aerisdead Thanks for clearing this up. Easy to get “semi-known” people in a similar field confused sometimes, but as you say, it’s not helping anybody to throw this stuff around. I did not know about Richard Stanley though, good to know… at least I do not really care for him (even though I translated and was paid for subtitles for “Hardware” (Ooops.).
exodus Starting to feel like Alex Cox himself or his sleazy private attorney here but could it be that you are also getting this mixed up (at least you misremember the country)? Cox talks A LOT about Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (maybe also in the commentary for Walker), made a documentary about it and wrote numerous essays since he was a friend of Hopper’s and he always felt a strong connection through the “cancellation” and non-distribution of The Last Movie that was fairly similar to what happened with Walker 16 years later.
Hopper and crew were notorious of course for smashing all over the place (Peru) and mostly looking for cheap drugs. Overall the reports of that production seem to range from annoying to exploiting concerning the locals. With Walker I thought it was exactly one of Universal’s major problems that Cox left “too much” money in Nicaragua, a country that the US was extralegally “at war” with at the time. In his own words on his website, Cox describes this as follows:
WALKER was made in 1987, in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people. We made it with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks’ outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation. Then, as now, this was not a popular position with certain people in power. But it was the right one.
The film’s Wikipedia entry offers this:
Even after filming was over, Cox stayed in Granada, editing the film. He said, “I think we have kind of a duty not to just be the rich gringos and come down here and spend eight weeks and then disappear.”
But, again, glad to get any additional information. I hadnt’ thought about Alex Cox in quite some time, but now I really feel like watching some of his movies again and seem to have a strange urge to clear his name here (lol).
