Alex Cox on the legacy of Moviedrome, the BBC’s essential cult film slot

“What is a cult film?” asked Alex Cox, the iconoclastic director of Repo Man (1984), Sid and Nancy (1986) and Walker (1987), in the first of his many introductions for one of British television’s most unique and enduring cinema strands. Emerging on BBC2 in 1988 to shake up the typically staid Sunday night schedules, Moviedrome was a beguiling forum for strange, striking and singular films from across different eras. Many of the over 200 titles screened – including The Terminator (1984), Carnival of Souls (1962) and Dead Ringers (1988) – had their first outings on UK TV, while others were often difficult to see elsewhere. All were preceded by Cox’s distinctive forewords – often irreverent, but always deeply informed. After a mid-90s hiatus, Moviedrome returned with Mark Cousins as presenter, who put his own idiosyncratic stamp on the show’s framing segments.

Well before streaming and cable TV, Moviedrome offered an accessible gateway to cinephilia that still resonates with generations of viewers. A quarter of a century on from its final instalment, the strand is being celebrated with a two-month season at BFI Southbank featuring some of the most significant titles from its run. Here, Cox and producer Nick Freand Jones recall their experiences working on the hugely influential series.

Matthew Taylor: How did you first become involved with presenting Moviedrome?

Alex Cox: There was another series on the BBC [The Film Club] where notable British film directors talked about a film, which would then be screened. Lindsay Anderson did one and Nicolas Roeg did one… I’m sure Stephen Frears did one. And then I was asked to do one. But when they said, “Where do you live?” I said, “Well, it’s not in London” – and all the other film directors lived in London. You kind of have to live in London if you’re a film director. So, they said, “Well, let’s do the interview somewhere in town.” I said, “Okay, how about the Lloyd’s building?” Because at that time, the Lloyd’s building was this quite new edifice, built like the Pompidou Centre with its insides outside, and it was very striking and controversial.

I did two introductions, for Point Blank [1967] and The Long Goodbye [1973]. We shot them in the Lloyd’s building with these massive postmodern interiors and huge escalators going up and down. And they looked really impressive. And so later when the BBC were looking for a presenter for the Moviedrome series, I think I got the job because of the excellent backgrounds of my interviews, whereas with Lindsay Anderson and Nic Roeg and everybody, they went to their houses and interviewed them in front of the mantlepiece – it wasn’t as exciting.

What was your approach to the overall curation of each series, the selection of films? Were there any constraints involved with that?

Nick [Freand] Jones picked all the films. Much, much later, I think the third or fourth year that we did it, we were able to persuade the BBC to license some Italian westerns which hadn’t been seen in the UK before. So I had a hand in that, but everything else was Nick.

One of the notable aspects of your introductions is that they didn’t always champion the films involved. You were candid about discussing their flaws as well as their highpoints.

Well, I think that was why the series was popular. Because I wasn’t just a frontman. Most of the time it’s the guy in a suit and tie in front of the green screen and ‘everything’s wonderful!’ But not everything is wonderful. Most films have flaws – not all films, some films are perfect, but not very many. And especially when we were talking about a kind of cinema beast, it was likely that there’d be some flaw – some part of the film that wouldn’t stand up as well as other aspects of it. It was interesting to talk about that, and then it became more like film literacy as opposed to mindless boosterism. And I think that people liked that. I think one of the successes of my introductions was that I wasn’t obliged to pretend that everything in the garden was beautiful.

Were there any films that you really wanted to screen but were unable to?

Near the end of the process, I was getting a little bit concerned because we weren’t showing foreign language films anymore. And I felt it would be really nice to get back to the more bold and wide-ranging series that Moviedrome had been at the beginning.

So, when we were shooting the intros, I did one for a double bill of Salvatore Giuliano [1962] and The Mattei Affair [1972], both directed by Francesco Rosi. And sadly, although I shot the intros for them, they were never licensed and they didn’t show up on Moviedrome. That was a pity.

You’re introducing some of the films in the season at BFI Southbank, this time in person. Have you changed your view on any since their Moviedrome airings?

Well you know it’s funny, the first film that we showed was The Wicker Man [1973] and I was never really a fan. As it kicks off the season, I thought I better watch it again. So I watched it again a couple of weeks ago, and wow, it’s a good film. It’s got better… or I understand it better. I appreciate it more seeing it again. That was very exciting. On the DVD, there was Mark Kermode’s documentary about the making of the film, in which he interviewed all the principals, and that was fascinating too. So I have a newfound appreciation of The Wicker Man.

In your introduction to The Wicker Man, you pondered what constitutes a cult film: “…one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult films are very bad, others are very, very good. Some make a lot of money at the box office, others make no money at all. Some are considered quality films, others are exploitation.” Does this definition still hold for you today?

I think the only thing to add to that is that you cannot set out to make a cult film. If you do, you are a bad person. Because that kind of status, that kind of passion of following that some films acquire has to be earned, it can’t be bought or paid for. You think of all the attempts that Hollywood has made to do something wacky, and it always flops, it always fails. Because there’s no sincerity to it. The cult status that comes is a result rather than an intention.

Were there any controversies arising from films screened in the slot?

The only time I remember there being an issue was when we were going to show Riot in Cell Block 11 [1954]. I’d recorded the introduction for it, and it was programmed in the Radio Times and in the papers. And the night before, Nick told me, oh, you know what, we’re not going to show Riot in Cell Block 11, we’re going to show something else because there’s a rumour that all the jails in the country might kick off during the screening.

