Press Conference at
Toronto International Film Festival

Ellroy: I'll finish my introduction. I'm James Ellroy. I wrote the novel L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. It all started with me.

Hanson on the casting of Guy Pearce...

Curtis Hanson: Guy Pearce, who I had never seen before, walked into the office like one of any number of actors.. he was so good that I was knocked back on my heels. I started talking with him and I then discovered that he had been in the THE ADVENTURES OF PRICILLA: QUEEN OF THE DESERT and in fact that he was Australian. I chose not to see that picture because once I started becoming committed to him as Exley, I didn't want to have my confidence shaken by watching him run around for two hours in a dress.

Ellroy, Pearce, Crowe

The works of art...

Ellroy: To begin with. we had L.A. CONFIDENTIAL the novel, an established literary masterpiece... this is a book that will leave you dry-cleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side... and Curtis Hanson has made a film that does the same thing. I was startled to see it the first time even though I had previously met Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe. I had seen a few clips and I had read the seventh draft... but nothing prepared me for the film. Seeing my characters embodied by actors that I couldn't envision as people because I didn't know they existed. Here's a book that is eight years in it's time span and a hundred characters and a fully fledged out plot line, compressed , deconstructed, reconstructed, and completely done in away that I could have never imagined... The lines have started to blur.

The camera work...

Hanson: My number one directive with each and every one of my collaborators... was I wanted to be true to the period but being true, I didn't want it to keep the period in the background and have the characters and emotions be in the foreground. I wanted to shoot it as though the set dressing was ordinary, in other words, shoot it as though it were a contemporary movie so the audience in fact, on a scene by scene basis, could forget the period and just get caught up in the performances.

Kevin Spacey

The mixture of fact and fiction...

Hanson: In distilling down Ellroy's very densely structured, complicated novel into a screenplay, one of the things that Brian Helgeland and I latched on to as being the cornerstone of the action of the movie was the police riot on Christmas Eve. One of the things we liked so much about that was not only does it serve to bring these three characters together dramatically, but it is also a true incident that happened in Los Angeles and it did lead to a grand jury hearing. It's Ellroy's mixture of fact and fiction that is part of what I find so appealing and it also ducktails with one of the overall themes of this movie which is the difference between illusion and reality.

The effect of directing ALBINO ALLIGATOR on Spacey...

Kevin Spacey: I listened to everything that Curtis asked me to do... and I did it. I learned a great deal about the process of making a film and w goes into it, and this was a massive undertaking. We just tried as much as we could to be there, to be ready, to be alert, to be willing to work... There are so many things that I have learned from a lot of directors and I have been happy about that because the next time I direct I suspect it will have an effect.

Guy Pearce

The two aliens...

Guy Pearce: The [on screen] relationship [between Crowe and Pearce] was quite interesting. It really had to develop through the whole course of the film because of the relationship between the two characters. In many ways we felt like the two aliens on the set.

Russell Crowe: One of the things that we discussed when we first talked, when we knew we were going to do the job was when we did actually come together as a team, it should be like two halves of a whole. These two guys should actually make up one decent cop.

Curtis Hanson

On the soundtrack...

Hanson: Most of those songs I actually put together way before we started shooting. In fact, we had those songs playing, for instance, in the scene where Kevin Spacey looks in the mirror and his face registers that self-loathing, what have I become expression that he does so beautifully. The night we shot that I had Dean Martin on the juke box singing "Cover Your Face With Sunshine and Smile, Smile, Smile". Dean Martin is used as the first song at the pot-bust where he is singing "Blue Christmas". Dean Martin evokes the spirit, the image of Jack Vincennes -- a guy who is dress to the nines, a movie star among cops... he seems to have the answer to every question and yet is flawed, in fact, perhaps fatally flawed. The choice of the music was to help define the period, the themes of the movie...