Bret Easton Ellis on The Golden Suicides, His New True Story of Love and Death

As you were working on the screenplay, you tweeted that you pictured James Franco and Angelina Jolie while writing it.

I was, yeah.

So you were already picturing them as movie characters? How do you balance that with the fact that they were real people?

Well, you first of all want to respect that. I know that there was some concern among family and friends that this was going to be a script that was very much in line with the Vanity Fair piece, which really isn't true. [The script] is a very sympathetic take on their lives, and I think Jeremy was a really terrific artist. I wasn't interested in presenting a whole lot of "crazy," you know? I wanted to be pretty respectful, but it's also a movie. I was responding on an emotional level to them, and also on a creative level. The movie can't just be about the 12 years they were together -- it has to be shaped, you have to decide what's important to leave in, what characters to include. You see them, when you're writing the script, as movie characters. You kind of have to. It was difficult, because I've never written about people who were alive and actually walking around. It poses some problems. It was a little constrictive.

It sounds like it involved a lot of research.

Look, I did all the research that I possibly could have done. There's not that much on them. There's enough, but there's not that much. When I started talking to people who knew them, the movie started to slip away. The movie that I had envisioned and talked to Gus and the producers about was a certain kind of movie -- it was about this, and about this, and about this. When I started talking to people who knew them, that movie began to dissolve, and the movie that was replacing it wasn't very interesting.

Because you were learning things that pulled you in a different direction?

Yeah. It was also, like, the big narrative myth of the story is so much more interesting than the minutiae of the reality. There are so many ways to go with it, or I guess there are. I only saw one, to have the story told through his eyes.

When it was announced in the trades, Gus was very specifically the producer, and there was no director attached, almost as though he was feeling out the prospect of directing himself. How hands-on has he been?

Fairly. Fairly.

But it's still hard to get him to commit to directing?

A bit! I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I really want him to do it, and I think he knows this. We'll see.

He would be the first director with considerable studio muscle to tackle one of your projects -- especially coming off of The Informers, where things basically got undid.

Yes. They did. [Laughs] They got very undid.

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