Exclusive: Michael Winterbottom Talks 'The Killer Inside Me'

Prolific U.K. director Michael Winterbottom’s latest directorial effort, “The Killer Inside Me,” is the “Antichrist” of 2010.

Meaning, Lars Von Trier’s perceived misogynist picture that scandalized audiences last year with its genital mutilation (among other things) and Winterbottom’s grizzly adaptation of Jim Thompson’s infamous pulp novel has also had audiences up in arms because of its graphic depiction of violence against women (lead actor Casey Affleck plays a deranged sheriff who punches Jessica Alba’s prostitute character into a pumpkin-like pulp) and its overall shocking tone (Affleck plays a police offer-turned-serial killer). The picture also stars Kate Hudson, Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas (who is really remarkable in the picture), Simon Baker and Bill Pullman and comes out in limited release this Friday (June 18).

It’s not an easy picture to digest to say the least, but we’d be lying if we didn’t say the bold, thrilling, sometimes comical and sometimes incredibly dark and disturbing picture wasn’t one of our favorites of the year so far. We recently sat down with the perennially productive director (who basically got divorced because he was a workaholic).

What drew you to Jim Thompson’s novel?
I’d been trying to make a film here, in England, in Manchester and we borrowed a little bit from David Goodis’ novel [“Down There”]. Goodis was a pulp author like Jim Thompson. We were about to start filming and we had a problem with the rights so we couldn’t make that film. So at that time, I had read “Killer Inside Me.” I had read some of Jim Thompson ages ago. And I read “Killer Inside Me” and thought, well, we were just borrowing a little bit of David Goodis and taking him to a different time and a different place… with “Killer Inside Me,” I read the book and thought maybe we could make a film that stuck exactly to where the book was set (the time, the place) and make a film that was really the opposite of the film we were thinking about making in England, where we used the book and actually made a film of this book.

It was recently posited that Europeans do better Jim Thompson adaptations than Americans.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. You have to judge the individual films. In this case, having read the book, I just wanted to make a movie that was as close to the source as possible. As a coincidence, I met Walter Hill and he was saying that he worked on the story and said that Thompson was slightly frustrated on “The Getaway” because they had taken out all of his dialogue; gotten rid of it and made it more cinematic and that Thompson would have rather had the dialogue from the book in the film. So maybe from his point of view [‘Killer Inside Me’ would be a rather good adaptation because we tried to stick to the storytelling of the book and we borrowed a lot of dialogue from the book for the film.

The use of Mahler and Strauss, was that a nod to Kubrick? The film seems to have some Kubrick-ian shades (the departed auteur tried worked with Thompson on two projects including the unrealized Kubrick film, “Lunatic at Large” which is currently being redeveloped).
No, it was more to do with the fact that in the story, in the novel, he [Casey Affleck] reads his father’s medical books, and lives in his father’s house, and spends time in his father’s study. And I think that one of the ways he was connecting with his father was listening to the type of music his father had. And we felt that music was the right kind of music for the father. And it sort of connects to something inside Lou [Casey Affleck’s character] that is kind of opposite of the kind of public persona of Lou.

What did the female actresses think of the violence in the script versus what ended up on the screen?
Obviously, from the novel, even when we did the violent scenes in the film, we tried to stay as close to the novel as possible. In terms of the scene with (Kate Hudson’s character), in terms of violence on screen there isn’t that much violence on screen. He kicks her twice. It’s about emotional violence in a way. And I think what makes those scenes so disturbing is that Lou is such a character and he’s also telling a story. You can’t get away from Lou when he does these terrible things. And what he does is killing people in these horrible ways and killing people who love him and people that he also loves. It’s this kind of emotional violence that is very hard, rather than visually actually.

A recent NYTimes piece suggested that you and Casey Affleck didn’t talk much on the set and that he was inside his head a lot. Was that part of his method?
I didn’t read it. From my point of view, we had a pretty fantastic cast. All the actors came in for four or five days maximum, really, because all the actors really have scenes with Casey. Casey is in every scene, and all the other people act with his character. So with Casey, we were with him the whole time and he was my first choice for the part. And obviously Casey and I talked about it in anticipation of the film and then on set, he’d just get on with it. I don’t think it’s my job to tell people what to do. And certainly with Casey, he thinks about what he’s doing a lot, and my job is to capture what he’s doing and create the environment where he can do what he does best. And I think he’s a great actor.

Was it weird finding that tonal balance for the film? There’s some twisted things going on.
[Laughs] Yeah, there is this kind of dark humor in Thompson. There’s a gap between who Lou is pretending to be, this kind of slow-witted, low-talking sheriff and what he really is inside his head. And that gives you potential for dark humor and it was difficult in trying to decide how far to go with that. I kind of wanted that tone but I didn’t want it to become too quirky, post-modern where everything is kind of smirking. Because there’s a moment in the story where he’s telling you what’s happened and therefor it isn’t necessarily true. There are all these things that characters are doing off-screen that you don’t see and don’t know about until you psychologically figure it out later. So he’s a very unreliable narrator, and I wanted it to be there but I didn’t want it to be too much about that, because then it becomes a thing about “maybe it doesn’t matter because it’s a story.” It is a fiction because Lou is giving you a version of what happened but Thompson’s novel has a lot of power and he makes you feel for how the characters get destroyed as well.

