In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Mary Harron‘s American Psycho, MovieMaker.com just ran a lengthy 4-page oral history of the film that features interviews with Harron, co-writer Guinevere Turner, stars Christian Bale and Willem Dafoe, and Bret Easton Ellis, the writer of the controversial novel that was adapted by Harron and Turner twenty years ago.
The piece is loaded with interesting insights into the production and pre-production processes of the film, some of which we’ve heard before – as you may recall hearing, both David Cronenberg and Stuart Gordon were at times attached to direct the film! – and some of which has been detailed for the first time within the piece. If you’re a fan, it’s a must-read.
One of the more interesting tidbits from the article is in regards to the casting of Patrick Bateman, the film’s main character who may or may not be a serial killer. It was Christian Bale who of course ended up playing the character, a satire of American businessmen in 1980s New York City, but several other actors were considered early on in the process.
Billy Crudup, for starters, had been attached to the project, and so too was Leonardo DiCaprio. But it was Harron who insisted on Bale, as she felt DiCaprio was wrong for the part.
Harron explained why she wanted Bale and only Bale to play Bateman, “[Bale] saw the part the way that I did, and he got the humor of it. He didn’t see Bateman as cool. I sort of had the feeling a lot of the other actors kind of thought Bateman was cool. And he didn’t. I met with a lot of actors about it but Christian was the only one who was right for it.”
When Lionsgate offered DiCaprio the role instead, Harron was so insistent on Bale being the only actor to play Patrick Bateman that she decided to step away from the film entirely.
“Obviously, I think DiCaprio’s a great actor, but I thought he was wrong for it,” Harron recalls. “I thought Christian was better for it, and I also thought, and I think my instinct was right on this, he carried enormous baggage because he had just come off Titanic and I thought you cannot take someone who has a worldwide fanbase of 15-year-old girls, 14-year-olds girls, and cast him as Patrick Bateman. It’ll be intolerable, and everyone will interfere, and everyone will be terrified. It would be very bad for him and very bad for the movie. Because everybody will be all over it. They’ll rewrite the script and all the rest. And I knew I could only make this work if I had complete control over it, over the tone and everything.”
She continued, “The other thing is, a lot of the plot depends on people mistaking Bateman for someone else. Not a lot of people look like Leo DiCaprio. They called me and said we’re going to offer him $20 million, but the budget of the movie will remain $6 million. You’re giving the star enormous power over this project, and basically taking it away from the director if you’re making it that disproportionate. So that just didn’t interest me. I’d only done one movie, so it was a big thing to do. But I’d seen lots of movies that have gone awry because they cast a huge star that they shouldn’t have cast. I thought people would respect that and say, oh wow, integrity. But actually I think a lot of people thought I was crazy. So I went through a period after they fired me, of thinking, God, my career’s really ruined, because everyone’s going to think I’m out of my mind for walking away from this.”
Long story short, Oliver Stone stepped in to replace Mary Harron on the project, but ultimately his version of the film never happened – and Bale reclaimed the role he was destined for.
Bret Easton Ellis chimed in, “Ultimately I think Christian Bale, in that moment, was the better choice. And of course Leo got to play a version of this as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, and he was spectacular.”
Head over to MovieMaker.com to read the full oral history of American Psycho!
