There's no better way to meet the neighbours than to make a film about them. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland tell Donald Clarke how they brought their portrait of Echo Park, a mainly Latin area in Los Angeles, to the silver screen without annoying the people next door
RICHARD Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, a gay couple, one American, the other English, resident in a largely Latin quarter of Los Angeles, have just directed a decent micro-budgeted film entitled Echo Park, LA. In the movie, a gay couple, one American, the other English, resident in a largely Latin quarter of Los Angeles, behave like arrogant oiks to their new neighbours. They greedily eye up properties for development. They embark on an irresponsible triangular relationship with a younger, working-class neighbour.
"Oh yeah I know," Westmoreland chortles in his largely unmodified Leeds accent. "Without even asking us, many people have written that these guys wrote themselves into the movie. The gay couple has to be them. Really? If a film is written by a woman, does the lead woman in the film have to be that writer? Those guys in the film are people we detest. They enter those communities wearing blinkers. Look, if we did write ourselves in, it is the first time directors have written themselves in a movie as complete villains."
Well, yes. But they didn't have to cast an Englishman, David Ross, as one of the two leads.
"Dave was the guy who came in and read for that part and we thought he was perfect, except for the fact that he had an English accent," Glatzer says. "The part was not written for an English guy. We thought about it for a while. But he was perfect for the film. So it was just a coincidence."
Glatzer and Westmoreland do, indeed, come across as the antithesis of the characters they created for Echo Park. The American is short, dark and nervously articulate. The Englishman, clad in a T-shirt bearing a message in praise of Leeds, is warm, friendly and unpretentious. Far from exploiting their new neighbours in Echo Park, an area currently undergoing ruthless gentrification, Glatzer and Westmoreland enjoyed remarkably warm relations with the locals throughout the film-making process.
"The irony is that our story was of complete harmony with our neighbours," Glatzer says. "They didn't actually sit down and read the script, but they were enormously supportive of the film. They all went to see it later and loved it. Sadly, if we'd shown that degree of harmony in the film people would have said it was bullshit. They wouldn't have believed it."
The picture moves among an array of characters, but focuses most acutely on a young girl who discovers she is pregnant just as she is to enjoy the traditional coming-of-age celebration known as Quinceañera. The directors, who had been asked to take the official photographs at a neighbour's own Quinceañera, decided on New Year's Day 2004 that they were going to make a film about this changing community. Strangely, a glance at (of all things) Shelagh Delaney's northern England kitchen-sink drama A Taste of Honey, which also deals with an unwanted pregnancy, spurred their determination to bring their locale to the big screen.
"Initially we thought somebody should make a film about this, but we never thought it would be us," Glatzer says. "But these things all came together. We saw our next-door neighbour being booted out as the area was gentrified. We thought of the Quinceañera and then we watched A Taste of Honey. All those things made us want to make this film."
"Yes. This was one of those rare New Year's resolutions you actually keep," Westmoreland adds. "By April 30th the film was in the can."
Glatzer and Westmoreland are, in at least six senses, unlikely fellows to discover directing a wholesome and inspirational film about Mexicans in Los Angeles. The American has a PhD in detective fiction from Virginia University and might, therefore, have expected to end up wearing a corduroy jacket in some leafy quadrangle, rather than hefting booms around Hollywood.
Westmoreland's story is more intriguing still. Glance at his CV and you will discover stimulating titles such as Naked Highway and Dr Jerkoff & Mr Hard. Yes, indeed, this cheery, markedly unsleazy character is an alumnus of Gay Porn University.
"I went to Newcastle to study physics, then switched to politics before going to Japan to learn Japanese," Westmoreland, clearly no stranger to this line of enquiry, begins. "I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Then I quickly realised I wanted to get into film-making, but really it was too late to go to film school. Then, in LA, this opportunity to work in adult film came up and I quickly thought, I will learn more doing this than I would getting coffee as a PA on some Hollywood movie. It was, I think, very much like being a B-movie director in the 1940s."
Westmoreland, taking on aspects of Burt Reynolds's character in Boogie Nights, goes on to explain how he set out to introduce real characters and coherent stories into his films. This interests me. As I understand it, the arrival of video and, later, the internet frustrated the efforts of artistically minded directors to include anything other than penetration in their films.
"To be honest, my experiences were mostly before the internet. A lot of the results of my careful work and care were fast-forwarded through by viewers. These things have a very precise function. Art wasn't always on people's mind when they were watching them back then, but the internet has accelerated that process dramatically."
Quite a number of prominent directors started out making blue movies under assumed names, but very few - Wes Craven is an exception - came clean about their involvement in later years. Yet Westmoreland has no inhibitions about discussing his past. Did he never think his career might be damaged by his early adventures? "I wouldn't have got here without it," he says. "People are a lot more open to these things now than they were 20 years ago and I have been very open in discussing it. It makes an interesting narrative. This guy came up through that industry. Will he be able to handle it making mainstream movies?"
By the time the two men met at a party 11 years ago, Glatzer, academia now just a memory, already had one film, 1994's barely released Grief, under his belt. "We immediately began talking about movies," Westmoreland says. "Actually our first conversation was about the dream sequence in Rosemary's Baby and we have remained interested in unusual conceptions ever since."
The two men form a comfortable partnership. Chatty and enthusiastic, they bounce ideas of one another and finish each other's sentences in the manner of a long-married couple. Working so closely with one's life partner must, however, introduce certain pressures into a relationship. Do they never crave a bit of space? "No, I think we are very compatible in the way we work together," Westmoreland says. "We spend more time together than most people do, it's true. But Richard is not somebody who, if I have been with him for a while, I think: oh, I've had enough. He is somebody I can always have a conversation with." "He is a harder worker than I am," Glatzer adds. "I am more of a goof-off. He is thinking 24 hours a day about movies. He generates so much stuff."
Indeed, nobody could be in any doubt that the inspiration for the lads' first feature sprang from Westmoreland's brain. The Fluffer, whose title refers to the poor unfortunate hired to firm up the star of a porn film before action is called, dealt in unsettling detail with the mechanics of the adult film industry. When the film was released in 2001 Westmoreland was finally forced to tell his family what he had been up to for the past few years.
"The Fluffer turned out to be a great way of telling them," he says. "The great thing was that it was playing at a cinema in Leicester Square. That sort of thing shouldn't matter, I suppose. But it made it clear to them that it was a legitimate thing."
The Westmorelands of West Yorkshire need have no concerns about Echo Park, LA. Though there is the odd tastefully shot gay love romp, the film operates mostly as a delicate, open-hearted study of Latin life in an evolving suburb. The film presents a fascinating contemporary snapshot of an area, just north of downtown LA that was the first home of the movie industry, before turning into a bohemian locale and then, later, being colonised by the Mexican working classes. The directors must, however, have been concerned that critics from within the Latin community might ask why middle-class white boys were making such a film.
"We do have a number of Latino friends we could consult and we were eager to do that because we wanted to get it right," Glatzer says.
"We asked about what the old ladies talked about, assuming they would discuss the old country and so on. 'Are you kidding?' they said. 'They are getting drunk and grabbing guys' asses.'"
Westmoreland takes up the theme. "It's not like this movie was looking for a director and we stepped up. This movie simply wouldn't exist unless we had made it. It is scandalous that there are so few Latin directors and actors in Hollywood. If this helps promote their cause even a little then I will be happy."
Everybody needs neighbours as good as Westmoreland and Glatzer.
