By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Alex Cox still has dream projects
David Willentz catches up with Alex Cox’s many projects at Brooklyn Rail. Cox’s latest, Searchers 2.0 is a “microfeature.” Cox explains. “A microfeature is made for $180,000 or less under the SAG low-low budget agreement, which actually was negotiated by one of the actors in the film. Sy Richardson was on the SAG committee, which created this new form where you literally can pay the actors a hundred bucks a day. The committee created this because they knew there was this void where films were being made but they couldn’t employ SAG actors, hence they made this kind of little realm for very low-budget films.” You have a project about Buñuel, right?“I tried to get the life story of Buñuel on. We have a script you can download on my site [PDF]. It’s called ‘Bugs Are my Business.’ He’d wanted to be an entomologist. We had an incredible cast for that movie: Jeanne Moreau playing his wife, Javier Bardem as the young Buñuel and Sy Richardson as Louis B. Mayer. And for the old Buñuel we talked to Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, everybody wanted to play Buñuel. But Buñuel is an old Spaniard. They’ve forgotten him. Then we were going to do a puppet version. That’s still my goal but I’m also trying to persuade Rudy Wurlitzer that we should do a puppet version of “Zebulon, “his western that was never made. I’m thinking we can put the puppets on the backs of dogs (for horses). It’s cheaper to work with puppets and we can put the voices later. We just go to Jeanne Moreau’s house and say “Can we record your dialogue?” What’s a dream project? “I would like to make four films for a million bucks because that’s how you make money. When a television company buys a film they don’t care if it’s good or bad, they just want to fill 8 or 10 hours of television time and justify the commercials. If I take Searchers 2.0 and four more films made for the same price as a package that’d be easy to sell… so if you run into anyone with a million dollars…I’m always looking for money for films, I’m always writing, every so often some money appears.” [More at the link.] Here’s the the pitch for those four-pics-for-a-mill enterprise. Preview the graphic novel of the sequel to Repo Man, “Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday.” In a clip from the newly-released Walker DVD, Cox dissects his critics.