Chapo Trap House - Movie Mindset Bonus: Interview with Repo Man Director Alex Cox

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

As a special endcap to this season of Movie Mindset, Will, Hesse & Chris interview the director of Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker and many others, the great Alex Cox. They discuss the Los Angeles of Repo Man, his visual style, his approach to making “political” films, and various genres, writers, and actors he admires. And of course, we get to the bottom of who killed JFK. Alex is currently crowdfunding what may be his last movie, “My Last Movie” on Kickstarter. Please consider kicking in and becoming one of the dead souls:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexcoxfilms/my-last-movie Find the rest of this season of Movie Mindset, including our episode on Repo Man, on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/collection/510340?view=expanded

Let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a juice Welcome back movie fans. It's been our distinct pleasure on this season of Movie Mindset to take some time to talk to the people who really matter, the people who make movies. And I'm just going to jump right into it because we are thrilled today to be able to talk to a filmmaker whose work I have adored for years. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to our program the director of Repo Man, Alex Cox. Alex, thank you so much for being here. Thank you very much for having me. And I'm sorry that it was all all kind of a bit alarming a few minutes ago. But I'm a member of a volunteer fire department in rural Oregon, and we're

about half an hour from town. And so if we get an emergency and it's not, you know, broken, broken back or something like that, it's quicker to take the customer to the emergency room than to wait for the ambulance to arrive. And they save $2,000 in the process. Yeah. I failed to mention to my co-host here that you had said that you had to take somebody to the hospital this morning.

I did not want to alarm them as we were figuring out if you were gonna make this or not. It was a lady who thought she was having a heart attack and she actually wasn't. But but it was necessary to for me to wait outside the emergency room for five hours. But here I am back just in time. Yes. Well, we thank you for your service to that both that lady and to the people of Oregon. But I'd like to talk about the people of the city of Los Angeles. Alex, we just finished watching Repo Man. It was the last movie that we did on this series of Movie Mindset. I've seen it

like probably at least a half dozen times over the course of my life, but in rewatching it this time, something that really struck me was just how perfectly it captures both America and Los Angeles. Like a really like just essential sense of time and space. And I was wondering if you could talk about your experience of moving to LA from the UK to go to UCLA and how your sort of impressions of America and Los Angeles as sort of a semi outsider like how like what were they and like how they contributed to like what we see on the screen

and repo man? Well, I think I mean, everybody in the world pretty much has an impression of America or the United States because of all the media that we see. So everybody has an idea of America, you know, or the US. What I didn't realize was that LA was any different from anywhere else. I mean, I just assumed all American cities were like that, you know, because it was the only one that I knew. And I had been living in Los Angeles, I guess, for like six years before we made repo man. So I'd become very familiar with LA. And but as far as I knew, everyone was like that. I mean, it's like when watching it, it really you really feel like this is the real LA. This is the LA that you see when you walk down the street in LA.

If you're one of the few people who actually does that, like the LA that exists outside the blur of traffic and but just like your sense of like Los Angeles and how perfectly you captured it on film. Like, like what is it about LA that like that made it into the movie? Well, that's what it was like in those days. I mean, I think the interesting thing is that what you said on your show about Repo Man, which I enjoyed listening to, was that a lot of these, like what was once a junkyard is now artists' condos.

You know, especially the downtown area that we were shooting in, and the city of Vernon, the city of industry. In those days, nobody would voluntarily live there because the air quality was so poor. But then things changed, you know, unleaded gas came in and there was more public transport. And the air quality in Los Angeles got better for a while.

And so then people started thinking, oh, I actually can move and live in the city of Vernon, you know, which I think nobody would have voluntarily done in the 1980s. You know, I said on the episode that like when I first saw Repo Man, it was like, you know, opening the stargate in my mind. I was like, I didn't know that they could make movies like that. That seems so specifically for me. And I think a big part of it was that it was the first movie I ever saw with Harry Dean Stanton.

And Chris mentioned, I think it was from one of your commentaries, you said there was a run of movies in the 60s and 70s in America that were actually really good. And they all had Harry Dean Stanton in them. I'm just wondering, like, do you remember the first movie you saw with Harry Dean Stanton? What about him makes him such a compelling leading man. I think the first film that I saw him where I learned his name was The Missouri Breaks, a Western with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. And Harry Dean was a member of the gang in that film. And there's this early on in the movie, he's getting a haircut. And literally, they's getting a haircut and literally, they have put a pudding basin on his head

and they're cutting around the pudding basin. And I thought, you know, this guy is a serious actor. He's not messing around, you know, many actors are vain and they wouldn't want a pudding basin haircut, you know? But Harry went for it and although I have to warn you too, I mean, I think somebody said in the show that Harry Dean would be the ideal father.

