The Killer Inside Casey Affleck

"It's a good act, but it's easy to overdo."

Casey Affleck is starring in Michael Winterbottom's upcoming adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, and I'm more excited about a film adaptation of one of my favorite books than, perhaps, I have ever been. First, there's the casting of Affleck, who is perfect.

Lean and wiry; a mouth that looked all set to drawl. A typical Western-country peace officer, that was me. Maybe friendlier looking than the average. Maybe a little cleaner cut. But on the whole typical. That's what I was, and I couldn't change. Even if it was safe, I doubted that I could change. I'd pretended so long that I no longer had to.

What he's "pretending" is that he's a likable, easygoing lunk who bores the shit out of people with long conversations loaded with tired aphorisms ("I tell you the way I look at it, a man doesn't get any more out of life than he puts into it."), when underneath he's a brilliant, savage killer. At the beginning of the novel he'd managed to suppress "the sickness" for fourteen years, but his relationship with a prostitute (played here by Jessica Alba for some unfortunate reason) sets him off again.

Stanley Kubrick described this novel as "possibly the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." The covers of thrillers always bear that kind of exaggeration, usually supplied with exclamation points by helpful book designers, but in this case the blurb doesn't quite cover it. I'd remove the "possibly," along with the "first-person," because this novel is quite simply the scariest book I've ever read. It's 244 pages inside the head of a frightening, believable lunatic. Stacy Keach, now king of the stage historical drama, played Lou Ford in a 1976 film that I haven't seen.

Although Thompson wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's amazing Paths of Glory, his relationship with the movies hasn't been good. Directors as varied as Stephen Frears, Roger Donaldson, James Foley, and Bernard Tavernier have tackled his novels, but none of them has grasped that peculiarly Thompsonian edgy craziness. The ones I've seen have either been bad (After Dark, My Sweet; the Getaway remake with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger) or seemed to miss Thompson's particular kind of insanity (The Grifters, which is otherwise a good film). And one of the most popular, Sam Peckinpah's 1972 take on The Getaway, manages a happy ending, eliding the surreal, horrible-ever-after that Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw's characters faced in the novel; the real getaway happened when McQueen balked and had Walter Hill rewrite Thompson's script. The Tavernier (Coup de torchon, based on Thompson's Pop. 1280) I haven't seen, and most look forward to. At least, until now.

The only real question is which Winterbottom will show up. The restless, probing, intelligent director of A Mighty Heart, who might concentrate on the beggar's banquet of personalities in Thompson's fictional Central City? The sober, cold, calculating director of The Claim, who might delve into the story of Lou Ford and his father and adopted brother, who knew of his sickness but chose to cover for him? Or the pretentious wanker behind 9 Songs, who will fuck things up? Here's hoping it's one of the first two.