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.
When Bret Easton Ellis wrote The Rules of Attraction in 1987, it came burdened with heavy expectations, as his first novel, Less Than Zero, had made him a literary wunderkind two years prior. In a similar way, Roger Avary's 2002 film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction came two years after the relative success of Mary Harron's film version of American Psycho, and if ever Ellis were to become a book-to-film crossover franchise a la Stephen King or John Grisham, Rules would serve as a litmus test.
The film -- a darkly comic college roundelay where Paul (Ian Somerhalder) lusts for Sean (James Van Der Beek) who lusts for Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) who's still not over her ex Victor (Kip Pardue) -- wasn't a breakout success on the level of American Psycho, but it has its defenders, including Ellis himself. After plumbing the adaptations of Less Than Zero and American Psycho with Movieline, the author was happy to talk about what he thought went right with Avary's shot at his oeuvre.
I know that The Rules of Attraction is your favorite of the movies adapted from your books.
Yeah, totally.
It's interesting that the other movies are very particular about capturing the 80's details of the era the books were published, but Rules of Attraction throws that out the window. It's modern-day, though not very specific about it.
That's my main problem with it. I've talked to Roger about it, and he knows that I would have preferred for it to be set in the 80's.
So why wasn't it?
I think there were some sort of commercial problems with that. The studio thought its main audience was college kids today -- which it wasn't, because no one went to see the movie. I think there was a compromise, because the movie doesn't announce so strongly that it's taking place now. It's in this hazy middle period of 80's music and 80's references, and yet there are cell phones and computers. But that's just wallpaper. I think the movie itself is the one movie that captured my sensibility in a visual and cinematic language.
How do you mean?
I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically. That's why I think, personally, that they're very tricky to adapt -- that, and the fact that my narrators are semi-secretive and unreliable at times. There are a whole host of problems with adapting the works into movies, and I think Roger solved it visually. The way he set the movie up on a visual level is a nice counterpart to the novel, and I also thought it was kind of outrageous. He didn't try to push the likability, he didn't try to give these people sympathetic backstories. It was like, "This is it, and you can either take it or don't take it." There was something uncompromising about it that I found exciting.
Breck Eisner was originally attached to direct, right?
Yeah, I worked with Breck Eisner for about a year on it.
Him being the son of a former studio head is definitely evocative of the world you write about.
Oh, yeah.
Do you think that's what attracted him to the novel?
You know, I don't know what it was, but he was really smart about it. I would have been perfectly happy with him doing it, it just got bogged down in terms of finding the money. He really wanted to make a movie, and it was like, "OK, what's going on? Why can't we get this movie made?" As always happens, he moved on to something else, and then the producers brought on Roger Avary. Or maybe Roger Avary found the producers, I can't remember how that all happened.
How did the money eventually come to make it?
I think the success of American Psycho is a big part of why Lionsgate decided to go forward with Rules of Attraction. In one of the cuts of the movie, he did shoot the scenes at the end of the novel where Sean Bateman goes to meet his brother Patrick Bateman [the protagonist of American Psycho], and they weren't very good, so they had to be removed.
I heard that Roger asked you to play Patrick in those scenes.
It was never gonna happen. Not in a million years. Well, he wanted Christian Bale to do it, but he said no. They shot it with Casper Van Dien.
One of the problems I had with the movie was that I thought James Van Der Beek's performance was too informed by Christian Bale's -- like he knew he was supposed to be the brother of this character, so he played him more like Bale than what I had pictured in the book.
You know what, that's interesting. I loved James Van Der Beek in it and I did not see that at all, I thought he completely captured that character as I had written it. I don't know, that's interesting. I understand what you're saying, but I thought he was so good.
I also felt like the relationships were barely there in the movie. When Van Der Beek and Shannyn Sossamon break up, it's supposed to be a big moment, but we've only seen them share one scene before that.
You're right. Yeah, that is true. Didn't bother me.
No?
No, because I liked everything else that was in there. Yeah, there are arguments to be made that the sexuality between everyone is muted in a way. Yeah, that is missing, but I think the rest of the movie makes up for it.
The best sequence in the film, as everyone seems to note, is the montage of Victor's adventures in Europe.
Of course. That is the best sequence.
Roger shot reams of footage of Kip Pardue misbehaving abroad for that sequence, and then cut them together for this supposedly illicit spinoff film called Glitterati.
Oh, it is illicit.
So you've seen it?
Yes, I've seen it.
Early on, Roger had intimated that he'd be releasing it, but from what I've heard, it's not releasable. What's in this film?
What do you want to know? Be specific.
What's the most shocking thing in it?
Well, real people getting it on.
It's pornographic?
It's extremely explicit. And Kip is in character the whole time. I don't know if he had a girlfriend while he was making this movie, but I hope he didn't. I feel kind of bad even talking about it, but like, there's a scene where he meets a girl someplace and the camera crew is following them and he seduces the girl, and they're in a cab and the girl pulls out her phone and calls her boyfriend and says, "I'm not going to be home for a little while." Then they all go up to a hotel room and...things start happening. I don't know, it's like...[laughs]. I can't say any more than that.
Does it actually hang together as a narrative?
It's fascinating to watch. It's like a documentary with a fictional character in the middle of it. Still, even the idea Roger had that he could release this is ridiculous. It's just not possible.
He was also intending to direct your novel Glamorama for a while.
I think the days of being able to make that movie are over.
Yo
u don't think it's the right climate?
Don't think it's the right climate. I was talking with a very successful TV director who'd always been interested in the book about doing it as an HBO miniseries, but HBO's just not going to do something like that -- it's got to be about a big, important subject. So my hopes of Glamorama lay with Roger. If he ever gets it together to do it, that would be fantastic, but it's a very expensive movie to make. What do you do? How do you make that movie in this climate? It just doesn't seem possible.
TOMORROW: Ellis on how the adaptation of The Informers became one of last year's most reviled films.