It normally doesn’t take much convincing for Hollywood to pounce on the latest bestseller about a serial killer.
It’s only when a book is widely reviled as “a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women” that studios might think twice about turning it into a film.
Such was the case with “American Psycho,” Bret Easton Ellis’ famously controversial 1991 novel about Patrick Bateman, a twentysomething Wall Street turk with a Harvard MBA, a closetful of Valentino and a penchant for murder. Morally bankrupt and perfectly soulless, Bateman was a symbol of the greed-is-good 1980s — the embodiment of materialism taken to preposterous extremes.
But it was the novel’s horrific descriptions of violence — not its merciless satire — that earned “American Psycho” its notoriety. Combined with the book’s plotless structure, which unfurled through the psychotic eyes of a highly unreliable narrator, “American Psycho” seemed perfectly unfilmable.
Nearly 10 years later, they’ve finally made a movie out of it. When “American Psycho” opened, it marked the end of a tumultuous journey for a project that tempted everyone from cult independent filmmakers to Hollywood’s biggest talents. And the biggest surprise about the film is that it turns out to be an unmistakably feminist work.
The trouble with “American Psycho” began when Ellis, the celebrated writer of “Less Than Zero,” pitched his idea of “a Wall Street yuppie who’s a serial killer” to Simon & Schuster. “They were really interested,” he recalled. “But when I turned it in, they were like `Where’s the detective who saves the day? Where’s the girlfriend?”‘
Baffled by the bizarre, pornographically violent manuscript Ellis had written, Simon & Schuster slashed a planned huge first hardcover printing down to 15,000 copies. The publisher’s feet got even colder after early copies of the manuscript leaked out. When Time and Spy magazines published excerpts from one of the book’s grisly torture/murders, the National Organization for Women’s Los Angeles chapter launched a ferocious attack on the novel and its author.
The uproar led Simon & Schuster to cancel the book altogether. Vintage Books, a trade paperback division of Random House, immediately moved in and picked it up for publication, smack in the middle of a raging media debate about censorship, First Amendment rights and violence in entertainment.
The first printing of 65,000 sold out immediately, even as the book was vilified by critics and Ellis was receiving death threats.
Despite the controversy, producer Edward R. Pressman (“Badlands,” “Wall Street,” “Two Girls and a Guy”) snapped up the film rights to the novel. “I was intrigued by the challenge,” Pressman said. “The idea of capturing a period in time the way Fitzgerald did in the 1920s — a study of class in America in the late 20th Century — appealed to me.”
Stuart Gordon, director of the cult gorefests “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond,” was the first filmmaker brave enough to take a stab at an adaptation. He submitted a script to Pressman, but it was deemed too X-rated to pursue.
Next up was David Cronenberg (“Crash,” “Dead Ringers”), who spent a year working with Ellis on the script. “David wanted to make a movie about objects and acquiring things,” Ellis recalled. “He wanted a script that was 60 pages long, had no scenes in bars or restaurants or clubs, and no scenes of extreme violence. He was much more interested in brand names and the status symbol mentality that permeated the book.”
Ellis’ draft didn’t impress Cronenberg. The director brought in screenwriter Norman Snider, who had worked on “Dead Ringers” with him, and together they produced a script they both loved — but no one else did. Then came Mary Harron. Born in Canada, Harron had spent her teenage and college years in London, where she made several documentaries and short films before moving to the United States to direct her film debut, “I Shot Andy Warhol.”
“The difficulty of the [`American Psycho’] project — the harshness of it, the risk — all appealed to me at that point, partly because I felt I was in danger of settling for something easier and more mainstream,” Harron said.
It helped that Harron had an affinity for the novel. “I always thought it was a misunderstood, underrated book,” Harron said. “Even though I found the violence very extreme . . . Bret clearly wasn’t endorsing the violence. But people were so outraged by it that they never talked about the book being funny. I thought he completely nailed things about the 1980s no one else had.”
But Harron wasn’t convinced there was a movie to be made out of the book. Pressman sent her screenplays he had collected over the years, none of which impressed her. Instead, she hired writing partner Guinevere Turner to collaborate with her on their own script.
“I don’t think it was a coincidence on the part of the producers to bring women on board to validate the project,” Turner said. “We knew we had to have some violence in there, because it is about a serial killer. But we didn’t want the violence to overshadow the whole piece, which is what happened to the book. We were convinced that we could turn it around and make it a feminist piece, poking fun at men and at the way men interact with each other, how they value each other’s company and opinions, and how women are a commodity, like a nice suit and a car.”
Harron and Turner’s first draft was immediately approved by Pressman, who began shopping it around to studios in summer 1996. “A lot of studios liked the script and flirted with it, but people were just scared of it,” Harron recalled. While waiting for a studio to bite, Harron started casting the difficult lead role. “It wasn’t enough just to be good-looking and charismatic,” Harron said. “I had to have someone with incredible acting range and skill.”
Harron considered Johnny Depp and Jude Law before settling on Christian Bale, the 24-year-old British actor best known to moviegoers as the boy sent to a World War II prison camp in Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun.”
Bale, who had never read Ellis’ book, fell in love with “American Psycho” because of what it wasn’t.
“I had assumed that the book was an extremely violent analysis of a serial killer, what motivates and creates this sort of monster,” he said. “But it isn’t that at all. It’s an analysis of 1980s vanity and Wall Street, these overprivileged guys who act as if they can get away with anything. The serial killer aspect takes that sense of power to an absurd extreme.”
In early 1997, Harron finally found a studio willing to take a chance: Lions Gate Films. The upstart distributor approved Harron’s $10 million budget and hesitantly OKd the casting of the unknown Bale — as long as Harron could land five or six “ridiculously big names” for supporting roles.
And then disaster struck. Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off the monumental success of “Titanic,” was looking for a role to combat his newfound status as teen pin-up idol when he read Harron’s script. During the Cannes Film Festival in May, Lions Gate suddenly announced that DiCaprio has been signed to the role, “American Psycho’s” budget had been upped to $40 million, and that Harron had left the project.
DiCaprio’s flirtation with “American Psycho,” however, turned out to be short-lived. In August, director Oliver Stone held a read-through of Harron and Turner’s script in his Los Angeles offices with DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. A week later, Harron was given the movie back — along with her original $10 million budget and choice of Bale in the lead.
“After that reading, I think everyone realized they didn’t know what to do with it,” Harron said. With the rest of the cast in place — Willem Dafoe as a police detective, Reese Witherspoon as Bateman’s fiance, Chloe Sevigny as his secretary and Jared Leto as a rival Wall Street turk — shooting on “Psycho” finally began in Toronto in winter 1999, followed by a week of shooting in New York.
“American Psycho” was finally unveiled at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where the reaction was decidedly mixed.
“While I was doing interviews at Sundance, I thought everybody loved it,” Bale said, laughing. “Then I read the reviews and realized differently. . . . It does jump all over the place so much that some people are a little startled by it.”
“Obviously people are expecting something different, maybe more of a `Silence of the Lambs’-type thriller,” Harron said.
