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| Interview: Asking Robert Towne about "Ask the Dust" |
by Peter Sobczynski
One of Hollywood's most acclaimed screenwriters sits down to talk about his 30-year-plus struggle to bring John Fante's novel "Ask the Dust" to the screen.
With the current release of his new film, “Ask the Dust,” writer-director Robert Towne has finally seen the culmination of a dream that began over three decades earlier. While doing research in the early 1970's for a screenplay set in Los Angeles in the 1930's–a little thing you might have heard of that would eventually be called “Chinatown”–he came across a short autobiographical novel by cult writer John Fante that dealt with a callow, inexperienced and struggling young writer, the son of Italian immigrants, who years for the American Dream–which, in his mind, means a successful writing career and a blue-eyed blonde bombshell on his arm–and who instead finds himself both attracted and repelled to a Mexican waitress who also yearns to transcend her ethnic heritage by marrying an all-American man and fully assimilating. Ever since then, Towne has been trying to get it made–no doubt using such work-for-hire projects as the screenplays for “The Firm,” “Days of Thunder” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” films as a way of building industry goodwill (and since Tom Cruise is one of the producers, it seems to have worked)–and finally managed to get it produced with Colin Farrell as writer Arturo Bandini, Salma Hayek as sexy waitress Camilla and South Africa in the role of Depression-era Los Angeles.
Recently, the surprisingly soft-spoken Towne sat down with me in a hotel conference room and, while thoughtfully smoking a thin cigar, discussed the long process of getting “Ask the Dust” made, his work as both a writer and director and the recent re-emergence on DVD of a couple of celluloid skeletons from his closet.
You have been trying to mount a screen adaptation of John Fante’s “Ask the Dust” for a long time now. When did you first encounter the book and what was it about it that made you want to bring it to the screen?
I was doing research for “Chinatown” back in the early 1970's and I knew that I was going to set that story in the early 1930's. I also knew that movies from the early 1930's never showed day-to-day life in Los Angeles back then and while the dialogue was as clever as it could be, I knew that real people never talked like that. I was looking for something that had been written by someone in that place and time to give a real sense of what that time and place was like. I came across “Ask the Dust” and read it and was immediately bowled over by it. What it did was bring my own past and my own childhood back to me–all the physical memories and senses of the locations that he described felt like my own childhood. He remembered things that I had forgotten or that I never even knew about–it all came flooding back to me. Not only that, it was about a writer and I was a struggling writer at the time that I read it and I identified with it. I identified with that character in the way that others identify with Holden Caulfield. Then there was the relationship between Camilla and Bandini and I was fascinated by the tone of it.
I met him and asked about it and he was very cantankerous and asking why I thought I could even write a screenplay or how I could be any kind of judge of his work. His wife Joyce calmed him down–she was a lovely woman and a poet herself–and he finally said, “Okay, nobody else knows about the book. If you want it, go ahead.” Then he actually got a first edition of the book and signed it for me in the hope that I would take it to faraway places. Just about 34 years later, I got to take it to South Africa.
One of the interesting things about the film is that even though it is an adaptation of the work of another author, it fits in perfectly as part of the cinematic history of L.A. that you have composed over the years in films like “Shampoo,” “Tequila Sunrise” and the two “Chinatown” films. How do you see it fitting in with those previous efforts?
Well, it is just as you say. I felt there was a certain point in the writing that where John ended and I began was kind of seamless. I felt that I understood him and that he, without meaning to, understood me. I was able to work my way into it in such a way that it was the easiest adaptation that I had ever done. In the book, it is a more one-sided love affair–he is madly in love with her, obsessed with her but she is still hung up on marrying the tubercular bartender and getting the last name of “White.” To make it work, I think that they both had to be drawn to each other and both had to be highly resentful that they were being distracted from what their goals were, which was to marry into the white Anglo-Saxon world. That was the biggest change that I made.
You have done other adaptations in the past. In doing them, is it more difficult to work on one like this, where the story is mostly character and behavior-driven, as opposed to something like “The Firm,” where everything revolves around the mechanics of the plot?
