Michael Winterbottom: On Adapting Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me (Directed by Michael Winterbottom)

The pulp writer Jim Thompson, wrote over 30 novels and is  known for writing some of the bleakest noir ever put to page. Stephen King, who claims Thompson among his favorite authors, wrote with a kind of wonder of Thompson’s desolate stories. “There are three brave lets” in Thompson’s writing, King explained in the introduction to Thompson’s Now and On Earth: “he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.” 

The director Stephen Frears, who adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film, was struck by the relationship between Thompson’s work and certain aspects of classical Greek tragedy. Thompson’s uncompromising noir informs and feeds back into these tragic aspects to create a vision of a hell in earth; an a stark but recognizable—vision of present day life. This relationship is particularly evident in Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece The Killer Inside Me.

Killer Inside owes much to traditional noir tropes. The principle character, small-town sheriff Lou Ford, is obsessed with setting right a wrong. His brother, he believes, was killed by a corrupt local industrialist. Ford devises a strategy to bring the man down, beyond the law, by setting his son up with a prostitute. Ford however falls in love with the woman himself, but continues with the scheme: to murder both the prostitute and the son and make it look like a murder-suicide. The plan falls apart in the best noir tradition, leading Ford to kill further to cover up his initial crime. The crimes become increasingly savage as Ford’s recklessness grows, but Ford continues to remain convinced right until the end that he’s in control of events and can, ultimately, not face the consequences. By the novel’s end, Ford is in jail and reflecting, in his typically calculated manner, on his crimes, his reasons, and his own state of mind.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s faithful recent adaptation divided critics and audiences. Here he discusses his approach to the book and adaptation in general.

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 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 relation- ship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples, who’s a sort of alternative father figure, and between Chester Conway and Elmer Conway, who’s another bad father. There’s a pattern of relationships with fathers and surrogate fathers that runs through it. So it’s an incredibly rich book, you know, it’s not necessarily a naturalistic novel. But it’s full of human emotions.

Q: I’m just wondering if Thompson’s connections to cinema interested you at all.

A: In terms of his own writing?

Q: Yeah, his writing for Kubrick, for instance.

A: That would not be a reason for me to make a film of this book. The reason is because it’s a great book and when I read it, I felt it would be a really interesting film to make, and completely different from the films I normally write. In the end, when you choose a film, it’s for that reason. The material is interesting. It’s not that surprising that Jim Thompson had a connection to cinema because he’s brilliant at dialogue, he’s brilliant at stories, and the worlds he writes about in his novels seem like worlds that would be interesting for cinema. I think with Kubrick—I’m not sure what kind of credits he got on the two collaborations [The Killing and Paths of Glory]—I think he got an “additional dialogue” credit on one. I was talking to his daughter, who came onto the set, and she was saying that, you know, he did a lot more work on it than that. So that’s kind of fascinating, but it wasn’t the reason for making the film, obviously...

Q: In general, you invoke genre—road movies, for example—without retaining all the expected codes. Did you see yourself trying to steer clear of certain noir conventions with this film?

A: Only in the sense that from the beginning we didn’t want to do a pastiche of the 1950s. We didn’t want to shoot it in a particular style because of genre or the content of the story. So it’s not a particularly noir-looking film. Jim Thompson is a great writer, but he’s a very simple, direct writer. He’s very focused on the story and the character and what’s happening and why are they doing that. Really, he’s writing very lean and kind of spare. So it was trying to be true to that more than [make it] look or feel like a noir fifties’ film. So in that sense, perhaps, we got away from generic convention, I’m not sure. But basically, it’s okay, this is how the book works, and [we said] let’s find an approach to the film that will be in keeping with that...

Q: In the past, when you’ve made period dramas like Jude or The Claim, you always manage to retain a very contemporary language and feel to the way you dramatize things. Is that something you’ve continued here, with The Killer Inside Me?

A: Well, I think Jim Thompson’s stories are actually very contemporary, and one of the things is that it’s someone writing in the early fifties about small-town Midwest America, talking about the sex and violence that goes on behind closed doors. The dialogue we’re using in the film is very much taken from the book. Even so, it feels very contemporary because when you read the novel, it’s very fresh. You really don’t feel you’re reading a creaky old period piece.

