Director Mary Herron on 'American Psycho's 20th anniversary
20 years after American Psycho, Mary Harron talked to @Vulture about almost losing the movie, fighting to cast Christian Bale, and why its original reception reminds her of Joker’s https://t.co/mkLGFyr8V0
- NYMag Communications (@nymagPR) April 22, 2020
- Talked about studio objections to the script: "I’d be having a meeting, and they’d want to know more about his childhood and his parents. It doesn’t matter if his mother was mean to him. I don’t care. He’s a monster."
- On meeting Christian Bale: "He was this skinny English kid. I said, “Christian, have you ever been to a gym?” He said no. And I said, “Well maybe you should go to a gym, because Patrick Bateman works out, so just get a gym membership.” Two weeks later, he’s totally transformed. I had no idea how obsessive Christian was or what I was unleashing with this kind of casual comment."
- On how she tricked the studio into casting Christian Bale when the studio didn't want him: "They still wanted a big star. This started a whole campaign. So I went for five or six people that I was pretty sure would say no - Ben Affleck, Matt Damon. Matt and Ben said no pretty quickly. And then Ewan McGregor said no. And I was talking to Christian throughout this process, and he was getting upset that I was going out with these other people, and I was like, “No! They’re going to say no, you’ve got to be patient, this is a long game we’re playing.”
- Compares the controversy from her film to Joker's: "It was so ludicrous. I was so familiar with that conversation because that conversation has happened around me, because it happened around American Psycho, and it’s always the same conversation. These attacks always focus on some kind of art movie. They never focus on the extreme violence in mainstream entertainment... Marvel, you can blow up most of Manhattan and people love that. People are very uncomfortable with moral ambiguity. If that same violence had been perpetrated by a person [like John Wick] who was seeking noble revenge, they might feel differently."