Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis will tackle a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
American Psycho is by far the most controversial work that Bret Easton Ellis has written, and yet when it comes to the adaptations of his novels, Mary Harron's 2000 film is the most critically acclaimed and well-regarded. It went through a bumpy production process that attracted directors like Oliver Stone and David Cronenberg and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp, but the final result eventually became a calling card for both Harron and its star, Christian Bale, and it's only grown in public esteem since its release.
Still, is Ellis happy with it? Not quite. Yesterday, he shared his thoughts on the compromised movie adaptation of Less Than Zero, and today, he delves into the tortured backstory of American Psycho and how he feels about female directors in general.
In many ways, American Psycho is an extremely faithful adaptation. A lot of the dialogue and scenes are taken straight from the book. And yet, when I saw you last, you were sort of implying that you thought Mary Harron was hamstrung by it.
Oh yeah, I do. I think any director would have been.
How so?
Well, the book has this reputation and it has its following, and if you're going to take that material from one medium to another, you're just going to have to make some decisions about it. The book itself doesn't really answer a lot of the questions it poses, but by the very nature of the medium of a movie, you kind of have to answer those questions.
What questions do you think she answered that she shouldn't have? Whether or not this was all in Patrick Bateman's head?
Right. And a movie automatically says, "It's real." Then, at the end, it tries to have it both ways by suggesting that it wasn't. Which you could argue is interesting, but I think it basically confused a lot of people, and I think even Mary would admit that.
I feel like the film has become almost more iconic in the years since it's come out.
Oh, it totally has. Completely. It's insane.
Did you see the Miles Fisher video that drew from it?
Loved it. Love Miles Fisher.
Did you expect American Psycho to become so iconic?
Not at all. I mean, I did not think that was going to be a particularly popular book. I thought it was going to be very pretentious. No, I didn't have any idea.
At this point, it's probably the most well-known of the films adapted from your novels.
Totally, totally.
Are you OK with that?
I've gotta be.
It went through a lot of director-actor combinations before it eventually got made. The earliest one I could find was Stuart Gordon intending to direct Johnny Depp. What did you think of that?
Well, I don't know about Johnny Depp's feelings about it, but I talked to Stuart Gordon a lot, and I thought he was the wrong director for it. I expressed that, but I don't think [producer] Ed Pressman was necessarily listening to me.
And then David Cronenberg attached himself. Is that the point where you actually wrote a draft of the screenplay yourself?
I did write a draft. David told me, "I want to make this movie, but I don't want any scenes in restaurants, I don't want any scenes in clubs, I don't want to shoot any of the violence..."
Why no scenes in restaurants or clubs? That's half the movie!
Because he said they're very difficult to shoot. "They're static, they're boring, people are at a table, and you can't really do a lot with it." He said, "I don't want to shoot in restaurants and clubs, and I want the script to be about 65 to 70 pages long, because it takes me about two minutes to shoot a page. I don't do a minute a page, I do two minutes a page."
Wow.
I mean, these directions were insane. I just went off and wrote a script that I thought would be best for the movie. It did veer off a lot from the book, because I was kind of bored with the book. I'd been living with it for, like, three and a half years, four years. I invented some scenes.
Like a musical sequence?
There was a musical sequence at the end, yes.
What was that about?
I think Barry Manilow's "Daybreak" was playing, and there's like Patrick Bateman sitting in the park talking to people, and then it ends on the top of the World Trade Center. A big musical number, very elaborate. I'm glad it wasn't shot, but that kind of shows you where I was when I was writing the script. I was bored with the material.
Do you usually get bored with the books after you write them?
Not while I'm finishing them. After the book comes out, I am completely bored with the book.
Even though that's exactly the point at which you have to start talking about it to the press.
[Smiles] A problem! You get better at it as the year of promotion moves along. You get into a groove.
Anyway, Mary Harron eventually got involved with Christian Bale set to star, and then both of them briefly got thrown overboard when Oliver Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio expressed interest. Were you privy to any of that?
