Christopher Nolan's Early Years

About a decade ago I was tipped off to an odd, inscrutable film by a budding English director living in LA. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which starred Guy Pearce in an ill-fitting pale suit and bleached hair, knocked me out, and I spent an afternoon talking about movies, memory and fragmented narrative with the 30-year old director at his apartment near the LACMA while he played Radiohead's Kid A on a boom box.

I just dug up my old New Times cover story, "Indie Angst," because of Nolan's new film Inception, and part of what's striking is how much a struggle the director went through to get that early film shown. For reasons I have never understood, the company that owns New Times does not keep an online archive for the LA paper, but thanks to the UC Berkeley film archives you can read the story here.

Memento, of course, is one of the most original movies of the last 20 years, with a bizarre structure -- a few minutes of exposition, then a violent jump back to a previous sequence -- that should not have worked but somehow did.

Nolan talked about how the novel had spent more than a half century messing with chronology -- he was especially interested in Graham Swift's Waterland -- and discussed Harold Pinter and his interest in noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and James Ellroy.

"The only useful definition of narrative I've ever heard," Nolan told me, "is 'the controlled release of information.' And these novelists and playwrights -- they're not feeling any responsibility to make that release on a chronological basis. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we don't feel that responsibility in day-to-day life."

Of all the filmmakers I interviewed during my years at New Times -- Labute, Linklater, Solondz, Spike Jonze, Kevin Smith, the Blair Witch guys -- Nolan was among the smartest, the most sure of himself, and the last one I would have expected would be making blockbuster movies.

Nolan's lean, mean, Hitchcock-inspired debut, Following, was made with borrowed equipment from his British university and almost no money. "For me it's very satisfying filmmaking, because the only sacrifices are practical ones. The filmmaking process in my head, the imaginative process, was identical to making a film for millions of dollars. When I made a film with a bigger budget, I realized it's the same thing. You've just got more trucks."

One thing I don't recall discussing with Nolan, by the way, was comic books.

The Killer Inside Jim Thompson

WITH the film adaptation of Michael Winterbotton’s The Killer Inside Me opening in Los Angeles today, I turned to the author's biographer for insight into this very complicated pulp figure. If there is a better biography of an American writer than Robert Polito’s Savage Art, I’ve not read it. (The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.)

Polito’s book describes Thompson as a “profoundly alienated man’’ who belonged to the Communist party in the ’30s, worked in oil fields and ran with the underworld during Prohibition. Thompson, he writes, produced work that seems congruent with the early rock n roll of Elvis and Little Richard, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the films of Nicholas Ray.

Polito – a poet who heads the graduate writing program at the New School -- and I spoke in the context of Winterbottom’s adaptation, which I write about here. What follows are excerpts from our discussion.

Q: Let’s start out by framing Jim Thompson in literary history.

A: I very much see Thompson as the leading writer of the second generation of crime writers, along with David Goodis and Patricia Highsmith. The shift from the first generation – the Hammett/ Chandler generation – is the shift from the detective to the criminal as the focus of the books. Thompson offers us the most complicated structures, especially in his first-person novels: The Killer Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, Savage Night, Pop. 1280. They’re as experimental as anything in American fiction at that moment.

Q: What’s the structure in Killer?

A: That’s Lou Ford’s voice – the way he treats the people in Carter City, with his mix of clichés. He’s mistreating the reader the same way he mistreats the good citizens of Center City.

Q: He’s a classic unreliable narrator in Nabokov’s sense, and very conscious – like a certain kind of novelist – that life is a performance.

A: After working with Thompson on two films, Stanley Kubrick directed a Nabokov adaptation. [Lolita.] Kubrick was fascinated with that kind of dangerous, repellent, charming narrator.

Q: Thompson’s collaborations with Kubrick – The Killing and Paths of Glory – were unhappy experiences for him. And directors, especially American directors, have not had much luck adapting Thompson’s books.

A: Some of it comes from the refusal of those directors to take on the voice of the main characters, which reduces the novels to their violence and action. You have to be willing to take on those weird structures, and the weirdness around the edges.

Q: Do you feel the same way about Winterbottom’s take on The Killer Inside Me?

A: There’s a lot to like about the film – starting with the performances. Casey Affleck if terrific. And the music is terrific. But I was disappointed by the absence of energy or thought in going into what makes the book exciting: Ford’s voice and the way he tells the story. Ford controls your perceptions in the novel, and you read under and around the unreliability and the slipperiness. But it’s filmed too much like the book was written in the third person.

Godard in his prime could have made a great Killer Inside Me.

Q: Those last years, in LA, sound pretty sad and did not produce great novels. Was it mostly the drinking?

A: He was distracted in a very serious way by the movies and the prospect of making a living from the movies.

And he suffered from a total alleviation of the censorship he had worked under. Now Thompson could say anything rather than accomplish it through subterfuge. That had allowed Thompson to write on all cylinders. The Killer Inside Me was an allegory for the kind of pulp novel Thompson was writing: You think you’re reading one kind of novel, and you’re reading another. When you have to slip something by the official channels, it enforces subtlety and experimental art.

Q: In Savage Art, you talk about the fact that these novels, though pulp fiction, were actually taken seriously by sharp-eyes readers and critics.

A: Hell of a Woman had reviews comparing him to Celine and Joyce – Jim Thompson was appreciated in his lifetime. He was getting words like "experimental" attached to him before he died. It’s like early rock n roll: It was meant to be disposable, and then it wasn’t.

The Killer Inside Casey Affleck

RECENTLY I spent some time with Casey Affleck, who appears in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of the Jim Thompson noir novel, The Killer Inside Me.

I don’t often write about actors – I’m not usually that curious about their inner worlds the way I am with novelists, musicians, or directors – but Casey Affleck is so strong, and so elusive, in his films that I welcomed the chance to sit down with him.

Here is my story. Found him quite a smart, if reticent, cat -- very interested in science-fiction and early Vonnegut. Winterbottom calls him "the reluctant actor." I'd call the film a stylish, often gripping and in some ways misfired.

Casey and I spoke about a lot of things I didn’t have room for, including his love for Vonnegut's early novel The Sirens of Titan, which he has wondered about adapting for years.  

We did the interview at a coffee place in Pasadena called Jones, where the air conditioner directly above where Casey was sitting began to rumble and shake like something out of Naked Lunch, dripping green liquid on his newspaper and dangerously close to the actor's cup of tea. I thought it was something out of Candid Camera.

I really enjoyed meeting Winterbottom, who has directed at least one of my favorite films -- the Manchester UK chronicle "24 Hour Party People." Winterbottom is as revved up and enaged -- and promiscuous in his filmmaking -- as Casey is reserved and choosy. When I asked the director if he was frustrated that after a decade and a half in the business he had not worked his way up to a recognizable style or a big-budget movie: "Because those films," he responded, "are boring."

At the end of the interview I asked Casey what kind of body of work he wanted to look back on in 10 years. “Number one, time with my family. Number two, 10 science-fiction movies,” he said, laughing. “Number two, a variety of work with people I respect, doing things different from each other – a movie set during the Hundred Years War, then go and do a movie about a guy who works at Jones. Really mix it up. I don’t know, it sounds almost impossible.”