And sure enough, there was a prison riot at Strangeways that evening! So the idea that prisoners were anticipating the screening of Riot in Cell Block 11 in order to kick off all over the country, who knows if that was true. Things were different then because there were fewer sources of television – there were fewer television stations, there was less media. So it’s interesting to think that a film was broadcast all over the British Isles and really could have an impact.

The locations for the introductions could be as eclectic as the films that followed – a ghost train for Les Diaboliques [1954], a cricket pitch for Dead of Night [1945], a missile silo for THX 1138 [1971]. How did you go about choosing them?

It really depended because the first series we did in the studio in London, then we started going on location thereafter. When we filmed in Tucson, Arizona and Tabernas in Spain, I had lived in those places and was very familiar with them. So I was able to contribute some thoughts as to the locations. But a lot of the time, again, it was Nick. Nick would book the Bullring in Almeria, or the Titan Missile Silo outside Tucson. Later, when we went to New York, and to Budapest, he was the person that knew those locations and picked them entirely.

Your film Walker had its UK television premiere on Moviedrome, five years after its theatrical release. How do you feel about the film now? Do you think it’s been critically reappraised in the time since?

Not by the mainstream. It’s detested by the mainstream then as now. But I think obviously in the more eclectic areas of film appreciation it might have been. I like it a lot, I have no problem with it at all. But I also thought when we did the introduction that it was a bit unfair of me to analyse or to describe my own film. So I read the BFI review from the Monthly Film Bulletin, an entirely negative one, as an introduction to the film. But I like it and we’re going to show it in the season.

Moviedrome is often spoken about as a formative series for a generation of cinephiles and filmmakers. Do you think there’s anything equivalent in today’s diffuse streaming era?

It’s the difference between the shelves and the stacks in a library, isn’t it? I mean, if you know what to look for, you can just go to the librarian and say, I want such and such please. But part of the joy of the library is wandering down the shelves and looking at the other books in the vicinity of the one that interests you – assuming that they’re catalogued according to the Dewey system – and that was also true of the video shop.

In the days of the video shop, you could go in and they’d have sections like Horror, Cowboys, War, Romance etc. You could check out not only the film that you’d come looking for but other films in that genre. I think the problem with the internet is you can find a lot of things, but you need to know what you’re looking for. And I think that maybe Moviedrome was a bit like the video shop. You might not like Diva [1981], or you might not like Alphaville [1965], but you would like The Long Hair of Death [1964]. It was like a continuously expanding shelf of relatively decent films on video.

There was a lot of film on the BBC at that time. Across the two BBC channels you’d have possibly 25 or 30 movies showing a week. Satellite TV was in its infancy, there was no streaming. And we had hundreds of library titles that you could select from a list that each studio would have. Consequently, there was a catalogue of films as thick as a phonebook to choose from, including foreign language and older titles, and also stuff from the 70s and 80s.

We thought to create a new strand for all this library material, some of which was a bit curious. I had in my mind the cinemas that – when I first moved to London in the 70s – were showing late night double bills, places like the Paris Pullman, the Scala, the Academy. The double bill would start at 11 – you might stay awake through the whole thing, or you might start watching Two-Lane Blacktop [1971] and wake up in whatever followed it. If you didn’t live in London, you couldn’t see films like that unless you happened upon them on television.

So when we were casting around for what sort of movies we should be screening, this broad definition of cult came up. And Alex seemed like the man [to present the films] because he had a kind of cult reputation of his own. He clearly knew a lot about cinema. He had technical expertise as well as cultural acumen. And he was opinionated and political and quite different to the sorts of faces that you would traditionally see on the BBC.

For the first movie, we showed The Wicker Man, which didn’t at that time have quite the storied cult reputation it does now. It was beginning to be thought of as a film that maybe had been cut too heavily. We had traced a longer version of the film to the Roger Corman offices in Los Angeles and I remember there was great excitement about the presence of some extra scenes. It seemed like the ideal first film for this run really – a genuine find.

With both Alex and Mark as presenters it was the same principle. We didn’t want them there to be salesmen. We wanted them to be there as people who would have interesting things to say about films, even those that might not appeal to them directly. Because the cult definition was so broad, the selection could go from the very highest of high art to the lowest of low art and everything in between. And that’s what made it different; everything prior centred around films that people liked, whereas Moviedrome was a way of smuggling into the BBC schedule these kinds of oddities.

There were certain obvious titles that we wanted to have for the BFI season. The Wicker Man, because it was the very first. Scarface [1983], because that was Mark’s first movie that he introduced when he took over. Curiosities like Carnival of Souls and The Great Silence [1968], a then very rare spaghetti western which Alex had identified as one that would be really interesting. Also, ideas like having both versions of The Fly [1958/86], which played in different series. Or putting Mommie Dearest [1981] and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962] together, something we hadn’t done on the show itself. It was a way of not just replicating, but maybe embroidering what had been done before.

I’m very heartened by how people seem to have these great memories of it. There’s this whole second life on the internet, with people talking about it and putting the intros up on YouTube. I recently worked with John Maclean [director of Tornado], who said Moviedrome was his film education because he grew up in a small village in Scotland and there wasn’t a cinema. And Edgar Wright has been very vocal about Alex’s influence through the series. I think curation is needed just as much, if not more, in the modern film landscape. With the big streamers, it’s not even a human who’s making the decisions about what gets prominence.

• Nick Freand Jones was talking to Matthew Taylor.

Moviedrome: Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen runs at BFI Southbank in July and August.