By Travis Johnson
Irish director Billy O’Brien first encountered the morbid world of John Wayne Cleaver after a meeting with a producer’s reader to see if she might be able to suggest some novels that he might be suited to adapt for the screen. “We met in Foyle’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London for coffee,” he recalls. “And I unloaded my brain and all my crazy ideas. She walked around the corner, put her hand out and found this book – it was in paperback at that stage. She emailed me and I got the book and read it the next day and it was amazing.”
In American author Dan Wells 2009 novel, a disturbed teen must wrestle with the twin threats of a serial murderer and his own emotional disconnection and violent urges. The hero of the book, John, sees a psychiatrist and has an internalised system of rules, checks and balances to ensure that he doesn’t do anything that will bring harm to others, but he still sees upsetting parallels between the actions of the killer haunting his town and his own desires. Although it deals with some extremely dark themes, the book is rich in gallows humour and has gone on to spawn six sequels.
“The humour in it really came through to me,” O’Brien explains. “It was a bit like Russian, dark humour. Unlike a lot of Hollywood studio stuff, the characters are really real. They’re damaged and interesting and Dan wrote such wonderful dialogue with them. The story itself, in this small, little Midwest town, icebound and covered in snow and all these strange goings-on, that just struck a nerve with me – something about that was very powerful.”
O’Brien worked with a young writer, Christopher Hyde, to knock the book into filmable shape, which necessitated some alterations. “The biggest change insofar as people have read the book is that the book is all in John’s mind, it’s all first person, and in film that means voice over. We did in fact write the first draft like that but it felt just a bit like a comfort blanket. There was no risk any more and I think with john’s character and his problems, I think the more on edge you are with him in that you don’t know which way he’s going to jump each scene, the better. So once we stripped off the voice over, it suddenly felt a lot more dangerous, and that was interesting.
“The other thing is that even in a small book there’s just too much.” he continues. “There’s too much dialogue, there’s too many character moments that, when you put them in a film, they begin to drag because it’s a different experience than reading a book on your own. You’ve got to make a lot of crucial decisions about which bits you leave in.”
When it came time to cast the protagonist, Max Records, best known as the child lead in Where the Wild Things Are, quickly rose to the top of the list of potential candidates, having appeared in a short, BlinkyTM, produced by Nick Ryan, who also produced I Am Not A Serial Killer. “When we were initially talking about casting Nick had suggested Max, who was coming up 13 and in the book he’s 15. We were going to do a test in order to finance the film and we figured it would take two years to get the funding.”
Of course, the vicissitudes of film finance being what they are, it took four years to secure the money, and Records was 17 by the time the cameras rolled. “We just got in there with him not being too old.”
The other key role, that of Mr. Crowley, John’s elderly neighbour and number one suspect, was eventually filled by genre legend Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future), a stroke of luck that O’Brien is still audibly grateful for. “We were sort of getting used to getting turned down by a lot of people, so we hadn’t actually come to him directly. He responded immediately and I had this very long conversation where it was very clear that he got the character, hadn’t been offered a role as interesting as this for a long while, so he came on board and that really helped open doors and everything.”
Indeed, the success of the film rests greatly on the interplay between the two, which O’Brien said was immediately apparent. “I put him [Lloyd] in a room with Max, and Max and him just hit it off. Max wasn’t shy or anything and they just immediately started talking about the characters. It was brilliant. It just seemed to work so well.”
I Am Not A Serial Killer screens at Melbourne’s Lido Cinemas tonight with a Skype Q&A with Director Billy O’Brien hosted by Lee Zachariah. It is released in Melbourne and Sydney for a full theatrical run on September 29.
