X Films by Cox Alex

Author:Cox, Alex [Cox, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857730398
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

Children in ‘Realejo’ – one of Dave Bridges’ gorgeous images for Walker.

It was a wind-up worthy of Gerrit. Then, suddenly, the traca-traca phenomenon passed. By the end of the Battle of Rivas, sounds of traca-traca-traca-traca were scarcely heard. No one knew why, but it was good news for the sound department.

A more serious issue for the Granadans was the dust. Though colonial and often beautifully preserved, Granada was a modern city with asphalt roads, pavements and overhead electric cables. Like all oppressive film productions, our mission was to get rid of them. The electric wires were re-routed, the phone lines the same. But hiding tarmac and concrete meant bringing tons of dirt into the centre of the city, and dumping it in the streets.

I paid little attention to this process, which seemed so natural and sensible. I was more concerned with Cecilia’s project: hiding various modernities, including the Sandinista soldier on a giant plinth in the main plaza. To do this, she had decided to build a theatre in the dusty main plaza, where Walker might mount the works of Shakespeare, in English, for the improvement of the populace. Granada was already a beautiful city, and, as far as I could see, we were improving things. I wasn’t thinking about the actual results of dumping a load of earth and sand in the middle of a community, of the dust that would rise and swirl through town, of the discomfort, inconvenience, and respiratory consequences. It all looked great to me.

But I was wrong. Overestimating the importance of our project, I underestimated people’s willingness to put up with it. In 2004, almost 20 years later, I saw Ernesto Cardenal in Caracas. Cardenal had been Nicaraguan minister of culture, and a supporter of the film. The first thing he said to me was, ‘That film of yours – do you remember the dust, the problems you created in Granada?’ I had been playing the artist, but at what a cost to the locals? Wasn’t I acting arrogantly, like one of those Hollywood movie crews with their paid cops on Venice Beach? If Walker contained anachronisms, why couldn’t one of the anachronisms have been paved streets with parking signs? I was stupid, lacking in solidarity, not to think of this.

Late in the course of his disastrous battle, the actual William Walker took shelter in a house on the outskirts of Rivas. There was a lot of action and dialogue to cover in this interior scene, and Dave Bridges suggested that we should do it all in one take. It was an exciting idea – a proper plano secuencia, like Sid and Nancy exiting the boat. We’d just come out of a very staccato sequence – the street battle – so it would be in complete contrast to what had gone before. The shot took less than a day to get: we rehearsed it a couple of times with the camera at the end of one day, had it in the can by lunch time on the next.

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