The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right.
Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape.
Los Angeles survives on that which is unpredictable. The unexpected courses through its very veins.
I had the advantage of reading the book, and when the script was first submitted to me, it was just another gangster story - the east side taking over the west side and all that.
'West' is one of those scripts that, when it came out, everyone wanted a piece of it and everyone wanted to be involved in it.
Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.
Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not.
When someone hears that I've written a book about 1897, I'm usually met with blank stares. And the first thing they say is, 'Was there even an L.A. back then?' A lot of people don't even think there was a city before the movies appeared. That concept of Los Angeles is so strong in the popular imagination that celebrity overrides everything.
The Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story.
If one wants to talk about the end of the world, the apocalypse, you're talking about the world itself. It's not Southern California breaking into the sea. The story is global, and it requires that kind of approach.