No, no, no, no. You do not want Harry Dean for your father. You would be terminally, terminally messed up if Harry Dean. If Harry Dean. If Harry Dean. If Harry Dean. If Harry Dean.

I have a question that kind of relates to what you said about how he's a serious actor and most actors nowadays would be too vain to get a putting base and haircut. It's something I noticed in a lot of your movies is that you're not afraid to let the characters get silly with it and to let them, you know, be, may look like a fool on camera. Is that something you dislike about modern movies? Is this vanity and refusal to look bad on film? Yeah, I don't think that's quite the same as looking like a fool, though.

I think that today, if you're, the actor prepares today by going to the gym and checking their Instagram, you know, seeing how many followers they have. And back in the day, I don't even know what those actors did to prepare, but it was something different. But Harry was a...

Drinking a bottle of whiskey. Yeah, I mean, drink a bottle of whiskey. I mean, Harry was, as he said frequently, a complicated character. And at the beginning of the shoot, he told me that he wasn't gonna learn his lines. He was gonna have them written on cards and have them taped to the dashboard and read them.

And I said, no, you can't do that. You have to learn your lines. And he said, listen, Warren Oates did that. If Warren Oates did that, I can do it. I mean, Warren Oates was the greatest American actor of all time. So in a way, Harry had a point, but I tricked him because I told him that if he wouldn't learn his lines, he would be violating his Screen Actors Guild oath. And he believed me. There is no Screen Actors Guild oath. But I told him that as a member

of the Screen Actors Guild, he was sworn to come to the set every day, having learned his lines. And he did. So he could do it. It's just I think at the outset, he really didn't, he didn't think very much of the film. He didn't think the film was very good or would amount to very much.

He didn't like the script very much. It was just a payday for him. And then over the years, he realized that the film or all the people liked the film, you know, and that it had been a good idea to be in it. And also it got him the job in Paris, Texas. Because Vim Vendous was going to go with Dean Stockwell for that role. And when Robbie Muller came out to shoot Repo Man, he phoned Vim and said, Hey, listen, there's an actor out here

that you might want to consider the lead role in in Paris, Texas, which they were going to do immediately after Repo Man. And his name is Harry Dean Stanton. And so sure enough, I guess that Vim tracked him down on film and saw what he was like and signed him up. And so Dean Stockwell got relegated to the sort of the supporting role in that film. And Harry of course was, boy, I mean, Repo Man and Paris, Texas are probably his two

Greatest roles and also maybe he's only two. He's only two starring role. Yeah, it's only two I was gonna say I only like he's usually like in a supporting role I'd like to at least talked about another one another actor in in repo man as I sort of audition, you know I'll try out various father figures Maybe you can maybe you set me right with this one But an actor who's something of a good luck charm for you He shows up a lot of times in your movies is Miguel Sandoval who plays Archie in Repo man I'll always remember him from the first scene of Jurassic Park and playing the Pablo Escobar character and clear in present danger How did you and Miguel link up and what has led to such a fruitful collaboration between you two?

We met through Michael Nesmith, who was the producer of a film called Time Rider, which they'd made in New Mexico. And Michael was the executive producer of Repo Man. And he introduced me to two actors, both of whom I think had been in Time Rider, who we thought would be good in Repo Man. One was Miguel, and the other was Tracy Walter.

Oh, wow. So Michael's instincts were very, very good. And what led you to keep working with Miguel so often? He's in Three Businessmen, he's in A Small Part in Sid and Nancy, it's like straight to hell. Straight to hell, yeah. Oh, I just, I mean, I think if you meet good actors,

if you are fortunate enough to work with good actors, you should keep trying to work with them because that was the idea of all the directors that we looked up to when we were students, whether it was Vinzi Anderson or Sam Peckinpah or John Ford, they all had a stock company. And so that was what we were. Or I don't know if we all were inclined towards that,

but I certainly felt if you could meet a number of good actors, another one of course being Cy Richardson, then keep working with them, because your relationship will develop and you'll form a sort of a shorthand where it's not necessary for you to tell them that much stuff because you've already worked together and they already know what to do.

