When I met Paul Cox in Sydney in late 2015, in the lead up to the release of his final film Force of Destiny, he was thin and wiry, picking at a muffin for the entirety of our hour-plus conversation.
Cox told me he no longer had an immune system. The cancer that corroded his first liver, leading to a last-minute transplant in 2009, had come back with a vengeance and hit its replacement. “That really hurt me,” he said in his distinct, clipped Dutch accent, quiet but fierce.
Every Australian film-maker owes something to the prolific and internationally renowned writer/director, who has passed away, aged 76. Beginning his feature film career in the mid-1970s, the Dutch-born, Melbourne-based artist made more than a dozen documentaries and more than 20 features including Lonely Hearts, Innocence, Man of Flowers, Cactus, A Woman’s Tale, Salvation and The Nun and the Bandit.
Almost always working with very limited budgets, several financed by European investors, he was a huge force on the international festival circuit and accrued many champions at home and abroad. Among them was the American film critic Roger Ebert, who called Cox “one of the best directors of our time”.
Born Paulus Henriqus Benedictus Cox in 1940 in Limburg, Holland, his first memories – of a Nazi invasion – stayed with him for life. One assumes they played a part, conscious or otherwise, in shaping his approach to telling stories and informing a long-running loathing of gratuitous violence. Cox’s films are deep, sensitively drawn and sometimes profoundly humane; clearly the work of a person who felt a lot and thought a lot.
The auteur was often described as the father of independent cinema in Australia. While such an honour is, in reality, almost always shared (George Miller and Byron Kennedy funded the first Mad Max completely independently, for example) there is no under-estimating the film-maker’s influence.
And there’s no doubt he was feisty until the end. Many people who collaborated with Cox speak about his big heart, his passion, his hatred of injustice. He certainly didn’t seem like the kind of bloke you’d want to get off-side. Cox never forgave, to put it lightly, the producers of 1999’s Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (one of several collaborations with actor David Wenham) after they fired him from his own film.
In post-production the producers hired Cox back after, according to him, the original print was tampered with beyond repair. For the record, I still think Molokai is a very fine film – moving and beautifully shot, with one of Wenham’s best performances. Perhaps the director was too close to it to recognise its virtues.
Cox wrote an as-yet unpublished book venting about his experiences. He even came close to outright blaming the producers for his death. “I think it really killed me on many levels,” he told me. “Suddenly I couldn’t get out of bed and my liver was fucked.”
The film-maker took the “write what you know about” mantra to extremes. Art imitates life, as they say, but in his case the causality was obvious and direct, closely wired to his own life and experiences.
In Force of Destiny, Wenham, like Cox, finds romance late in life after being diagnosed with liver cancer. After his transplant, the director met his partner Rosie Raka in hospital and they were together from then on. For his 2012 documentary The Dinner Party, he invited a group of recipients of life-saving transplants to share a meal and reflect on their experiences.
Cox was inspired to make 2008’s Salvation after seeing an evangelist on TV. The 1984 film My First Wife (which stars John Hargreaves and Wendy Hughes and was co-written by Bob Ellis) is probably Australian cinema’s most powerful portrait of a marriage breakdown. It was based on his own.
Cactus (1986), one of Cox’s most elegant films, is about a French woman in Australia who becomes blind. It is dedicated to Cox’s mother, Else Cox-Kuminack, who also lost her sight.
In true art house/indie style, Cox’s films generally did not receive a wide release but most are available on DVD. Some are better than others – the director’s fondness for an improvisational style sometimes put slow-moving naturalism ahead of compelling writing – but when they were good, they were very good. His sheer output was inspiring; Cox just kept on pumping out quality films, putting aspects of his own life and personality on the line.
One of my favourites of his films is 1981’s Lonely Hearts, which stars Norman Kaye and Wendy Hughes as an oddball couple who meet through a dating agency. My experience writing about it, for a column exploring classic Australian cinema (by complete coincidence, published one week before we met) will always be associated with my memories of Cox in person.
When I told him our interview was for The Guardian, his eyes lit up. Cox said that on the way to the café where we met, he got a phone call from the co-writer of Lonely Hearts, the veteran comedian and character actor John Clarke. Clarke, according to Cox, said to him “finally somebody cares”. Cox said his eyes immediately filled with tears.
When I told him I was the person who wrote the column, Cox went quiet for a moment. He placed one of his hands on mine. I don’t recall what he said. I don’t think he even said anything at all. The look on his face was warm and appreciative.
Soon after, we hugged and said goodbye. As I walked down the street, I remember thinking that moment marked a lovely synergy between art and the artist. Like his films, it was beautiful but not sentimental. It was soft but profound. Paul Cox will be missed.
