American Psycho [2000] dir Mary Harron (Christian Bale)

American Psycho is a 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's controversial novel American Psycho. The movie stars Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, with Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Justin Theroux, Bill Sage, Chloδ Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, Willem Dafoe and Samantha Mathis. It debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on April 14, 2000.



Mary Harron, who had previously directed I Shot Andy Warhol based on the story of Valerie Solanas, directed the film and co-wrote its screenplay with Guinevere Turner. This screenplay was selected over three others, including one by Ellis himself. Turner claims Ellis' only complaint with the movie was Bateman's moonwalk before killing Paul Allen. Although the movie doesn't fully depict all of Bateman's goings on that occurred in the novel, the film accurately depicts the atmosphere of the book: gruesome and dark, yet also humorous. In the novel, Patrick Bateman's favorite bands are Genesis, Huey Lewis & The News and Whitney Houston. Three distinct, and entire chapters, are devoted to each. Virtually every line in the film, including voice-overs, are taken verbatim from Ellis' novel. One of the few discrepancies is that several names from the book were changed for the film; for instance Paul Owen became Paul Allen and Tim Price became Tim Bryce.



American Psycho, as other works by Ellis, has connecting characters from his other books which subsequently do not appear at all in the film version with the exception of the character of Vanden, whom Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) introduces as her cousin at Espace, is also from Rules of Attraction. Patrick Bateman's brother Sean from Rules of Attraction is in the chapter entitled Birthday Brothers, but is mentioned nowhere in the film; However, Patrick is mentioned by Sean in both the book and the film version of Rules of Attraction.

Many people in the film industry have said that the novel was "unfilmable" because of its story, extreme violence and sexual content. During the early stage of preproduction, many actors, directors and crew members were considered to take on the movie adaptation. Director Mary Harron and actor Christian Bale were originally set to make the movie, but Leonardo DiCaprio expressed interest in playing the lead. Production company Lions Gate issued a press release that DiCaprio would star, after which Mary Harron walked off the project, and Oliver Stone subsequently expressed interest in directing the film. When both DiCaprio and Stone dropped the project, Harron and Bale returned to the movie.

Christian Bale spent several months working out by himself, and then three hours a day with a trainer during pre-production, in order to achieve the proper physique for the obsessed, narcissistic Bateman.



To clean up the unedited DVD version of the movie and achieve a relatively mild R rating, the producers excised approximately eighteen seconds of footage from a ménage α trois scene featuring an emotionally detached Patrick Bateman and two prostitutes. Some dialogue was also edited: Bateman orders a prostitute (Christy) to bend over so that another (Sabrina) can "see your asshole", which was edited to "see your ass." The unedited version also shows Patrick receiving oral sex from Christy. Some events that Bateman mentions in the phone message to his lawyer are events that transpired in the book, but not in the film.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho_%28film%29




http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144084/