Just piggybacking on what you said about the people you looked up to, the people we all look up to in film school did. I was wondering, something I really admire about your movies is that you have this ability to move between genres, but never really lose this essential Alex Cox-ness. Even if you use different techniques, like straight to hell, all the spaghetti western like inserts or the highway or highway patrolman with all the, you know, handheld long like takes with no inserts at all. There's this like through line that runs through your work of, and I'm just, I'm wondering, what is it? What is that through line? Tell me. I, it's, I think it's just this, um, beautiful like I for,

I mean, it's very stock and silly to say like this beautiful compositions very graceful like they're all very beautiful movies and they all I don't know they grab you and they they move you a little bit. I think because even though they are, the subject matter is generally not the most estimable, but the visual aspect is often incredibly beautiful. And I think that that's because I've been fortunate enough to work with really good camera people like Robbie and Roger Deakins, David Bridges, Steve Feerberg, Miguel Garcon. I've been very lucky in being able to work with such good cinematographers that I could just trust. I was thinking about, I mentioned this a few times on the episode, listen to your commentary. And I love you talking about the scene in Repo Man when he's walking along the LA River and screaming TV party. And as the camera pans over this beautiful sunrise shot, you're just going

wait for it, wait for it, wait for it and point there. And then the light, one of the street lights comes on right as the shot cuts. No, all the lights go out. Oh yeah, they go out. They go out. And I just really appreciated how proud you were of capturing that one perfect moment that has to come with his blocking and the singing and the lighting and then something you can't really control the the street lights and everything. I think that speaks to what you know, Hess is getting at is like even though this is a grimy moment of this punk on the dirty side of the river, just the eye for detail of getting this pop of light and the closing off of light

in the background. It feels like a particularly coxswain visual moment. And that was Los Angeles. That was the city of Los Angeles because we actually turned the lights off ourselves. We had two guys from the downtown public utilities division, whatever it's called. LA DWP. DWP. And one of them was really tall and skinny and looked like Ichabod Crane. The other one was like really short and fat and his name was Mr. Nickerbocker. It was like that of a Raymond Chandler. And they said, you know, you just tell us when we'll pull the switch, you know,

two takes and they pulled the switch and that was really amazing. And now I guess it wouldn't be that way. They've been replaced by software. You do it in post. The king of filming at night. But Alex, if I could suggest like potentially another through line in your films, it's that another thing that's trying to show is your very strong political sensibility and like political point of view. And like a lot of movies shy away from having an unabibility and political point of view. And a lot of movies shy away from having an unabashedly political point of view. And one of the things we mentioned on our episode is that you talk about how Repo Man

is a portrait of a young punk who becomes a reactionary small businessman with more or less no change in their character. And I was thinking about this because I thought of another movie that came out in 1984 that is them you know, thematically, but, you know, if not spiritually linked to Repo, man, that's Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters, which is another movie about slackers who become reactionary small business owners.

And I'm just wondering if, like, that 80s cultural turn in which, like, becoming totally cynical and out for yourself kind of became a form of rebellion, like, whether you see that sort of as a failure of previous cultural movements, be it like the hippies or the punk era, to achieve anything political. I don't know. I don't know. I kind of I'm just trying to get my head around what you said, because Ghostbusters is a viciously reactionary film. Yeah, I know. Like most Hollywood movies, it's completely reactionary. Who is the villain in Ghostbusters? The EPA.

It's the Environmental Protection Agency. I mean, this is a wet dream of the reactionaries who run Hollywood, you know? That's why Ghostbusters is a $25 million film and Repo Man is a $1.1 million film. Well, I mean, I guess what I think what Will's saying is, like, you know, do you see Repo Man is kind of skewering the thing that Ghostbusters is then celebrating?

Repo Man is in and is the antithesis of most of the films that Hollywood was making at that time and continues to make today. Immediately after he finished Repo Man, Emilio Estevez was hoping to get a part in Red Dawn. Of course. Right. And the producers and I just skewed him.

We said, if you're in Red Dawn, man, we're going to make, we're going to humiliate you in this film, you know, every chance we get when you're off camera, there's going to be sniveling and weeping and whining, you know, and we would have done it too. Um, especially in the scene with Cy Richardson, where he has to, where he's You know, whining, you know. And we would have done it too. Especially in the scene with Cy Richardson, where he's getting shot at. And I said, you're still on the job, why don't you get in the car?

