By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Quaint, folkloric crap: Alex Cox visits with Arturo Ripstein
Writer-director-raconteur Alex Cox writes about trying to find directing gigs in the UK as well as in Mexico: “On Thursday I have dinner with the director Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego, his partner and screenwriter. Ripstein was once Buñuel’s assistant; Paz has written many scripts for Rip, and did the Mexican re-write on El Patrullero. Ripstein was the first Latin American director to shoot a digital feature. He’s just finished his latest, on HD. I ask who will distribute it, and they both laugh. Our positions are peculiarly similar. Rip and I are middle-aged white guys who like to piss people off. We refuse to die, or to watch American movies. For some reason, we continue to make films. Rip and Paz, like me and Tod, have no health insurance. Fortunately, they’ve both been given honorary Spanish citizenship, so now we all have the same health plan: if you get sick, try and make it to the airport, fly to Europe, and go the hospital. It’s a fine plan if you’re diagnosed with cancer or a wasting disease, but I’m not sure it works in the case of apendicitis, or a broken leg. I always have fun with Rip and Paz. We spend the evening shouting at each other (“I’m talking now! Let me finish!” and so forth). They both hate political correctness; I support it but I hate identity politics; so we have a lot to shout about.
As in England, the Mexican state film agency is pushing filmmakers to make shorts, which of course have no commercial value or chance of distribution: the goal—largely accomplished—is to convert both Mexico and Britain into maquilladoras for the Hollywood studios, making quaint, folkloric crap. Mexican filmmakers, if they’re lucky, can work on American Zorro pictures, while London’s film technicians can help out on the “Harry Potter” films. The only filmmaker Ripstein thinks highly of is a Hungarian called Bela Tarr: he recommends in particular Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies…. On Sunday I have two lunches – first with John Ross, the blind and brilliant journalist and Zapatista chronicler, and second with my dear friend Pedro Armendariz. He and Ripstein have fought and don’t speak to each other. Almost everyone here has fought with everybody else and so nobody talks to anyone… Who are the new filmmakers? As in Britain and the US, it’s now the children of the rich. Who else can afford to work as a production assistant, for no money, in Mexico, or London, or LA, except the independently wealthy? In 2005, Mexican cinemas screened 274 feature films. 156 of them were American, 93 came from other countries, and only 25 were Mexican. In the same year, 53 Mexican films – most of them extremely low-budget – were made…Most of my Mexican friends are looking south, to Argentina, which has repudiated its IMF debt, pissed off the Americans, and seen a resurgence of state and public support for nationally-themed films. Poor Mexico! Pobre England! So far from God, so near to LAX…” [More at the link, including downloads (for a fee) of Cox projects, realized and not.]
