I’d heard of the Salton Sea, but didn’t really know what it was. Is it more familiar to people on the West Coast?
No, not at all. People in Los Angeles and people who live two or three hours from the place never heard of it. It’s kind of incredible that there’s a sea in the middle of the desert that nobody knows about (laughs).

You discovered Bombay Beach and met Benny Parrish and his family when you worked on the Beirut video “Concubine.” Were you thinking about making a documentary at the time?
Yeah, for a long time I was thinking about doing a documentary that would have dance sequences in it because I work a lot with dancers in my music videos — not with dance and movement — and I’d never seen anything like that, to explore real life with movement, but in a way that’s organic and isn’t explained because the person is a dancer. Then I saw that place and met the Parrishes and it kind of all came together. I realized that it would be the perfect backdrop, dreamy and tragic and beautiful, to tell a story about America and also about some existential imaginary place in our heads.

You grew up in Israel. Did you have a fascination with the American West?
Not really, but I had a fascination with pictures I’d seen of Art Brut or environmental sculptures; people who are obsessive collectors, who make their houses into art. A lot of them live in the desert area; they cover their houses with found materials. There was one photo I saw in several books of something called Salvation Mountain, which you see in the film at the entrance to Slab City, about eight miles from Bombay Beach, where Red