“I don’t understand how Sundance could book this movie. How dare you? How dare Sundance?”
That’s how one woman responded to “The Killer Inside Me” which has proven to be an early contender for this year’s “Antichrist.” Director Michael Winterbottom though has now come out in defense of his film, an adaptation of pulp writer Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel of the same name.
“It’s a brilliant book. And it is shocking. And I felt that we had to keep that element in the film,” Winterbottom tells The Guardian. “If you’re going to tell a story told from the point of view of a killer who is crazy, and it’s in that noir tradition anyway – a melodramatic, hardboiled kind of story – I think the audience should be shocked. If you make a film about murder that isn’t shocking, that’s far worse; there are too many films with violence for people to enjoy.”
Stanley Kubrick, who helmed two of Thompson’s stories with “The Killing” and “Paths Of Glory,” once described ‘Killer’ as “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” It was never meant to be easy to take in, it sounds like.
“The violence is shocking in the book and it’s shocking in the film,” Winterbottom reiterates. “It’s not a police procedural. The story is being told by someone who’s crazy. The story is the way he tells it and sees it, not the way it happened. The film has no sense of pleasure in the violence… Like all noirs, it has violence in it. It’s violent and shocking, cathartic in a way. Thompson is trying to create this imaginary dark wild Texas. It’s also a quite tender story. The audience didn’t understand when they watch this shocking violence, Casey is not the hero where the audience gets off on it… He wants to destroy anyone who is intimate with him, and he wants to destroy himself. ”
So, what has the director learned from this whole experience?
“The implication is that we should not be allowed to show violence against women. No one is encouraging that. There’s a lot of violence against women in the world. You can show men and women being killed, and as long as it’s entertaining, it’s ok. And if it’s brutal, we don’t want to see it.”
Also, reports now indicate that Jessica Alba walked out of the film’s screening not in response to what was on screen but because she had a flight. She has already seen the film and loved it, or so says her P.R. team.