You know, no, he would have come over really, really lame. You know, like the full pants guy. He would have been even more of that, excuse me while I fold my pants stuff, you know. But fortunately, I think he auditioned for Red Dawn, but luckily he didn't get a part and so, you know, we didn't have to do any of those horrible things. But this is how bad things are. This is how bad things are. The imbecile guy who was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, who's now the national security advisor to Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan. He gave an interview

recently in which he says he grew up on these great movies like Red Dawn. Oh, God. Oh, my God. This is a great little son of a bitch who never saw Repo Man. If he did, he didn't. And his idea of a great film is Red Dawn. And so then you think, well, this is why in the White House and not just in the White House, but in other Western capitals, there's this, is the word Manichaean, I don't know how to pronounce it,

this division into good and evil, and you're not permitted any gray area. It's either, you know, America's good, Russian's bad, you know, like Red Dawn. And that was interesting because it always seemed to me that even the most reactionary characters like the Repo men or the inventor of the neutron bomb, there was good in them.

And even in the, you know, the most outrageous punky bad boys, you know, there was something really lame in them. And even in the most outrageous, punky bad boys, you know, there was something really lame in them. You know, and so nobody is an archetype and nobody is good and nobody is evil. Well, there are, no, there are evil people, but in general- Make an exception for Jake Sullivan.

Make an exception for Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken, and Victoria Newland, and Biden yes. And Biden and Trump and Pompeo, you know. Yeah. Alex, now you're speaking my language here. But like in Reaper Man, one of the things we talked about is that like in the background, there are news reports which sort of contextualize the era of as one of like Reagan's dirty wars in Central America that was going on at the time. You know, Otto's parents are sending Bibles to El Salvador. And it's like you're sort of almost

previewing Walker. If you want to talk about a movie that people in the White House should watch is Walker and a movie that Chris said I just watched it perfectly captures America and what we really are and what we stand for in this country. But I guess I'm wondering, like, when you like... One of my favorite parts of your movies is how unabashedly left-wing they are. And, like, by the end of Walker, when we're seeing Coke cans and cars or at the end of Revengers tragedy

where you just show the 9-11 footage, you couldn't be more obvious about George Powell. Oh, no, we had to cut that out. We were made to cut that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The 9-11 footage was in the rough cut, and the British Film Council, who were among the financiers, forbade us to use that footage because we would never get a distribution in America. The film didn't get a distribution in America.

Yeah, your adaptation of a Jacobean tragedy couldn't get a distribution in America. Yeah, it was because of the 9-11 footage. Yeah, because of 9-11. But the thing is, it's, the English are terribly afraid of the Americans. The English live in quaking fear of the Americans and they always seek to appease whatever wicked crime the Americans embark upon. So, you know, invade Iraq, Tony Blair will be there, destroy Libya, David Cameron will be there. Whatever happens next, nuclear war with Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kyrgyzstan, he'll be there. On the front lines, well actually no,

he'll be in his bunker in New Zealand. The Starmor Fuhrer bunker, I can't wait. It is interesting because the thing is, and I think in a way, by coming to America and living in Los Angeles and being, you know, not a wealthy person, being just a person that has to, you know, has to make money and survive in a relatively modest way you know you get a completely different view of things from from what you do if you're a you know a public school boy in England who then becomes Prime Minister. Yes well I mean I guess my question was like like how do you how do you like seek to express a real political point of view and a left wing

political point of view in your movies like other through genre or however you wed it to your films? It's it's overt, but it's not in it never feels didactic or lead in which often is the problem with like, I don't know, incorporating political ideology or points of view into a film. So like, how do you approach expressing a like a political point of view in your films? Well I think I mean probably it goes back to that thing

about not dividing characters into good and evil. Because in Walker for example, apart from Marley Matlin's character who dies very early on and does seem to be genuinely good, all the characters in Walker are bad. You know some of them are worse than others, but they are all bad. And that includes the Nicaraguan characters with whom Walker associates. And I think that not to make that division,

not to play the story from the perspective of a good American journalist who goes down to Nicaragua and sees the reality of everything, you know, because that was what Salvador was like. And that was what the year of living dangerously was like. Right. You know, films that got made around about the same time, but they had, they had to be seen through the eyes of an inverted commerce, good American journalists.

