The Farmer's Daughter Motel is not the kind of place where Hollywood directors are usually interviewed. Located on a busy commercial street near L.A.'s ramshackle Farmer's Market, there are cracks in the building's cheap stucco walls, the pool is missing some tile and decorated with mold blossoms, and the cars in the parking lot -- of which every room has a view -- are neither new nor European.
One speculates with John Dahl why Twentieth Century Fox has chosen this location over the usual, four-star venue to promote his new thriller, Joy Ride.
Maybe the marketing department thought it was a cute idea, as grubby motels are where much of the action happens in his new film, about three young people on a cross-country trip who pick the wrong, psychotic truck driver to play a practical joke on.
But the main reason for being here seems obvious: This place is way cheap. And considering the overall shape of Dahl's filmmaking career, that kind of studio treatment should come as no surprise.
"I've never really understood the marketing and distribution of films, and I wouldn't profess to know anything about it now," says the unassuming 45-year-old writer-director. "I just feel really fortunate that I get to make movies.
"I try to be very aware and respectful of an audience," he adds, which, while true, also makes for a nice rationalization as to why Dahl's never made the breakout hit that's long been expected of him. "I treat them intelligently, I guess, as opposed to trying to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator so that, 'Oh yeah, they'll definitely get this.' I may lose a few people by doing that, but I think that I'll gain a few others."
A veteran Hollywood storyboard artist -- one of the people who draw comic strip-like blueprints from which filmmakers stage and compose their frames -- Dahl worked his way into directing on the independent outer fringes of the movie industry.
Though credited by many with being a key talent in the neo-noir revival of the 1990s, Dahl's acclaimed early films, Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, were nonetheless very low-budget cult items. The latter two, which most critics consider his best work, were infamously almost lost in a straight-to-cable twilight zone, and released to theatres after their uncertain financiers sold them to pay-TV (and thereby prevented, in Seduction's case, Linda Fiorentino's scariocomic portrayal of a lusty femme fatale from qualifying for Oscar consideration).
After that, Dahl's one previous shot at the studio-financed big time, Unforgettable, was both a critical and commercial disaster. The semi-independent Rounders was better received, but still failed to capitalize very profitably on the superhot status of co-star Matt Damon, who was then enjoying his Good Will Hunting/ Saving Private Ryan breakthrough year.
And now there's Joy Ride, which boasts the typical Dahl mixture of deadly jeopardy, moral confusion, jet-black humour and young stars on the verge of . . . something big, maybe: Paul Walker ( The Fast and the Furious), Steve Zahn ( Out of Sight, Saving Silverman, the upcoming Riding in Cars with Boys) and Leelee Sobieski ( Deep Impact, Eyes Wide Shut, The Glass House).
Whatever Joy Ride's virtues, however, there's no getting around the fact that a film about naive Americans desperately trying to cope with an unpredictably determined and lethal nemesis may not be the most bankable of products at the moment. And even though its scenes of big rigs demolishing rural motor courts may not remind every viewer of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, they do uncomfortably recall recent warnings that terrorists' next weapon could be semis carrying hazardous materials.
Asked if the studio has expressed any concerns in recent weeks, Dahl, whose shaved-head brainiac image is underscored by professorial granny glasses and tweed jacket, shrugged in what quickly becomes apparent is typical bemusement.
"I was more, like, asking them if they still wanted to release it at this point," he says.
"In a way, like Hollywood in general, they're all just businessmen and women. They're sensitive to what's going on, but at the same time, there's also that feeling that life goes on and people want to be entertained."
Dahl's idea of entertainment might be thought of by some as peculiar. He attributes his artistic interest in the darker aspects of contemporary life to an absurdly normal upbringing in the small, city of Billings, Mont. There's probably something to that; Dahl's brother Rick, who has co-written most of John's better films, obviously gets the same charge out of kinky sex, compulsive self-destruction and fatefully bad choices.
"I guess it's something that I don't know anything about," Dahl says of society's underbelly, "so it's kind of intriguing to me to spend some time there.
"The thing I like most is people finding themselves in moral quagmires. That's always an interesting subject for me to film. What I always look for in drama is really good conflict, and I kind of feel like we're all just a step away from it; there but for the grace of God go I."
Joy Ride is one of the few films the director did not originate for himself, but something about Clay Tarver and J. J. Abrams's script appealed to Dahl on a sick-humour level.
"I really liked the fact that they played a practical joke on somebody, and then it went terribly out of control," the director admits. "That's something that I can relate to. As a kid, I was always doing rotten things to people. You know that spray thing kitchen sinks have? Every April Fool's Day for, like, four years in a row, I would put a rubber band around the bottom of it. I would just sit and wait for my mom to turn the water on and just get sprayed. It was kind of sadistic; she never figured it out."
Dahl's knack for cruel humour leads to the obvious question: Why hasn't he made the kind of gross-out comedy that's been so popular over the past several years -- or, for that matter, anything other than tricky-to-sell film noir updates? "I'd like to, but when there are so many good comedy directors, I don't know why they'd hire me," he reckons self-deprecatingly.
Many are predicting that audiences will want ever-sunnier escapism in their darkened theatres to counterbalance the horrors of Sept. 11 and whatever others the war with terrorism may bring.
"I honestly think it's too early to tell right now," Dahl says. "We're still in a state of shock, and once the greater impact on people becomes clear, I think Hollywood will try to respond."
As for his own immediate future, Dahl plans to go the indie route again with the next script he's writing with his brother. It's about entertainment lawyers and the filmmaker, unnecessarily, assures us that it will be a very black comedy. But unlike a good number of moviemakers who've suffered but a fraction of the frustrations that have dogged his career, Dahl expresses no discernible antipathy toward the studio system, nor at the often equally philistine indie production world. Of course, he could be wickedly pulling our leg, but he sounds sincere enough when extolling the joy of any kind of filmmaking.
"To me, the budget of a movie is almost irrelevant," Dahl says.
"Despite what anybody tells you, having a lot of money makes it easier to make a film; whenever you need something, it's there. Then again, doing Last Seduction was really a lot of fun. It only cost $2.5-million [U.S.] so it meant nothing to the studio and there was little or no pressure as a result.
"But the amount of money you have in the budget would never be a consideration for me to make a film. I'm very inspired by the material. If I had a piece of material that I liked that required spending $80-million to make, then yeah, I'd love to do that. But if I like some little thing as much that only requires $3-million, then that'd be great, too."