Bret Easton Ellis

That’s being done on Wednesday the 17th.

I have been forced to learn it. I literally have received three or four phone calls this morning reminding me of everything that I must do.

The head guy at Random House, Paul Bogaards, called me very early today because he had seen this Time Magazine profile that came out and he wasn’t pleased. I had gotten an email from a friend, who had seen it last night online, and they thought it was great. I read it and I thought “Oh yeah, it’s pretty good!”’ But the PR people at Knopf are not happy. He thought I was being too coy. It’s not that I wasn’t being real. I’ve got to stop this whole shtick of telling the interviewer “I guess I like you so I can be honest with you today.” But I really wasn’t doing that. I always have been nice to interviewers. I’ve never been grouchy or mean. I’ve always been real and sincere. I’ve known my publicist since he was a young editorial assistant and was passing out in snow banks in front of Manhattan brownstones 20 years ago. Now for some reason he thinks I’m coming across as not very sincere, which bothers me. I don’t know why Paul is thinking that.

Well you know what? I did have this whole sort of performance planned when I was about to embark on this tour. I was going to do it in character as the Bret Easton Ellis of the book. About two interviews in, it became exhausting. I’m not an actor, I can’t do it. It wasn’t fun either. It was having to maintain a pose with a journalist who wanted genuine answers to genuine questions and it didn’t work out. There have been very few things written about me that haven’t been true or that I’ve had a problem with. I’ve never read a profile and said “Lies, lies! What in the hell is this person saying?” I mean I’ve been upset about profiles because I don’t like the way I come off. But there’d been nothing in it that I can point to and say “Well that wasn’t said” or “I didn’t do that.” It could be taken out of context and it can all be the events of that day or those hours are obviously going to be filtered down through the sensibility of that journalist. So you’re going to come out on his side of the fence and you might not recognize that person but that’s how he sees you and you just have to accept that.

That also can backfire, so either way you’re screwed. You can either be too honest which might not translate well in print. Quite honestly I just don’t know what the answer is. If you can tell me, I would appreciate it.

That’s a waste of time.

That’s because most actors aren’t very smart and they’re very suspicious. Also because of the nature of their business, which is constant rejection, they’re haunted souls. Most of them haven’t graduated high school. They’re not very smart people. I have a lot of friends who are actors, but come on, let’s get honest here.

That’s also where a lot of the insecurity comes from and that’s also why you see them wearing fake glasses at political rallies and stuff.

I went to the site once and they have their little profiles and stuff. Saying what they like and don’t like. Recently I was told they love me.

Yes. They’re part of my audience.

I never expected to hit any kind of audience. I literally was a musician in college. I thought I was going to be in a rock band. I swear to God that was my future. I wrote songs and played a band, that was what I was going to do. I wrote books on the side. I had Less Than Zero but I hadn’t planned on getting it published.

First, through the publication of my five books the culture has changed tremendously. In 1985 I don’t think I even knew a single person with a tattoo and anybody who did have a tattoo was considered really dubious material. That’s not true now. The culture’s completely different now. In 1985 my audience was a lot of 80’s girls with their collars up and wearing a lot of pink and green preppy stuff. Then in the 90’s it was much more cool and streamlined. Now I don’t know because I haven’t given a reading in seven years.

Yeah, the last book I had out came out at the end of 1998 so it’s been years since I’ve even been out in public to read anything to anybody. When this tour kicks off I will see pretty much a new audience.

[laughs] Well the Bret Easton Ellis in the book would have said yes and that I was bitten by a bird doll and was walking with a cane and I really didn’t want to talk about anything. No, it’s just I don’t like to do them. I’m not particularly comfortable with reading out loud. I don’t necessarily think it’s my thing. I always get very frustrated at other author’s readings because I always think “No they shouldn’t read it that way, they should read it this way.” Then when I’m up there I get very self-conscious.

When I am promoting a book I do the readings because it’s part of the contract. But I’m offered to read a lot in between books but I just can’t do it.

Uh, half. Maybe sixty percent if you take out some of the more outrageous elements in it. If I look at the dynamics of the key relationships in the book. The relationship between Bret and Jane, Bret and the shrinks, the father and the son, the publishing business stuff, the party throwing. There’s a lot of stuff that is pretty close and then you have some of the more nightmarish stuff that can only be attributed to my fantasy life, my dreams and stuff. I can’t call it an autobiographical novel, but it is in the end it is because all novels are autobiographical because they show the reader where that writer was during that period in his life.

