Stanley Kubrick described Jim Thompson’s book The Killer Inside Me as ‘the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind’ he’d ever read. British film director Micheal Winterbottom, who’s just turned that book into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, agrees. “It is a great book, a very short, fast read,” he says. “It’s powerful and the violence is very shocking, but afterwards – unlike a lot of noir stories that grip you only while you read them – this story stayed with me. There was something truthful about Thompson’s picture of this dark world.”
Written in 1952 during the great pulp crime era, Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (like the equally famous The Talented Mr. Ripleywhich was published three years later) is written from the point of view of the criminal, taking the reader inside the twisted reality of a killer’s world. It tells the story of Lou Ford (played by Affleck), a charming and unassuming small town sheriff who appears amiable on the outside but who is actually dangerously psychopathic when you dig a little deeper. The book doesn’t take long getting to the heart of Ford’s personality. “By about page six,’” says Winterbottom, “Ford has gone to meet a woman. She slaps him, he slaps her back, he has sex with her and he decides to kill her. It has a classic noir feeling.”
Winterbottom – the prolific director behind independent films like 24 Hour Party People, Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, A Mighty Heart and, more recently Genova – read the book while developing his own film noir project in England. When that fell through he began to search for the owner of the film rights to Thompson’s book, and discovered that Australian John Curran had completed a script for a version that had never been made. “ I was very lucky that they hadn’t already made it,” says Winterbottom. “And when I read the script that John had written, I could see that it was very faithful to the book, with only a few alterations to the narrative structure. I didn’t do much to his script, just put it back in the original order. I was only really interested in doing a very literal version of the book, to see if I could recreate the impact it has on the screen.”
This meant of course that Winterbottom had to work with the brutality of Thompson’s central character – a man who seems to love, but who is compelled to destroy. It’s this aspect of the story that Winterbottom saw as the most complex and interesting. “I was hoping that the film could work the same way as the book,” he says. “Lou Ford does these terrible things but afterwards you feel that he’s doing it because of self hatred and that he’s destroying his own possibilities. Gradually as the story goes on you feel like he just wants to be caught, and be put out of his misery.”
In playing the role of the treacherous antihero, Casey Affleck appears in every scene of the film, giving a compelling performance as a man who seems strangely disconnected from his actions. Winterbottom chose Affleck because of his ability as an actor to make you wonder what’s going on inside his head. “The whole film depends on this role,” says Winterbottom. “I had to find someone who’d be appealing to the women who love him in the story, but who’d be believable when he is violent. But more than that, Thompson constantly emphasises the huge gap between the inner workings of the character and his outward behaviour. Casey was the perfect actor for that.”
The Killer Inside Me is quite a departure from Winterbottom’s trademark style of filmmaking. He rarely works from a script, preferring actors to improvise around a basic story idea in order to keep the performances and the story fresh and alive. It’s an approach Winterbottom has developed since he first started in the industry. “Early on when I started directing it was quite improvised and loose,” he says,” and the films I always liked to watch early on felt – even if it wasn’t true – like a small group of people had just gone out and made a story about people in their natural environment, out on the street. They felt free wheeling. And those are the films that I still love. There’s a great [Jean-Luc] Godard quote about how producers give directors too much time and too much money. You don’t need to spend years working on a script with three hundred script editors and twenty-five producers. I think that it’s more fun to go out a make a film. The idea of spontaneity is much more attractive to me.”
Whilst Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me was made with a script and a more traditional approach to getting the coverage he wanted, Winterbottom (who famously turned down directing Good Will Hunting and The Cider House Rules) wasn’t about to take a simplistic Hollywood approach to telling the story, despite the American setting and his A-list team of actors. “The interesting aspect for me in this story is the idea that Thompson is portraying this world where people destroy things, and you don’t want to explain it psychologically. Because this is just what happens, this is just what it is like. People fuck up, people destroy their lives, people, for whatever reason, are destructive. He captures something true about the world. You don’t need to try to explain it; you just need to show that it’s true. In the end this story is not a kind of documentation of how a killer behaves, or what a killer is,” he says, “but a very dramatic and extreme version of how we all behave.”
