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| Alex Cox - October 1996 |
Alexander B. H. Cox (born 15 December 1954)is an English film director, screenwriter, actor, non-fiction author and broadcaster. Cox experienced success early in his career with Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, but since the release and commercial failure of Walker, his career has moved towards independent films. Cox received a co-writer credit for the screenplay of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) for previous work on the script before it was rewritten by Gilliam.
As of 2012, Cox has taught screenwriting and film production at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Wikipedia
I have photographed quite a few English, American, Canadian, Irish and Polish film directors in my life as a magazine and newspaper photographer. I can state here that the most wonderfully off-the-wall unusual one was Alex Cox who faced my camera for 9 exposures on October 1996 in Vancouver at the Pacific Cinematheque.
Wikipedia has a lot of detail about him but fails in informing us well about two films he made that are, like him, most unusual. One is El Patrullero (Highway Patrolman) filmed in Mexico in Spanish with Mexican actors and Cox has a bit part in it. It is a film in which a young rookie policeman, upon graduation from the academy, has to face corruption.
El Patrullero - the full movie
The other film, the reason why he came to
Vancouver in 1996, was to promote a film based on a Jorge Luís Borges story called La muerte y la brújula
(Death and the Compass) made in 1992. The story ends with a Borgesian-labyrinth-of-a-problem in which our protagonist states he will kill a man twice.
I will stop here to explain that the titles of books and films in Spanish only capitalize the first word and any given names within the title. And Argentines (I am an Argie) usually put the index contents of a book at the end. Nationalities are never capitalized. Soy argentino.
By a
curious coincidence the Cox film on the Borges short story was filmed in the
polluting Azcapotzalco refinery in Mexico City. While I lived there we all complained that the refinery on the north side of the city with the north wind it made the air in Mexico City one of the worst in the world at the time.
In 1969
I was living in Mexico City and I had recently married my Rosemary (Feb 8,
1968). We paid our rent by teaching English to Mexican executives of American
companies. One in particular was Colgate Palmolive. My students there were unusually
literate so I brought a Borges book I had purchased that year called Ficciones.
My students were assigned to translate passages from it into English. One of the stories they translated was La muerte y la brújula.
While I have always been interested in Borges, and I have read most of his output, it was Cox who put that bug into me that to this day I persist in. I read one Borges poem every night.
Cox lives in southern Oregon. He communicated with all the people he had emails for (me included) asking us to help make his Last Film (his words). He even warns us that many directors who start with a film sometime don’t make it or don’t finish it.
Below is the email contents and the link to information on his forthcoming (last) film.
Dear Friend
I'm contacting you since we've corresponded regarding film-related matters, and I've just launched a Kickstarter campaign - the last one, I promise! - for a feature film i'm calling My Last Movie.
The details of my new project are here:
If you're unable to back this one (or not interested) I understand.
And if you can spread the word, I will very much appreciate it.
Warm regards
Alex
PS if you receive more than one copy of this email it may be that I have more than one address for you, or that you feature in more than one mailbox. If so, apologies!