The first chapter is an introduction. It sets up why Bret is where he is and why the rest of the book is going to happen. That was always part of the structure of the book. I was not necessarily the narrator when I first started thinking about this book in 1989. It was a fictional narrator, but as the years went on and certain things started happening to me my response to the material started getting more complicated so Bret Ellis became the narrator of this book.

I was.

I’m going to go back into it. I’ve got an appointment a week from today at two o’clock.

It is no coincidence at all that it is coinciding with the release of the book. No coincidence to that whatsoever. But yes, I have been in therapy on and off ever since I was a kid. It really hasn’t been helping much.

No, it is Dr. Kim, the shrink that I’ve had for many years.

I don’t know if she’s read [Lunar Park] yet. I have been living in LA for about a year and a half so this will be the first time I’ve seen her in a long time. She knew about it and we talked about it sometimes in therapy so Monday will be pretty interesting.

One of the most interesting things is that for one year we did dream therapy. I kept a dream journal for about eight or nine months.

[laughs] Yeah. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. You really have to make an effort. When you wake up you really have to have that pad by the bed and you really have to scribble down immediately what you just dreamt. I did this for about a year and I would type the dreams up and I would go into Dr. Kim’s and we would start discussing what the dream meant and it really did make clear where certain anxieties were coming from and what I was thinking about subconsciously. It was amazing; you live an entire life in your unconscious. An entire life with the same characters and landscapes. It read like a novel. It was one of the most mind blowing things I’ve ever done.

We’d meet every Tuesday and I would come in with a dream. I would type it out and we would read it together. We would go “Why is this person back in your dreams now? Why are you back in Nevada? Remember you were roaming around Nevada and you kept going back to that one hill.” Then she would ask me “What’s been going on this past week that’s brought you back there? Why are you back at your father’s high school?”

No. It’s too dirty.

Yes, it’s too dirty even for me.

The dream journals will never be published. I’m going to destroy them. Dr. Kim probably has them on file because I made copies for her.

No, Lunar Park came out of wanting to write a Stephen King novel. In 1989, I wanted to write two genre novels. I wanted to write a Stephen King novel and a Robert Ludlum novel. I loved those genres and those writers. For some reason I didn’t think I could pull off the Stephen King book but I thought I could pull off the international espionage thriller. So I spent the next eight years working on Glamorama and during those eight years I kept up an outline on Lunar Park. Then by the time I was finished promoting Glamorama it was time to sit down to write Lunar Park. I’m glad I waited.

It was incredibly therapeutic. I felt I resolved so many issues with my Dad, which is strange. He was a big part of a lot of problems I had. He died very suddenly so it was unresolved. We hadn’t spoken much before he died. Now in talking with a lot of friends my age who had similar problems that I did with their dads they say “Listen, they mellow out. They get tired and become nicer.” That just makes me sad because I didn’t have that kind of resolution with my father and so I think writing a book like this helped a lot. It exorcised some demons. That’s not why I wrote it, but in the end I guess that’s what I got out of it.

I don’t know if I could help it. I mean it would be there.

Gee I never thought of it that way. I don’t know.

No, people are afraid of me. You don’t understand.

But I don’t know if I want to be having kids. That’s a whole other issue. You can never say never. I had the male biological clock thing going in my early to mid thirties that completely took me by surprise. I didn’t expect it to happen at all. Where you start looking at kids and wanting kids and thinking “Oh yeah I can do this, I want to do this.” Then it let up, maybe it will come back.

Yes.

I do not have Larry David money.

Yeah, but considering the economics of book publishing, far less than you might think. Also I think far less than what people assume in terms of sales of books and the notoriety of books. Booksellers take 45 percent, publishers take 45 percent, you’re left with ten percent, taxes and agent fees. It is not a ton of money. I have enough money where I can live comfortably but I don’t have any fuck you money.

I would have fuck you money if my Dad had managed his assets a little better and was not five million dollars in debt when he died. He left us with nothing and my Mom was almost penniless. But I don’t have expensive taste and I’m pretty simple about what I have to have. Curb Your Enthusiasm is sort of about the freedom that money brings but then that freedom just makes him more neurotic. That’s a peculiarly American trait.

