THE APARTMENT
Harron and production designer Gideon Ponte had one rule when it came to Bateman’s living arrangements. “We said, ‘Nothing personal. No family photos. No-one’s at home,’” says the director. “We wanted it to look like a page in Architectural Digest.”
Ponte recalls adorning the walls of Bateman’s abode with showy signifiers of success: expensive artworks, designer furniture, a telescope and so on. “We looked at a lot of fashion ads from the ’80s, which were obviously so constructed, and tried to put Patrick in the middle of one,” he says. “It doesn’t feel lived in at all, not in any meaningful way.”
Ponte also describes subtle tricks that gave the impression of “something being a bit wrong” with the interior. “The way that cameras work, they don’t like too much of a range of contrasts. There’s a rule that you never usually use white to paint a wall, because flesh tones against a white wall are too much. So you tend to feather it back, painting the wall closer to flesh tones so it’s all softer on the eye. But with Patrick’s apartment, we went for it, painting things white, making it harsh in a way you can’t really put your finger on. It’s shot in a way that’s purposefully not very poetic.”
“A great element of the American Psycho book was the way it alternated between these chapters of horrendous violence and then chapters on the greatness of Whitney Houston, written in rockcritic speak,” says Harron, who was a music journalist before becoming a filmmaker. “I found that particularly entertaining. So early on in the project, I thought, ‘What if we took those chapters and turned them into monologues?’” This gave birth to one of the most famous elements of Harron’s movie. Before his kills, Bateman will often regale his oblivious victims with cheery, detailed analysis of ’80s pop and rock albums.
“Music has great emotional depth and meaning. But he can only engage with these albums in a very analytical way without any of their humanity,” Harron continues. “That was a lot of fun to play around with. The film was very low budget… Then the music budget pushed the costs up considerably,” she adds, noting that it was important to license the authentic music.
In 2016, Phil Collins, whose music forms the soundtrack of one brutal killing, expressed his admiration for the film: “I thought the movie of American Psycho was quite funny —
I don’t know if it was meant to be,” he remarked. “I don’t think him being a psychopath and liking my music is linked; my music was just omnipresent in that era.”