THE PSYCHE
In Easton Ellis’ book, Bateman was an unknowable force whose backstory was left tantalisingly unexplored. Hints of the character’s family life were threaded through some of the author’s other novels, but in American Psycho, all you needed to know was that he was rich, successful and hiding a blood-soaked secret life. Harron felt this was an important thing to protect in her movie adaptation. “There’s no real explanation for his moral deformity, and I wasn’t interested in pinpointing one,” says the director. “His parents got divorced? He was bullied at school? That doesn’t explain killing all these people. It would only diminish the madness.”
Instead, American Psycho dropped viewers into the mind of a man who’s chillingly detached, taking you inside his head through a disturbingly placid voice-over. “It made sense. He doesn’t have anyone else in his life he talks to about what he is and the inane things he thinks about,” says Turner. “So he does it to the viewer. As a device, voice-overs are usually revealing or intimate and personal. But his interior life is so fake and non-existent, there’s nothing there: just bullshit about his skin regime.”
After Edward Norton and Johnny Depp flirted with the role, Bale was eventually cast, committing to the role with gusto. “One of my favourite scenes to shoot was the one where Bateman’s in his office, on the phone confessing to his lawyer,” remembers Harron. “Usually I don’t do a lot of takes. But with this one, Christian insisted on 16 takes, drinking an entire cappuccino between each one, to give this incredibly unhinged, wired and neurotic performance, full of crying and laughter, hysteria and release.”
Bale nailed the character’s “infinite shallowness”, as Turner puts it. The writer adds, though, that a lot of the actors on set didn’t understand why Harron had fought so hard for him to play the part. (The director at one point departed the project after financiers Lionsgate tried to oust Bale for Leonardo Dicaprio; as a result, the film was momentarily set to be directed by Oliver Stone, with the Titanic star in the lead role — see p103.) “His co-stars couldn’t get their heads around why he seemed so flat and detached. They were like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ Then of course, when they saw it all together, they understood.”