Battling demons in the City of Angels

Robin Williams in the movie <i>What Dreams May Come</i>. Photo / Supplied

In this extract from The Past Awaits, respected Wairarapa-born film-maker Vincent Ward, 54, explains after several years living in Los Angeles how his battered sofa saw the best - and the worst - of the glittering city where stars are born.

I was 39 when I went to live in Los Angeles. I remember a bald, black taxi driver picking me up from the airport. He didn't say a word to me and drove fast, very fast. His silence was unnerving, as was his head, which seemed to sit directly on his shoulders like that of a giant bullfrog. Where his neck should have been was a wide scar like a glistening necklace. It was night, and I grew nervous as he took me through unfamiliar streets in the slum parts of LA. I asked him if this was the quickest route. He didn't reply. I asked him about his scar. There was no answer. When we finally reached my destination, he suddenly spoke. All he said was that he had been a child soldier in Africa.

This was not the LA I had imagined. It was a far cry from the cliche that every waiter is an actor or a writer with a story to tell. My LA turned out to be very different from that. I seemed to run into people who just didn't fit the standard image of the City of Angels. These were drifters, the crazy and bewildered, who lived in a parallel universe to the stars, celebrities and film-makers. I rented a small apartment and set aside an area of my living room for an office so that I could look professional as I pursued projects. Somehow I managed to squeeze a "pre-loved" floral green sofa into it, which dominated the space.

One of the first people who wanted to use the sofa as a bed was William. His teeth were coated with slime and he stank. He was fat, black, blind and homeless. I had come across him lying in the middle of a road as I was driving home from the studio. It was dusk on Sunset Strip, and traffic had come to a standstill and was backed up a long way. The angry drivers were yelling and beeping their horns. I saw a prone man spread across the centre of the road. As cars tried to negotiate their way around him, he swore at them. Drivers wound down their windows and abused him back. Some car tyres ran over a thin white cane next to him.

I took the man back to my apartment, where I was living with my girlfriend. His name was William and he had an unnerving way of staring at me with his sightless eyes, which seemed to be all-white orbs. He appeared to be an articulate and intelligent guy whom life had given a bum rap. But from the moment he arrived, he was angling for a place to sleep. To distract him, we offered him a shower.

As William washed, he sang in a rich, powerful voice. His happiness spread to my girlfriend, Cecile, in the kitchen. She passed her head around the door, caught my eye, and started to hum the same tune. I joined in, and the singing went back and forth from kitchen, to bathroom, to living room - along with a lot of laughter and with Cecile dancing. Then the shower stopped and an angry William began to curse God:' `I did everything! I did everything right! Today. You f****r, God! You're messing with me - why, you f****r!"

I guess my experience had made me unafraid of aggressive paranoid schizophrenics. Of course, it helped that William was blind and I had a 19th-century tomahawk somewhere in my apartment. He was cursing because, somehow, his jacket had fallen into the toilet bowl. It was his prized possession, and he needed it for sleeping rough in cold winter parks.

Cecile managed to calm William down by offering him a roast dinner. He sat in the armchair and Cecile handed him his food. He poked at it, sniffed it and sifted through it. Then he looked up and announced, "I can't eat both potatoes and rice - that would be two carbohydrates." I almost choked on my food. Only in LA would a homeless person complain about the number of carbs in a free meal. Shaking his head, William condescended to eat it.

By the time William had finished, he seemed to feel right at home. "Now that my jacket is wet I guess I'll have to stay here," he said, seemingly staring at me, his pupils rolled back in his head so that his eyes resembled two dead moons. "On your sofa," he added, smiling.

I didn't know what to say. Fortunately, Cecile was able to say no when I couldn't. To assuage my Catholic guilt, around midnight we bundled him into the car and headed downtown to try to find him accommodation, but not even the meanest flea-pit motel would take him. It was clear they knew him.

We were at a loss, when William directed us to a street he wanted to go to. Cecile and I couldn't figure out why he wanted to go there - after all, there were no hotels or flop-houses in the street. The only people we came upon were four young women in the shadows, standing around some burning garbage bins. It finally dawned on me. The street was filled with hookers. I realised what William wanted to do. He had the $30 I had given him for a hotel, he had had a good feed and, most importantly, he had had a shower. I let him out of the car and he moved quickly towards the women, his cane tapping impatiently.

As Cecile and I drove home, she smiled and said, "Tout est bon." Indeed, yes - all was good.

A year later, I flew a playwright from New York to LA to work on a script, as I knew he had an exceptional ear for dialogue. I put him up in my apartment. He was 52-years-old, 1.95m and, as the Americans say, large. He was a charming, rambunctious character who had earned a considerable amount of money from his plays during the 1980s, but what I didn't know at the time was that he had managed to fritter it away on copious quantities of coke and alcohol. The result was a life that had become chaotic.

I gave the playwright sheets for the sofa, which is where he slept the first night. The next morning, I got up and stumbled into the bathroom, only to reel back at what I saw. He had torn out pictures from girlie magazines, dipped them in water, and then stuck them all over the walls and floor. He had made my bathroom into a sort of shrine in praise of breasts and vaginas. There was also a near-empty bottle of whisky, pools of cheap perfume and empty coke vials on the floor.

