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 has tackled a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
So far this week, Movieline's talked to Bret Easton Ellis about movies made from his own books -- movies he often didn't script himself. His upcoming screenplay, The Golden Suicides, is for a very different film entirely. Adapted by Ellis from a Nancy Jo Sales article for Vanity Fair and written for producer Gus Van Sant, it's based on the true story of artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan (pictured above), a glamorous couple who eventually secluded themselves in a cocoon of paranoia when they believed that government organizations and Scientologists were out to get them. Duncan killed herself in July 2007, and a week later, the despondent Blake walked into the Atlantic and drowned.
Did you just finish the screenplay for The Golden Suicides?
I did.
Your first draft of it?
Sort of first draft, with a brief second pass on it.
What was being in that headspace like for you?
I connected with the two of them, and I connected with the story a lot, so it was really exciting and emotional to write it. I didn't find it depressing. I thought it was the most difficult thing I've had to write.
How so?
Because I didn't want to make up anything. I wanted the script to really follow what happened. There were three or four scenes where the two of them are alone and no one really knows what they said. You have to take liberties during those scenes, but more or less, everything that's in the script can be verified by things they said or things they did out there in the public. I didn't want to veer away from that.
It surprises me that there would be so few scenes of them alone together. Didn't they isolate themselves near the end of their lives?
Yes, they did. Well, she isolates herself and draws him in, and he becomes isolated as well. It's really his story, it's not her story. We meet him when he's a kid and so we kind of follow him all the way to the end. He meets her maybe 15, 20 pages into the script.
Were you familiar with him before you read the article in Vanity Fair?
No, I was not.
I remember reading it. It's a very gripping piece.
It's haunting, yeah. It hit me at just the right time. I'd had my own problems with the movie business at the time; The Informers was slowly becoming this car crash, and it was very shocking and upsetting to see that happen. I'd also been involved with someone who was unbalanced, and I understood what Jeremy was going through. Like, I got it. You fall in love with someone who's crazy and you become crazy. You do things that you would never do if you weren't with that person -- it kind of rubs off. Now, most people get to the point where they go, "Wait a minute. I'm acting crazy, I have to put an end to this." This is the extreme conclusion, but what happens if you're in love with someone for so long and their world has become your world and suddenly, they're gone? I don't know. I kept thinking that could have been me. It could have been me.
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.
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.