Farrell Stars in Robert Towne's "Ask the Dust"

Robert Towne has been one of Hollywood's long-standing greats, having been an actor, director, writer and producer. Breaking into the Hollywood elite with the 1974 blockbuster Chinatown, and bringing Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Shining) along with him, Towne has enjoyed successes in his writing career with the screenplays for Days of Thunder, The Firm and Mission: Impossible. With his name firmly entrenched in Hollywood, Towne was able to go back and make one of his personal projects, Ask the Dust.

Ask the dust was originally a novel written by Towne's friend, John Fante. The novel never made it to publication, due to problems with his publishing company. In a story posted by the Chicago Tribune, Fante talks about how he fell victim to circumstance. "Well, my publisher was Stackpole and Sons, and they published 'Mein Kampf' and they didn't clear the copyright and Hitler sued them. They went broke, and they never distributed my book, so basically it was that goddamn Hitler that ruined the publication of my book."

In an interview with ScreenTalk, Robert Towne talks about the problem he had in convincing John Fante to allow him to make Ask the Dust into a movie. "I was nobody and he was unknown and his wonderful book that he thought was going to be a masterpiece had been ignored for decades. He wasn't that impressed that an unknown writer wanted to adapt his book into a screenplay. He said 'Who says you can write a screenplay? What have you done? Who says you're any kind of judge about my book?" It was only after Towne's successes with Chinatown, Shampoo and Last Detail that, Towne says, "I had some kind of reputation that heartened him and we continued to talk about it."

The story of Ask the Dust is centered around a writer who is trying to make it big in the times of the Great Depression. Playing Arturo Bandini is Colin Farrell, who is trying to distance himself from the flops of Alexander, where he played Alexander the Great, and The New World, portraying John Smith, and get back to up to the form he had with his better movies, such as Minority Report, Hart's War, Phone Booth and S.W.A.T..

Backing up Colin Farrell is Selma Hayek, who portrays a beautiful Mexican waitress by the name of Camilla Lopez. Farrell's character, Arturo, is the son of Italian immigrants, and he finds a common thread with Lopez, by the way of their embarrassment of their roots. As well as that romance, Bandini also engages in a romance with a Camilla-type character, Vera played by the beautiful Idina Menzel (Rent, The Tollbooth). That romance is the dominant factor in an alcohol-fuelled subplot to the story. Also adding support is Donald Sutherland (Cold Mountain, The Italian Job), as Arturo's drunken neighbor.

As it turns out, Colin Farrell was not Robert Towne's first choice for the role. In the decades it took to get the film going, Towne had entertained some other ideas for the lead role. As he mentions in his interview with ScreenTalk, "Johnny Depp wanted to do it but we couldn't get it made. It took another ten years until an agent at CAA called me up and said 'I think I got the perfect kid for your movie.' So up to my door trumped this Irishmen in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. A girlfriend of my wife's came up to me and said 'you know I don't know who he is or what he wants but, whatever it is, give it to him.'"

With the help of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Passion of the Christ, National Treasure, Timeline), Towne has finally seen his labor of love turned into a feature film. Speaking of his trials and tribulations in getting this made, he tells ScreenTalk, "I thought a number of times of setting up a website called rejection.com and putting down every studio and every executive and what they said. I sometimes think I'd like to win an award for this movie just so I can stand up and say 'Please go to rejection.com, those of you that figure it's tough to get something made and see how you really have to ignore the rejection and somehow move on.'" He left the interview with one word for everyone aspiring to break into the industry.

"Persist"

[Additional Sources: ScreenTalk, Chicago Tribune]