“Perfidia”, the first volume of his second “LA Quartet”, was released in France. James Ellroy received us in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk at length, in a live interview.
Thirty years after the writing of the Black Dahlia, James Ellroy again crowd the streets of a city that never left blow. In the imposing Perfidia, her fourteenth novel, he finds the Los Angeles 40s and to talk about it, makes an appointment in his usual haunt, the Pacific Dining Car, a restaurant opened in 1921 when the City of Angels was booming. “I completely live in the past, he says, the city today, I do not see it. “
He came breezed his house in the hills, where they can be isolated to listen to Beethoven thoroughly. And a burning desire to return quickly. In the restaurant filled with shadows, he moved alone in the large lounge, the waiters treat him like a king. He ordered a shrimp cocktail, swallowed quickly, slumped in his seat, and answers questions with rare expertise in the art of blowing hot and cold. Four ninety-minute interview on.
How did you get the idea to go back to Los Angeles 40 years?
a flash! One Saturday night when I was alone at home during the winter of 2008. The night was cold. I was standing at my office window, I looked outside and I had as a vision of Japanese handcuffed, sitting in the back of a military truck. American soldiers in front of the convoy which borrowed a snowy pass to reach the Manzanar internment camp in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. It happened in the winter of 1942. In seconds, everything came to me. I knew I was going to get into my second “LA Quartet”. The first began in 1947 with The Black Dahlia and ended in 1958 with White Jazz . This would take place during the Second World War, in the years before my birth.
“It is God who guided me. The whole saga appeared to me at once. “
Where they went, these Japanese? Why have you thought of them?
Minute butterfly! I have not finished my presentation! It is God who guided me to them and gave me the vision. The whole saga appeared to me at once. I knew she would consist of four novels and the first to be called Perfidia, as a love song of the time, beautiful and bewitching [popularized by Xavier Cugat, the one hears Casablanca note]. I knew that I would come back some characters from my previous novels, which have much more real to me than most people I meet in real life. I also knew that the first volume would be 700 pages [he has finally 836, note], it would begin with the attack on Pearl Harbor, it would take me a Japanese hero, I would write the plot in time real, twenty-three days for the first volume, he would mix of fictional characters and real figures. All this came to me as clearly the world in minutes.
You already telling a similar experience at the time of Black Dahlia …
At the time I was writing this book, which obsessed me for years, I was in a state of exceptional concentration and excitement. I had the sudden intuition that I should leave the modern world to take me in the LA of my childhood and draw a saga of several volumes. Within minutes, my office, I even saw appear before me the whole LA Confidential, the third of four volumes of the series, its themes, its characters, its size, and even some scenes like the killing in a cold room. It did not let go. I wrote the four volumes in five years, in a sort of trance, and I understood that, whatever my ideas, I was able to realize them. My ambition has no limits. I must always write the best books, richer, thicker, denser.
“I’m back! With my most ambitious book. “
The goal was when you played the same tricks. You wrote that your “novelist megalomania” terrified you, and you made a long depression in the early 2000s …
I was exhausted. Mentally and physically. My books were bestsellers and asked me everywhere. I also published my memoirs in 1996 [ My Dark, the murder of his mother when he was 10, note], and the media always wanted more. They made me tell my story to no end. Months of tour. On all continents. And I could not let go of my books. I could not sleep, I was getting crazy. But I’m back! With my most ambitious book. I always come back. Nothing will ever destroy me.
Your novels paint a history of America’s Cold War aftermath of World War II. Posed it for you, in your childhood?
I was born in 1948 and I remember a discussion with my mother when I was 8, when she realized that I still believed we at war. “You know, peace was signed for a while,” she said. The conflict was so rooted in the American imagination that I did not believe, I do not even know if I believe today. I still live in the grip of my imagination. The Los Angeles where I grew up has been shaped by the war. It was a booming town in the early 40. A port on the Pacific, where were our enemies and whence our soldiers. The defense industry had established his quarters, the troops were staying in the city. The film industry, largely led by exiled European Jews, was here too, and it’s in LA that were turned major films antifascist propaganda. And here still had the highest concentration of Japanese-Americans, we rounded up for internment. An explosive own situation and the drama.
