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144 Michael Winterbottom: The Killer Inside Me Damon Smith/2009 Previously unpublished. Reprinted by permission of the author. Q: Your method of adapting novels—Tristram Shandy, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge—is not to be strictly faithful to the story or methodology of the source text. How did that play out here? A: Well, it was the opposite, really. When I read the book, I thought that you could almost film it. The book tells its story through dialogue. Jim Thompson is a brilliant dialogue writer and plotter. And then I approached the people who had the rights, and they already had a version of the screenplay which they’d sent me. In terms of individual scenes, it was very close to the book anyway, but the order had been changed. So my approach was to go back to the original story of the book and really keep the film as accurate and as faithful to the text as possible. Q: What themes in the novel captivated you, and which of your own did you want to incorporate? A: I think one of the great things about the book is the pace of the narrative . Within a few pages, the story’s being set up. Lou’s gone to meet Joyce Lakeland, there’s been a moment of violence and sex, and really from that point on, Thompson keeps the story moving so new things are constantly happening. The story unfolds incredibly fast and it was that, I think, that made me feel it would be kind of interesting to make into a film. Q: The Killer Inside Me is structured as a first-person narrative told by a deranged personality. Was there something about the psychology of Lou Ford that especially intrigued you? A: Obviously, if you read a book and want to make it into a film, there have to be lots of things you like about it. There’s something about the damon smith / 2009 145 way Lou narrates his own story that makes you feel sort of close to him, and makes you feel as well that’s something going to happen to redeem him. And what’s brilliant about the way Jim Thompson tells the story is you’re constantly feeling that you’re going to come to this moment of knowledge—and then the book ends! [Laughs] There’s a great story in the middle of the [narrative] that Lou Ford tells. He’s read somewhere that there was a guy who was happily married, who had a wife and a couple of children, and then he got a girlfriend in the neighboring town, and he’s happy with the girlfriend. And one day they discover the girlfriend had been killed and that the wife and children had been killed as well. And as he’s telling the story, he wonders, Why does someone do that? People do these things for no apparent reason, without any explanation. Newspapers are still full of stories like that, about people who seem to live normal lives, love their children and wives, and then they decide to destroy everything, to tear everything up. Lou is that sort of character. The people who he kills are quite close to him. A lot of people in the story love him, a lot of people love him despite the fact that he’s been violent towards them. So there’s a sense of the kind of waste that violence creates, which [anchors] the movie, rather than the psychology of why he does it. There are psychological explanations in the book, but it’s more the sense of that pointlessness and waste, and the tenderness of the situation that attracted me. Q: A lot of readers of Thompson’s novels have seen aspects of Greek tragedy at play in his work. A: For me, it’s Shakespearean as well. There’s a sense of this person who people do love, he does have this ability to inspire trust and faith. And yet, whether because of what happened in his childhood or what his father did to him, he feels worthless in a sense. When he’s destroying other people, he’s trying to destroy himself. He feels like he’s not worthy of being happy or being loved. So you have all this kind of stuff going on. Obviously, there’s a big play on fathers in the novel: the relationship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou...

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