"The
landscapes and all those guys getting
wasted."
ALEX COX, maker of the
astonishing Repo Man, director of the
Pogues brown eyes in a bag video, planner
of a film about the romance of Sid
Vicious and Nancy Spungen, describing his
early fascination with film, particularly
Westerns.
Alex Cox himself was
described by a mutual acquaintance as 'big
ears and a punk rock haircut'. I
notice this is true as he sits on my sofa
wasting a toasted cheese and marmite
sandwich. He's wearing a pair of boots
purchased in Guadalajara, Mexico and
regretting not getting the silver
supports for the heels necessary to
protect the boot when one is driving
one's Chevy. Alex's Chevy is back in Los
Angeles "on loan, I'll probably
never see it again."
Alex got his first taste
of glamour by attending Wirral Grammar
School, an institution where some years
earlier Harold Wilson had been head boy. 'White
Heat', in those days, had a
connotation not linked with the Velvet
Underground, "there was a great
emphasis on being a physicist or a
chemist and making Britain a competitive
technological nation. I had no capacity
for any of that."
Instead he found himself
at Oxford studying law. "I was a law
student but I didn't study much law. As
soon as I went to my first lecture I
thought this is the most boring place and
the most boring subject known to
man."
He almost left but then
realised, "You didn't have to work!
If you were half bright you could get by
on a couple of hours a week. That's what
I did. "
And spent the rest of the
time in amateur dramatics: "I
directed a production of Cabaret
the week I did my finals so I didn't get
a very excellent degree..."
From the dreaming spires
he spent a short spell at Bristol Film
School and then a shorter spell in London
applying for jobs that he didn't get,
until he did get a Fullbright grant to
study film at the University of
California in Los Angeles.
"I flew to New York
and got a driveaway (pay for the petrol
and transport the car) Mustang and drove
across the USA. Through Arkansas, Kansas,
Monument Valley in Arizona, the Grand
Canyon, saw all this fantastic stuff
(guys getting wasted?), In L.A. I got rid
of the car and ought a little Honda
motorbike."
UCLA should not be
confused with USC, the University of
Southern California where,
"Spielberg, Lucas and all the good
boys went. That school is primarily for
the white middle classes. The fees are
very high. At UCLA the fees are lower and
they're forced, through the Affirmative
Action Programe to have a wide racial and
sexual mix. It means you get to hang out
with Mexicans, black people, Peruvians,
French, vociferous women and people that
you wouldn't run into if you went to a
good children's university.
"Not everybody in the
school was radical but I fell in with a
bunch of people who could remember the
60's – had seen it on TV – and
knew a little about politics. On the
campus you could see the preppy, freshly
washed and pressed, blank faced young
Americans that were being churned out by
the business school and school of nuclear
physics. At the other end of the campus
there were all these scruffy types
hanging around.
"We went on strike
one time and invaded the administration
building. They were the kind of people I
would hang out with. Not Jack Nicholson
or anything...
"You can do anything
at UCLA. At USC they tell you if you're
going to be a director or an editor or a
cameraman, and they vet your film. This
is why the so called movie brats are such
good boys, they're used to being told
exactly what to do and they do it. At
UCLA they didn't tell you anything except
some rudimentary schooling on how to use
the equipment."
Repo Man is ostensibly the
story of Otto, a kid who by chance
becomes a repo man – driving around
L.A. repossessing cars when the buyers
falter on the payments. Otto is
introduced to this strange and compulsive
world by a hardened speed snorting repo
man (played by Harry Dean Stanton) who's
life is his work ("life for the repo
man is always intense").
Incidentally the film was
financed by Mike Nesmith, the ex-Monkee
but mercifully there are no choruses of 'hey
hey we're the repo men'. "I
thought it was interesting that these
guys would drive around and steal your
personal possessions legally.
"I had a neighbour
who was a repo man and drove around with
him, making notes an occasionally
assisting him. This was socially the
wrong thing for me to do but a lot of
what Harry Dean Stanton says in the film
comes straight from the mouth of that
guy. He was quite a raconteur of
repo-dom. It was good for him too because
he didn't normally have a kid riding
around with him writing down what he
said. "He liked the film. All the
repo men like it, some of the things
reflect their own experiences.
Repo Man has comedy,
drama, thrills, spills, nuclear paranoia,
pulses with a punkish energy and, from
the mutated Batman theme over the opening
titles onward, is a weird portrayal of
the contemporary American nightmare. It
has been said it would be a better film
if it was about repo men!
"I lack interest in
rigorously conforming to a particular
genre expectation (he grunts at the
pomposity of that phrase). It goes off at
a bunch of tangents and has a lot of
elements besides repo-dom. I like "
films that are rambling and associative.
The idea that a film has to be a certain
way like the 19th century concept of the
play. It was set in a drawing room with
the fourth wall missing. That concept was
SMASHED by the dadaists and by
Brecht especially.
"That almost happened
with films in the early 70s with things
like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and the
Spaghetti Westerns. You were getting to a
point where the cinema was really going
to get interest ing, breaking down all
the genre expectations and making really
good films. Then it got reactionary and
now people make films that are very
stodgy, like television programmes.
"I don't know if that
was the time when the studios were all
bought by the oil companies. I don't
think the audience got tired, films like
Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider were
extremely popular. Hopper's next film was
sabotaged because they couldn't
understand it. People in studios were
genuinely afraid of what was going on.
