American Psycho director Mary Harron

It is very interesting.

Yes, now we’re just timing the print but we’re basically finished.

I thought it came out very well. I’m very happy with it.

It was great. That was wonderful.

Yeah we had a wonderful time.

I did a commentary and we had a lot of back and forth about it. They kept me informed which was nice because I didn’t have anything to do with the first edition so it didn’t have any special features. They just kind of put it out and much more care went into this.

No nothing with the sequel.

Nothing as far as I know. I never met him. I think long time ago he was attached as director. Sometimes when someone leaves a project they give them a credit.

The cut itself is the one that was released on DVD earlier and there is about ten seconds of sex stuff in it. The new edition has a lot of those deleted scenes that we couldn’t put in. Not for censorship reasons but they were just scenes that we couldn’t fit into our cut. I always wanted to have those. There’s a great one with Reese Witherspoon and Christian Bale and I had this great scene with Willem Dafoe. The film was long and I had to just lose stuff that I really loved in order to make it tighter. It’s not like the cut is different, its just got all these extra scenes.

Originally Justin Theroux had a whole subplot and we put it all together and realized that you just couldn’t afford to follow anyone else’s story. I always felt really bad about that because Justin’s a great actor and a really close friend of mine. Then there’s this great scene with Christian and Reese in bed together and there’s a great one with Samantha Mathis and Christian in bed together and it was just cut because of pacing.

Also I never did a director’s commentary before so it has that.

Fun actually. I hadn’t seen the film in a long time because you see the film so often when you are getting it ready.

Yeah it feels even more relevant now. It’s sort of for the audience to decide what the point of the movies. In terms of the world it’s presenting, I don’t think it’s any different and in some ways it is worse.

All of these people I had to fight to have in the movie. They would say who’s Justin Theroux , who’s Josh Lucas and of course now they’re very famous.

With that cast, yes. Christian himself would cost a lot more because of Batman.

I haven’t seen it yet, no. Have you seen it?

Yes, very scary movie. Christian is great in it but he should never do that again.

I don’t think he will.

Yeah, that was a couple years before I came on and Cronenberg decided not to do it for whatever reason.

I met with a lot of people and I looked at a lot of different people’s movies. He just came in and I put him on tape and watched the tape of his audition, that was it. There was never anybody else I thought could do the role as well as he could.

I had him do a couple of scenes. I had him do one of the monologues about the music. I think it was the Huey Lewis monologue. I had him do the scene where he killed Paul Allen.

It was really funny because he auditioned in my apartment. He was doing the axe murdering and yelling “Take that you stupid bastard” and all of that. With the windows open, my neighbors must have thought it was very strange with all the yelling going on and then we did one of the very quiet monologues.

Yes I think so, about nothing there, “When you take off the mask there’s nothing there.” He was just so interesting and there so much going interior life behind his eyes.

I really liked the social satire in the book and thought that was funny and very relevant so I focused on the elements that I was most interested in.

I read the book in 1992 when it came out in England where I was living at the time and I felt that it had been very misunderstood. It had a lot of interesting things in it and it was very funny and it didn’t deserve this terrible reputation it had. I felt that a lot of people who had attacked the book never read it. I didn’t read it and think oh God make a movie out of this. I just really liked it. Then it was four or five years later when somebody called me and asked me if I was interested in it. That’s when I started thinking, “Wow, can you make a film of this? Is it filmable? How would you do it?”

They had called me up and I just went in and I had a meeting with Ed Pressman the producer and I had an idea how to exercise the copy. They asked me about it and I just thought you could do it as a period film of the 80’s and bring out the social satire.

I realize it does have that because when you look at IMDB you see that a huge amount of people are into it. Its internet following is crazy.

Sometimes late night I kind of am amused so I go on and read about it and it’s always people who say that they hate me because I didn’t make it violent enough. I just look at those debates. Some of them raise some very interesting, perceptive comments sometimes.

I’m interested in fear and suspense and dread but I’m not interested particularly in physical violence or gore. I’m not a horror director in that way. I’m not interested in the special effects or the really detailed presentation. I’m more of a Hitchcock or a Polanski person. Keeping it off screen and just creating fear is more interesting to me.

The last murder with Christie and Elizabeth, when the girls are back at his apartment late at night. That was the very last scene that we shot and it was all murder and mayhem. It was just a crazy shoot and it was just night shooting for three days. I could tell it was going to be good. It was intense, but I didn’t know if I could go to that kind of place again.

Yes she’s got a lot to do with Bettie Page. She’s a fantastic actor.

I knew her already as a stage actress. I really liked her because thought she had a very expressive face. On paper it was a small role actually but by casting a great actress, she will bring so much and you will feel those scenes so much through her. Those scenes are from her point of view and they‘re all filtered through her. She ended up giving so much that I thought it was very memorable.

A lot of those exteriors we had to shoot in New York. I’m from Toronto and I kept saying to producers, “I’m from Toronto and this does not look like New York.” All those office scenes are shot on a stage and the view outside the window is a trapped slide. So we created New York on the soundstages in Toronto. The scene where he’s running in the plaza between the two big office buildings. It just looks very Wall Street, but it’s actually Toronto. There’s certain parts of Toronto in the business district that could pass for New York.

I think there were interesting things about it. I never watched the whole thing, so don’t ask me about that.

We auditioned many people.

She was so great. It was like after I saw Christian for American Psycho. After Gretchen came in no one else would do.

Yeah, really.

Now you will.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck