DIRECTOR ALEX COX ON ‘DEAD SOULS’, IN THEATRES IN JULY!

 

The teaser trailer

Alex Cox is a gifted Western filmmaker and a Punk Rock legend! The Liverpudlian auteur first made a splash writing and directing 1984’s dark comedy delight, Repo Man for Monkees bassist-turned-producer Mike Nesmith.  “(He) was pretty great actually. He was funny and he was quite low key, and had his opinions; strong opinions. He said at one point, ‘Don't think for one moment this is gonna be all full of punk rock.’” Alex also has strong opinions: when the film was finished, the soundtrack included songs by Fear, Black Flag, The Plugz, Suicidal Tendencies, The Circle Jerks, with a theme by Iggy Pop.

Alex went on to direct the biopic Sid and Nancy, about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, then in 1987 made the first Punk Western, Straight To Hell, starring Joe Strummer of The Clash, and Courtney Love of Hole. He turned down offers to direct Three Amigos! RoboCop and The Running Man to make the wild biography Walker, starring Ed Harris as William Walker, the American mercenary who became President of Nicaragua.

His encyclopedic knowledge and keen insights into American and Spaghetti Westerns have enriched his commentaries on numerous Westerns, and in 2017, his audacious and thought-provoking Tombstone-Rashomon examined conflicting versions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as seen through the eyes of extraterrestrials making a documentary.      

His newest film is a Western, Dead $oul$, which was named Readers’ Choice for Best Western Movie of the Year in the January/February 2026 Best of the West issue of True West Magazine. When I interviewed him for that piece in November of 2025, distribution in the United States had not been set, but I heard the good news from Alex yesterday that the prestigious Kino Lorber will be distributing, with a theatrical release in July, followed by streaming and discs.

Based on a novel by 19^th century Russian author Nikolai Gogol, Dead $oul$ stars Alex Cox as Strindler, an at-first innocuous-seeming Englishman travelling from town to town in 1890 Arizona. He’s willing to pay cash for the names and descriptions of dead Mexicans, but for reasons he will not reveal. Not surprisingly, chaos ensues as locals fear what use he might make of that information.

Our discussion began as soon as Alex was able to convince his dog, Ben, to share a bit of the chair with him.

Henry Parke: I enjoyed Dead Souls very much. I love your ability to tell a story in a humorous fashion without getting too jokey and undermining the drama, the reality of it. It's a visually beautiful film, wonderful location work. I really like your performance in it.

Alex Cox: Oh, thank you. It's beautifully photographed too. It has two D.P.s (directors of photography), and they both do a great job.

Henry Parke: A wonderful job. You've had cameos in your films before, but was this your first lead?

Alex Cox: No, I played the main guy, or the co-lead, in a film with Miguel Sandoval called Three Businessmen (1998). But I think that's the only time I've been the lead in anything; other than that I was a supporting actor.

Henry Parke: With Three Businessmen, were you directing?

Alex Cox: Yeah, I was directing. It was super low budget, but the conceit of the film was that we go all the way around the world in a single night looking for dinner, never find it.

Henry Parke: Normally as the writer/director, you have a lot of the responsibility on your shoulders anyhow. How did you like having the responsibility of also carrying the whole story yourself?

Alex Cox: Well, luckily I had a very good producer. Merrit Crocker was the overall producer of the film, and so he took a lot of the burden off the director. I originally wanted to do this with Gianni Garko.

Henry Parke: Yes, star of the Sartana Westerns. I saw that he co-wrote it with you.

Alex Cox: Yes. I wrote the script and I wanted him to play Strindler. But Gianni is I think 91 years old. It probably would've been too much. He would've needed more than three weeks to pull the film off. He probably would've wanted five or six.

Strindler wonders if the hangiing man

belongs on his list

Henry Parke: My goodness! Did you shoot this whole film in three weeks?

Alex Cox: Yes. One week in Spain, two weeks in Mescal, in Southern Arizona.

Henry Parke: Your character, Strindler is so mysterious, so oblique and menacing without being directly threatening.

Alex Cox: The protagonist of the book Dead Souls, he's doing what Strindler's doing, he's compiling a list, but he's considerably younger and more charming and gay, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. The protagonist in the book, he's quite different in his approach to things and his appearance.

Henry Parke: Why did you decide to shoot part in Tabernas and Mini Hollywood, and part in Mescal?

