You were there for a whole summer?
I was there for five months and it was hot the whole time. I wasn’t living in Bombay Beach, I was in Indio, which is 45 minutes away; I would drive there every day. I did rent a room inside Bombay Beach; it was so hot, it would reach 120 degrees sometimes in the middle of the day, and outside my camera would start melting. There was one bed and breakfast, a very strange place; when I rented a room, the woman told me that they’d shot a horror porn there. I’d go there around noon every day for a few hours when the heat was too much, doing a lot of the interviews and voice-overs.

Obviously you really gained the trust of these people. Was that difficult?
The hardest at first was Red. He was a very private person; he had a busy schedule and never had time for me (laughs). And he doesn’t trust people, only has a few friends. When he was sick, I was the person who sat with him in the hospital so then he trusted me. After that I got a lot more access to his life. CeeJay was harder than the Parrishes. The Parrishes were obviously my sort of base and I really connected with them from the start. I’d leave my stuff at their house and a lot of times spent the night there; that was a real friendship from the start.

Did you start with these three as your subjects or were there others and you narrowed it down?
I filmed a lot of people and for a while I thought I’d have a few stories and also jump to vignettes around the town, show the life of the town, but at a certain point it was clear that these were my three stories.