Hugely divergent in tone, yet both made by exiled Europeans with an outsider’s perspective on their American location and featuring Robby Müller’s elegant cinematography, Repo Man and Paris, Texas became the twin pillars of Stanton’s reputation. Alex Cox had originally wanted the character of Bud, eminence grise of the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, to be played by Dennis Hopper, but once Stanton was cast he took complete ownership of the role, embodying the would-be mentor to suburban punk Otto (Emilio Estevez). Bud is the gatekeeper to the world of the repo men-and, as such, to the swirling arcana and battery-acid satire that make the film a masterpiece. Stanton is as generous to his co-stars as ever (Estevez would never get this close to being an actor again), but Repo Man is his film. Snorting speed and gabbling about the ‘Repo Code’, he is Bud, every cowboy he played on 1960s television feeding straight into the radioactive vision of a weed-infested, sleepwalking US.
Entering the film as the epitome of besieged, middle-class America – an affable family man just wanting to ‘get my car out of this bad area’ – Bud is swiftly revealed to be a scabrous car thief, his every word more punk rock than the last. Hopped up on its own postmodernist daring, the film presents Stanton with a catalogue of great lines. ‘No commies in my car,’ Bud glowers at the blank-faced Otto, and a beat goes by. ‘… No Christians either.’ Not that Stanton showed his gratitude on set – he had paid his dues working for temperamental filmmakers (while making 1973’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid an addled Sam Peckinpah had taken a shot at him) and the result was a flinty desire for artistic independence summarised by Cox as: ‘I’ve worked with the greatest directors of all time! You know why they’re great? Because they let me do exactly what I want!’
Danny Leigh, Sight and Sound, August 2006
Alex Cox on ‘Repo Man’
At UCLA, I made a 40-minute short called Sleep Is for Sissies in which, until Alien came up, Harry Dean Stanton was going to appear. It’s basically the story of a Limey going mad in L.A. There are all sorts of other weird people in it too – a very pretentious hippy girl who lives with her dad’s old chauffeur in a geodesic dome in Big Sur, another Limey who is a repossessor and professional assassin, a Cuban bank robber, some very corrupt and villainous immigration agents, and a lot more besides. It’s a very fractured narrative, like Performance (though there the comparison ends!).
After I left UCLA, I eventually got a couple of scriptwriting jobs, though neither script was filmed. The first was for MGM and called Out of Order Percy; it is the story of a World War One deserter called Percy Topliss who led a revolt against the British army on the eve of Passchendaele. MGM declined to make it because, they said, it was ‘too English, too expensive and too anti-war.’ I don’t know how it is possible to be ‘too anti-war’, except that Reagan had become President by then and war had once again become an admirable occupation for young men. The other script was called The Happy Hour and was about the last hour before atom bombs land on New York State. It was written for Adrian Lyne, who wanted to make a film about nuclear war. But he read it and decided to make Flashdance instead.
I then went into partnership with two other ex-students from UCLA, Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks, who had a small company which made independent, non-fiction films, commercials and industrial shorts. One day I suggested that they make a feature, and I agreed to write a script if they would produce it. That was how Repo Man was born. We shopped the project around for some nine months until we were finally put in touch with Michael Nesmith, the ex-Monkee and liquid paper king. He took the film to Universal Pictures, where Thom Mount and Bob Rehme had the good sense to offer him a $1.5m negative pick-up deal, which means that if he delivered the film to them on a certain date and it was a reasonable facsimile of the original script, they would give him one-and-a-half million dollars for it.
In fact, we had initially thought that we could make it for $100,000, bearing in mind the example of Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding and Killer of Sheep, which he made for $10,000, although that was in 16 mm black-and-white. However, we had so much trouble trying to set up a limited partnership in order to raise the $100,000 that the $1.5m Universal deal actually came along before we’d found the $100,000. By the time we went to Universal, the two leads, Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, were already cast. But after the deal was struck, we still had to find a cameraman. We were thinking about somebody from UCLA, but Nesmith was very anxious to avoid anything that looked at all hand-held; he wanted something very Hollywood-looking. One day, Peter McCarthy said to me, ‘If you could have anyone you liked to shoot the film, who would it be?’ I’d seen The American Friend and Kings of the Road, so I replied, ‘The best director of photography in the world – Robby Müller.’ We sent Müller the script, and it all flowed very smoothly from there. It was generally the script that got people interested, because it was something different – an exploitation film maybe, but not the normal type of exploitation film.
The soundtrack is representative of the best aural things in L.A. right now. It plays a vital role in the film in that it’s highly representative of Otto’s culture. Like all those Valley punks, he’s a middle-class kid from a ‘nice’ home who listens to all this incredibly hardcore, driving, angry music. These are middle-class kids who are angry without really knowing why – they’re not like the really desperate punks living in a squat in Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia. So the soundtrack isn’t just a means of selling the film, it also plays a vital role in the narrative. Of course, we had to keep our plans for the soundtrack rather a secret at the time, because the one thing that Michael Nesmith said at the outset was, ‘Don’t think there’s going to be any punk music in this film!’ (He likes Jimmy Buffet, you see.) Anyway we just did it and stuck to our guns.
The title track, which plays over the end credits, is by Iggy Pop. Getting Iggy was the brainchild of Dick Rude, who plays Duke in the film. Before this we’d contacted The Clash, but their manager proved to be too much of an obstacle. I suspect that one of the reasons why The Clash have never done a good movie score is because he has constantly interposed himself between them and the filmmaker and made their decisions for them, and that’s disastrous. Iggy’s manager asked us to show them the film, and as soon as he saw it Iggy was very enthusiastic and agreed to do a track immediately. In fact, if he hadn’t had to go off and have Christmas with David Bowie he could have done a lot more. Fortunately, however, the score was in the very capable hands of Tito Larriva and Steven Hufsteter, who are members of The Plugz (now known as Los Cruzados). They come out of L.A. punk circa 1976/7, but are now more Mexican/Latino oriented; they’re just extraordinary and definitely my favourite band. They did all the incidental music that is not credited to specific bands, including the final ascension into heaven track. They’re the Ennio Morricone of
the film.
Alex Cox interviewed by Julian Petley, Monthly Film Bulletin, November 1984
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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