Alex Cox: I originally wanted to shoot it all in Spain in three weeks; to shoot, in addition to Mini Hollywood’s El Paso location, in either Rancho Leone or Fort Bravo, but they were all full. There was this enormous quantity of production at the end of last year in Spain. There was a Dutch Western, German Western, a French one all being big shot in Almeria around about the same time. So we were very lucky to be able to get access to the El Paso location, because that was built as El Paso for Leone's film For a Few Dollars More. So we were able to revisit it in its original incarnation.

Henry Parke: Was it a special feeling to be on those Leone sets?

Alex Cox:  Oh, it's such a great set! It's a really beautiful set. And it was built for A Few Dollars More, so there's the enormous bank that Indio (Gian Maria Volonte) robs, and there's the two hotels facing each other, so Eastwood can stay in one, and Van Cleef can stay in the other. It's a very purpose-built location and a real pleasure to work in. And it's dominated by this mountain of (Cerro) Alfaro. All western towns in Almeria (are) facing this incredible-looking triangular mountain.

Henry Parke: Did you shoot on film or electronically?

Alex Cox: No, on the electronic camera. When we were in Arizona, I said to the American DP (Chance Faulkner), “Use the same equipment exactly as the Spanish guy (Ignacio Aguilar) used, right?” And he goes, “Absolutely, chief!” And then of course he got a much better deal, for the same money; a much better camera, much better lenses. So really disobeying me, he shot with completely different (equipment). I think in the end it all merged and looks good.

Henry Parke: I think it looks great; it cuts together perfectly.

Alex Cox: Yeah, it's very nicely done. Chance Faulkner, the American DP also did the color grading.

Henry Parke: Do you storyboard?

Alex Cox: No. I would draw a storyboard for visual effects because it's useful to the real effects people, and to the camera department. But other than that, no. We just show up on set and figure it out, you know, have a rehearsal, then talk to the cinematographer and see how best to shoot it.

Henry Parke: Will you tell me approximately what your budget was?

Alex Cox: Very, very little money.

Henry Parke: I think people will be very impressed with what you accomplished in three weeks in two countries.

Alex Cox: Well, we had a couple of weeks off in between, which is just as well, to get reoriented.

But the location that we found is the western town called Mezcal, in Arizona. Great, great interiors, fully dressed.

Henry Parke: I've been to Mezcal for a couple of shoots; it's a very nice place. Maybe it was there and I missed it, but I think yours is the first new Western I've seen in five years without any drone shots.

Alex Cox: No; we had a drone shot in the last Western that I did, Tombstone-Rashomon: the beginning of the drone. At the very end, there's a drone shot where the camera pulled back and up away from the grave of the Clantons, and all of those who got shot, the two McClaurys and Billy Clinton. We drone up at the very end of the film to reveal the Western landscape. But no drones in Dead Souls. It's totally earthbound. I think that's right. I don't think we should do it.

Henry Parke: Is it the same Johnny Behan, Jesse Lee Pacheco, in both of these films?

Alex Cox: It is. And it's the third time he has played Johnny Behan. Because Geoff Marslett did a western called Quantum Cowboys. It's very cool, very worth watching. It's sort of a parallel universe type film, with a couple of cowboys ne’er do wells as the protagonists, and Jesse is their jailer.

Henry Parke: Your westerns have such a classic look to them. Is there something different in your approach?

Alex Cox: I don't really know. It just depends, because the Western can be shot in different ways. The Spaghetti Westerns were sort of rule breaking, and usually original. But at the same time, they did sell the great landscape. And that's the thing: gotta have the big landscape there.

Henry Parke: In the cemetery, I noticed a cross with Charles Buchinsky, Charles Bronson’s real name, of course recalling Leone’s cemetery in My Name is Nobody. Are there any other names I should have spotted?

 Strindler looking for customers

Alex Cox: All the names in the cemetery, or almost all the names, are backers of the Kickstarter campaign. It could be that a Kickstarter backer was using that as his Nom de Kickstarter. I think we had, like 70 people sign up to have their name on a cross in the cemetery. The production designer in Spain built every one of those crosses. We planted them all, but we couldn't guarantee that everybody was gonna be seen on-screen. But everybody got a photo of their grave, to prove we did it.

Henry Parke: I've been a big fan of your work ever since Repo Man. There's always your distinct sense of humor in your films. I'm thinking of things like the speeded-up action as you walk through the cemetery, and the flashback of your childhood, which is animated.

Alex Cox: Isn't it great?

Henry Parke: I love it. But I was wondering, did you plan to do that with actors and decide to animate it? Or was it always planned that way?

Alex Cox: We were shooting it in front of a green screen, and the producer on-set said, do you want us to find a kid to play the part? I said, we'll deal with it later. I'll hire the kid later; it's all green screen. And then of course it was much simpler not to hire the kid, so I never did. Then I asked the guys who work at Tippett Studios (note: Phil Tippett shared a Special Effects Oscar for Jurassic Park), I said, do you guys want to do an animated Young Strindler? And they just said yes. So he did.