That’s true too.

Do I find myself getting into more trouble when I’m not working on a project? Definitely. Do I find myself fucking up a little bit more when I’m not focused on a book or inspired by something? Yeah, I see my life getting more complicated. The drama queen in me comes out and starts fucking things up so on that level I can definitely relate to the show. There was always part of Seinfeld too. That always seems to sort of be a theme where people need more to do. But it’s like that old thing, once you have enough food, once you have shelter, once you find out you’re not dying then you want more. Then once you have all of that then you want more and more and more. It’s just a peculiarly human trait.

A reoccurring theme that I can find that links book to book to book; My God I can’t do it. That’s so weird! What is it about the artist that they can’t locate that and tell people? I don’t know what it is. It’s like this wall in a way. You’d think you could do it.

Yeah, I hear that theory a lot but that’s not my problem here. Artists always feel that they should never see shrinks or go to therapy because they feel that they’ll talk out all their neuroses and therefore they would not have their art. I’m just not a believer in that. I think it actually helps.

I was sent a copy of it.

No, I was not involved in the movie at all. But I liked it.

Yes, it actually does. I run into a lot of readers who are college students and have no idea the controversy that the book generated when it came out. If you had asked me within the three days of Simon and Schuster dropping the book and Random House picking it up. if that would be the end result I would have walked away from you and not been your friend. I would have said “You’re being really fucked up; you’re being really mean right now. Do you really need to rub it in?” It is a shock.

I read about it and saw a picture. It looks like Christian Bale. Now for a lot of people Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman. Though I have to tell you I never had a guy in my head while I was writing American Psycho. He always seemed to be this faceless guy. Now that Christian Bale did so good in the movie. I was really afraid that everybody’s going to read the book and see Patrick Bateman as Christian Bale. Yet when I reread the book a couple of years ago I didn’t picture anybody.

He has the rights now for the rest of his and my life. So it’s up to Roger. Roger made a bunch of money from this Beowulf script that he sold and with that money he came to me and just made me an offer I could not refuse. Since I loved Rules of Attraction I said great. He’s written a real spellbinding script for Glamorama. I think the problem is that it’s an expensive movie to make and I think it’s topic, which is Americans committing terrorism abroad, makes it not a very popular movie in development right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Roger keeps saying he’s going to do it. He keeps showing me storyboards for some of the big set pieces.

I did not go to the set for Less Than Zero because I was actually in college in New England at the time and they were shooting in LA. Then for American Psycho I did go to the set when they were shooting the interiors in Toronto just because it was publicity for Glamorama. I’ve been on film sets before and it’s so horrible to hear people say it’s boring but it sort of was. The interior of the restaurant didn’t quite look like what I thought and it was cold. Then the other time I met up with the American Psycho crew it was purely by accident. They were shooting exteriors and I had just left a restaurant with some friends and in the distance were all of these arc lights and this film crew. Then the closer we got we actually saw Christian Bale get out of a limousine. We went over and actually hung out on the set for a while.

Then on Rules of Attraction I didn’t go on the set at all even though Roger tried to get me into the movie. He begged me to do a role. I knew that there was no way in hell that I was going to do it.

Well in the novel Rules of Attraction you’re first introduced to Patrick Bateman. He’s the brother of Sean Bateman, who’s the main character of Rules of Attraction and Sean has to go to New York because his father’s dying and he meets his brother in the hospital. Then we see that his brother is some sort of vicious Wall Street guy. So Roger wanted to shoot that scene and so he had gone to Christian Bale to reprise his role as Patrick Bateman. Christian said that he didn’t want to do it. Then Roger asked me to play him. I thought it was such a terrible and gimmicky idea. He begged and begged and begged but I never did it. They finally got Casper Van Diem to do it. Then Roger cut the two scenes entirely.

Yeah I did.

I guess I understand why it was made. Lions Gate had made a profit on American Psycho so I guess they thought they could make more money. It didn’t particularly piss me off but I don’t think it’s a good movie. I really don’t care that they made it, but my only problem is that the money situation wasn’t cool in terms of them owning the rights and using the name Patrick Bateman. But in the end it had nothing to do with Patrick Bateman or with American Psycho or with Bret Easton Ellis. It was just a title being used to sell a kind of dumb campus slasher movie.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck