The reason Mary Harron thought she “failed” on ‘American Psycho’
The 2000 film American Psycho is simply one of the greatest films of the 21st century so far, despite its controversies. The movie was directed by Mary Harron with Christian Bale in the lead role as Patrick Bateman, adapted, of course, from the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis.
In a past interview with Charlie Rose, Harron, Ellis, and Bale discussed the novel and the film and compared the two side by side. Immediately, Ellis responded to the elephant in the room and admitted that he did indeed enjoy the film. However, Harron couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret over the final product.
She said: “One thing I think is a failure on my part is that people keep coming out of this film thinking that it’s all a dream, and I never intended it [to be that way]. All I wanted was for it to be ambiguous in the way that the book was.”
“I think it’s a failing of mind in the final scene,” Harron added. “I just got the emphasis wrong, and I should have left it just more open-ended. Without wanting to give the plot away, it makes it seem – clearly because people keep saying this to me – it makes it look like it was all in his head. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s not.”
While Ellis himself admitted to liking the film in the interview, during the point at which Harron made her concession, he looked desperate to jump in and add his point. However, it was then that Rose moved the topic on, and Ellis missed his chance.
Elsewhere, however, and years later, Ellis noted his problem with Harron’s film, and it is strikingly similar to Harron’s own admission of failure. “I don’t think it really works as a film,” he said. “The movie is fine, but I think that book is unadaptable because it’s about consciousness, and you can’t really shoot that sensibility.”
“Regardless of how Mary Harron wants to shoot that ending, we’ve already seen him kill people; it doesn’t matter if he has some crisis of memory at the end,” Ellis added. “And a movie automatically says, ‘It’s real.’ Then, in the end, it tries to have it both ways by suggesting that it wasn’t. Which you could argue is interesting, but I think it basically confused a lot of people, and I think even Mary would admit that.”
Harron did indeed admit that, and while the end of American Psycho did perplex several members of the audience, we still ought to go with Ellis’ original feelings about the film in that it was a great adaptation of his novel. Whether Ellis was being polite to Harron and Bale in an interview setting remains to be seen, but he must have been pleased that Harron was at least ready to make concessions about her own work.
