Back in the early ’80s, Liverpudlian director Alex Cox had just finished his debut feature, Repo Man, a twisted punk-rock crime comedy starring Emilio Estevez. But the film had yet to become a breakaway cult hit, so the then-30-year-old optioned his next project: Harry Harrison’s 1965 anti-war sci-fi novel, Bill, the Galactic Hero.

Cox followed up Repo Man with two more certified punk classics: Clash-starring Western Straight to Hell and Sex Pistols biopic Sid and Nancy. But Bill? Well, that took 30 years.

Now a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, Cox has finally brought Bill to life. It’s a student film—shot, cut, acted, you name it—by the school’s film department and funded by a $115,000 Kickstarter campaign.

Cox hits the Clinton Street at 7:30 pm on New Year’s Eve for the West Coast premiere of this bizarro tale about a reluctant astronaut battling space reptiles. He talked to WW about Bill, student filmmaking, and how his version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would have looked.

WW: What drew you to Bill, the Galactic Hero?

Alex Cox: It’s an authentically anti-war sci-fi novel. There are others—The Forever War is one—but generally sci-fi movies take a very militaristic position (Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, etc.). Unlike Orson Scott Card, [author Harry Harrison] had actually served and knew what bullshit it all was.

It’s billed as “the largest student film ever made.”

Harry and I came up with the idea as a way of making Bill inexpensively after our efforts to raise money via the conventional route failed. The deal was, nobody was to be paid while working on the film, and if a big studio came along and wanted to make their own version, they could do so simultaneously.

What roles did the students play?

Undergraduates and recent graduates of CU Boulder did everything—produced, acted, edited, did production design and sound design. I share the director credit with six former students. The stakes were higher since no one apart from me and Iggy Pop [who wrote the theme] had ever worked on a feature film.

How did these students compare with you as a young director?

I don’t see much difference. They go fast, try to keep a happy atmosphere on set, are respectful of their cast and crew, know they don’t know everything, yet press forward anyway. They reminded me of me, as John Wayne said of Mattie Ross in True Grit.

Repo Man might be one of the era’s most enduring cult movies. Why do you think so?

It was authentically of its time and place, unlike the studio attempts—think Streets of Fire—to monetize youth culture.

You were slated to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas until Hunter S. Thompson famously lost his shit over a proposed animated sequence during the “wave speech” segment. How would you have done things differently from Terry Gilliam?

It would all have been shot in single takes, because that was my style during those days. The cinematographer would have been Tom Richmond, who shot Straight to Hell, and I would have done the visual effects and animation with Tippett Studio [Robocop, Jurassic Park]. And I would have fired Johnny Depp on day one—the most overrated and childish actor I have ever met—and hired Alex Feldman or Jaimz Woolvett for the part.