You’re British, but over the years you’ve covered a lot of very American topics, and especially relating to Hollywood. What brings you back to that subject?
Well, I’ve lived in America, or at least I’ve pretty much split my time between England and the United States, and my eldest son went to school here. L.A. is a city I spent a lot of time in, that I’ve been very curious about. It’s a city full of secrets, and people with the most improbable stories. Either that they’ve come there to realize their dreams and sometimes their dreams don’t happen and they become an incarnation of a completely different creature, without really realizing it—I guess that’s what the Heidi Fleiss film [Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam] was about in many ways.
And was that your first L.A. movie?
That was my first L.A. movie. And I think this last one, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, was about this growing awareness that there are really two cities in Los Angeles. There’s the rich part—the Beverly Hills part, the Santa Monica part—and then there’s the major part of the city, which is composed of, basically, disenfranchised people who are completely neglected and abandoned, and don’t have the benefit of the facilities, schools, hospitals that everybody else has in the other parts of the city. And you have a police force that is completely unresponsive to their needs. It’s like a sort of Ferguson situation where you have a population that doesn’t have any political input. And the Lonnie Franklin case, of somebody who was able to kill for 25 years and was then actually caught by a computer—having killed probably over 100 people—seemed to me to be about that story, that there were these people that were considered disposable people, that nobody really cared about. The motives weren’t even reported in the L.A. Times, in the local press. It was… You can just imagine if it had happened anywhere else, in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, and they would have closed the whole place down.