The challenge of it was to make people accept the fact that this was a film about a writer and that the whole damn thing is a writer’s recollection of how he came to write the book that you are reading. I had to make them accept that and be done with it and not worry about it. It was a challenge but it was far more of a challenge to get it made than it was to get it written.
I also liked the use of voice-over in the film. Voice-over tends to be frowned upon a lot in movies these days–the theory is that if you can’t tell your story without using it, you have failed to tell your story–but it can be an effective way of telling the story when used properly. I assume that you chose the device because it allowed you to better utilize Fante’s specific voice.
The narration is almost never used to advance any of the action. It is used to get his reactions and to show the disparity between the way he is behaving and the way that he really feels inside–he is calling her names but he is completely hung up on her and can’t stop thinking about her. It also allows him to rewrite the events that have happened to show how he wishes that they had turned out and it lets us show his writing itself as he writes to Mencken in despair about his life. I wrote the Mencken stuff because there is almost none of that in the book to dramatize his anxiety about his lack of experience.
How difficult was it to get “Ask the Dust” made, both in terms of convincing people to finance it and the actual production of the film? I know that you had to go to South Africa to shoot the film because it looked more like 1930's L.A. than the actual city does today.
From the time the script was written, it took me twelve years because nobody wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do a period piece, they didn’t want to do something with racial antagonism and they didn’t want to do a story in which the two main people behave so unpleasantly towards one another. Finally, the only thing that mattered was that a kid came along who wanted to do it and was right for it. At the time, he was an unknown but three years later, he became a movie star and I was able to do the film because of that.
In terms of the casting, the idea of Salma Hayek playing a fiery Latino character like Camilla seems like almost too perfect a match for the role. However, while he is very good in the role of Arturo, I have to admit that if I were looking for someone to play a callow and inexperienced young Italian who is unsure with the ladies and struggling to make it as a writer, Colin Farrell might not have necessarily been at the top of my list of potential actors. What did you see in him that convinced you that he was right for the part?
When I first met Colin, he was completely unknown and I had no preconceptions of him as a womanizer or this or that. He was a young and unique kid who showed up at my doorstep who was hungry and full of energy. He had this magnetic presence and if you are going to write a movie where a guy was alone in a room, you wanted someone who would hold your attention. Strange as it sounds, he looked a bit like John Fante. John was a young man and very handsome and even though Colin is black Irish, he looks Italian to me. His ability to be up and down and manic-depressive and to use his energy levels to lash out in completely unexpected ways seemed totally right to me.
When I did “The Last Detail,” I had written the part of Meadows for a little skinny kid in the script. Hal Ashby, who was a wonderful man, began to tell me that he knew how I had written the part but that seen this big goofy kid, an eighteen-year-old actor who was about 6'4'’. I said, “Hal, say no more” because I knew instinctively what Hal was getting at. A guy who is feckless and being abused and the subject of a monstrous injustice–how much better to have him played as a pitiful and helpless giant? It is just more poignant that way. Casting can be an unexpected thing sometimes and what looks to be the opposite of what you need can turn out to be just right.
While watching the film, the voice of H.L. Mencken that we hear was driving me nuts–I knew I had heard it somewhere before but I could not for the life of me place an actor’s face to it. Of course, it is the voice of film critic Richard Schickel, whom I have heard in any number of interviews and DVD commentaries. How did you strike upon the idea of having him do Mencken’s voice?
I met Richard on a panel–some three-day forum about screenwriting–and it turned out that we agreed about the same things. Richard has a wide range of interests and we just became friendly. I loved his gravelly voice and I didn’t want a professional-sounding actor–I wanted someone with a voice that had something familiar about it but you didn’t know who it was. It is a voice that carries a suggestion that it has lived in the way that it phrases things and I thought that Richard would be right for it. I asked him and he just looked at me. I said, “Come on, man, you’ve been on television. You’ve interviewed Martin Scorsese. You can do it.” He said okay and that was that.
