Effectively blacklisted, Cox struggled to find feature work. He finally got financial backing for a feature from investors in Japan, where his films had been successful on video. Cox had scouted locations in Mexico during the pre-production of Walker and decided he wanted to shoot a film there, with a local cast and crew, in Spanish. Producer Lorenzo O'Brien penned the script. Inspired by the style of Mexican directors including Arturo Ripstein, he shot most of the film in plano secuencia; long, continuous takes shot with a hand-held camera. El Patrullero (Highway Patrolman) was completed and released in 1991, but struggled to find its way into cinemas.

In May 1988 Cox began to adapt a story by Argentine poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges for the BBC. Given his choice of stories, he picked the 1942 short story Death and the Compass (Spanish title: La muerte y la brújula). It stars Peter Boyle, Miguel Sandoval, and Christopher Eccleston. Mexican actress Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez makes her second appearance in a Cox film here, her first being in El Patrullero. Despite being a British production and an English language film, he convinced his producers to let him shoot in Mexico City. This film, like his previous Mexican production, made extensive use of long-takes. The completed 55-minute film aired on the BBC in 1992. Cox had hoped to expand this into a feature-length film, but the BBC was uninterested. Japanese investors gave him $100,000 to expand the film in 1993, but the production ran over-budget, allowing no funds for post-production. To secure funds, Cox directed a "work for hire" project called The Winner (director's cut here). The film was edited extensively without Cox's knowledge, and he tried to have his name removed from the credits as a result but was denied, but the money was enough for Cox to fund the completion of Death and the Compass. The finished, 82-minute feature received a limited cinema release in the US, where the TV version had not aired, in 1996. Soon after, Cox was set to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for Rhino Films, but was replaced by Terry Gilliam due to creative differences with Hunter S. Thompson.² Cox was never employed again by a major Hollywood studio.

In 2006, Alex Cox tried to get funding for a series of eight very low budget features set in Liverpool and produced by locals. The project was not completed, but the director grew interested in pursuing the idea of a film made for less than £100,000. He had originally hoped to shoot Repo Man on a comparable budget, and hoped that the lower overhead would mean greater creative freedom.

In 2019, the Almería Western Film Festival awarded Cox the Tabernas de Cine award.

Searchers 2.0, named after but not based on The Searchers, became Cox's first film for which he has sole writing credit since Repo Man, and marked his return to the comedy genre. A road movie and a revenge story, it tells of two actors, loosely based on and played by Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo, who travel from Los Angeles to a desert film screening in Monument Valley in the hopes of avenging abuse inflicted on them by a cruel screenwriter, Fritz Frobisher (Sy Richardson). It was scored by longtime collaborator Dan Wool. Cox claimed the experience of making a film with a smaller crew and less restrictions was energizing. The film was released in October 2010 in North America by Roger Corman.

Cox had attempted to get a Repo Man sequel, titled Otto's Hawaiian Holiday, produced in the mid-'90s, but the project fell apart, with the script adapted into a graphic novel of the same name (with Otto's name changed to Waldo, for legal reasons). For his next micro-feature, he wrote a fresh attempt at a Repo follow-up, although it contained no recurring characters, so as to preserve Universal's rights to the original. Repo Chick was filmed entirely against a green screen, with backgrounds of digital composites, live action shots, and miniatures matted in afterwards, to produce an artificial look. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 9 September 2009.

Cox then began teaching film production and screenwriting at the University of Colorado at Boulder. During his tenure there, Cox supervised students who wrote, filmed and starred in the feature Bill, the Galactic Hero, developed from a science fiction book by Harry Harrison. The idea for this project was for film students to make an actual film with supervision from professional film makers, giving their time on the film for free. The film was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising $114,957 of the original $100,000 goal.

In 2017 Cox released another crowdfunded film, Tombstone Rashomon, which tells the tale of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral from multiple perspectives in the style of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon. The experience of filming in that area of Arizona connected Cox to many of the actors and crew that he is still using today in this project, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls, which Cox says will be his LAST FILM! Instead, let's hope it's just the latest chapter in this amazing, diverse, iconoclastic career. Cox resides in Colestin, Oregon, with his wife, writer Todelina Babish Davies.

