Los Angeles – the glistening neon-flecked vista of your electric dreams, the City of Angels, and home to Hollywood – the factory where the dreams of the world are spun into gold. The stars who cast out inviolably megawatt smiles from billboards, elevated in glorious airbrushed perfection, often made their fortunes there. To the rest of the world it would seem that LA is the very soul of glamour. So embued in LA’s cultural identity are these notions of glitter and pageantry, that its most lionised district - Hollywood - is famously nickednamed ‘Tinseltown’.

But what of the other side to Los Angeles? The side you don’t see in the tourist videos – the dirty, smog-choked, otherworld of thwarted ambition. A flyblown cesspit of squalid motels, sleazy strip clubs, and dive bars. And what of the people who did not become celebrities or make it big in the movies? The drifting rootless – the never-quite-made-its who come panning for gold, and find only bone-crunching reality in its place. It is in this number that you will find the unnamed ‘driver’ – movie stunt driver by day and getaway driver by night - who is the enigmatic centre of James Sallis’ best-selling modern noir, Drive.

Drive was adapted into a critically acclaimed film of the same name, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan.

In this post-screening Q&A, American crime writer, poet, and musician James Sallis discusses his work, including his love of 1950s science, pulp, and genre fiction, his methods as a writer, and his reaction to the film version of his best selling modern noir novel.

Related Links:
James Sallis

A Festival of Ideas event in partnership with Watershed.

Posted on Sat 26 May 2012.

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