Towne made his directorial debut in 1982 with Personal Best, about two women athletes and their mixed-up feelings for one another. He followed that with two more efforts, Tequila Sunrise (1988) and Without Limits (1998). While all this was happening, Ask the Dust sat simmering on the back burner.
Based on the 1939 cult novel by John Fante, the film revolves around an Italian-American writer, Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell), who arrives in Los Angeles seeking fame and fortune. He meets a feisty Mexican waitress, Camilla (Salma Hayek) and finds himself both enchanted by her awesome beauty and repelled by racial factors.
Towne found the novel while researching Chinatown, and became so entranced by it that he decided to meet with its author in person. According to Towne, Fante greeted the young fan with accusations like, "What makes you think you're any kind of judge of my work?"
"He was hilariously rude," Towne says, speaking slowly and carefully, working a cigar around in his lips.
Towne and Fante became friends, and the author gave the young screenwriter not only the screen rights to Ask the Dust, but also a first edition, "which he signed to me in the hope that I would take it to far places."
Interestingly, Towne says that very little has changed since his original draft, written in 1993. In adapting the novel, Towne found that he needed to take the book's love triangle and distill it closer to a two-way romance. In the book, the Italian writer is attracted to the Mexican barmaid, and the barmaid is attracted to a white man.
"In order to deal with the themes of racism in the book and make it dramatic, I felt that it had to be a real love story," he says. "Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture—their own shame at being Mexican and Italian."
Now that the finished project has finally arrived in theaters, Towne muses on the idea of directing his own screenplays. Even though he has worked with some of the world's greatest directors, there are always things that the writer wishes had turned out differently.
Though Towne is crafty in phrasing his answer, he admits that he prefers directing his own scripts in one respect: "It's more satisfying to the extent that, if you don't like it, there's some relief in that. There's no one to blame but yourself."