There are no good American journalists. They're all corrupt. If they weren't, they wouldn't be, they'd be in jail like Julian Assange was until two days ago. Yeah. Just thinking about that, because I just watched Walker recently for the first time because it's unfortunately very hard to come by, but it's fantastic. But I was really struck by, you know, maybe not the scenes of outrageous violence, but one that really stuck with and unsettled me is the scene of Walker weeping in his sleep about his dead fiance and this moment of this character who we've now seen to be this vicious and unrepentant killer having this moment of deep vulnerability and fear and trembling and sadness in the midst

of this Holocaust that he's doing on this country. It's a very unsettling moment that I think is kind of what you're getting at with what you're talking about, the not all one way or the other. Yeah, and very insulting to the lady that he's in bed with. Yes, exactly. Exactly. But that's the thing. I mean, it's not like, I mean, I mean,

Walker maybe is a little bit of a comic book character, but there is a side to Walker. When Walker starts out, you know, he's antislavery, you know, he's very progressive in favor of God, science and hygiene. But then through his process, in order to maintain power, he abandons every principle that he possessed because the only thing that matters to him

is clinging to power and being Walker, Walker, Walker, you know? And yet within him, as Cy's character points out to him when they read from his diary, you know, he was woke, you know, Walker had this army of Black people and Mexicans and Nicaraguans all fighting for justice and freedom. You know, unfortunately it didn't work out that way.

So Will alluded to it earlier. The device that you use in Walker that as the film goes on, you slowly introduce more modern props and scene elements, which is, you know, as we'll set up a very interesting and clever way of, of kind of linking this very 19th century story to the current moment in a way that becomes more and more evident as the film goes on. And I was just wondering how you came up with that and decided to implement that device. And then also just, if you have any thoughts in general of like putting history on film and making those resonances

between the current moment. I think that that was probably something that Rudy Wurlitzer, who was the screenwriter, pushed very strongly because he didn't want to make a conventional film. He thought, I mean, he'd written Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, you know, and that was a very, very good Western, you know.

But it was a, you know, and that was a very, very good Western, you know, but it, but it was a, you know, conventional Western too. And I think he wanted to do something that was different. He didn't just want to take another historical trip down memory lane. He wanted to make it relevant to the society in which we were living. And so the anachronisms, I think was something that he and I and Lorenzo, the producer, we were all behind them because they made sense and they said that this isn't just, you know, an historical story of things that happened long ago. This is a story that's happening right now, which was much more interesting for us. And also at the time, there were some

other films that were doing the same kind of thing. Derek Jarman's film, Caravaggio, did a very similar thing. There were computers and anachronistic elements in that film. And there was a Russian film called Remembrance about Stalin. And this was still in Soviet times, but it too was kind of genre breaking

and incorporated anachronisms to say, Stalin may be dead, but the system that created him is still with us. And so I think that was interesting that that was a movement that was starting, that had shoots, a little shoots there, that a historical film didn't have to pretend to be really happening in the period

that you could play around with Contemporary relevance and contemporary issues as well. Mm-hmm. I wanted to ask about You working with Rudy Wurlitzer. He's one of my favorite writers. I think and I Was wondering how that came to be what made you choose him? Did you choose him and like? was wondering how that came to be. What made you choose him? Did you choose him and like, what made you choose him to write this story? This is thanks to Harry Dean Stanton.

Wow. Because when I was in Rotterdam, I think that was the first or the second film festival that I went to. And they were showing Repo Man in Rotterdam. And they'd invited Harry Dean over for the screening as well and so I Walked into the bar of the hotel Something like that on the way to the screening and there was Harry sitting at a table with another guy

And so I went over and said hi Harry. How you doing then and And Harry introduced me to the person he was sitting with and he goes and this is Rudy I go you're Rudy world it, author of Tulane Blacktop, and Pat Garrett and the Little Kid. You know? And he was, you know? And I think that, you know, I was an innocent and I ran up a hotel, I'm not a hotel,

but I ran up a telephone bill at the hotel, you know, calling the states to say the film had been very well received. And I ended up owing them like a hundred bucks or something. And Rudy, even though we'd only just met, he loaned me a hundred dollars to pay my phone bill for the hotel, which I later paid him back.