I was a bystander. I mean, it was terrible because I knew Mary and I'd met Christian, and yet, I also didn't think Leonardo DiCaprio was a bad idea. I said that a couple of times in interviews, and I'm sure it pissed Christian off and I'm sure Mary wasn't pleased to hear that.
So why did you say it?
Because I didn't really realize what was happening when I said it. I thought Mary was maybe going to direct the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. I mean, look. She probably made the right choice.
It's interesting that so many good-looking, almost feminine teen idol types wanted to play this role. Even Brad Pitt was involved at one point.
It's the kind of role that an actor wants. You have to be very pretty to play the role, and leading men are often very pretty and not allowed to show a lot of range. You're either put into this action movie role or the romantic lead role, and there are not a lot of projects offered to them that can invert that or twist it up a little bit. I think it was probably very appealing for an actor of a certain age to play crazy like that, and also look really nice. I don't know, it's the best of both worlds.
Gloria Steinem was among those protesting DiCaprio's involvement -- ironic, because she later became Christian Bale's stepmother.
Yeah. I love it. Though, I've always thought that the feminists got it totally wrong on that one. But I can't go there anymore.
When Christian Bale first asked to meet with you to get your approval for the role, he actually showed up at the restaurant in character. Did that freak you out?
That was in 1998, I think, when that happened. I didn't have an issue with Christian Bale doing that at the time, it was just seriously unnerving. You
know, even though the book had done well and it was a popular novel, I had not seen people acting like Patrick Bateman or trying to appear like him. There was actually a period there for four or five years after the movie was released where people would come up to me at book signings, and guys would show me [pictures of] their Halloween costumes, and it was them dressed as Patrick Bateman. All over the world, maybe a thousand times it happened. [The meeting with Bale] was before any of that happened, and I was unnerved that I was in a restaurant with someone pretending to be this monster that I created. I just wanted him to stop. I asked him to stop, and then he did, and it was fine, and then Mary Harron joined us, so it was more comfortable. But he was intense!
What are your thoughts on women directors? After you saw Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, you tweeted that you might have to reevaluate your preconceived notions about them.
I did. And after I saw [Floria Sigismondi's] The Runaways, too.
Really?
I loved it.
I wish I'd loved it.
Well, I wasn't looking forward to it. I avoided it, and then I was with some people and they said, "It starts soon at the Arclight. Let's go." So yeah, I do have to reevaluate that, but for the most part I'm not totally convinced, [except for] Andrea Arnold, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola...
Not Mary Harron?
Mary Harron to a degree. There's something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze.
What would that be?
We're watching, and we're aroused by looking, whereas I don't think women respond that way to films, just because of how they're built.
You don't think they have an overt level of arousal?
[They have one] that's not so stimulated by the visual. I think, to a degree, all the women I named aren't particularly visual directors. You could argue that Lost in Translation is beautiful, but is that [cinematographer Lance Acord]? I don't know. Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors. But I have to get over it, you're right, because so far this year, two of my favorite movies were made by women, Fish Tank and The Runaways. I've got to start rethinking that, although I have to say that a lot of the big studio movies I saw last year that were directed by women were far worse than the sh***y big-budget studio movies that were directed by men.
Which are we talking about?
I mean, do I want to say this on the record? Did you see The Proposal? Anyway, whatever.
Lionsgate did eventually make a sequel to American Psycho, and I guess you've seen it?
I have. I think it went straight to DVD, and I didn't even watch it on DVD. I think I watched it when it was on cable. Yeah, it's not good. I think we all know that.
And somehow, Mila Kunis was the Patrick Bateman figure this time. Luckily, her career survived.
We like Mila Kunis a lot. Mila Kunis is wonderful. She's really good, she's unique.
Was she unique in that film?
No one could be in that film. It didn't allow the actors room for that, and it was so tongue-in-cheek, it was difficult to take any of that seriously. It's not particularly bloody, it's not particularly scary, it's kind of campy, kind of a joke. When a movie doesn't take itself seriously, then why are we taking it seriously?