“It’s been more than I would expect that people act as I would like.”
The internment camps are discussed a little episode in American history, your book has he generated debate?
Not so much . The story is known in California, but very little in the rest of the country. I was ready to go talk to Little Tokyo, the Japanese district of Los Angeles, but no one asked me anything. How long have I do not expect that people act as I would like. You can lead the horse to water, not make it drink.
You have described yourself as a child “raçophobe” and “xenophobic” …
It’s part of my past. I refuse to talk about it.
You wrote …
I forbid you ask me this question! ? You understand me
(An angel passes, followed by a few others …)
Then: what your research told you about the racial atmosphere of the time?
I’ve realized how much anti-Semitism was virulent and insidious in America in those years . The Jews controlled the banks, they created Communism … Nobody called for eliminating, as in Germany, but a resentful speech crept everywhere, even on the benches of the Senate. The time was crazy, America was just coming out of the depression and the most delirious populism was expressed through figures that are found in Perfidia: Gerald K. Smith, leader of the “Christian national crusade”, and Father Charles Coughlin, a pro-Nazi priest influential. I am a novelist. I embrace the view of my characters, I speak their language, I use their words. I live with them in their time. When you consider the prejudice at work in Perfidia, you need to think in context. My main character is an Irish Catholic, he lived the civil war, he hates Protestants. The Chinese in Los Angeles, they, hate the Japanese, the Nanjing Massacre has just taken place. And suddenly, the attack on Pearl Harbor! America is taking an anti-Japanese hysteria. We must catch them – and, unlike Americans of German or Italian origin, can be recognized in the street. Only with the Chinese that can confuse them. Hence the grotesque idea Japanese hewn face scalpel strokes, for the Chinese air – well, that’s me who invented … But the time was full of ideas frankly delusional.
“The atmosphere of a city going to war is explosive and festive.”
In often funny and provocative scenes, Perfidia showcases real people, such as actress Bette Davis. How do you define your limits?
A instinct. My goal is to recreate the past of my city and my country, and to make ordinary characters mingle and those that are sewn with gold. The atmosphere of a city going to war is explosive and festive – alcohol, sex, drugs – people are terrified, they are no longer sure of anything, they need to decompress, to meet up with others. In any other circumstances I would have imagined a connection between my character Dudley Smith and Bette Davis, and send them see Citizen Kane – a film that I hate, like all films of Orson Welles for that matter. But I find it hilarious. I have fun with a figure like Bette Davis. As an actress, I prefer much Joan Crawford, but he’s a great character in a novel. She would constantly on stage. I just documented, I relied instead on the idea I had of her.
You grew up in Los Angeles at the time of film noir. His actresses they fascinated you?
I was born the same time as the black film itself, that of Laura Otto Preminger and Indemnity, Billy Wilder, but I found out much later. Its popularity was exhausted when I was old enough to be a film buff. But I saw most movies can police. And westerns. I did not like comedies. I spent my time in Los Angeles cinemas. The Wiltern in particular, on Wilshire Boulevard, a magnificent room, a palace where I could settle down to the balcony, mulling, brooding, lost in my dreams. Venerate women like Dorothy Malone, get carried away by them, and the stories that came out of my horrible life. I was an unhappy child, I lived with my father in a miserable apartment, tiny, dirty and smelly.
The hero “positive” of the book, William H. Parker, also existed . Why is it important for you?
This is one of the greatest authority figures of twentieth century America. He reformed the LAPD by establishing a military model and fighting against corruption was crazy in the 40s Its influence was very important when I was a child, he knew very well use the nascent television. A hugely popular soap opera of the time, Dragnet, which he had worked, celebrated the LA Police Department, he directed. And it was a complex character, full of contradictions.
