Its been twenty years since the release of American Psycho and Christian Bale's crazy performance as Patrick Batman. In 2000, Christian Bale, and even his co-star Jared Letto were A-listers on the top of every Sexy Man Alive list. But the role of Bateman could have gone to another good looking actor, Brad Pitt until the idea was turned down completely.
When Bret Easton Ellis released his book American Psycho in 1991, it wasn't welcomed with open arms, in fact, it was largely boycotted. Many people stayed away from the horribly gory book about the disturbing murders of not just women but men and even animals as well. Even the initial publisher told Ellis it would be a waste of money to release, and Ellis received death threats about it.
Hollywood picked it up nine years later and it surprisingly had a woman slated to direct it, Mary Harron. But the decision on who should play the handsome maniac was the biggest problem.
When adapting the novel to film Harron had the help of Ellis, who was also writing the screenplay, and in an interview Rolling Stone the author admitted that Brad Pitt was supposed to play the rich neurotic Bateman, but it didn't go so well. Ellis revealed that in fact a lot of different producers wanted to adapt the book, and one version had Pitt together with body horror director David Cronenberg. But in the end, creative differences were the cause of that version to hit the bin.
"David was lovely – is lovely, I still like David – but he had strange demands," Ellis told Rolling Stone when asked about the Brad Pitt version. "He hated shooting restaurant scenes, and he hated shooting nightclub scenes. And he didn’t want to shoot the violence. I ignored everything he said. So, of course, he was disappointed with it and he hired his own writer; that script was worse for him and he dropped out. I did another pass on the script for Rob Weiss in 1995. That didn’t work out either. And then it was Mary Harron and Oliver Stone and again Mary Harron, who made the film, and the draft that Mary wrote with Guinevere Turner had a lot of similarities to the drafts I did for Cronenberg and Weiss. That really was what you could take from the book."
No doubt Brad Pitt would have been an interesting fit for the role of the yuppie killer. Pitt was up and coming in the late '90s and early 2000s, and had just done Fight Club, another psychotic thriller.
It is strange that Cronenberg didn't want to shoot the violence though. As a famous body horror director who has done movies like The Fly, you'd think that he'd be an interesting find for the movie. But at the very least, we know that the reason Pitt didn't score with American Psycho wasn't because of him but because of artistic differences in post-production.
In the end, American Psycho became a cult classic with Harron's direction and Bale's performance as Bateman seats him with the likes of other famous horror killers from everyone between Hannibal Lector and Dexter.
"I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties – a very specific time and place – and yet he’s really infused with my own pain and what I was going through as a guy in his 20s, trying to fit into a society that he doesn’t necessarily want to fit into but doesn’t really know what the other options are," Ellis explained. "That was Patrick Bateman to me. It was trying to become a kind of ideal man because that seemed to be the only kind of a guy that was “accepted.” Bateman keeps saying, “I want to fit in.” I felt that way too. It’s very surprising and completely shocking that a novel that I was writing in 1987, 1988 and ’89, is being referenced now. Certainly, the movie helped move it into a higher plane of consciousness for a lot of people. But it is surprising."
Even though we'll never see Pitt as Bateman, we can still celebrate the cult classic that American Psycho has become. Anyone up to listening to some Phil Collins?
