Savage Night

"I think everyone knows the Dashiell Hammetts and the Raymond Chandlers. But Jim Thompson—I knew a few of his books, but I didn’t know his name so significantly. He was referenced several times in the screenplay for our movie, so he was the first writer I started to read. His books tend to be darker—like, actually dark. “That’s what is so special about noir in general—these books capture and create these worlds, these dreamy environments” With Raymond Chandler, the surface level is dark, but Jim Thompson’s books feel internally dark. In The Killer Inside of Me —you see it all from the perspective of the killer—a sociopath. Savage Night is another of his more famous books, and it plays with the character of the hitman. You see it from his perspective, and that’s something that Jim Thompson is able to do very well—step into the shoes of his characters, the anti-heroes, and show you these dark, complicated, and sometimes perverse minds—and he’s able to do it with a twisted sense of humour. So his books are muddier and grimier than Raymond Chandler’s. I’m a big fan of Jim Thompson, and I think he’s really worth exploring for those that haven’t heard of him or read him before. I think so. Even if you just look at the movies—because, for me, I often come from the movie angle first—the play of light, the shadows, is the biggest thing in noir cinema . That’s the most transparent visual metaphor: What’s in the darkness? What’s in the shadows? So yes, that’s a quintessential part of noir. It doesn’t have to be seedy underbelly all of the time, but it does have to look at what’s lurking beneath the surface."