‘I’m a polarising figure. I don’t know why’
Outspoken as ever, Bret Easton Ellis talks to Susannah Butter about why millennials are wiped out after the US election, the JK Rowling trans row and nights in watching The Crown
BEING cancelled?” asks Bret Easton Ellis. “I absolutely think being cancelled is a badge of honour. I have been cancelled quite a few times; I think I am cancelled now.”
We are talking about a dinner party he went to before Los Angeles went into lockdown last week where, he says, “the millennials were all talking about friends of theirs who had been cancelled. They weren’t famous, but this has spread out of social media and into the private sphere. I don’t know how much longer cancel culture can go on for. There’s an exhaustion with it that wasn’t there a year ago.”
I should mention that, while saying all of this, Ellis (56) seems in a chipper mood. Clearly, it will take more than being cancelled to ruffle the man who wrote American Psycho.
“My armour got built pretty early,” he says. “I am a polarising figure. I don’t know why.”
Ellis was 21 when his debut novel, Less Than Zero, was published, receiving both adulation for his stinging social critique and death threats from those revolted by the naked amorality and materialism in his work.
He didn’t care: he was out every night with Manhattan’s literary Brat Pack — a talented set including Donna Tartt and Jay Mcinerney, who were bright, caustic and consumed phenomenal quantities of cocaine.
Since then, he has been distracted by the film business, writing screenplays, producing and directing — with mixed success — and last year he published his first collection of essays, White, which took a swipe at millennial fragility, coining the term “Generation wuss”.
Now, he is writing fiction again. He has called me from his study, where underneath a crossword he is trying to finish sits a stack of handwritten notes for his new novel, The Shards.
It is a “camouflaged memoir about my last year in high school in 1981” and his first since Lunar Park in 2005 (he doesn’t count 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms). “I’ve missed writing prose and I didn’t realise that until the pandemic,” he says. “I’d been spending all my time writing screenplays.”
He has a jaded view of the film industry (“It is frustrating to make any movie, there are money problems, it’s boring”), but is valiantly ploughing ahead promoting Smiley Face Killers, the new film he wrote.
It is inspired by a spate of drownings in 11 US states of young men in the 1990s that involved smiley faces graffitied near the waters where they died, sparking theories that the deaths were the work of a serial killer.
It focuses on a student called Jake (Ronen Rubinstein) who is on medication for depression. Ellis wrote the script “quickly” in a couple of months in 2010, when he had just started a production company and “was told to do a horror movie, because they sell and get finance easily”. Then, in 2017, he was approached with an offer to buy the script. “I said, ‘That script? I have so many other better scripts, why that?’”
Critics have called it “a tedious watch” that’s “about a vapid college student having a mildly bad week”. Ellis reads his reviews out of curiosity, but says they “often miss the point”.
“It is meant to be a slow movie. If you go expecting horror, it will not deliver. I was taken by the idea that many of these men who died were good-looking, athletic college guys and wanted to create a voyeuristic experience, inspired by French minimalism.”
Anyway, his boyfriend, the musician Todd Michael Schultz, liked it, “and he doesn’t like a lot of my things. Maybe that is because of Ronen (Jake), he is hypnotic. He said it was about the erasure of white men — they are the villain and need to step back a bit.”
Schultz, whom Ellis met at a dinner party 10 years ago, comes up a lot in conversation. Ellis calls him “the Millennial” (he is 32). They post gently teasing photos of each other on Instagram and disagree often.
Recently, they debated JK
Rowling’s views about trans identity. “People know exactly what she means (when she says you can’t erase the idea of being a woman), they just don’t like it. But she is rich enough to say “screw you” to the mob; rich kids say what they want and everyone else has to keep their mouth shut.”
“The Millennial is wiped out after the US election,’ Ellis continues. ‘I feel like no one won, it was muted — there was no exulting moment. Seeing how many people still voted for
Trump is a depressing sign. Half my friends voted for him: gay people, women. I do not vote, so I have no right to complain. I live in California, so you can virtue signal with your little badge saying “I voted” but it makes no difference, it is so Democrat.”
What does he make of Boris Johnson?
“The only Uk-related thing I’m following is The Crown,” he says.
His favourite character is Prince Charles, which makes sense given father/son relationships loom large in his work.
“I sympathise with Charles. That sense of entrapment that the show heavily pushes is so compelling, regardless of how authentic it is.”
Nights in with The Crown sound far removed from Ellis’s earlier life. “I haven’t taken drugs for about 10 years, since I met Todd,” he says.
“(My drug use) has been played up and I helped self-mythologise. Usually, I am happy that part of my life has gone — doing a ton of blow and going to a club sounds like a nightmare — but sometimes I am wistful.”
Ellis is currently creating a TV show with Irvine Welsh about the animosity between generations. There’s also his Bret Easton Ellis podcast, where he is reading The Shards.
Looking back has put him in a nostalgic mood and he reflects about the first book he wrote, aged five. “It was about a boy who wakes up and is a pancake — pancakes are easy to draw. At school, people are shocked and hungry people chase him around.”
An identity crisis and an action scene? It doesn’t sound so different from Smiley Face Killers.
‘I haven’t taken drugs for about 10 years... doing a ton of blow sounds like a nightmare