The Elias Koteas character seems like he may only exist in Casey Affleck’s imagination.
I think there are lots of elements that you can say “What is going on?” on a basic plot level, like when he goes to Fort Worth, he’s gone crazy and Chester Conway [Ned Beatty’s character] is manipulating Lou away from Joyce [Jessica Alba]. There are all these plot things that are aware of the fact that because Lou is telling the story you’re not going to get everything until later. And obviously there’s a sense that Lou is also gotten to the point where he’s seeing things that aren’t there or whatever. So it’s possible that things aren’t real. But at the same time I don’t think there’s a “real” version and an “unreal” version of the story. You just have to accept that Lou is telling the story, and you’re in Lou’s world and it may not be happening, but it’s not like this bit is true, this bit isn’t true, you kind of have to question. Beyond that, you’re in a noir novel where you buy into a very fictional world and Lou’s narration lends an extra level. It’s all fiction in the end.

The controversy surrounding this film that is the controversy surrounding “The Promised Land,” as a Palestine-set thriller, just isn’t going to phase you at all?
[Laughs] It’s going to be a different set of problems, it’ll be a different set of people annoyed. We’re actually shooting in autumn.

You’ve worked outside of Hollywood for so many years. Do you think that level of diversity works against you?
Definitely. I think that in independent films, there’s even more commercial pressure to remake the same kind of film because that’s the kind of film that gets made. If you make the same kind of films for the same kind of audience, with the same sort of story, you kind of know you can get the money or you can’t. If you’re making a variety of different stories, some with big stars with Kate Hudson or Jessica Alba, but it’s aimed at different audiences, then it makes it more complicated. It doesn’t make things easier. But it makes it more enjoyable for me. We find the kind of stories we want to make and then we try to make them.

Now some people say that eclecticism leaves you without a distinctive style.
I don’t care, to be honest. From my point of view, one of the pleasures of film is that you’re working on each film with a different group of people. We have a kind of group of people that I work with all the time, and the crew is the same. But on each film it’s a different set of actors, different locations, to me the idea that every film is different is different is appealing to me. The fact that each film has its own concrete set of problems and that is part of the fun. I love shooting on location, I hate shooting on sets, and whenever you get on location, everyday, you have to make a whole bunch of decisions that all affect the film. One day it’s raining, one day it’s sunny, all these random factors affect the film and I love that. For me, I hate when it’s all storyboarded out and you know exactly what you’re doing. For me, each film being different is part of the enjoyment and part of the fun.

Your pace of making film is a super quick clip. Are you in pursuit of something artistically you haven’t achieved yet?
No, if you look back at filmmakers in general. If you look back to the Hollywood studio system and the systems in Europe, everybody up to the ’60s and ’70s, everyone was making a film a year or even six films a year. And in the last twenty or thirty years it became “Oh you should wait two or three years before you shoot the next one” and I don’t think anyone would argue that films today are that much more sophisticated or are that much better than they were forty years ago. If anything, they’ve moved away from that. For me, making films as fast as possible, it’s like once you finish one film and you can make the next one, you make it.

Wanted to ask about some outstanding projects. Did “Genova” ever get a proper U.S. release date?
What happened was when we showed it in Toronto [Film Festival] it was bought by a U.S. distributor that just went bankrupt. So for a year or so, people have wanted to buy it but couldn’t buy it because this company wouldn’t sell it. But now it has been bought and should see some sort of release soon-ish, but I’m not sure when. It was bought by E1.

Is “Seven Days” and “Murder in Samarkand” still happening?
Yeah, well, we’re making “Seven Days” over five years [ed. It stars Shirley Henderson who also starred in Winterbottom’s “Wonderland”]. We’ve done it for three years and we’ve got another two years to go. ‘[Samarkand]’ we wanted to make it, but we’re not going to make it, so you can cross that one off. [laughs]

We were particularly interested in your attachment to “London Fields” too.
Eeeeeeh, there’s a loose attachment. I think I’ll have to wait a few years before I do that one. I think it could be misconstrued, that one, because of the violence towards women. Martin Amis is a great writer but all the movies based on his books have been disasters so maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there.

Well you can be the one to break the mold!
[laughs]

We’re doing a retrospective on your work. Do you ever think about your oeuvre? Do you have a favorite film or something you’re not quite happy with?
To be honestly, like all directors, I don’t spend that long pouring over the films I’ve made. I don’t think about how good they are or how bad they are. Obviously, there are films that you do that you’re warm to but that could be because of the memory of the experience, which has to do with making the film than the actual film. I think the things I have the fondest memories of are things like “24 Hour Party People” and “Wonderland” and “In This World” and that area, really. But that could just be when they were made or random factors.

“The Killer Inside Me” is again, one of our fave films of the year so far and hits theaters in limited release Friday June 18. It should be on VOD the same day or shortly thereafter.