So we bonded very early on and it was a wonderful thing. And of course, I think almost immediately I was thinking about William Walker and about making a film in Nicaragua. And of course, I think almost immediately I was thinking, you know, about William Walker and about making a film in Nicaragua. And this is the guy to write it because the idea of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is that these are two men who are seeking their own death, but the only way they can get there

is by climbing up a pile of bodies. And that's of course, is the story of Walker as well. And so even though the two films are that similar, but that that's at the heart of both of them, I think. Yeah. You mentioned you've mentioned Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. You mentioned Peck and Pah. I know like the Italian

Western filmmakers are a big influence on you. Hesse, I think you had a question about Western Western influences on his work. Yeah. I read somewhere that when you were at UCLA you wrote a thesis about spaghetti westerns and I was wondering if you could, if you remembered what that thesis was about and also like who are some of your guys, who are some of your favorite, what are some of your favorite spaghetti Western movies? Like I know there's a lot of Jango Kill in- In Straight to Hell.

Yeah, in Straight to Hell. And one of my favorites for a few dollars more, there's some influences of that in there with like the opening titles. But I was wondering like, yeah, what was your thesis about? And who are some of your guys? Well, that, I mean, that was funny because I wrote this, yeah, because I'd started out at UCLA.

I got into the critical studies program because I didn't have a body of work. If you wanted to go into production, you had to be able to show the films that you'd made. And I hadn't really made any films. So I got into critical studies. And I was just trying to work my way through critical studies as quickly as possible so I could switch to production.

And so I wrote this thesis about Italian-Westerns. But it was very bad. It was because that was a time when there was a lot of semiotics around. You remember Roland Barth and all that stuff and categorizing everything and splitting everything up into little categories and made it all meaningless. And it was kind of in that form. But many years later, I rewrote

it or I did it or I just did it again. I wrote a book about Italian Westerns called 10,000 Ways to Die, which is now in its second edition and you can find a copy in the bookshop. And it's a book about, it's a chronological history of the Italian westerns because once I got the semiotics out of my system, I realized that the only real way to understand anything or to approach anything is via chronology because you can only understand what's going on in Ukraine if you go, well, at least 90 years back in historical time, if not much further. And you can only understand what's happening in Gaza if you go back a similar distance or much further.

And then you can start, you can see how systems develop and how things come about. And so the book that I finally wrote is a chronological history of the Italian Western from the point of view of a film director. And it's called 10,000 Ways to Die. And in terms of my faves, yeah, I'm the same as you. I love for a few dollars more,

I think that's probably like the most perfect Italian Western. But I love I love Once Upon a Time in the West and I love Django Kill very much. And also a movie called Requiescant directed by Carlo Lizzani in which Pasolini plays a small part. Oh, wow. There's some great Italian westerns. And you're talking about the Italian western. Do you see a marked contrast between the Italian directors, their vision of the American west, and the American west that is depicted in the classic American westerns? And do you see your role as a filmmaker with it doing a similar kind of demythologizing? Because the Italian westerns is like, everyone in West is like a cold-blooded killer. They are

ruthless, gleeful murderers with no moral code or character whatsoever as opposed to... Or the dead. Yeah. But like, yeah, like do you see like a similar like sort of juxtaposition in your work and like how you depict America and like how America depicts itself or how America wants to be depicted? Well, I think, I mean, you know, I think it depends on which American Westerns we're talking about because I think that Peking Pa was a person of leftist inclinations. Peking Pa was very angry about the Vietnam War. He used to send telegrams to Nixon. I don't know what Nixon thought getting the getting these telegrams asking him to pull out of Vietnam from Sam

Peking Pa. But Mr. Nixon, please stop this war. Stop. I don't know what Nixon thought getting these telegrams asking him to pull out of Vietnam from Sam Peckinpah. But Peckinpah was convinced about the Vietnam war. Mr. Nixon, please stop this war, stop. Yeah, and so you get, and then he made the wild bunch, which begins with a bunch of guys in American army uniforms provoking a massacre of civilians, you know? And so Peckinpah knew what he was doing.

And there were other directors of Westerns like Sam Fuller or who was the guy who directed the Gunfighter? Anyway, tending in a leftist direction too. I can't remember. Oh, it's easy to find out. But anyway, and you think about John Ford. Henry King, of course. Henry King, of course, who also directed The Bravado,

another sort of kind of neo-Western. Didn't he direct also Yellow Sky, very good film. So there was a tendency to make Westerns which were social commentary. But sometimes, think about what John Ford did with Fort Apache. He makes this film in which Henry Fonda's character, this very upright, very by the book colonel in the cavalry, causes all his guys to get killed.

