INTERVIEW | Billy Corben [Cocaine Cowboys]

It was the French premiere of Cocaine Cowboys. It's quite a spectacle this festival, like a mini Cannes. It's over the top but it's fantastic. I got to see [adopts outrageous comedy French accent] Catherine Deneueve and [maintains outrageous comedy French accent] Michael Douglas was there. He told us that nine years ago he met his wife at the Festival. And I was hoping that this year I would get to meet his wife...

So, Catherine Zeta-Jones related disappointments aside...

Yeah, she had to stay home and babysit. Fuck. And I missed Angelina Jolie as well. I got to see [back to the outrageous comedy French accent] George Clooney and Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass.

A whistlestop tour then. Any idea when you were compiling the film that you'd be doing the international circuit?

Not exactly. When we started it the Scarface 20th Anniversary DVD had just come out and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — which at the time was the most successful video game of all time — had just been released and that took place entirely in 1980s Miami, with all of the sights and sounds of that era and Michael Mann had just begun the Miami Vice film. Though little did we know how bad that would be until many years later... How many years had we been waiting for that movie? And to set it in present day? I was like, "Fuck me, does he just not get it? How did HE miss the boat on that one?" It didn't have to be a Starsky & Hutch satire, it could have been a very gritty '80s set drama, and the cast was good too, I mean, just get it right, man!

Er... but we knew that the audience was going to be younger than your typical documentary and definitely skewing from the hip hop world. The hip hop community were the early adopters for the film, the ones who really embraced it in the States and promoted the hell out of it, and are really responsible for it taking on more of a life of its own. I thought it was going to be a cult thing, an underground thing. But now we're doing two or three DVD sequels a year. We've got Cocaine Cowboys II in the Spring and Cocaine Cowboys III in the winter. We're doing an animated series with Pharrel Williams! A half-hour animated comedy series called Miami Cowboys, based on the smuggling culture of the '80s. We knew it was a good title, but ...! It was originally called City Made of Snow. The irony being that Miami, where you don't think of snow, had a different kind of snow, but we wanted something a little sexier, and Cocaine Cowboys came up.

The Grand Theft Auto connection is an interesting one. In that, everyone looks like a Hollywood / Miami Vice notion of a drug dealer. The real people, the two main guys in your documentary, look like office workers.

Well Jon [Purnell Roberts] was a little flashier in his day but Mickey [Munday] was, as John described him, this McGyver character. Mickey could build a plane out of everything on this table right here. He'd figure out how to do it with a keyboard, a phone, a cup of tea, The Independent ... he'd find a way. He was in it for the adventure. The fact that there was so much money being generated, he had infinite resources at his disposal, which meant that whatever he could conceive of, he could build. This was outstanding!

Before he was this guy with a workshop and a screwdriver having a good time, building ham radios or whatever. Now he's working to the limits of his imagination. Barns that became airplane hangars. He'd build planes and boats that were as light as they could be so he could get the most product on them. He'd build fuel systems from scratch, so he could maximise consumption and take the safer West route , the less patrolled side, to Cuba. He was an adventurer. Do you have The Mythbusters here? It's these two guys that take myths — if a window gets blown out of a plane midflight, does everything get sucked out of it? — and they test these things in these ingenious ways. Like getting struck by lightning. They have to find a way to get struck by lightning. Mickey could have been a mythbuster.

The film shows both Jon and Mickey, in the present day, reflecting on their previous activities. They're both so matter-of-fact you can't help but like them but when you consider what they actually did...

They're affable chaps [laughs]. The movie goes so quickly and they're so inherently likeable, that you have to pause after the movie — because the film never pauses — and realise how unremorseful these guys are, all three of them. It's an issue with their likeability but you only realise after the movie that they're not really sorry.

It's the third person, contract killer Jorge 'Rivi' Ayala, that's perhaps the most alarming.

Rivi is one of the most polite, pleasant interview subjects we've ever worked with on any of our projects. And he is a murderer of women and children. [Laughs.] He is a man who, in broad daylight in a busy shopping centre, would pull out a Mac-11 and spray the whole room. During his interview I had to keep kicking myself in the head to remind myself what we were discussing because he was so calm, cool and collected that he could have been discussing the weather.

It is remarkable. His body language is so contained and settled...

A critic in the US wrote that this finally goes to show that every depiction of hitmen in the movies thus far has been incorrect. Here's the real deal and he's nothing like you've seen before. He's remorseless, cold... yet still likeable, in a casual way. Although I'm sure 20 years in prison helped his demeanour.

At the end of the film, it's revealed that Griselda Blanco, the 'Queen of Cocaine', is 'still at large'. Is that because she's genuinely 'at large' or because it's a euphemism for having disappeared completely?

I think she's in Bogota. I know she was trying to get into some European countries who obviously didn't want her coming in. But you can get in and out of Panama without a passport. There are a lot of Colombians in South Africa right now. She came in and out of Mexico countless times — it was like a revolving door at the time — and we haven't exactly got the border under control so it's conceivable she could return at some point or has returned at some point. We heard from her son, Michael, the eldest — the only one that's still alive. He was in Miami for a while and he turned up at our executive producer's office to tell us his mother had seen the film. And I guess she liked it because I'm still here.

Cocaine Cowboys II is all about her as well. Some of it's from the same footage but most of it's new, about Griselda's time in Federal Prison after she's arrested at the end of this movie. She was still operating a $50m a year cocaine business from inside prison. You have to look at it like an international conglomerate. If the CEO got busted for drug activities, the company doesn't shut down. There's a whole company that kept going on — but she had 24 hour access to the phones. She did not wear regulation uniform, she wore silk robes and make-up. I've seen the pictures, it's remarkable. They often call it Club Fed — it's prison but you can elevate your lifestyle if you had money.

It turns out there was this black kid from California in the early '90s, Charles Cosby, who wrote Griselda a fan letter. He was selling crack in Oakland, he writes a fan letter, he goes to visit her in prison and she becomes his supplier. And he becomes the King of Oakland because of her. A week after visiting her, he gets 50kg of cocaine delivered to his door. This was a kid making a grand a week selling rocks and now he's the main supplier of cocaine to Oakland. He starts having an affair with Griselda, they'd pay the guards $1500 a time to turn a blind eye so they could have sex. It all culminates in an eleborate escape scheme, where four Colombian kidnappers were dispatched to the Tribeca area of New York to kidnap JFK Junior and hold him to ransom for her freedom. The kidnappers were there, the FBI busted the plot in mid-motion.

So you've found all of these amazing stories AND got Jan Hammer to do the music...

Jan Hammer writes the best driving in Miami at night with the top down music. You just want to get in a convertible.

How did you secure his services?

We were in post-production and my co-producer said 'who do you want to score this?' And I said, what my dream? My wishlist? Or the real thing? Because I was expecting to be sitting there with a keyboard doing it. And he said, 'no, your wish list, the nothing ventured, nothing gained one'. I asked him 'where are you going to start?' He said 'with the top one.' There were only three names on the list and Jan was the top, he said yes and we didn't have to go any further. Jan's wonderful that way, he's not one of these artists that says 'oh no, I've moved forward, I don't look back...' All the best artists are the ones that embrace their past, like the Stones and Aerosmith. It's what people love them for. Jan wrote the score in the same room in his home in upstate New York where he wrote four years of Miami Vice music, on much of the same equipment. He did a superb job.