Quirky Director, Quirky Detour : Movies: British director Alex Cox is going against the grain with ‘Highway Patrolman,’ his film on police corruption in Mexico. For one thing, it’s in Spanish with English subtitles.

Talk about playing against type. Alex Cox, the iconoclastic British director best known for the funky, surreal “Repo Man” and the gloriously gritty punk bio-pic “Sid and Nancy,” has just released his latest feature: a movie filmed in Mexico, starring Mexican actors, using a Mexican crew, on a subject with a specific Mexican bent (police corruption)--and totally in Spanish, with English subtitles.

Cox’s “Highway Patrolman” (“El Patrullero”), which opened Friday, is the story of rookie officer Pedro Rojas (Roberto Sosa), who sheds his youthful naivete as a fresh cadet stationed in rural northern Mexico, slowly transforming into a smooth operator.

The leap from quirky British films to a quirky Mexican film is one that makes perfect sense to the 39-year-old Cox, who actually had his first taste of directing in Mexico with 1987’s “Walker,” starring Ed Harris, Pedro Armendariz Jr. and Alfonso Arau (who went on to direct “Like Water for Chocolate”).

“I wanted to go back to Mexico to make another film,” said Cox in an interview in his Culver City office, peppering his sentences with Spanish. He remembered a conversation with his friend Arau several years ago. Arau wanted Cox to work on a sequel to his low-budget first film, “Mojado Power.”

But Cox had other things in mind. “I said, ‘Listen, I will do the film, but you gotta make it in Spanish, really make it like a Mexican film, not like something for an American market.’ And Alfonso said: ‘Alex, you’re crazy, because no one is going to see a film in Spanish.’ ”

Arau, of course, never imagined the enormous success of his own “Like Water,” filmed in 1991 just months after Cox went to Mexico to do his cop movie.

It never occurred to Cox that “Patrolman” could be in any language but Spanish. “I thought it was more correct,” he explained. Cox didn’t want to repeat what he saw as the mistake of director Luis Mandoki’s 1987 “Gaby: A True Story,” based on the life of a Mexican paraplegic woman.

“It was quite a good film, but they did it in English,” he said. “And it seemed like, oh, man, like a traicion-- a betrayal--to do a Mexican story in English.”

Cox, who is fluent in Spanish, is married to a Peruvian and traces his interest in Latin America back to his UCLA Film School days. There he teamed up with Peruvian scriptwriter-producer Lorenzo O’Brien, who had grown up in Mexico. O’Brien is “Patrolman’s” screenwriter.

“Highway Patrolman’s” protagonist emerged after O’Brien interviewed a series of real Mexican patrolmen. Instead of a typical hunky hero, Pedro is thin, nondescript, always looking for a bad guy to prove himself against. In other words, he is painfully real, trying to make the right choices and not always succeeding.

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Pedro’s human flaws are apparent at every turn: He removes his wedding ring when sleeping with his mistress, although she knows full well he’s married. He hesitantly accepts his first bribe, then uses the money to placate his wife’s anger at his infidelities. And standing at death’s gate, he’s visited by the spirit of his father--something that would never happen in an English-language film, Cox said, because “English cop films don’t have ghosts in them.”

Yet the controversial story wouldn’t exactly have been choice subject matter for Mexican directors either. “The most important thing was to be able to talk about a reality that we see (in Mexico) every day: corruption and abuse of power,” said Sosa, 23, who won the best actor award at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival in 1992 for his portrayal of Pedro.

To prepare for his role, Sosa trained at Mexico’s Transit Police Academy. The country’s Federal Highway Police refused to allow the actors to train on their premises, wear their uniforms or use their cars.

“Police corruption is a taboo topic, something no one wants to talk about,” said Sosa, who lives and acts in Mexico City. “And to have a director from outside doing such a film is very important, because a foreigner is showing interest in something that concerns us.”

That interest has earned Cox what may be the ultimate compliment from Mexican moviegoers, who seem to agree that the film has a definite Mexican look and outlook. (The film opened in Mexico last April.)

Cox, whose last directorial effort was “Walker,” considers “Patrolman” to be the strongest visually of all his movies--a result of the close collaboration between cameraman Miguel Garzon and production designer Cecilia Montiel, who convened before every single shot.

Garzon’s hand-held camera is what ultimately makes “Patrolman” a departure from Cox’s other movies.

“What I managed to do was develop a style,” Cox said. “It’s not a film that depends on master shots, long shots or close-ups. It exists in real time.”

Perhaps the movie’s most powerful example of the use of real time occurs when Pedro’s car breaks down on his way to help his partner Anibal, and the camera stays with him as he painstakingly limps up an interminable hill. The camera doesn’t cut even when he arrives at Anibal’s car, but instead keeps following Pedro for several yards till he finally finds his partner’s body.

Because of Pedro’s appeal, Cox and O’Brien are already talking about making the logical sequel featuring Pedro, “El Politico” (“The Politician”).

In the meantime, the duo is working on their next project, Ian McKellen’s “Richard III,” to be filmed in England--in English--with Richard Harris, Anjelica Huston, Jeanne Moreau and Malcolm McDowell. Shooting is scheduled to begin this fall.

“We’re still waiting to hear from the money people,” said Cox, shrugging. “If it doesn’t go quickly, we’ll just go back to Mexico.”