Then all of a sudden Leonardo DiCaprio was playing the role right after coming off Titanic. It was important to have someone who really could blend in because of the way the story works. We were so excited about how amazing he was because he wasn’t already super famous. "The biggest (upset) was that we already had cast Christian (Bale).
Here, Turner charts its marathon to the screen and looks back at how this murderous masterpiece found its legs in feminist territory. She still gets fans coming up to her to quote their favourite scene ("I’ve had men recite lots of things from that movie but they love to recite the beauty routine to me"). Ewan McGregor was also attached at one point to play Bateman, but all wrongs were eventually righted and this vehicle finally roared to life with Christian Bale in the lead as a sinister Wall Street banker slash serial killer.Īfter all this time, Guinevere Turner is fascinated by Psycho's lasting legacy. Draft after draft of the screenplay was written – including an early draft by Ellis himself which ended in a musical number – before Lionsgate awarded the project to Mary Harron, all before being sniped away when it was surprisingly announced that Leonardo DiCaprio (fresh off the boat from Titanic) was set to star, Oliver Stone to direct.
"She's transformed a novel about blood lust into a movie about men's vanity."īuffing out the sharper edges for Turner's screenplay wasn't the only hurdle in getting American Psycho to the screen. "It's just as well a woman directed American Psycho," wrote Roger Ebert of Harron in his review of the film.
Writer/actor/director Guinevere Turner had the formidable task of taking one of the most controversial novels of all time – replete with grisly scenes including one of a rat entering a woman's downstairs to eat out her insides ("I remember reading that and thinking, ‘Fuck you Bret Ellis, that’s never gonna get out of my vision!'") – and distilling it into a quasi-thriller-satire which traded stock in laughter rather than blood-letting. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck," said Tammy Bruce, then-president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organizaton for Women. When the novel first came out in 1991, an endless torrent of death threats were sent to smite its author, Bret Easton Ellis.
It certainly was not a feminist comedy that the naysayers and boycotters had expected. When Christian Bale peeled back his herb-mint face mask to reveal his chainsaw-wielding proclivities as a serial killer in Mary Harron's American Psycho, America froze.
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