Paul Cox, a friend of Kerala, is no more

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: By the time the Australian auteur Paul Cox came to the state in 2012 he had achieved the calm of a man who had foxed death. When told that a Malayalam filmmaker called Blessy had based his latest film ‘Pranayam’ on one of his hugely successful films, ‘Innocence’, Cox just shrugged as if asking ‘so what?’. “Nothing can be copyrighted. Does life have a copyright?” he said. Cox even expressed a wish to watch ‘Pranayam’.

He was in the state as the IFFK jury chairman, but he was also scouting around for locations in the state to shoot his new film ‘Force of Destiny’, which eventually came out in 2015. Cox was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2009. Doctors did not give him more than three months. “I remained sick for four years but kept beating the deadlines the doctors set for me but one day my joints just blew up,” Cox had said. The Australian Directors Guild announced his death on Twitter, without disclosing the cause of the death. He was 76.

A bug that got inside his system while in India 40 years ago, and which had all along remained mild, suddenly turned aggressive. (Cox was in Kolkata in 1971 to film the documentary ‘Calcutta’). The medicine that could save him was sourced from New Zealand, one of the only two places in the world where it was available.

And then on a Christmas day he got his liver transplanted. Cox had famously said that he was saved by a man who was kind enough to sign away his organs before death. Through ‘Force of Destiny’, Cox hoped to create donor awareness.

In a way he was bitten by the India bug. Initially, Mao Zedong’s China formed the backdrop of ‘Force of Destiny’. However, his arrival in India in November 2012 for the IFFI in Goa changed things. “India is a country I know, not China. A part of my soul is in this place,” he had said. Soon, Mao’s China was replaced by the blood-soaked Indo-Pak partition years as the background of his movie.