Author Bret Easton Ellis has long maintained a touchy relationship with Mary Harron‘s "American Psycho" starring Christian Bale. "I…don’t think really works as a film," he said back 2013, arguing that the very construct of Patrick Bateman becomes compromised when realized in a movie. However, people might’ve forgotten that a couple of years earlier, Ellis himself was throwing his weight behind a feature film remake from Noble Jones, a second unit director on "The Social Network" (the author wanted Scott Disick or Miles Fisher for the lead role). That project fizzled (as did a potential prequel series), but Ellis is now mounting a Broadway take on "American Psycho." And in an interview in Rolling Stone, Ellis reveals that before Harron made her film, he had a written a script with some heavyweight talent involved.
READ MORE: Bret Easton Ellis’ 2-Hour Talk With Quentin Tarantino
David Cronenberg had been kicking the tires on the movie, but he had some very specific requirements before he would agree to make it.
"[I wrote the script] in the early Nineties with a young actor attached named Brad Pitt. David was lovely – is lovely, I still like David – but he had strange demands," Ellis said. "He hated shooting restaurant scenes, and he hated shooting nightclub scenes. And he didn’t want to shoot the violence. I ignored everything he said. So of course he was disappointed with it and he hired his own writer; that script was worse for him and he dropped out. I did another pass on the script for Rob Weiss in 1995. That didn’t work out either. And then it was Mary Harron and Oliver Stone and again Mary Harron, who made the film, and the draft that Mary wrote with Guinevere Turner had a lot of similarities to the drafts I did for Cronenberg and Weiss. That really was what you could take from the book."
Cronenberg and Pitt taking on material written by Ellis? That certainly would’ve been interesting, but then we never would’ve gotten Mary Harron and Christian Bale’s take, so maybe things worked out as they should’ve.
Meanwhile, if want to see Ellis’ vision, the Broadway musical of "American Psycho" starring Benjamin Walker is now in full swing.
