Interview - Michael Winterbottom: Portrait of a killer that pulls no punches

JIM Thompson died in 1977 having never really made it despite writing 30 novels and collaborating with the likes of Stanley Kubrick on the screenplays for Paths of Glory and The Killing.

In fact, it was Kubrick, himself – no slouch when it came to identifying a dark, complicated yarn – who described The Killer Inside Me as "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered".

Yet despite his prolific output and the uniqueness he gave to the pulp crime fiction genre – his books include Savage Night and A Hell of a Woman – Thompson was little-recognised in his lifetime. Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen made perhaps the best-known adaptation of a Thompson work with The Getaway in 1972. Four years later, Burt Kennedy made The Killer Inside Me. In 1990, James Foley directed After Dark, My Sweet and Stephen Frears made The Grifters. A pallid, voyeuristic remake of The Getaway followed in 1994.

Enter Michael Winterbottom. Never a director to repeat himself, the 49-year-old Lancastrian was seeking an English gangster story as his next project. He happened upon the novella, struck a deal with the rights holders and launched into what represents his American film debut.

Winterbottom calls the book "a very short, fast read". He adds: "It has a classic noir feeling: a deputy sheriff in a small town in 1950s Texas meets a woman, and being in love with her or having sex with her triggers various repressed memories from his childhood. From that point on, he's on a journey of revenge and violence, really."

Audiences who saw the film at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival were shattered by the brutishness of the violence depicted on screen. Winterbottom takes a pragmatic, unapologetic approach. "My original interest was to make a film with the book and not a remake of a film," he says.

"The aim was to make something as close to Jim Thompson's book as possible. I love the book and I think he's a great writer, but what's interesting is that although the book was written in 1952, it still seems shocking today.

"If Thompson saw the film, he'd probably still feel that it pulled its punches slightly compared to his own novel. But I think it's a great book."

Winterbottom describes central anti-hero Lou Ford (played in deliciously creepy fashion by Casey Affleck, the more talented younger brother of Ben) as "a very extreme version of what you see around you in real life". Thompson's book is told in the first person, from Lou's point of view.

Thus Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran constructed the film around this one central character – a man described as a victim as much as an abuser. He is uneasy, inadequate and self-destructive. Lou is in love with two women. One is notionally the traditional "good girl"; the other is a prostitute – the "bad girl". But Thompson weaves a complex, contradictory web around these three characters. Hooker Joyce (Jessica Alba) unlocks his repressed childhood memories. Girl-next-door Amy (Kate Hudson) loves him passionately and enjoys violent sex. Sadistic psychopath Lou projects his own self-loathing onto her. It is, observes Winterbottom, "a big, ambitious, full-blooded template that captures something of life.

"I think it's perfectly fair for people to feel that this film has violence in it and they don't want to see it. I completely understand that," he concurs as he considers a sequence that sees Lou beat a woman to death with his fists.

"Obviously, to see someone kill someone else – to see a man killing a woman – is difficult to watch and is brutal. I hope those scenes in the film are like that, because I think the point of Thompson's novel is that he's trying to show you something of his vision of the world.

"There is a lot of violence out there and he deliberately makes it as horrible as possible to show you how nasty and brutal and pointless it is. The book is almost like a Shakespearean tragedy. You have these incredible passions and a very theatrical story. The interesting aspect for me is the idea that Thompson is portraying this world where people destroy things, and you don't want to explain it psychologically.

"This is just what happens; this is what it is like. People, for whatever reason, are destructive. Thompson captures something true about the world. You don't need to try to explain it. You just need to show that it's true."

The Killer Inside Me (18) is on nationwide release.