If you’ve ever seen the IFC documentary The Spaghetti West or the extras on the Once Upon a Time in the West DVD, you know Alex Cox loves him some Italian westerns. “My obsession with the spaghetti western started early,” Cox writes in The Financial Times. (Really, Commie Alex? The Financial Times? That just seems wrong, somehow.) “Mostly, I blame my schooling. While it’s thought that girls do better, academically and socially, if educated separately from boys, the awful corollary of this is that boys would be educated separately from girls. And that – as I discovered when attending a single-sex grammar on the Wirral in the mid-1960s, where arbitrary violence and crazed sadists ruled the playground – is a horrible thing.”

Cox theorizes that attending a mixed-sex school might have facilitated an appreciation for nuanced cinema, but as it turned out, “the world I knew best had more in common with the psychos and testosterone freaks depicted in the new Italian, or spaghetti, westerns that emerged during this period.” Since the American western was in serious decline in the mid-60s, it was up to the Italians to pick up the slack. “For them, westerns were a great fantasy world, something they had enjoyed in films or comic books. Yet their take on the wild west was something quite different. Hollywood had chosen to manufacture a certain type of product, pretending this was what the audience wanted: it was sentimental, propagandistic, authoritarian stuff. The Italian directors made cynical – ironic would be too mild a word – popular action films, sometimes about gladiators, sometimes about spies. All featured the kind of infantile male violence that greatly appealed to teenage boys such as me and my classmates. The fact that the Italian westerns tended to receive an X certificate – and were, therefore, banned to all under 16 – made the thrill even bigger to 13- and 14-year-old boys.”

After arriving at UCLA in the mid-70s, Cox finally tracked down his holy grail of spaghetti westerns, Django. He even wrote a book on his favorite genre, 10,000 Ways to Die. It was never published, but a new version of the book is due out soon, and you can download the original (re-titled Massacre Time) from Cox’s website.