I left the bathroom and peered into the living room, dreading what I would find. The first thing I saw on the sofa was the playwright's enormous bare arse, staring back at me. It looked like a giant concrete mixer with a gaping crack down the centre. He hadn't even bothered to protect my sofa with the bottom sheet, and there was a large wet patch on it, so big that the upholstery was soaking.

As I was trying to take all this in, the playwright woke and, only vaguely aware of my presence, staggered past me and headed into the bathroom. I sniffed the sofa, suspecting he may have pissed on it, but no, it was his sweat. I felt like vomiting as I set about taking off the cushion covers.

When I'd finished, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was five to nine. I could hear my assistant, Sarah, coming up the stairs. I ran back into the bathroom, pushed the human beast into the kitchen, and shoved a rubbish bin in his hands. I rushed back to the bathroom and frantically tore down all the pornographic images, stuffing them into the bin. The playwright glanced down at his crushed porn and then at me, a look of complete incomprehension in his eyes.

A few hours later, my visitor cracked open his fifth beer, sending its foam fizzing over my papers as we tried to work. We had gotten nowhere and I was becoming increasingly anxious. I had typed out nothing of interest. "Wait! Wait!" he suddenly cried out, and, using a pencil, began to scribble furiously. For a moment I was pleased that he was working, but as I looked closer I saw that he wasn't actually writing any words, just scribbling in a manic, unco-ordinated way. Then he picked up a blue pen and scribbled over what he had already done. It was obvious that he was incapable of thinking, let alone thinking rationally. "It's not working," I blurted out. "I think you should leave."

He silently searched for his shoes, and when he eventually found one of them he shoved his spare clothes into a garbage bag. I thought he would go, but instead he went into the kitchen and fossicked through the rubbish bin. Ignoring the slops and tea leaves, he pulled out all the porno pictures, wiped them clean and tenderly put them into his garbage bag.

He then put the bag on his shoulder, stuck the empty whisky bottle in his jacket and, wearing only one tennis shoe, limped out the door and down the stairs.

It wasn't all crazies, coke heads and lost humanity on my sofa. Many movie people also came to my cramped office, including an actress who impressed me greatly when I interviewed her for a film I was developing. She was beautiful and elegant, with bee-stung lips and large doe eyes. Although she was still relatively unknown, she was one of those people whose glamorous presence is a striking confirmation that you are in Hollywood.

The actress was friendly, professional and responsive to what I was attempting to achieve. Most importantly, she was keen on the screenplay. But the studio didn't think she was a big enough name. It was 1996 and I knew, as did a few others, that she was a rising star. The film never made it any further, but the actress certainly did - she was Angelina Jolie.

At a low point in my life the sofa was also a silent witness to my drunken attempt to dismember a frozen turkey with the tomahawk. The monster turkey was a free Thanksgiving gift from my local supermarket. I struggled home with it, only to find it was too large to put in my freezer. I had also just learned that my film about conjoined twins had been "let go" by Fox studios.

To drown my sorrows, I drank a bottle of wine. I grabbed my tomahawk and, in tears of drunken frustration, hacked away at the frozen bird, trying to make the pieces small enough to fit in the freezer. Each time I hit the bird, the blade slid off its icy skin and shavings of frozen turkey mashed across the floor. Although I was conscious that a piece of the turkey, or worse still the tomahawk itself, might hit me in the eye, I didn't care. I was drunk, angry and bitterly disappointed.

Behind the paper-thin walls, my neighbours must have wondered if I was doing away with my girlfriend, limb by limb, or as Cecile would have said, "limp by limp".

But by that stage Cecile and I had broken up and she was back in France. I had no girlfriend and was completely broke. The rejection of my twins project was just the latest in a series of disappointments. The film we'd proposed Angelina Jolie for fell over because the studio couldn't find a big enough star, at that time there were no takers to direct The Last Samurai, and the script the playwright had been working on stalled because I didn't have enough money to pay for a new writer. It was Thanksgiving, I was broke, with little or no prospects, and I was alone. I guess you could say I was rock farming.

But the gods smiled on me. Three days later I received a large cheque for the story credit I had been given for writing Alien 3 some years before, even though my agent had said I would receive nothing. The money meant I could survive for another year in the business.

In some ways, I had adapted easily to LA. When one of my film projects was financed, I bought a house in old Hollywood up in the hills overlooking Griffith Park.

One morning I looked out of the kitchen window to see two wild deer grazing on the lawn. I stared at them for an hour, transfixed. For some obscure reason they reminded me of the loss of my father. My father had died peacefully a few years previously, when he was in his 80s. I had been away filming and was unable to attend his funeral. Making What Dreams May Come was not an attempt to understand my grief, but my decision to direct it was certainly tied inseparably with the loss of my dad.

Vincent Ward's 1998 movie, What Dreams May Come starring Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding jnr and Annabella Sciorra, won one Academy Award and was nominated for another. After that, Ward returned home to live and work in New Zealand.