With Harron not budging on casting Bale and only Bale in the lead, the studio had to consider recasting Harron instead. DICAPRIO WROTE UP HIS OWN WISH LIST OF POTENTIAL DIRECTORS. Ironically, on September 3, 2000-less than five months after American Psycho’s release-Steinem married David Bale, Christian Bale’s father.
And it was long rumored that she tried to talk DiCaprio out of taking the role. Legendary feminist Gloria Steinem was a vocal opponent of American Psycho-both the book and its proposed movie-for the violence it depicted against women. GLORIA STEINEM WAS NOT A FAN OF THE BOOK, OR ITS PROPOSED MOVIE. It could've gotten us in a lot of trouble.” 6. He's not credible as one of these tough Wall Street guys … He brought way too much baggage with him I did not want to deal with someone who had a 13-year-old fan base. “There's something very boyish about him. “Leonardo wasn't remotely right ,” Harron told The Guardian. LEONARDO DICAPRIO WAS OFFERED THE LEAD-WITHOUT HARRON’S KNOWLEDGE.Īt the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Lionsgate executives announced that Leonardo DiCaprio-fresh off his Titanic success-would be playing the lead in American Psycho-which was news to both Harron and Bale. “They would've taken almost anybody over Christian,” Harron said. “That's sort of how I reacted, too.” But the studio wanted a bigger name in the role (this was, of course, years before Bale donned a Batsuit). And that just made him more excited,” Harron told The Guardian in 2000. “When I offered the part, he said he had all these messages on his answering machine telling him this was career suicide. BALE WAS ADVISED THAT TAKING THE ROLE WAS CAREER SUICIDE. And Harron wanted Bale in the lead, so she offered it to him. She co-wrote a new version of the script with Guinevere Turner (who plays Patrick Bateman’s friend-turned-victim Elizabeth in the final film). I was bored with the material.”īy 1997, Cronenberg was out and Mary Harron was in as director of American Psycho, according to a report from Variety at the time. I'm glad it wasn't shot, but that kind of shows you where I was when I was writing the script. “I think Barry Manilow's ‘Daybreak’ was playing, and there’s like Patrick Bateman sitting in the park talking to people, and then it ends on the top of the World Trade Center,” Ellis explained. CRONENBERG’S VERSION ENDED WITH A MUSICAL NUMBER ATOP THE WORLD TRADE CENTER.Īmong those “invented scenes” was an elaborate musical finale that took place atop the World Trade Center. I'd been living with it for, like, three and a half years, four years. It did veer off a lot from the book, because I was kind of bored with the book. I just went off and wrote a script that I thought would be best for the movie. Cronenberg’s reasoning? “He said, ‘I don't want to shoot in restaurants and clubs, and I want the script to be about 65 to 70 pages long, because it takes me about two minutes to shoot a page,’” Ellis recalled. When Cronenberg came aboard, he enlisted Ellis to write the script, with one caveat: He didn’t want to shoot anything in a restaurant or nightclub, which is where the bulk of the action in Ellis’ novel takes place. DAVID CRONENBERG WAS ATTACHED TO DIRECT IT, TOO.Īs American Psycho continued its journey from novel to feature, David Cronenberg became attached to direct it. “I expressed that, but I don't think Ed Pressman was necessarily listening to me.” 2. “I don't know about Johnny Depp's feelings about it, but I talked to Stuart Gordon a lot, and I thought he was the wrong director for it,” Ellis told Movieline in 2010. Originally, Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon was set to direct the adaptation, with Johnny Depp in the lead.
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But it would take another eight years-and an ongoing series of writers, directors, and lead actors-to finally make it to the big screen.
#American Psycho Script Pdf movie
In 1992, one year after its original publication, producer Edward Pressman bought the movie rights to Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. IT TOOK EIGHT YEARS TO MAKE IT TO THE SCREEN. Here are 19 things you might not know about the homicidal satire, which was released 15 years ago today. Before he set the bar for superhero reboots as Christopher Nolan’s Caped Crusader, Christian Bale committed what many believed would be career suicide by taking on the role of Patrick Bateman, the 1980s Manhattan yuppie/serial killer/antihero of Bret Easton Ellis’ iconic 1991 novel.