And we used a lot of dialogue from the book. You can almost take the book and use it as a script. So, I read The Killer Inside Me and I thought it would be great to make it as faithfully as possible. We tried to borrow a little bit from a book by David Goodis, an American noir writer in the ’50s, but we ran into copyright issues and couldn’t make it. I had been trying to make a film in England–it was a modern film set close to the present. Well, I had read some work by Thompson before, but I hadn’t read The Killer Inside Me until about two years ago. When did you first read the novel and what was your first impression? I was surprised by how true it remained to Jim Thompson’s novel. HUNTER STEPHENSON: The film impressed me more than any other at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. In our interview with Winterbottom, he emphasized that not only is his film faithful to its 1952 source material, but Thompson pushed the boundaries even further…more than half a century ago.
When it premiered at Sundance this year, The Killer Inside Me sparked a curious controversy over what are, admittedly, two extremely graphic acts of violence. But a fiery encounter with a local prostitute named Joyce (Jessica Alba) ticks off a Freudian kettle inside his disturbed mind soon, Ford’s amusingly pathological whoppers are outmatched by his sexual, murderous destruction. In a career-defining lead performance, Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, a young deputy sheriff in 1950s Texas who masks homicidal tendencies and paranoia behind an endless supply of local-yokel bon mots and his small town’s mundanity. That is to say, he has crafted an entertaining and brilliant psychological portrait of a charming sociopath that is every bit the 2010 answer to Mary Harron’s American Psycho. Excuse the pun, ma’m, but Winterbottom killed it. Nevertheless, for his first American film, he chose to adapt one of the more delectably vicious, landmark novels in the annals of American noir, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.
Acclaimed British director Michael Winterbottom is no stranger to challenging and heady subject matter ( 9 Songs, 24 Hour Party People).
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