Henry Parke: Let me ask you about the current state of Western films? Have you seen anything lately that you liked, or didn't like?

Alex Cox: There aren't that many. I know there's been some more just come out that I haven't seen yet. But it's interesting that there's a Western Film Festival in Almeria, where we shot this movie. They have the (classic) films that they have every year; and they have films in competition. But a lot of them, maybe they've got 10 films in competition, but only two of them are really westerns, and the others are contemporary revenge stories. You can kind of scrunch up your eyes and say, well okay, we'll call it a Western, it's in the Western Spirit, you know? But actual Western films set in that period of time, those locations, are comparatively few. Although they still get made.

The herione of the piece, portrayed by Amariah Dionne

Henry Parke: Did you see Kevin Costner’s Horizon: Chapter One?

Alex Cox: No, I didn't. Was it good?

Henry Parke: It was very good as long as you went in understanding that it was the first third or quarter of a story and not a whole plot. I was just watching a video of you speaking about Sergio Corbucci.

Alex Cox: Oh, <laugh>, where I denounced him being mean to actors.

Henry Parke: Yes. I’ve gotta say, I was feeling sorry for poor Sergio, 'cause he's certainly one of my favorite Spaghetti Western directors. But you seem terribly disillusioned with him.

Alex Cox: Me too. But then, that's really mean to play those kinds of tricks on your actors, to show up late to the set and blame it on a flat tire, you know? I mean, that's like bullshit <laugh>, disrespectful of the crew and of the cast, don't you think?

Henry Parke: Oh, absolutely. It's the sort of trickery, it reminded me a little of stuff that Hitchcock supposedly did, but I don't think he was ever late a day in his life.

Alex Cox: And also John Ford was horribly mean to some of his actors, abused them physically. But it was those wacky days.

Henry Parke: What are you up to next? Do you have another project?

Alex Cox: My next project is I have to make like 750 DVDs and Blurays and mail them out to the Kickstarter backers.

RENDEZVOUS WITH A WRITER PODCAST - MAY 7TH

Join me, hosts Bobbi Jean and Jim Bell, and guest Mark Archuletta, author of Bank Robber Henry Starr, his biography of one of the most remarkable figures in the American West, the outlaw nephew of Belle Starr, who became a Hollywood actor! By the way, I join Bobbi Jean and Jim on the first Thursday of the month, but their show is on every Thursday, always with a guest author.

...AND THAT'S A WRAP!

See you next month!

Much obliged,

Henry

ALL ORIGINAL CONTENT COPYRIGHT APRIL 2026  BY PARKE - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

NOT TO BE USED FOR TRAINING A.I.

CHRISTIAN BALE RETURNS WEST FOR 'HOSTILES', PLUS WHO DO YOU BELIEVE IN 'TOMBSTONE-RASHOMON'?

Christian Bale

HOSTILES – A Film Review 

A decade ago, Christian Bale played the reluctant temporary deputy escorting outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crow) to a train in the remake of Elmore Leonard’s 3:10 TO YUMA. In HOSTILES, he’s more than reluctant; he’s defiant. A heroic, much-honored veteran of both the Civil War and Indian Wars, Cap. Joseph J. Blocker (Bale), is ordered to escort captive Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) back to his homeland in Montana, presumably to die. Having lost many friends at the hands of Yellow Hawk and his men, Blocker refuses, and it is only the threat of court martial, and loss of his pension, by Col. Briggs (Stephen Lang), that induces Blocker to transport Yellow Hawk and his family through deadly territory.

Jonathan Majors & Wes Studi

The movie becomes, in a sense, a ‘road picture’, with Blocker and Yellow Hawk gradually coming to grips with their intersecting pasts and their terrible memories. There are chance encounters along the way. En route they meet up with Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike, Oscar-nominated for GONE GIRL), a settler whose husband and three daughters have been piteously butchered by Comanches. Her mind shattered by her pain, she is brought along, and begins healing along the way. Soldiers and Cheyenne must do battle with Comanches, enemies of both. They’re also asked to transport a soldier to a court for trial and presumably a hanging – Sgt. Charles Wills (Ben Foster) hacked a family to pieces with an axe. Wills has a history with Blocker – they soldiered together – and Wills is eager to convince Blocker that his crimes are no worse than Blocker committed, and that they’re a pair of angels next to Yellow Hawk. Interestingly, Foster, who all but walked away with last year’s HELL OR HIGH WATER, as the bank-robbing brother with no off-switch, has a history with Bale, as he played Crow’s obsessively-loyal right-hand in 3:10 TO YUMA. Come to think of it, he all but walked off with that movie as well.

