X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker

As much an account of the high price of integrity as a memoir, onetime enfant terrible Alex Cox’s highly readable career diary is—like his output—inspiring, cheeky and maddeningly brief. Utterly dedicated to the indie ethos, the guy hasn’t made a halfway mainstream (read: easy to see) movie in a decade and a half.

So we’re lucky to have this book. The British Angeleno and unrepentant Aztlánophile details the specifics of his ten features (hence the title), from 1980’s UCLA student film Edge City to 2007’s shot-on-DV micro-epic Searchers 2.0. He gives his best-known works—Repo Man (1984), Sid and Nancy (1986) and Walker (1987)—extended chapters, but clearly loves all of his cinematic children equally.

The level of detail is only part of what makes X Films so compelling, though. True, Cox’s descriptions of Hollywood’s bloated bureaucracy and its terrifying alternative (his 1992 “labyrinthine venture” for Dutch TV, Death and the Compass, was attended by “debts of honour, disastrous business choices, duelling producers, and a mysteriously out-of-sync answer print”) are priceless. His gossipy miniportraits of character actors like flatulence-obsessed Timothy Carey are equally engaging, as are his tips to burgeoning filmmakers (“a good film, or any film, depends not on genius, but on slightly tedious, medium-term work”). But it’s Cox’s disciplined flexibility and belief that “too much time, money, and effort” diminish art that make his movies, and X Films, such a treat. (His radicalism, which all but sunk the shambolic Walker, is a trickier call.) Like his best movie, 1991’s El Patrullero, Cox exemplifies grandeur without hype.

Buy X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker now at BN.com