NOTES ON THIS PAGE:

¹—Cox has worked in film for his entire adult life. Cox has cited Luis Buñuel and Akira Kurosawa as influences, as well as the Western film directors Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Sam Peckinpah, John Ford and Giulio Questi. But he's done other stuff, too! Cox was the host of Moviedrome on the BBC. He's also an author, who wrote a book on the history of the "spaghetti western" genre called 10,000 Ways to Die, as well as books on The Prisoner, the Kennedy assassination, and other topics. Cox is a fan of the Japanese Godzilla films and appeared in a 1998 BBC documentary highlighting the series. He also narrated the documentary Bringing Godzilla Down to Size and wrote the Godzilla in Time comics for Dark Horse. He tried to direct an American Godzilla film at one point, but unsuccessfully submitted his outline to TriStar Pictures. Cox is an atheist and is decidedly left-wing in his political views. Many of his films have an explicit anti-capitalist theme or message. (Socialist Godzilla? Could have been interesting!) Cox has written numerous educational books on film and television and co-hosted the podcast 'Conversations with Cox and Kjølseth' with his friend and colleague Pablo Kjølseth.

²—In this writer's opinion, Cox had drafted a better screenplay with Tod Davies, but Thompson didn't like it for obvious reasons: While both Cox's and Gilliam's scripts are based on the same book, in the Gilliam version, writer Raoul Duke and his attorney, Doctor Gonzo, descend on Las Vegas and meet various hippies, groupies, fascist cops and media people who represent the sad end of the 1960s dream. In Cox's (frankly superior) screenplay, Duke and Gonzo, both aging burn-outs and addicts who have no interest in their jobs or the outside world, hole up in their hotel room and represent the end of the 1960s dream themselves. Since the fictional character of Duke represented the very real Thompson, it's pretty easy to see why he didn't fancy the script.

SOURCES:

"The filmmaker too tough to die: Director Alex Cox returns to Boulder with his latest film Tombstone-Rashomon," by Michael J. Casey, Boulder Weekly, February 23, 2017. "During Cox's tenure at CU, he crowdfunded a feature film adaptation of Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero and used his students to bring it to the screen. Bill was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign, one that gave Cox hope that there might be a new way to make movies. But as Cox quickly learned, the science fiction of Bill proved an easier sell than the Western style of Tombstone-Rashomon. "When I saw how little money we raised, [I thought] 'We are so screwed, man!' Cox says with a hearty laugh. "We were so screwed because we had no money at all." Cox and company adjusted their already micro budget to $50,000 but still only managed to raise $31,642 with 297 backers on Indiegogo. Not nearly enough to tell their Tombstone story with the ambition Cox had in mind. Thankfully, friends in high places came to the rescue. "We were really lucky because a video streaming company, Fandor, came in and added to the budget," Cox explains. "Then the producers of Snowden and the Iggy Pop documentary, Gimme Danger, also came in and matched what we raised from Indiegogo and Fandor. So, it was still minimal but at least we could afford to feed people and have horses." And with a crew of roughly 60 people, Cox set off to Old Tucson Studios to shoot his version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, only his version would be a spin on the nature of narrative and drew inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's 1950 seminal film about conflicting firsthand accounts, Rashômon."

"Alex Cox en MiniHollywood Regreso al Desierto (Canal Sur TV): Alex Cox vuelve tras 38 años al Desierto de Tabernas, después de rodar allí Straight to Hell, esta vez para realizar un largometraje western, con la que afirma que será su última película, pero de una forma distinta. Su nueva propuesta cinematográfica parte de la novela Almas Muertas, de Nicolai Gogol, para hacer una 'versión Western' de una historia irónica y misteriosa que se desarrolla en 1890 en Arizona y se llamará Dead Mexicans. Para retratar esta estampa, Cox pretende grabar en dos localizaciones: Tucson (Arizona) y, por supuesto, la provincia de Almería, dónde @minihollywoodoasys será uno de los sets principales del rodaje en nuestra provincia. Y para saber más de la película y conocer mejor a este icónico y ecléctico director, MiniHollywood Oasys ha realizado una mesa redonda, moderada por @carlosjvives ( @laoficinalmeria ) y compuesta por @josetabernas (alcalde de Tabernas); la cineasta, @margarets_dream Schindler y los periodistas, @carlos.juan.16 y @manuelcg1 ( @csuralmeria ); Pepe Cuenca ( @dipalmeradio ); @evaristomr ( @lavozdealmeria ) y @diegodimec ( @diariodealmeria ). La producción de esta mesa, estuvo realizada por @leonardogimenezmartin (Armería & Atrezzo Leonardo); @andy_arche (A&A Fotografía) ; @davidmirallesquesada & @el_indaliano ( @un_nuevo_renacer_producciones ) @diego_perez_cano ( @proyecto_cine_tv ); Pablo Torres (@detorresfw ) y @csuralmeria." (2nd Report) (3rd Report)

A bronze director's chair dedicated to Alex Cox in Tabernas, Spain, the city's equivalent to a Walk of Fame star in Hollywood. These chairs honor those who have contributed to Spain's cinema history.