Now that you have finally completed “Ask the Dust,” how close is the finished project to how you imagined it when you first came upon it? Have your feelings towards the story and what attracted you to it changed or evolved during that time?
It evolved, to some extent, but in general, my feelings towards it have remained consistent. I suppose if I thought about it, there are some things that I would do different but all in all, it is pretty much how I imagined it
“Ask the Dust” is the fourth film that you have directed, after “Personal Best” (1982) “Tequila Sunrise” (1988) and “Without Limits” (1998) Simply in terms of directing, how do you feel you have grown and developed as a filmmaker over the course of those four films?
You’ve stumped me–I don’t really have an answer for that. They have been so far apart that it sometimes feels like I have to start over again each time. The only thing I can say about this movie is that this is one for which I had an unusual passion and the only thing that I know for sure as a director is that I can’t begin to undertake this long process unless I am so enamored with the project that I want to see it come to life and I can’t stop thinking about it.
How has directing affected how you approach your screenwriting? Do you go about a script differently knowing that you want to direct it as opposed to a situation where you are writing something for another director to shoot?
No, I really don’t. In general, if I am writing for myself, it is somewhat easier because it is something that I am obsessed with. However, the form that the screenplay takes is the same and the effort is almost harder when it is a work-for-hire because you have to push yourself harder because the material isn’t necessarily pushing you.
What are your thoughts on the world of screenwriting today. On the one hand, “Chinatown” is generally hailed as the perfect screenplay model by these people who claim to know the secrets of screenwriting. On the other hand, these same teachers have used it to create a formula that has resulted in any number of dreadful and unoriginal screenplays that are the very antithesis of what made “Chinatown” so great in the first place.
I agree-I’m trying to think of how to add to what you just said. I think that teaching screenwriting by taking screenplays and analyzing them and extrapolating an analysis, like that there has to be a plot point on page 20 . . . there is much more to screenwriting. It is curiosity and passion. Just as heat crushes carbon into a diamond, it is curiosity and passion that crushes an idea into a screenplay. With the other way, you are just describing a movie that has already been made.
Who are some of the newer screenwriters and filmmakers working today that you find interesting?
There are a lot of really good ones. Paul Thomas Anderson has done some wonderful work. An unknown kid who is Larry Kasdan’s son, Jake Kasdan–I loved “Zero Effect” but no one seems to know about it. Those are the two that immediately come to mind. They don’t necessarily inspire me but they do gratify me.
The 1970's, when you first made your mark, has been lionized by critics and directors as perhaps that last great period of American filmmaking. At the same time, it has also been criticized as a period of gross excess, most infamously in the Peter Biskind book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” As a key participant in the film world of that era, how do you look at that period of time and how it has gone done in history?
This Biskind book was one of the most profoundly dishonest exercises that I have ever read because he selected very carefully who he wanted to talk to because he had some sort of agenda. Invariably, they were ex-wives of almost everyone in the book and ex-wives are generally not charitable towards their exes. What he did was find conversations with people–and in some cases, they were inaccurate–in which they were fighting and pissed off at each other along with moments of greed and vanity. He took all these things and extrapolated from them that this was the behavior of everybody at that time. That is a little bit like taking a happy marriage and zoning in on the two or three days where the couple was really unhappy and bitching at each other and saying that was what the marriage was. Well, as Mark Twain said, “The surest way to lie is sometimes just to tell the straight truth.”
Few people know that you, like so many others in Hollywood, got your start working for Roger Corman on a couple of low-budget quickies in Puerto Rico–you wrote “Last Woman on Earth” and acted in both that and “Creature from the Haunted Sea.” Since those two films, along with “Battle on Blood Island” have been released on DVD as “The Roger Corman Puerto Rico Trilogy,” I was wondering if you had gotten around to picking up your copy yet.
Oh my God, yes! Somebody got them and brought them over to the house. Now my daughter has got a hold of them and she is going to see them, so I am mortified!
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1778
originally posted: 03/20/06 22:27:23
last updated: 04/06/06 20:40:19
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