ALMOST PSYCHO

How the film nearly ended up in the hands of Oliver Stone and Leonardo Dicaprio

In spring ’98, with work well underway on Mary Harron’s film, American Psycho’s producers came to her with an idea. “They wanted Dicaprio,” she recalls. But the director was committed to casting a “skinny English kid” who she believed would perfectly embody Bateman — provided he could bulk up in time. The stand-off resulted in Lionsgate trying to remove Harron and Bale from the project. “I felt expendable. You just don’t matter when there’s money at stake. That was a painful and difficult lesson,” she says.

Oliver Stone was brought into the frame as a replacement director. “All I remember of [American] Psycho is that I wanted to work with Dicaprio, because I thought he had a future and it would be good to make this

Taxi Driver-like movie,” he tells Empire. “It’s a bit like a Natural Born Killers kind of an idea: very hard to pull off. Leo would have been an interesting choice. I think Cameron Diaz was going to be in it too. We had a reading with 25 actors. Some of them were very well-known. It wasn’t a great reading. It didn’t sound great. When we walked out of there, I think we were all a little bit deflated. Leo too. So it kind of fell apart…”

He describes the situation as “a controversial, political mess. [Harron] had gotten really critical because she lost control of it. In a way, I was glad not to get into that mess.” Eventually, the stand-off was resolved, with Harron and Bale returning to the project as Dicaprio opted to make The Beach. Stone has no regrets. “It got made very well with Christian Bale. I didn't particularly care for the movie, but Bale’s performance was pretty interesting.”