Rosamund Pike

HOSTILES, written and directed by Scott Cooper, based on a manuscript by the late Donald E. Stewart, an Oscar-winner for 1983’s MISSING, is a deeply felt story, peopled by soldiers, Indians and civilians who express their feelings with utmost caution.  Despite the familiar premise, the flow of the story, and the people who populate it, are happily unfamiliar. The cavalry soldiers assisting Blocker include a young Frenchman (Timothee Chalamet – currently starring in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME), a sergeant recently treated for melancholy (Rory Cochrane), and a loyal black corporal (Jonathan Majors) ironically in charge of chaining the Indians. It’s full of both quiet passages, and jarring, unflinching violence – in some ways it’s the SAVING PRIVATE RYAN of Westerns.  

Christian Bale & Adam Beach

Scott Cooper made CRAZY HEART with Jeff Bridges, but his Western credentials go back further, to his acting career, in GODS AND GENERALS, with Stephen Lang, and the excellent miniseries BROKEN TRAIL. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, who also shot Cooper’s BLACK MASS, makes full, beautiful use of the New Mexico and Arizona locations, and at times effectively thrusts the viewer deeper into the action than we want to go. There is also frequently a classical look to the images – his doorway compositions are not merely an homage to John Ford, but a jumping-off point.

My one disappointment is that the excellent Adam Beach, who plays Yellow Hawk’s son, has virtually nothing to do. But with a performance by Bale that runs from barely contained fury to understated grace, and a story that is frequently grim, but never without hope, HOSTILES is one of the finest Westerns in several years. From Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, it opens in theatres on January 19^th.

TOMBSTONE – RASHOMON – Alex Cox at the O.K. Corral!

There is probably no more polarizing incident in the Old West than the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or, as those involved demurely referred to it, ‘the difficulties.’ 132 years after the Earp and Cowboy factions faced each other, all that can be agreed upon is that 30 seconds after it started, Billy Clanton, and Frank and Tom McLaury were dead.  There is no consensus as to whether or not it was avoidable, and who was at fault.    

“I was a kid at grammar school in England, and in the school library was a copy of Stuart N. Lake’s book, WYATT EARP -- FRONTIER MARSHALL,” remembers wildly-independent filmmaker Alex Cox – whose previous Westerns include 1986’s punk neo-Spaghetti STRAIGHT TO HELL and ‘87’s classical WALKER. “I read that, and of course it’s a total hierography of Earp. But it was well-written, entertaining, and it got me interested in the subject.” His favorite of the films on the subject is John Ford’s 1946 MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. “It’s so beautiful. It doesn’t have a lot to do with the events; it’s a made-up story, for the purpose of entertaining and myth-making.” He also liked 1971’s DOC, “the anti-Earp version. And I kinda like TOMBSTONE – it’s a bit long, but it tells a bigger version of the story, so you know who Johnny Behan is, and Curly Bill Brocious, and all these guys who don’t normally make it into the story.”

Christine Doidge as Kate, Eric Schumacher as Doc 

To tell his own version, Cox took inspiration from Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, 1951’s Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner. The story of a crime is told repeatedly from several different perspectives, and it’s up to the viewer to decide what to believe. RASHOMON, whose title refers to the gate of a walled city, was remade as a Western, THE OUTRAGE, in 1964, starring Paul Newman in the Toshiro Mifune role.

The premise is explained in the film’s opening title: “On 27 October, 1881, a time-travelling video crew arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, to film the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Realizing they were a day late, they started interviewing the survivors.”

Adam Newberry as Wyatt

Cox’s research is as journalistic as his premise is whimsical. The various tellings come directly from Judge Spicer’s hearings, and the coroner’s report. Those who testify include Wyatt Earp, Ike Clanton, Johnny Behan, and saloon-owner Roderick Hafford. Cox also uses newspaper interviews with Doc Holliday, and a letter ‘Big Nose Kate’ Haroney wrote to her niece. Talking-head interviews lead to filmed versions of each participant’s memories, which overlap, and oppose each other. Among events leading up to the shootout, Wyatt offered Ike Clanton a reward for turning in three men for stage-robbery and murder. But their versions of the proposed deal, and involvement of Doc Holiday, differ radically.  And when it comes to the walk-down, and Sheriff Johnny Behan’s words, do we believe Wyatt’s version, that Behan said he’d disarmed the Cowboys, or Behan’s version, that he said he was there to disarm them?

