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Winterbottom - The (re)discovery of Jim Thompson |
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| 11/12/2010 |
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Adrian Wootton – head of Film London and regular guest of the Courmayeur Noir in Festival – spoke to the director of the controversial, new film adaptation of The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom on the often-underrated work of writer-screenwriter Jim Thompson.
Thompson has long lingered in unjustifiable literary and cinematic limbo and his work never achieved great success. On the occasion of the Italian premiere of The Killer Inside Me, Wootton and Winterbottom discussed the salient moments of Thompson’s career.
After writing pulp fiction in the 1950s, the Oklahoma writer broke into film and worked three times with Stanley Kubrick, on the films The Killing and Paths of Glory, as well as on a script that was never made, which was found in the director’s archives. Thompson fell away into oblivion after his brief collaboration with Kubrick, which ended on a bitter note and no mention of Thompson among the credits of either of those films.
Sam Peckinpah’s adaptation of Thompson’s The Getaway and Steve McQueen’s involvement in the film were an important (and missed) opportunity for the writer, whose screenplay was neither to his own or the actor’s liking. After making a cameo appearance in Dick Richards’ Farewell, My Lovely (adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel), Thompson finally saw his frightful and innovative The Killer Inside Me brought to the big screen by Burt Kennedy. The result, however, was once again disappointing.
On-again, off-again interest from publishers and directors in his work made Thompson easy to criticize and hard to forget. It was Michael Winterbottom’s faithful transposition of the duality of Lou Ford (the story’s main character, played in the film by a masterful Casey Affleck) that breathed new life into Thompson. “I wanted to make a film based on the work of David Goodis, who wrote Shoot the Piano Player,” says Winterbottom, “but I couldn’t get the copyright cleared for the book, not even with Adrian’s help! I had read The Killer Inside Me with great interest, I knew the American producer who had the copyright and had a screenplay for it, so I decided to do that instead. But I didn’t want to adapt the book, I wanted to film it, so I went back to the novel for the narrative order and a lot of the dialogue, which comes straight from the book.”
More than once during the discussion at the Noir in Festival, Winterbottom praised the visual potential of Thompson’s novels, as did Wootton, who believes that Thompson’s writing contains such strong cinematic elements that it lend themselves to relatively simple and easy transposition to film.
In The Killer Inside Me, Winterbottom strays from the book just once, sidestepping a superficial (albeit revolutionary for its time) breakdown of Lou’s “condition.” The director preferred instead to use purely cinematic elements to give audiences clues to the main character’s behavior. Thus, whereas Thompson portrays a man whose schizophrenia comes from his father’s abuse, Winterbottom was less interested in showing the origins of Lou’s self-inflicted manias than in their consequent violent actions, to depict a closed character in a dangerous cage.
Continues the director: “Lou lives in his father’s house, reads his father’s books, listens to his father’s music and is inertly prey to a destructive force fed by contrasting instincts.” Just as Lou’s emotional potential is canceled out by his violent impulses, the love offered him is pushed away by his brutality.
The book and film both share the first-person narrative, through which Lou reveals a disturbing disconnect between his perception of the world and reality. Because they stuck so close to the book, Winterbottom says, “Casey didn’t have a lot of freedom in creating his character, but he was brilliant in both showing [Lou]’s madness and in masking it.”
As for the shoot itself, the director says it was a particular one for him: “I usually work with a group the entire time but, here, while Casey was constantly on set, all the other actors worked for only a few days. They all approached their characters with enthusiasm and were dedicated to tackling the arduous challenges of the film. Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson and Casey Affleck worked intensely on the difficult scenes of violence.”
For the film’s music, Winterbottom drew from the world so vividly evoked by Thompson. The soundtrack – blues, swing, country and even opera – fully expresses Thompson’s themes of the death, violence and failed love. The music depicts the characters’ inner lives and is in perfect keeping with the spirit of Texas, of which brutality plays an integral part.
“Thompson portrays 1950s Texas in a realistic way and with melodramatic tones,” says Winterbottom. “His writing is fast and direct, enriched by brilliant dialogue. I think that Texas is a fundamental component of the novel and, consequently, the ideal setting for the film.”
Even though Winterbottom’s film had a lukewarm reception in the UK and was criticized for excessive violence, the director says he’s satisfied with the actors and the end result. He holds the same opinion as Thompson, that The Killer Inside Me is made up of nuances, and veers between good and evil, and vice versa, pushing perverse human mechanisms to the limits to explore the dark side hidden in all of us.
Although, as Wootton pointed out, Winterbottom has never repeated himself in terms of genre, the director says he would nevertheless like to go back to working on the Goodis adaptation.
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