– Excerpted from Michael Winterbottom. Interviews. Edited by Damon Smith, 2009.

John Cassavetes: On Writing ‘Husbands’

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

In 1970s Husbands the film's opening subtitle describes it as a "comedy about life, death, and freedom," and these are indeed the film's principal themes. Shaken by the loss of a close friend, three friends embark on a persistently raucous study of what may have been and what might come next. Their introspection results in a profound sense of self-evaluation, but the men are primarily living for the moment as they confront unpleasant truths about themselves, their mortality, and their relationships.

Husbands is an emotional experience, one that is difficult to pin down or easily digest. Filmed and acted with a gruelling directness, with certain sequences proceeding without narrative progression and little character revelation. It emanates unceasing activity and conversation, and Cassavetes' probing camera, which remains subjective and observational, captures with an unrestrained, almost random reality. “ Like life, it’s also very slow and depressing in areas,” writes Tom Charity. “The one thing it’s not is a shorthand film.” Private macho bravado seeps into the public realm, signifying a self-centeredness and recklessness regardless of the context. The men's interactions with women are clumsy, inarticulate. Cassavetes continued to edit the picture seemingly searching for a satisfactory version. Despite its brilliant exuberance, humour, despair, darkness and indulgences, or perhaps because of it, the final result was a critical and commercial failure.

Perhaps Geoff Andrew comes closest to best describing the great achievement of Husbands:

“But Cassavetes no more condoned the men’s boozily boisterous behaviour than he condemned it. He wasn’t interested in judging his characters as they embark on their binge, first in New York, then in London, following a friend’s funeral. Rather, his concern was always to represent human behaviour, in all its flawed, self-contradictory perversity, as honestly as he could. And if that meant showing a trio of middle-aged New York commuters being irresponsible, selfish, petulant, boorish, even boringly repetitive at times, so be it. The truth isn’t always attractive.

“The truth is fascinating, however, and it’s important. More to the point here, it’s also rare in American cinema, since film has usually been primarily regarded – by the Hollywood studios, at any rate – not as art but as a) a means of making money, and b) a source of entertainment, pure and simple. So endings should be clear, closed and happy, characters should be easily categorisable as good or bad, and stories should adhere to conventions already known to be popular.

“Husbands is a marvellous example of his methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative (‘story’ is far too strong a word for what happens) and its long takes, it makes for a warts-and-all study of male pride, self-pity, frustration and friendship that is at once properly serious and sharply funny.

“It’s the kind of brave, devil-may-care film that shows up the artistic timidity – and, indeed, the dishonesty (be it emotional, social, political or psychological) – of so much mainstream cinema. Small wonder Cassavetes remains one of the most important influences on filmmakers keen to preserve their independence. He understood, and repeatedly proved, that one didn’t have to tell lies in order to be entertaining. After all, what could be more interesting than life as it’s lived by recognisably real human beings?”

In the following excerpts John Cassavetes discusses his approach to writing a screenplay, how it relates to his life and how artistic freedom determines the path the script takes.

Before Husbands was a screenplay, I must have done about 400 pages of notes. I thought about it for several years. Then there was a screenplay. My first draft was abominable – all the pitfalls of that first-told tale – a slick farce predicated on men running away from their wives to the lure of the will. There are certain catchphrases that people are attracted to made famous by Time magazine, such as ‘Swinging London’ – and there’s always someone standing around behind you who says, ‘That sounds funny,’ but when you look into the eyes of two artists who want the best for themselves and want to be associated with something that has some meaning that’s not good enough. The characters were empty. During the second half of 1968, Ben, Peter and I passed dozens of revisions of the script around everywhere we went. From Rome [where most of the interiors of Machine Gun McCain were filmed] we had been to Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco [where the exteriors for Machine Gun McCain were filmed], Los Angeles and back to New York [where Gazzara lived and Cassavetes was supervising the release of Faces]. We had followed each other around using every spare moment we could find to assess the values of three men – three New Yorkers with jobs, who had passed the plateau of youth, who were married and happy and living in Port Washington, Long Island, the commuters’ paradise. That’s as far as we got in one year. Long conversations until five o’clock in the morning. Back and forth the story went.

