Álex de la Iglesia Puzzles Over “The Oxford Murders”

The Spanish madman tells us about dismembering Alex Cox and why his Elijah Wood-starring thriller will go direct-to-DVD.

I love your films for your appreciation of the macabre, but I also worry that you spend much of your time thinking about plotting out the perfect murder after seeing films like “El Crimen Ferpecto” and “La Comunidad.” Why is it a recurring theme?

I love murders. [laughs] I love murder and mystery movies. It’s a beautiful genre for me. I love the whodunit movies, trying to find out who is the killer?

Obviously, you also love Alex Cox [the director of “Sid and Nancy” and “Repo Man”], who has appeared in both of your English-language films. [In “Oxford Murders,” he plays a researcher who goes insane and attempts his own lobotomy.] How did you meet?

I met Alex Cox in Mexico. He was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” because he was the first filmmaker [around 1997] and suddenly he lost the project. Alex was very excited about this movie and we were friends. I love his work. I think he’s one of the best filmmakers and it’s a shame because Alex is not working in the way I love to see. I would like to see more movies from Alex Cox.

[I wanted him in “Oxford” because] it’s like another “Perdita Durango” [de la Iglesia's first English-language film], so I work with Alex Cox because I love Alex Cox. And now we’re going to make another movie in English [“The Yellow M”].

Did you enjoy cutting his legs off in the film?

Yeah, it’s so beautiful, huh? I remember people said to me during the movie, “you don’t [want to] cover the body with the sheet?” And I say, “No, no, naked, naked! I want to see the body!” [laughs]

This screening in Los Angeles is one of the first in the U.S. and I know that ThinkFilm was originally going to release it before they faced financial problems. What’s going on with a possible release?

I can’t understand because “El Crimen Ferpecto” had a very good distribution with a small company, Vitagraph, and I would like to have another one like that, but ThinkFilm [because of their bankruptcy situation], I don’t understand. It’s absurd that a movie like this in English has no distribution in U.S. and will go directly to DVD.

That’s such a shame. Do you know when that will be?

I think that’s going to happen soon.

Is “Yellow M” next for you?

“Yellow M” is the next film I want to do. It’s a Belgian comic book. I love Hergé [the Belgian artist famous for “Tintin”], and ["Yellow M" author] Edgar-Pierre Jacobs is one of his disciples. Jacobs was the man who drew the second version of most of the “Tintin” albums, and Jacobs began to work on his own characters, Blake and Mortimer. He made beautiful and wonderful comic books. I’m going to try to make a movie like the Hammer movies of the ‘50s. I am a very big fan of the Quartermass movies, so it’s going to be similar.

[It will be set in] 1953 at the same moment as the [Queen’s] coronation. The villain, the Yellow Mark, is like a mixture between “M,” the Fritz Lang movie, and a vintage superhero. He’s going to be very funny. The movie is an action movie. It’s like some kind of Indiana Jones, but in London in the ‘50s.

“The Oxford Murders” played as part of the Recent Spanish Cinema XV series at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles. It currently has no U.S. distribution.

[Additional photos: Alex Cox in "The Oxford Murders," ThinkFilm, 2008; Álex de la Iglesia in Los Angeles, Stephen Saito, 2009]

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