The non-Catholic Algemeen Handelsblad agreed: "[Cox] has managed to capture scenes of joy and sadness, moments of emotion and contemplation on film.

[9] Paul Cox discovered only much later that his father had been a filmmaker who made documentaries in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany before the Second World War.

'[11] Cox's older brother Wim, born 1938, after learning from assisting his father also made a career in film and photography.

[15] Cox was conscripted into the army at nineteen, was injured in training and subsequently, against his father's wishes, studied art in evening school.

He used an old camera from his father's studio to take his earliest successful photographs on a trip to Paris with his mother, one of which appears on the cover of his autobiography.

There, he held further exhibitions and was commissioned by The Australian Ballet as stills photographer on Robert Helpmann's and Rudoph Nureyev's Don Quixote, through which he met Hungarian actor and filmmaker Tibor Markus who was to produce Cox's first feature Illuminations.

[15] In the late 1960s Cox travelled to Papua New Guinea with Ulli Beier whose interest was indigenous poetry, drama and creative writing.

[23] Always working with small budgets, Cox used the equipment in making The Journey (1972) and Illuminations (1975), with Prahran drama lecturer Alan Money on the cast, and in 1994 featured 43 paintings by colleague Eleanor Hart in Touch Me.

[15][23] Students were recruited, both as practical education for them and as a saving for the budding director, to serve as the film crews on Cox's Mirka (1970), and documentaries All Set Backstage (1974), We Are All Alone My Dear (1975), and For a Child Called Michael (1980).

[24] We Are All Alone My Dear, a portrait of novelist Jean Campbell in a home for the elderly,[25] was made with $1,000 and brought Cox his first breakthrough, with an award for documentary film.

Cox turned his unneeded photography studio over to The Photographers' Gallery and Workshop which he founded with Ingeborg Tyssen, John F. Williams[26] and Rod McNicoll[27] in 1973.

He remained at Prahran College until 1980 and with Athol Shmith and John Cato[28] influenced a number of photographers and filmmakers, including artist Bill Henson, photojournalists Phil Quirk and Andrew Chapman, and Carol Jerrems, one of whose earliest exhibitions he showed in the Gallery.

[29] Cox's Kostas (1979) about a Greek taxi driver's (Takis Emmanuel) stormy love affair in Melbourne with a career woman (Wendy Hughes), was more successful in Europe than in Australia.

David Bradbury's 2012 documentary, On Borrowed Time, tells this story against the backdrop of his life and work, through interviews with Cox and his friends and colleagues.

[33] Cox's last film Force of Destiny, with David Wenham and Indian actress Shahana Goswami, was released in July 2015.

"[39] In a contrary view typical of much Australian criticism of Cox, Vikki Riley in a 1995 Filmnews condemns such "Europhile fetishes with lost connections and individuals' fragmented and uprooted lives - where the act of remembrance is a Proustian sensory pulse which unveils a seemingly bottomless pit of an inner narrative world driven by languid melancholia, inevitable destiny, missed opportunities and the heavy clouds of war," as precisely "the sorts of passions avoided by Australian filmmakers, save for the whining cultural cringe expressed in the works of Paul Cox, Ian Pringle, et al."[40] Cox had three children to three different women.