“I have a big project to do and it requires me to be alone.”
You present it as your double fiction …
There are a lot of me in him. He comes from a poor background, he is gifted, intelligent, arrogant, he likes the risk but wants to control everything. It is very pious but debauched and alcoholic. And I understand how people can live with such a strong ambition than his. I could never get into a political career, I can not be a leader if I am given the opportunity, but my ambition is consuming. Unless it leads me to dark rooms. I sometimes wonder if I would have liked to have children. One thing is certain, they would have interfered with my ambition. I have a big project to do and it requires me to be alone.
Faith does play an important role in your life?
Yes, I am Christian. Faith sustains me and comforts me. I try to set myself rules of life according to my beliefs. I pray. I am constantly in search of God. I feel his presence everywhere. I know it is in this room as we speak. And I try to do what it takes to stay consistent with it. I know how it is easy for me to derail and I cling. I’m older now, I feel the breath of eternity. I do not know how many books I have yet to write on this earth. I have planned seven. I must hurry.
How do you immerse yourself in the past on which you write?
I employ investigators who compile information and prepare a list of facts and a timeline from which I can extrapolate. I do not especially want to pervert history, but to insinuate myself, live in it and invent my version. I have no trouble immerse myself in the past, because I have lived all my life. I rarely go out of this imaginary world, I project myself constantly images of Wilshire Boulevard in the 40 All streets, all the buildings in the city, I feel close to me. Look at this hospital there: it is in me. The restaurant where we stand opened in 1921, and I still come because I feel at peace. My house, not far from Griffith Park, was built in 1926. I need to stay in contact with the past and reinvent constantly, it’s my way to confront it. And I am extremely focused when I work. And I work all the time. After you leave, I’ll go take a nap, I aboierai around with the neighbor’s dog, I’ll make a cup of coffee and I will return in 1942 [he is currently writing the second volume of his saga, whose canvas cross the Pacific War, ed]. I do not have a computer, I write by hand, with my plane next to me. I’m not the news, I have no radio, no TV. On Friday night, I’m going with a friend, we order pizza, we drink Perrier and we look series, four or five episodes, comfortably seated on the couch with his wife and dog.
What are you looking?
A bit of everything. I love The Killing, Danish series. Much less its American version. I willingly let myself be carried away by police adventures mariner and I even let me take the first season of the grotesque Homeland. I love Mad Men even if it only works 20% of the time. Seven seasons on the theme of solitude, this is exceptional. And the mere idea of this beautiful stupid guy, compulsive runner who can not help lying, destroying, enough to break my heart.
Are you approached by many strings?
Of course, they want Ellroy. One only has to look at all the ideas that True Detective I pricked! I hate this series is the handjob. We control a lot of things to me, but it rarely results. It takes so much money and compromise … I currently work with David Fincher on a series would happen in Hollywood in the 50′s hero is the private detective Fred Otash investigating Stars and was in league with tabloids, such as Confidential . I always admired Fincher. It has long tried to adapt The Black Dahlia but his script was not good, and it was then taken and killed for the version that was released in 2006, directed by Brian De Palma. When the project collapsed, Fincher turned Zodiac is a magnificent thriller about obsession, and one of my favorite movies, much better than LA Confidential.
Speaking of obsession, you wanted to make your mother a character in the new saga?
Yes, but my editor dissuaded me he found it fine like that. On arrival, Parker’s character is obsessed with a big redhead. I called Joan when my mother’s name was John, you see nuance …
James Ellroy few dates
1948 Born in Los Angeles.
1958 Murder of his mother in El Monte, a suburb of LA where they just moved. The culprit will never be found.
1981 Brown’s Requiem, first novel after years of hard up.
1991 White Jazz closes the “Quartet of Los Angeles”.
1995 American Tabloid opens the trilogy “ Underworld USA Trilogy “.
1997 Adaptation of LA Confidential in cinema, in competition at Cannes.
2011 Hilliker Curse, second autobiographical essay after My Dark.
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