Alex Cox – The Razor’s Edge
For nearly thirty years now, Alex Cox has conducted his filmmaking career with fierce intelligence, an extensive knowledge of cinema (both commercial and obscure), and a punk rock spirit that imbues his best work with an independent vitality that slicker, big-budget projects can only hope to match. A Cannes Film Festival alumnus both as a director and actor, Cox’s cult classic biopic Sid and Nancy screened at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival and went on to be one of the director’s most highly-acclaimed works. In addition, he lent his captivating personality onto celluloid as an actor in Arturo Ripstein’s The Queen of the Night, which not only screened in the 1994 Cannes Film Festival but was nominated for the Palme D’Or as well. In 2008, the director again graces screens in The Oxford Murders, which makes its market debut at the 2008 Marche du Film, represented by THINKFilm International. Cox recently spoke with IFQ regarding the twentieth-anniversary re-release of his film Walker, consistent themes throughout his work, the connection between Sid and Nancy and Courtney Love, and how you can tell a real independent film from a manufactured one.
IFQ: Would you agree that Walker has become perhaps a more timely film now, given the current political situation and how many of its themes are more applicable today than during its production?
Alex Cox: Yeah, but that’s also the terrible thing about Walker is that it’s more timely.
IFQ: What are your thoughts specifically regarding how the film’s myriad political themes resonate as strongly now as they did back in 1987?
AC: Nothing has really changed. You know [Robert] Gates, who is over at the Pentagon now, used to be the head of the CIA. And when he was the head of the CIA or after he’d been head of the CIA under the previous Bush administration, he wrote a book and said that in working for five or six presidents including Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ford, etc. he had never seen any change in foreign policy, that the essential foreign policy of the United States remains the same whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House. So that’s the thing. It’s the story of an empire isn’t it? Walker is one of many stories of the creation of an empire and nothing’s much changed since then [laughs] although in the mid ’80s there was Reagan. We were in the Reagan time, but the person who had started the Contra war in Nicaragua was Jimmy Carter. So it’s a constant and I wonder how different things would have been if Gore had been president instead of George W. because W takes a lot of flak for starting the war in Iraq and all the rest of it, but would it have been any different with a Democrat?
IFQ: The film speaks to the notion that the causes of such horrible foreign policy are more systemic, often with religious and capitalist factors involved, and that even if you remove a particularly bad individual the system itself does not adjust and you really have no lasting change.
AC: That’s the thing isn’t it? It could be somebody else. Walker could have either succeeded or failed, but there are always people who are going to come along. What is Walker right now but one of the directors of Blackwater? He was a very successful mercenary for a while with a very profitable career. Maybe he could be president today?
IFQ: There’s a great feature on the new Walker DVD where you go over the critics’ inordinately negative reviews that were published during the film’s initial theatrical release. Do you think any of those critics would revise those initial opinions all these years later?
AC: No. They wouldn’t because think, everything that they were complaining about they liked in other films such as Blazing Saddles and the films of [Sam] Peckinpah. It was the politics that they were terrified of and I think it is interesting when one revisits those reviews how the language is so similar. Almost as if they had been handed a crib sheet and said “these are your talking points; you’re going to talk about the blood spurting” as those specific words were in all the bad reviews, “you’re going to use the word ‘clever’ as a pejorative term” because nobody likes someone who’s too clever “and you’ll say that this should never happen again, this is a terrible thing.” What they mean though when they say “this should never happen again” is never clear. Do they mean a political film? A film made in Nicaragua? A film which spends a studio’s money in an enemy nation in a time of war? They’re very annoyed but they can never quite say what they’re annoyed about, which I think is quite interesting.
IFQ: Looking back on your body of work thus far, what themes or ideas do you feel have consistently shone through either intentionally or unintentionally?
AC: About two or three films back I became aware that in almost all of the films there is this desperate scramble—like Walker’s scramble to be Nicaragua or Sid Vicious’ scramble to be an idiot and then they succeed and it means nothing. The thing is achieved and it immediately proves to be like the gold in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It just all blows away and it’s not there anymore. So that’s one thing that seemed to be consistent in most of the films I’ve done. And also there is a tendency for women in the films to be portrayed as more intelligent than men and men as more stupid than women, which is probably true in real life.
IFQ: Speaking of Sid Vicious, we were curious about Courtney Love in relation to her originally auditioning for Sid and Nancy and then later on becoming a lead in Straight to Hell.
AC: Well she was great to work with, but that was like twenty years ago. She’s a natural actress and a very good one at that. She was too young to play Nancy because we had already cast Gary Oldman as Sid and there was quite a disparity between their ages. It would have seemed very odd— like Sid Vicious and his younger sister. They wouldn’t have been equals in the way that Gary and Chloe Webb were equals. But she was a very good actress and I thought, “Well come on, we should do some movie with this girl though, put her in a film because she’s very interesting and a good actress, really an interesting person to look at.” And so it ended up that Straight to Hell had four principal characters and she was one of them. I always thought that she should get first billing because she was the lady, but I think first billing went to Sy Richardson and that was good too. I think Courtney’s great and occasionally I’ve read stuff she’s said about copyright and telling off the record companies and the studios for being unreasonable in terms or pursuing people for downloading music. So the things I’ve heard her say in that context have been very sensible.
IFQ: We briefly touched on the idea of studio films, especially regarding how critics took you to task for spending a major studio’s money to direct a political film and I wanted to ask you about the state of studio films versus “independent” films and whether they really exist still, especially with the proliferation of all the ‘specialty’ divisions.
AC: Independent films exist insofar that independent people continue to make films, but as you say the specialty divisions are just low-budget arms of the studio. It’s sort of entertaining for me because I can always spot what is a real independent film and what isn’t by the soundtrack because a real independent film will have no money for licensing for any songs. It will have all original music. A so-called “independent” film done by the studio will have a big budget for licensing music and will have an amazing soundtrack. So one’s caught in these traps where if you want access to the back catalog of The Clash, you better make a studio film and pretend it’s an independent movie, but then there are rewards in not doing that but in doing original stuff instead.
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