It won Oscars and accolades as the best film of 1997, but the crime writer James Ellroy has a different recollection of the adaptation of his novel LA Confidential. “It is about as deep as a tortilla.”

“And if you watch the action of the movie, it does not make dramatic sense,” he told Hay festival. “I don’t care how many awards it’s won … I don’t like the bulk of the performances.”

He did, though, like the money he got. “They paid me some good dough to sign over the rights … money is the gift you never have to return.”

Ellroy was a highlight of the final weekend of the literary festival, talking about his new novel This Storm, set just after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He said LA Confidential the film, which starred the then relatively unknown Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe as LAPD detectives and Kim Basinger as the femme fatale Lynn Bracken, was nonetheless probably the best film adaptation of one of his novels. It was fortunate for film-makers that he did not, therefore, say what he thought of Cop (based on Blood on the Moon) or Brown’s Requiem or The Black Dahlia.

All the writers who come to Hay answer audience questions at the end of their session, but Ellroy said he did not want to be quizzed about “contemporary issues” or what he thought about Trump.

“Whether you like it or not, I live in the past,” he said. As far as he was concerned, history ended – as did his 2009 book Blood’s a Rover – in May 1972. He was only interested in what came before. “That is the period of my emotional and intellectual curiosity. Nothing after May of 72 vibrates my vindaloo.”

He said he had always been the same. “In 1956, when I was eight years old, I alerted my mother to the fact that I believed that world war two was still going on.” It ended before he was born, she replied. “I didn’t believe her then, I don’t believe her now.”

Ellroy writes about lowlife Los Angeles and admits that as a young man he read a lot of Raymond Chandler, the patron saint of hard-boiled crime fiction. But woe betide anyone who suggests he is beholden to him. “Raymond Chandler is the most overrated writer in the American canon,” he told Hay. “Raymond Chandler sucks chihuahua dicks.”

His preference is for Dashiell Hammett, the creator of Sam Spade. “Hammett wrote the kind of man that he was afraid that he was. Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wished he were.”