And at one point, in order to attempt to prevent the massacre, John Wayne, who plays a sergeant in the film, he throws down his glove in front of Henry Fonda, and nobody notices that when they view the film. That's a challenge to a duel. He is challenging his superior officer to fight it out. And Fonda, because she's a chicken, doesn't do it. Fonda's character.

And so the film is very, very critical of the military, and very, very critical of the Imperial project. And yet after the story is over, there's an epilogue in which they lie outright about Fonda's character. You know, and there's a glorious montage of the troops all marching through the sky and all that stuff, because the important thing is to print the legend and to To recreate the story of Fonda's character as if he were a hero

And so I think that that was quite interesting because Ford was obviously quite conflicted in terms of What he wanted to say and what he felt he had to say I? saw an Intro you did for your movie presentation series on BBC Two of the Parallax View, where you talk about your theories about the JFK assassination. And I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that

a little bit and what you think happened. Who killed JFK? We're going to get to the bottom of it right now. That's a good question. I mean, you know, I mean, I mean, there's been so many theories about who is actually pulling the triggers in Dealey Plaza over the years. But I think that the only way that that murder could have been accomplished is with the complicity of the Secret Service, because they were the people who pulled the guards off the vehicle.

They were the people who all kept well back while the shooting was occurring. Greer, the Secret Service agent driving the car, was the guy who jammed the brakes on when the shooting started. So I think if you're trying to find who was responsible, who were the intellectual authors of the Kennedy assassination, they were able to control the behavior of the Secret Service and they were able to control the autopsy

because the Secret Service literally stole the body of Kennedy. The autopsy was supposed to take place at Parkland Hospital but the Secret Service pulled out their guns, stuck Kennedy's bleeding corpse into an improvised coffin and took it off to Washington, D.C. And the autopsy was supervised by the military. And even down to like there being a couple of generals

there, one of them smoking a big cigar throughout the autopsy. So I would assume it was a military coup, as almost happened yesterday in Bolivia. You know? It was a military coup. It was organized at the highest levels by the Joint Chiefs, but it couldn't have been achieved also

without the complicity of the intelligence agencies. And it's important to remember that Kennedy had fired Dulles, who was the head of the CIA. And Cabell, who was deputy head of the CIA, was an Air Force intelligence officer whose brother was the mayor of Dallas. So there was a lot of resentment directed towards Kennedy by these CIA guys who'd lost their jobs, especially

Dulles. Dulles then got himself put by LBJ on the Warren Commission. Of all the Warren Commissioners, Dulles was the one who attended the most meetings and who organized the direction of the Warren Commission and the decisions that it made. So I would assume that the assassination had to be done with the complicity of the Secret Service, but it was directed by the US military and the coverup was organized by Alan Dulles and the CIA.

And I think that's a pretty common belief. Yeah. I think that all tracks. Case closed. I mean, it's, yeah. Case closed, right? Case closed. No, Costco did it.

That's the fallback position, you know. Yeah, yeah. If the official story is too ridiculous, then Putin did it. Yes. Yeah. So before we get onto your newer project, I would like to circle all the way back to your earliest works and just ask you a question about, well, I guess not as much music, but aesthetic. Your first two major films, Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, both deal with punk in fairly direct

ways. And you also had a working relationship and I assume friendship with several punk musicians. But you also seem to approach the whole scene from a kind of critical angle. And so I was just wondering if you could talk about your relationship to punk at the time, the movement or the aesthetic and kind of what you felt about it then and what you feel about it now. Oh, I mean, the aesthetic was great. The music was great.

And it was a revolutionary movement. It was like surrealism. And remember what Luis Buñuel said about surrealism. We weren't just interested in making films or painting pictures. We wanted to change the nature of society, make everything different. And we completely failed. And just as surrealism failed, punk failed. And there's a scene in Sid and Nancy,

there's one scene in Sid and Nancy which tells you what the film is about. And it's the scene where Cy Richardson plays the man in the methadone clinic. And before he gives them their doses of methadone, he makes them listen to a lecture based on McCoy, the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia, where he says it was the intelligence agencies that were shipping all this heroin out of, out of Vietnam in body bags and injecting it into the arms of young Americans. And you guys, the pair of you are a disgrace, you know?