"Its like Coca Cola
owning Columbia, the dictate has gone
out. There are certain subjects that
Columbia cannot make a film about because
Coca Cola have a healthy, clean living,
sugar imbibing image they wish to
project. The dull time for movies has
persisted right up to last year –
when Repo Man came out!"
Otto and cohorts trail a
green Chevy Malibu with a mysterious
cargo. Exactly what that cargo is, is
never made clear but whatever it is, it
is... intense.
"Originally the
screenplay ended with an atomic bomb
exploding in the trunk and L.A. being
destroyed by a night time nuclear blast.
But we didn't have the heart to destroy
L.A. It seemed too heavy to kill
everybody off and you can't do it any
better than Dr Strangelove. Instead you
get all these hints about what's in the
trunk but it's not a bomb, it's something
else. It's also a rigorous piss-take of
Spielberg. Luckily the special effects
are so wonky that no one could think it
was anything other than a
piss-take."
Prior to becoming a repo
man, Otto is involved with the L.A. punk
scene. While he's repoing motors his old
friends are making half-assed raids on
supermarkets toting shotguns.
"I had a big friend
called Dick Rude who plays the bald
maniac punk gangster (as he gets blown
away he wails 'a life of crime led me to
this sorry fate, I blame society') and I
went to a lot of punk shows with him. I
met Circle Jerks, the Plugz and Suicidal
Tendencies who were neighbours of mine. I
went to punk shows all the time. Or
hardcore as it's now known. I like L.A.
hardcore music a lot and the Plugz very
much. They did a lot of the incidental
music in the film."
Following Repo Man Alex
returned to England to get his Sid
Vicious project off the ground. But
diversion arrived by way of the Pogues. A
journalist had interviewed Alex and
curiously transplanted his own enthusiasm
for the band into Alex's mouth. Alex,
amused, got a call from the Pogues
manager thanking him for the mention and
inviting him to shoot the band's 'A Pair
Of Brown Eyes' video.
"I told him I'd never
heard the Pogues so he sent Pogues
T-shirts, Pogues cuff links and the
records which were really good. Nothing
like what I expected at all, I thought
they were going to be a punk band.
"I went to see the
Pogues and the reaction they got was one
I'd never seen a band get in England
before – people doing battle on the
dancefloor. Even in the days of English
punkdom it was all very restrained.
People would pogo up and down in their
little space and clap politely after each
song. But the Pogues got the kind of
reaction Suicidal Tendencies get in L.A.
"We were really given
a lot of freedom, there was no pressure
from Stiff to make a conventional rock
video. They knew they were going to get
something weird. The only problem is that
it is difficult to get airplay because it
suggests that Britain is perhaps not
entirely free and absolutely perfect.
That political aspect tends to put the
BBC and ITV off showing it. Plus there's
things like the dog eating the
eyeball."
Would you like to do more
promo videos?
"Nah. But with the
Pogues yes. Or the Plugz. But I don't
really want to get into it. I've already
turned down the opportunity to do a
£100,000 Kate Bush video because... who
needs it?"
Alex wrote his first Sid
Vicious script in 1980 while in America
and took it around the "bastions
of mammon" in Hollywood to no
avail. "They want films about nice
middle class people who go through the
trauma of divorce.
"I find the story of
Sid and Nancy very romantic. There was
something about the intensity of their
passion which I find very attractive.
Plus, there are various other Sid and
Nancy projects and I don't want to see
some stupid exploitation thing
done."
Were you a fan of Sid?
'Very much. Not the
pathetic junkie or the failed tough guy
but Sid the performer. For a brief while
he did some very good things. His version
of 'My Way' has got to be the best one
ever done. Also the two things in the
Great Rock And Roll Swindle, 'Somethin'
Else' and 'C'mon Everybody'. Sid could
have been as popular as Liberace. Sid
could have been playing Las Vegas right
now, the Tom Jones of the 80's! See him
doing 'Somethin' Else' to himself in the
mirror. 'I'm so good looking man, I'm
somethin' else' – tremendous
sense of humour.
Alex is already quite
definite about his plans beyond the Sid
and Nancy film. He visited Nicaragua for
a week during the elections and wants to
return there to make a film about...
"William Walker. He
was a 19th-century filibuster. He was
five foot one, weighted 90 pounds, was a
brilliant surgeon, doctor, dentist,
lawyer and journalist in San Francisco.
He was betrothed to a beautiful deaf mute
who died of yellow fever. Walker, who
until then had been a liberal and against
slavery became a maniac. An Al Haig,
Casper Weinberger type – an insane,
jingoistic fascist and he went off to try
and take over Central America and turn it
into a slave state to be annexed by the
USA.
"It's a great story
and it's a relevant to right now. The USA
is still coming out with the same stupid
statements about manifest destiny. In
Central America the USA is fighting a war
it can only win by killing everyone
there. The Nicaraguans are continually
coming up to you and saying, 'when you go
back to America tell Reagan we beat
Somoza and we'll beat him too'.
"In Nicaragua there
is a sense of optimism you don't get in
the States or Britain and the people know
what they can do. If the British people
believed they could control their own
destiny the way the Nicaraguans control
their destiny, there would be no cruise
missiles, there would be no Trident, we
wouldn't have allowed it to happen.
"Is there any more
toast?"
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