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.
Gregor Jordan's The Informers begins with a quick, abrupt car accident, but to hear Bret Easton Ellis tell it, the production was something like a car crash in slow motion. Though it's the only adaptation of Ellis's novels where he actually served as a producer and co-writer on the film, he's not happy with how it turned out, and he's hardly alone. When The Informers was released last year, audiences stayed away and critics were scathing (pundit Devin Faraci, unwilling to review the film according to a normal ratings system, scored it a "F**k God out of 10").
The film can boast a lot of intriguing elements: an impressive cast of veterans (Billy Bob Thornton, Winona Ryder, Mickey Rourke) and attractive up-and-comers (Jon Foster, Amber Heard), a sleek look, and an intriguing director (Gregor Jordan, an Australian director who'd made an early Heath Ledger film called Two Hands). Still, this adaptation of Ellis's 1994 collection of short stories never comes together.
This week, we've already spoken to Ellis about the films made from Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and The Rules of Attraction. Here are his candid thoughts on why things went awry with The Informers.
The Informers may not work as a movie, but for once, the cast actually seems to nail the aesthetic you describe. Finally, the tanned, blond characters are being played by tanned blondes.
I know.
And it's a strong cast...
It is.
...so where did things go wrong?
An Australian director and a German producer.
Before they came on board, you were writing this film with Nicholas Jarecki for him to direct it. Then he brought on Marco Weber to finance it, and Weber threw him overboard for Gregor Jordan, right?
Yes. A very stressful period. Nicholas was a very, very good friend of mine, and then... He now is a very good friend of mine [again]. We resolved our differences. But yeah: Australian director and German producer.
Are you saying they were too foreign to understand the material?
You need someone who understood that milieu. You need a Breck Eisner [the son of Michael Eisner, who was originally attached to direct The Rules of Attraction], you need someone who grew up around here. You also need someone with an Altman-esque sense of humor, because the script is really funny. The movie is not funny at all, and there are scenes in the movie that should be funny that we wrote as funny, and they're played as we wrote them, but they're directed in a way that they're not funny. It was very distressing to see the cuts of this movie and realize that all the laughs were gone.
Did he just want it to be more serious?
I think Gregor was looking at it as something else. I think we had this miscommunication during pre-production that it's not supposed to be played like an Australian soap opera.
But you were involved with it the whole time, weren't you? You were a producer on the film.
I was involved until the writer's strike hit, and that banned any writers from visiting the set. Everyone followed that rule because everyone was really scared about what might happen. So, I was involved with The Informers until about a week or two after filming [began], because I was on set rewriting scenes. Then when the writer's strike hit, I was told I could not go back on that set or I would be...whatever. Whatever happens to writers when they do that.
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.