And that's the point of the film, but it gets lost in the romantic saga of Sid and Nancy. Well, but before we bring you are a disgrace, you know, and that's the point of the film. But it gets lost in the romantic saga of Sid and Nancy. But before we bring you out of here, could you let us know what you're working on nowadays and like, like what your current project is and how things are going with that? What we can expect from it? Well, glad you asked that question. I've been trying to

make a sequel to Repo Man for 40 years. I've been able to get the rights to the American rights back. So I now own the American rights to the screenplay, sequels and remakes, but not foreign. And unless I could get foreign, that film will never happen. So in the meantime, I'm making a film which probably will be my last movie

because I'm nearly 70. And it's based on a book by Gogol called Dead Souls. And it's the story of a man who pays good money for the names of dead people, because he's figured out a way to turn those dead people into more money. And it's a great book. It's a very funny book.

Well, it's a very funny book. It's a very funny book if you have a certain sense of humor. It's Mel Brooks' favorite book. Mel Brooks is still alive, 97 years old, and apparently he has a copy by his bed. And so it's an adaptation that I have done of Gogol's Dead Souls to be shot in Almeria in the south of Spain where the Italian Westerns were made and also outside Tucson in Arizona in the Saguaro desert. And it's the story of the man who collects the names of dead Mexicans and what he does with them. And I'm trying to raise money for it

or I am raising money for it via a Kickstarter campaign. Even though those things are slightly less common than they used to be, but so far it's gone very well, but I need more money. Give me more money. And so if any of your listeners would care to, if they went to the Kickstarter site, you just type in my last movie, or type in my name,

which is Alex Cox, site, you just type in my last movie, or type in my name, and which is Alex Cox, and you'll be directed to the page and you can boy, you know, you can do anything from obtain a copy of the score by Dan Wall for 11 bucks to be the executive producer. Many things in between. You can't do now one of the one of the rewards on the Kickstarter campaign was to have your name on a grave in the cemetery in the film. And that was the most popular by far. But the thing is, we got to 60 graves and we had to call a halt because the art department have to make these graves and

we have to put them in the cemetery and paint people's names on them and it would be abusive to the art department to go beyond. It's very appropriate for the subject matter for Gogol and Dixos and purchasing the names of dead people to make money off of them. So yeah, perfect. Here the live people are paying you to be dead. Yeah. Ernesto Cardinal.

Ernesto Cardinal was the priest who was the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua when we were making Morka. And he wrote various poems about William Morka. And one of them, there was a couplet, Garrison and Morgan knew what they were doing and down in Nicaragua, they made dollars off the dead. And so that's what we're trying to do now.

You know? It comes around. It's a call to action for, I was just gonna say it's a call to action for our listeners. Go on Kickstarter now and donate. We will all be kicking in after this. Become a dead soul for Alex Cox. Thank you guys. Thank you very much.

No, I really appreciate it. Thank you. Anything we can do to get another Alex Cox movie out there. And before we let you go, I would just have to acknowledge, you know, really the obvious debt that this podcast, Movie Mindset, owes to your Movie Drome series. But, you know, in light light of that I just wanted to ask you like real quickly what's the last good movie you've seen this could be in theater movie you've seen many times before just the last good movie

you watch that you'd like to share or pass along or evangelize to our listeners oh well I mean I um no I watched once more time in the West on on video again recently but that's hardly fair to say that. A couple of years ago, I saw a film by Andrej Konchalovsky called Sin. Do you know that film? I know, I haven't seen that. It's an artist biopic and I won't tell you too much more. It was made in Italy. It's very, very, very good. And he's a Russian director, but it was made with an Italian crew, Italian actors,

and it's about one of the greatest artists of all time. But it's not a hagiography. It's actually a very complicated film. And I highly recommend that you try and see Sin by Kaczalowski. Amazing. Yeah, sold. Consider it seen. Yes. Good. And consider the Kickstarter kickstarted.

And really, Alex Cox, I really want to thank you so much for joining us. It has been a really privilege to talk to you. And I want to thank you so much for like just your movies and just how much they have informed my life and sensibility and ongoing interest in movies. So really, thank you, thank you so much, Alex. Well thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure talking to you. Likewise. I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win

I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win I'm gonna be the one to win