The casting-for-resemblance is striking: Adam Newberry as sulky Wyatt, Eric Schumacher as manic Doc, and Benny Lee Kennedy as Ike seem to have emerged from the pages of The Tombstone Epitaph. Kennedy’s Ike is unexpectedly sympathetic, but Christine Doidge, as Kate, walks off with the movie as a character who is by turns hilarious, tragic, savvy and innocent. Doidge recalls, “Alex had given (Kate) a real space to be herself. Which is great, because he could have easily written this film without her, or with her in one scene; I think having Kate’s perspective is important.”

Hafford's - Richard Anderson as Hafford, 

Benny Lee Kennedy as Ike

It wasn’t a film easily put together. After a “disastrous” crowd-funding campaign, Cox spent a month preparing at Old Tucson, accomplishing the impossible. “We shot a five-week movie in a week.” Having recently taught a learn-by-doing film-production class at University of Colorado Boulder, making the feature BILL THE GALACTIC HERO, he hired several ex-students as crew. 

The real Hafford's Saloon

Cinematographer Alana Murphy remembers, “I was an assistant camera for HERO.  I suppose I made an impression. When I graduated in 2015, Alex said, hey, I’ve got a project I might want your help with - very mysterious.” A year later she was cinematographer on her first feature. She loved working with Cox. “He starts with a lot of inspiration; he gave me a lot of homework, a lot of films to watch, that inspired. That’s how I got to know him, through the source material.”  The biggest challenge?  “The heat. We were having technical issues with batteries not lasting very long. And we were working on a bigger scale then I’m used to.”

Production Designer Melissa Erdman marveled at Cox’s ability to pull it off. “Alex really had great planning skills in the way that the film was structured. So we had an ‘A’ unit and a ‘B’ unit operating pretty much the entire shoot: the B unit was doing the interviews, and the A unit was shooting the various reenactments.” Recreating the interior of Roderick Haffords’ Corner Saloon, famous for hundreds of pictures of birds on its walls, required major planning.  “We had a pretty limited team – it was me, and my art director, who helped to construct the inside of Hafford’s. We had two days of load-in, and most of the stuff came pre-painted, and then putting the bar together, and then getting all the birds put up. I had three people cutting out birds for two days.”

Cox, like Kurosawa, has no intention of telling the viewer if any version of the shoot-out is the unvarnished truth, but he gives each speaker, without pre-judging, a chance to state his or her case. While some differences are flagrant, some are surprisingly subtle. Doidge remembers that after the shootout, as Kate remembers it, “When Doc comes back, grazed by a bullet, I’m there, and I’m horrified.  And in Doc’s version he’s just sitting on the bed by himself. I’m not there.”

TOMBSTONE – RASHOMON will be available on video in 2018 – stay tuned for details!

SILENTS DESCENDS ON THE AUTRY - AND OTHER AUTRY NEWS 

For years The Autry has had their monthly ‘What is a Western?’ screening series – they’re showing STAGECOACH on January 20^th -- and every second month they screen a Gene Autry double feature. They’re now adding a new film series, The Silent Treatment, featuring silent Westerns with a live piano accompaniment by Cliff Retallick, starting on January 27^th with James Cruze’s epic, THE COVERED WAGON (1923). 

Also at the Autry, on Tuesday, January 16^th, Rob Word’s Cowboy Lunch and Word on Western series, Rob will look at the role of women and children in Western films, and Rob always gets terrific guests.

HENRY PARKE WINS WWA'S 'TWEET US A WESTERN' CONTEST! 

I don’t mean to brag, but like Ralphie’s old man, I just won a Major Award. I won first place in the Western Writers of America’s ‘Tweet Us A Western’ contest, where you were challenged to write a complete Western story in 280 characters or less – the length of a tweet.  My winning entry was as follows:

“Eureka!” shouted the old sourdough, sluicing the last of Columbia River silt from his pan to reveal the glitter of color. He straightened.

'Thwack!' The Indian's arrow pierced his back between the shoulders. For a moment he knew his gold rush was over. Then he knew nothing.

...AND THAT'S A WRAP!

...and my New Years resolution is to get the Round-Up out a lot more frequently in 2018. I've got a huge backlog of stories and interviews, and books and movies to review, and I'll get to them as soon as I can. In the meantime, please check out the February 2018 True West, where we asked readers to help us choose the Most Historically Accurate Westerns. And in my column, I take a look at continuing popularity of  The High Chaparral series. Have a wonderful 2018!

Happy Trails,

Henry

All Original Contents Copyright January 2018 by Henry C. Parke - All Rights Reserved