ve made a film — nearly 10 years since I’ve made a feature. Well, 10 years from now, I’m going to be 80. How likely is it that I will make another film? I don’t know.”

Of course, Jean-Luc Godard was directing into his late 80s, and Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira was 104 when his last feature came out. To that, Cox retorts with a laugh: “That’s a bit excessive, don’t you think?”

Laughter comes easily to Cox. Anyone who has seen his work knows that.

Cox burst onto the film scene 40 years ago with the sci-fi punk rock comedy Repo Man, a movie that continues to enchant and entertain. CU’s International Film Series will host a free 35 mm screening on Sept. 5, just two days after The Criterion Collection releases a newly restored 4K UHD version.

“It looks really good,” Cox says of the new transfer. “It just looks so pretty.”

Pretty might not be the word that first comes to mind about a movie loaded with world-weary repo men and unkempt punks. But Repo Man was shot by “one of the great cinematographers,” Robby Müller, who imbues every scene, every shot, with a loving kind of poetry.

Repo Man was just the beginning. It launched Cox’s career, which currently encompasses a dozen features, some shorts, several books and a stint teaching cinema studies at CU (where he made Bill the Galactic Hero with his students). The movie also kicked off a lifelong collaboration between Cox and several players, many of whom will be in his next, maybe last, movie.

“Sy Richardson, Del Zamora, Zander Schloss,” Cox says, listing off participants. “The movie is a combination of people I’ve known since Repo Man and people I worked with on Tombstone-Rashomon. So it’s like my first film and the last film I made combined.”

The last picture show 

Like Tombstone-Rashomon, Cox’s latest endeavor is crowdfunded. What’s different is the attention.

“Normally, if I was doing my last movie, that would end up in Hollywood Reporter and in the Guardian in England,” Cox says. “But because of the basis of the piece, it hasn’t been mentioned anywhere in the mainstream media.”

That basis: the 1842 Russian novel by Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls.

“In terms of alternative media and in terms of the public reaction, the response to this has been far better than either of the crowdfunders I did,” he says. “Which really encourages me. Because, although the governments of the U.S. and England are really trying to gee up the population and get them ready for a war with Russia, there’s no support for it at all in the population.”

That’s how Cox came to Dead Souls and Russian literature in the first place. The more “we were being told we should hate the Russians and despise Russian culture,” the more he became interested in what the Russians had produced. So Cox started with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and found them “quite amazing.” Then came Dead Souls.

“It’s so lively, so interesting, the characters are so good,” he says. “This was the thing that you could turn into a Western.”

‘Miracle enough’

Cox is passionate about cinema, but his passion for Westerns, particularly Italian Westerns, goes even deeper. As a graduate student, he wrote a survey of the genre, which he reconfigured into a book-length study in 2020: 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Italian Western.

It’s an obsession that extends to location, particularly Almería, Spain, and the nearby Tabernas Desert, where many Italian Westerns were filmed. In 1976, Cox stole a 16 mm Bolex camera from school and went to Spain to photograph the still-standing sets for his short film The Black Hills. Ten years later, he returned to Almería as a full-fledged filmmaker with a cast of musicians for his punk rock homage, Straight to Hell, which he shot using sets constructed for 1971’s The Valdez Horses. That set has since “vanished.”

“Straight to Hell was an adobe town, and it has, over the years, melted back into the earth,” Cox says. “But adjacent to that location is the town [Sergio] Leone built For A Few Dollars More, where we’re shooting.”

Leone built the set as a double for El Paso. In a nice hat tip to the maestro, Cox will use the location as the same West Texas border city for his movie. 

“The title is in flux,” Cox says. “I was going to call it Dead Mexicans, and maybe I still will call it Dead Mexicans, but that might give offense to somebody somewhere. So we have an alternative title, which is Government Work.”

Cox hopes to have his new and possibly final film done by the middle of next year. Then he’ll “try to get it into some good festival” and see where things go from there.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “You have no idea. Just making the film itself is miracle enough.”