Winterbottom Of Discontent
Cult English indie director Michael Winterbottom caused a storm at Sundance with his latest movie, an uncompromisingly violent adaptation of Jim Thompson’s noir classic The Killer Inside Me. But the filmmaker remains nonplussed by the reaction. “Certain scenes should be shocking,” he says.
Tara Brady, 15 Jun 2010
It started at Sundance and the post-premiere Q&A when one punter leapt to their feet shouting: “I don’t understand how Sundance could book this movie. How dare you? How dare Sundance?”
The ‘you’, in this particular instance is Michael Winterbottom, the prolific British talent behind films as diverse as The Claim, A Mighty Heart and Twenty-Four Hour Party People. The film is The Killer Inside Me, a slavishly faithful adaptation of Jim Thompson’s disturbing pulp classic.
“I just really loved the book,” shrugs the director. “As you say, it’s a very heightened melodramatic world. We didn’t really want to counter it. I thought that it would be interesting to make it as close to the book as possible rather than worry about the excesses or attempt to make it more innocent or natural. I don’t want this to sound like a negation of responsibility but the moment I decided I was going to make the film I knew it had to be a literal version of the book. It had to tell the same story. Once I made that decision a lot of the ideas were decided for me. It’s not like developing a screenplay or characters. It’s about telling a story as is.”
The story is, of course, not suited to delicate sensibilities. Like the daring source novel, Mr. Winterbottom’s film centres on Lou Ford, a 29-year-old deputy sheriff in a small Texas town. As we meet our anti-hero, Ford (played with remarkable duplicity by Casey Affleck) seems to be a regular, perhaps dim-witted guy with Good Old Boy manners. Beneath this facade, however, he is a whip-smart and depraved sociopath who acts out crazed sadomasochistic urges with both his official sweetheart (Kate Hudson) and Joyce, a less-respectable lady beyond the town limits (Jessica Alba).
When Lou and Joyce hatch a plan to swindle a local property magnate, we’re fairly sure it won’t end well, but even fans of the original book may be taken aback by the resulting violence.
“I was taken aback by the nature of the criticism levelled at those scenes,” says Mr. Winterbottom. “The idea that in order to represent murder onscreen it should be glamorous and endurable is illogical. I mean reading Thompson it’s very modern and it’s very shocking. It still has a massive visceral impact. So certain scenes should be shocking. This is a film about a man who is capable of killing someone he loves with his fists, who can switch between tenderness and unbelievable brutality. It should make you uncomfortable.”
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