Director Mary Herron on 'American Psycho's 20th anniversary

[queenursula]

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

Comments

[saintclaire87]

“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."

:( Yeah, Bale went overboard in the past when it came to transformations. Hopefully he’s stopped now.

[doriiansz]

He's been putting his body through such extremes... Why? What for? I don't get it. And I've never been crazy about him as an actor tbh. No matter how fat or thin he gets I'm like oh yeah that's Bale doing his method acting again lol

[maltwhitman]

He likes to do it! Is that not a good enough reason?

[bellwetherr]

no, liking it is not usually a good enough reason to put your body through crazy turmoil like that

[her_schism]

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."

Very, very true.

I love American Psycho so much, but its one of those films where you can't trust any man who likes it.

[fraises]

Right? It's one of my favourite movies but I'm glad my bf hates it. One of my bfs in highschool was obsessed with the book and we actually went to see the movie together when it came out, I swear he saw it as aspirational.

[her_schism]

Obsessed with the book? I'm glad he's an ex. That book is straight up nasty, not good, and all the satire is just buried under the gore. The movie is a perfect distillation of the themes imo. I'm glad you're in a better place now!

[marywebgirl]

When I read the book I just didn't want to deal with all the violent/gross stuff, so I skipped those parts. You know what's left? Descriptions of men's clothes and menus. That's literally it.

[ahkna]

One of the biggest mindfucks of my life was realizing that people actually think that this is clever satire after they've left high school.

That last quote rubs me the wrong way. It feels deeply disingenuous to pretend that these are ~~~art films when they're at best shallow, and even more so when they entirely hinge on the violence. Does American Psycho even exist without the extreme violence against women? What is Joker except trying to make a psychopathic misogynist with 75 years of violent history sympathetic?

Now if these movies talked about the moral ambiguity of glamourizing and rationalizing male violence, then it'd be a different conversation.

[bellwetherr]

lmao ty her last comment is so weird to me, violence isn't singular to marvel

[meow_tan]

violence isn't singular to marvel but people always act like violence in films is the problem. it's not, people just get pearl clutchy when a movie has a bit of ambiguity or has villain protagonists. look at how people treat star wars now, i see it in fandom discourse circles all the time. there are certain people who think any media that has more complicated morality than a childrens cartoon is bad and harmful. violence in marvel is "good" violence because the good guys always win.

[sillycucumber]

Is that a plus for DC for making Batman hate Superman because he destroyed the city lol?

[black_swan87]

Thank god leo dropped out of this movie because he would’ve been terrible in it

[rhapsodeeinblue]

"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."

👏

[theladyflash]

Clearly she was the perfect one for the job with this comment. You weren't suppose to have any empathy for his. Would have ruined the whole adaptation.