The characters in Husbands are quite different from those in Faces. I mean Faces was about people who were just getting by. These guys don’t want to just get by in life. They want to live. I don’t really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it’s about three married guys who want something for themselves. They don’t know what they want, but they get scared when their best friend dies. Or you could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don’t know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment. Every scene in the picture will be our opinions about sentiment. I try to talk to the actors and try to find out what I really think about sentiment. It may turn harsh or bitter; but I can allow anything as long as I know we are honest. We worked with no story, basically no story except what I mentioned, and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.

When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it’s great. After being an actor for a few years you really don’t care about money, fame or glory anymore; those things are good, but you need something more.

Cassavetes’ elusiveness about the subject of his film was neither modesty nor coyness. He believed that to lock himself into a predetermined story or a preconceived conception of his characters’ identities was too limiting. To play a ‘character’ in a ‘narrative’ was to reduce the sliding, shifting complexity of life to cartoon clichés.

Each moment was found as we went along – not off the cuff, not without reason – but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a ‘story’ that is predictable – and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as I work. In Husbands the off-the-set relationship between Gazzara, Falk and myself determined a lot of the scenes we created as we went along. It was a process of discovering the story and the theme. When you know in advance what the story is going to be, it gets boring really fast. At one point we decided that we weren’t even going to shoot in London; Peter broke into laughter and so did I. What a ter- rific thrill to tell the truth – to not protect some stupid idea that doesn’t work. From then on, it didn’t matter if it was London, Paris, Hamburg – or Duluth!

I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and experiences, he should do with that character what he wants. If what he is doing comes out of that, then it has to be meaningful. If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is pure, the story will come out of that. If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a commitment to just saying lines. If you don’t have a script, then you take the essence of what you really feel and say that. You can behave more as yourself than you would ordinarily with someone else’s lines. Most directors make a big mystery of their work; they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thoughts, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role. Honestly, I never have! That indicates to me that you want to step forward and show someone something, and that terrifies me, really. What you want to do is be invisible as that character, so that there’s no pressure on you worrying about the outside world.

You made a role yours not by ‘acting’, but by believing in it, by adding something of yourself to it, by playing it personally.

I get bored seeing two people that are supposed to be in love, who kiss, screw or whatever they do. I get bored by that because they’re only supposed to do those things. I don’t really believe that they’re doing that, and I couldn’t care less. It always struck me when I used to go see pictures as a kid at Times Square that when it came to the love scenes everybody used to boo. But once in a while you’d see a picture like Red Shoes, and no matter how tough the audience was, they would root for the love story because these people didn’t pretend to be in love with each other – they were in love with each other.

All the people I meet make up my films. I make movies not about somebody else’s, but my life!
But the deepest connection between the actor and the character is their shared sense that it is critical to seize the moment and not let life pass you by.

Some people can’t wait. That’s the only reason I’m attracted to people. Because we don’t want to let the moments go by. Those are the ones I am attracted to. We might not be here tomorrow. I make every picture like it’s the last day of my life. You got anything to say, you put it in there now. Don’t hold back. What are you waiting for?

I make my films out of my problems. You know, I have problems, you have problems. You won’t admit it. I will admit it because I’m an artist. My job is to put emotions out on the surface. Not to report on other people’s emotions, but to put your own emotions out on the surface. My brother had died at thirty and I loved him and my life changed. That’s all. Simple as that. It was over so quickly, and I just had no room in my life. When someone dies that young there is no time to say good- bye. I was young and working and everything else and I couldn’t do anything except stagger around for a while, then try to reevaluate where I was. So I made a picture. I didn’t make a picture about my dead brother; I made a picture that was affected by the death of a best friend and these three men. I dedicated Husbands to him. You ask me why I do these things? I don’t know why I do them. I hope it means something to certain people that have suffered loss and don’t know how to express it.

– Excerpts from Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes.