Bret Easton Ellis on How The Informers Went Wrong

There are some writers who thought that was sort of a boon because the scripts couldn't be rewritten during the strike. The dialogue had to be performed exactly as written, with no modifications.

Right. But then half the scenes I wrote ended up on the cutting room floor anyway. Half the movie is on the cutting room floor.

The most notable cut was to the vampire storyline. Brandon Routh had been cast as the mysterious Jamie and all his scenes are totally gone from the movie, although there are still some loose ends there where you can tell those scenes would have linked up.

The vampire subplot is gone, yeah.

What would be the rationale for cutting that? If anything, I would think it'd make the movie more interesting.

I believe there was a concern about an NC-17 rating.

It was that explicit?

There was a lot of sexuality mixed with violence. I think there was a prestige factor involved -- like, I think they thought they had a shot at making an Oscar movie if they concentrated on the main families and their stories. To have a guy who thinks he's a vampire committing all these terrible crimes, it put it into the horror/cult genre. And then they said it was budgetary, that they just didn't have the movie to really shoot those scenes.

It's ironic that there would be so much interference from the top when this was basically an independent film. Didn't Senator fully finance it?

They did, yeah.

And yet they were as cautious as a huge studio conglomerate would have been.

They were. It was their first movie that they produced, and I believe their last movie. I think it was just a sensibility thing. Once I got the money and started doing rewrites for the director, I just noticed that I was losing things that were important to me. Still, I also kind of trusted him a lot, because he signed on to do this and he really seemed to know the material. Then I did all the rewriting and as I did the rewriting while it was being shot, a chill set in. I thought, "Oh. Maybe he doesn't get this at all."

What do you do when you realize that?

What can you do? I mean, you have to shoot the movie. You're a week in. You just have to hope it comes together.

Was Nicholas upset with you for continuing to write the film for another director?

We stopped speaking, yeah. But we're working on another project now, and we're very close [to finishing]. It took about a year.

What's that project about?

Well, it's a project about two writers who write a movie like The Informers. [Laughs] They go out to Palm Springs for a debauched weekend. It's just for fun.

In Imperial Bedrooms, Clay is the screenwriter of a movie that's casting called The Listeners, and he leverages that to sleep with some of the actors who are auditioning. It's pretty clear that his experience -- or The Listeners, anyway -- is something of a takeoff on the time you spent working on The Informers. Did scenarios from Imperial Bedrooms spring out of that casting process at all?

It's interesting. It's interesting to be a producer and a writer on a movie that's going to be shot in this town. It's very interesting to see what happens with actors and actresses. [Pause] It's very interesting...what is available to you.

TOMORROW: Ellis discusses The Golden Suicides, a film he's writing for Gus Van Sant.

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