Alex Cox on 'Repo Man' Sequel

Image credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Walker is an amazingly political film about a real-life American soldier, played by Ed Harris, who became the president of Nicaragua in the mid-19th Century. It not only attacks the philosophy of America-knows-best, but was also made in Nicaragua at a time when the U.S. was essentially at war with the country. How on earth did you get Universal to finance it in the first place?
ALEX COX: I had had a bad experience with Universal on Repo Man. And Rudy Wurlitzer [Walker's screenwriter] had a bad experience with Universal on Two-Lane Blacktop [a James Taylor-starring road movie from 1971]. Within Universal, like with any large company, there were people who sought to do good. And they said, ''Listen, these guys have got this project — maybe it's worth spending $5.6 million on them.'' I would guess the psychology might have been that by hiring me and Rudy for a second time, they were demonstrating that they weren't just a bad, evil studio, but that they were sensitive to the artist. This was 20 years ago, when such things mattered.

And at what point with Walker did they start becoming just a bad, evil studio?
They weren't really that evil. They didn't mess with the content of the picture at all. The evil occurs when they re-edit it or they fire a director. That's very naughty. Universal didn't do anything like that. They were very respectful of the piece. They [just] didn't really put a lot of energy into distributing it to cinemas. I viewed it as a very broad comedy — with a lot of violence but also a lot of jokes and beautiful women. We thought we'd made popular entertainment. But, obviously, Universal didn't view it that way, so they tended to sideline it domestically in art houses.

I can't really let you get away with that. Walker is not a broad comedy. Over the closing credits, for example, you included real footage of Ronald Reagan talking about the situation in Central America...
And then you see the bodies of the dead in Nicaragua. And it's really tragic.

Exactly — it's a long way from Police Academy.
I suppose that's the problem with genre-breaking. A studio or distributor are comfortable with genre. But as soon as you breach the genre...obviously by the end [the character of] Walker isn't funny. He's gone mad and become a monster and betrayed everyone and even those closest to him are killed. Then he gets killed. It's not very comedic [Laughs].

You recently completed a new film, Searchers 2.0. Can you give us a taste of what we can expect from that?
It's about these small-time actors — really miserable guys — who are working as construction workers and travel agents and decide to take their revenge on someone who they believe wronged them years previously. And the occasion of the revenge is a screening on an inflatable screen — which these guys from Austin, Texas, actually do. They take the screen around to places where movies were shot and they project them. I've been twice to Monument Valley to see projections of Once Upon a Time in the West and The Searchers. So the pretext of the film is that these two guys go out to Monument Valley to lurk at the big, inflatable screen and beat up this guy.

Will we be seeing it any time soon?
I very much hope so. It's doing the festivals at the moment. It's the opening night film of the Washington, D.C., festival on March 6.

Presumably, there's not much chance of a big-screen Repo Man sequel given that, apparently, movie execs 10 years ago weren't aware of the original?
But they've all gone anyway — and new people are there. Who knows, you know? I'd give it a go!

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