How is the Los Angeles of Ask the Dust different from the Los Angeles of Chinatown?
Well, the Los Angeles of Chinatown is a city of much more menace. Jake Gittes is going up and down those riverbeds looking for a crime, or a conspiracy — basically the foundation on which the city was built. But the Los Angeles of Ask the Dust is a much more quietly desperate place, a place of a kind of sunny desperation. In this film especially, it seems that Los Angeles is as much a character as any of the leads. Yes, it really is right up there with the major characters. It is the character that informs all of their actions. It’s a place of illusion and hope and, as that old Dr. Demento song “Pico and Sepulveda” says, where nobody’s dream comes true. [laughs] What is it about Los Angeles that makes you keep coming back to it as a filmmaker? I suppose that it’s a place that continues to have a habit of erasing itself from decade to decade, and yet it’s still classically that dream factory where, since 1848, people have come here to strike it rich with gold, with oil, with real estate
