10,000 Ways To Die: Alex Cox interview

British director Alex Cox crashed onto the indie scene in 1984 with Repo-Man starring Emilio Estevez as a punk-turned-bailiff. He made a bigger noise with his next film Sid & Nancy (1986) about the doomed love affair between the Sex Pistols' guitarist Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and groupie Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb). That led to numerous offers from Hollywood, including RoboCop, but Cox chose instead to shoot a comic homage to the spaghetti westerns he loved as a boy. Sadly, Straight To Hell (1987) went nowhere and his next film, the neo-western Walker (1987) was criticised at the time for being too anarchic (although it has since been reappraised).

Cox continues to make films on the fringe and recently authored 10,000 Ways To Die, a book cataloguing spaghetti westerns throughout the 1960s and '70s. He talks to us about his fascination with the genre and what it means to be a truly independent filmmaker.

Is there an intersection between your interest in spaghetti westerns and punk?

My interest in spaghetti westerns pre-dates punk. I was a little boy when I got into them. I grew up in an atmosphere of mindless violence, a very 'boy' world, so spaghetti westerns were a reflection of that brutal adolescent world. It's the idiotic world of boys. From the age of five to eleven I went to a mixed sex school then at the age of eleven I was thrust into a boy's only environment and you can't imagine the difference in terms of the levels of violence and stupidity. Boys, when they're deprived of the company of women, become horrible.

So then it's deeply-seated within you; that sense of 'anarchy' which is the intersection between spaghetti westerns and punk, isn't it?

Ah, but punk wasn't a boy's-only world though... I think the punk world was a more healthy world because of its sexual diversity.

In your book you only briefly mention British filmmaker Michael Carreras. Isn't there a case for saying he invented the spaghetti western as early as 1961 with The Savage Guns? It may not be the best but it's the first...

I don't see it as a spaghetti western. I see it as a British western made in Spain. I left those British westerns out of the equation because, stylistically, they're quite different. They tended more to ape the American model than the Italians did. The Italians were coming from a somewhat different place and the model for them was Yojimbo, the samurai movie by [Akira] Kurosawa. There were some great British westerns though, a lot of cranky comedy westerns. There was one with Arthur Askey in it. I forget what it was called... [Ramsbottom Rides Again, 1956]. Or was that Norman Wisdom?

Alex Cox as a drug baron in the 2005 film Rosario Tijeras.

What did the Italians tap into with spaghetti westerns that the Americans had missed?

They'd grown up on cowboy films and American propaganda. If you think about what happened at the end of the Second World War, one of the things Mussolini had done was to close the market to foreign films, and after the collapse of fascism the Americans took over. Then there was this influx of American movies that had been just piling up against the walls of protectionism. Filmmakers, the western guys like [Sergio] Leone, and even [Bernardo] Bertolucci grew up in this environment. What must've been interesting for them is the dichotomy between the American world they saw in the movies - generally positive - and the mafia corruption they encountered on the streets in Milan. I think the difference between the theory and the practise of 'the American Dream' encouraged the birth of spaghetti westerns.

Did their B-movie status mean the filmmakers were better able to tackle controversial issues?

Absolutely. They could make films that were parables and that had other meanings. They seemed to be westerns but they were also about the Vietnam War or something like that. It's true that, partially, that was possible because they were inexpensively made. If you're making films on a low budget you have more leeway whereas someone making a more expensive film is constrained by their financiers.

When the spaghetti westerns got a foothold in America and American stars began getting involved, do you think that was detrimental in the long-term?

It's interesting. There were two different types of success that they had. Christopher Frayling [writer/academic] is quite clear about it. There were Italian westerns that were made for the international market - and that really means the American market - and Sergio Leone's films were like that, and so those films tendered to have bigger budgets and a respectful view of the church. Then you have the lower budget Italian westerns, like the ones made by [Sergio] Corbucci which were made for domestic audiences starring Italian actors instead of Americans. So Franco Nero instead of Clint Eastwood, and they had a very disrespectful view of the church because a lot of the people in Italy were communists or anarchists. They hated the Vatican. They hated the power and corruption. So the films made for the Americans had one view and the films for the Italians had an entirely different view. I think the Italian ones are more entertaining because you're actually seeing them for who they really are. When the Americans got involved there was a kind of 'blandisation' of the spaghetti western.

Do you see yourself as a Corbucci type? You're outspoken in your views and some would say that it's held you back in your career...

I think there's no other way really. I think things turn out the way they turn out. What I find interesting about the bulk of these films is that the more interesting ones are the marginal ones, the ones that are strange and quirky where you wonder what on earth just happened; 'what did I just see?' That's the kind of cinema I like to go and watch. It's terrible when you feel like you know exactly what's going to happen in a film. It doesn't happen often that you see a film which surprises you and it's on the margins where that happens.

Over the years has it become easier or more difficult to work on the margins?

Harder and harder. It gets harder and harder because everything, in terms of the infrastructure, is prioritised for the studios. The UK Film Council serves just to transfer taxpayer's money to the American studios; lottery money to Rupert Murdoch. If you're not actually working for one of the Hollywood studios, you're probably not going to work at all. Or if you are working you're probably not going to make any money because the studios not only control production, they also control distribution. It's like an extraordinarily powerful cartel that operates a blacklist and it's a very difficult thing to find yourself on the outside.

You were offered The Three Amigos in the 80s, but you turned your back on it...

Yeah, they wanted me to direct that. I wasn't keen on it at all, not at all. I thought it was awful. It was just an awful, horrible script. It was very reactionary, very right-wing about these guys thinking they've got the right to go to Latin America and kick a bunch of Mexicans around and do what they want. It was like The Magnificent Seven without the class, without the style. It was just a vulgar comedy with these guys out of Saturday Night Live, farting.

How are you surviving on the outside these days?

I don't know! It's becoming increasingly difficult. I used to be able to survive just by doing bits on the side like journalism or making documentaries for the BBC or Channel4, but that work has really dried up. There's this terrible economic crisis and it's affecting everybody.

But you are working on a sequel to Repo-Man...

It's not a sequel as such, but I am doing a film about the economic crisis and about the repossession business, but this time the protagonist is a woman so it's called Repo-Chick. It's the story of an extremely wealthy heiress who's got to decide whether to get a job or go to prison and what happens to her in the context of the economic crisis. It takes place in LA.

Is it important for independent cinema to have something to rail against, whether it's the city bankers or in the case of the spaghetti westerns, mafia corruption?

Yeah, I think so. Certainly in the late '60s you had the New American Cinema that produced films like Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch; a lot of very interesting films were made and they were made in the context of the Vietnam War and the sense of horror that people had developed in that war. So, in that sense, yeah. I do think that out of very difficult and arduous times very good art is created, but it happens on the margins. You look at Universal and you understand why. Universal is owned by General Electric and General Electric is the biggest military contractor in the world. They have a huge stake in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so they're not likely to green-light an anti-war film.

Why are you based in America? Why aren't you over here making films?

It doesn't make any difference, does it? Britain is just a subsidiary of the United States now.

10,000 Ways To Die is published by Kamera Books and is out now.

Interview by Stella Papamichael | Published 11th May 09