‘American Psycho’ is back in North Texas theaters after 25 years. Here’s where
It’s been nearly 25 years since “American Psycho” slashed into movie theaters.
The 2000 horror film based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel stars Christian Bale as wealthy New York investment banker-turned-serial killer, Patrick Bateman. Mary Harron directed and co-wrote the film with Guinevere Turner.
“American Psycho” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000 and landed a wide release a few months later on April 14.
To celebrate the occasion, Dallas’ Texas Theatre is hosting a screening of the film Friday (Valentine’s Day) with Harron and Turner in attendance. The theater also screened the duo’s latest collaboration — “Charlie Says” — on Thursday evening.
Ahead of the dual screenings, Turner spoke with the Star-Telegram about 25 years of “American Psycho,” why she wanted to tackle the Manson family in “Charlie Says” and why she enjoys working with Harron. The Star-Telegram also spoke with Harron this week about the two-film event.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Star-Telegram: Guinevere, thanks so much for the time today. Do you visit Texas much?
Guinevere Turner: Weirdly, I was in Austin in October for their screenwriting conference. I was in Houston two weeks ago for a wedding and now I’m going back to Dallas. I don’t know, Texas is calling for me. [Laughs]
S-T: I guess so [laughs]. The Texas Theatre is a great theater to host these screenings. It’s the same theater where Dallas police caught Lee Harvey Oswald after the Kennedy assassination. Lots of history there.
Turner: Wow. I did not know that. I haven’t been there [yet].
S-T: “American Psycho” is 25. What do you make of its legacy all these years later?
Turner: It’s been a slow burn, I would say. Because 25 years ago, it didn’t get great reviews and it wasn’t a quote, unquote, “instant classic” by any stretch. We were premiering at Sundance in the biggest theater at that festival. It was jam-packed. It was frothy and exciting. Christian [Bale] was there, and I was there, everybody was there. I can only describe the audience response as polite clapping [laughs], which we were like, “What?” Then they’re all the reviews that get cranked out during the festival and we were like, “Oh.” We laugh about it, because we weren’t like, “Oh no, did we make a bad movie?” Not at all, we were like, “Oh no, they don’t get it.” [Laughs]
Then we spent the next 10 years speculating like, “What did we do? What did we miss? Maybe it’s that we satirized the ‘80s too close to the actual ‘80s?” Then as time went on, I feel the internet did us a huge favor, because between 2000 and 2010 so much changed. We learned that we made a meme-able movie. Also, a generation grew up that was farther away from the ‘80s and Christian Bale is famous. The world became a place where you could be like, “I’m gonna watch all of his movies all day.” Then Christian just got really famous. It’s kind of an inexplicable metric, really, but kind of thrilling.
I mean, definitely all you can hope for really, as a filmmaker, is that people are talking about your work 25 years later. [Or] five years later, five minutes later. What’s interesting about the movie is that part of its fan base are the very people it’s satirizing, who don’t really get that it’s a satire, and act like Patrick Bateman is an aspirational hero, which is weird. At some point the movies you make, the art you make, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. People take away what they take away. But we’re like, “Weird. That’s really weird.” It just seems so bald-facedly poking fun at this toxic masculinity culture, ‘80s culture, Wall Street, heterosexuality, capitalism, like all of it. And they’re like, “Whoa, I love that movie.”
S-T: Despite being set in the 1980s, the movie still feels relevant to today’s times in regards to capitalism and greed. Maybe these guys are now “tech bros” instead of investment bankers.
Turner: That’s interesting, actually. Because there’s been rumblings of a new “American Psycho” being made. I have students and they’re like, “What do you think they should do with it?” They’ve been saying this for about a year. I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know where you take it from there.” I mean, they were like, “What if it was a woman?” I’m like, “What’s the point of that?” But it never occurred to me. I’m like, “What do you do? Patrick Bateman has social media now? Like, who cares.”
But you’re right, the same or a very similar movie, but in the “tech bro” space would be current. Then it’s like, just make a different movie, because a lot of the things don’t translate. There’s a way in which technology is so deeply sort of infused with our muscles. It’s an ongoing conversation with screenwriters [that] cellphones ruin the romantic comedy. There’s no such thing as a blind date or a misconnection. But anyway, the fact that there’s rumblings of Luca Guadagnino directing a re-imagining of “American Psycho” starring [Austin Butler], I’m like, “Okay, go for it.” I would watch that movie out of morbid curiosity.
S-T: My colleague Lawrence Dow recently spoke with “American Psycho” director Mary Harron and she shared a similar comment about not knowing “what there is left to say about it.”
Turner: I mean, we just laugh because even now, think pieces have been written that extol the virtues of the original. [They] talk about how we’re geniuses, and we’re like, “Yeah, sure. Keep it coming. We don’t mind.” Free press talking about how we’re the most brilliant filmmakers in the world. Who knows if that’ll happen.
I actually asked my students, who are all undergraduates. [Editor’s note: Turner teaches at Syracuse University] They’re younger than the movie itself, but they all know it. You can see in their eyes that they’re just waiting for an “American Psycho” question opportunity. I was like, “Why does this movie matter to you? It’s so old compared to you.” This girl just goes, “The memes. You can’t understand the memes unless you see the movie.” That’s funny to make a meme-able movie, before memes existed as such.
When I watch it now, there’s a moment where he says, “Is that Ivana Trump?” It doesn’t make me cringe, because it makes perfect sense. Donald Trump himself, at that age, was dying to be anyone who looked successful in business. I guess it sort of gives me a little pang of like, “Remember when Donald Trump could just be a throwaway punchline?” We were so young, we were so innocent. We didn’t know what was coming for us. If you would have told us he’s gonna be president twice and possibly turn it into a fascist state. We would have been like, “That guy?”
S-T: “Charlie Says” will also screen alongside “American Psycho” at the Texas Theatre. You’ve made those two movies and 2005’s “The Notorious Bettie Page” with Mary. Do you remember when you two first met?
Turner: Yeah, it was Christine Vachon, the producer most recently Academy Award-nominated for “Past Lives.” She was producing Mary’s first feature, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” at the same time I was on a press tour for my first film, “Go Fish.” We just sort of landed in the same room and Christine introduced us. Mary, one of the first things she said to me was, “You look a lot like Bettie Page.” I was like, “Who’s Bettie Page?” [Laughs] Just clueless as always. I was like, “What’s American Psycho?” I don’t know what rock I live under, but Mary’s always bringing these things to me that sort of change my life.
We both lived in the East Village in the ‘90s and we just had an immediate affinity. We tried to write a short about Bettie Page, and I did my homework. Finding a collaborator that you can work with is way more important than finding a partner. There’s no such thing as collaborator divorce. You can just walk away if you want. We were doing some interview last year, and somebody asked us, “What do you attribute the longevity of your collaborative relationship?” And Mary said, “I think we just find the same things funny.” That’s a great way to put it, because it’s true. Like in “Charlie Says” there’s not a lot that’s funny in the movie. It’s not a satire at all. There are couple things in it that make us laugh, and then we’re like, “Oh my god, we’re the only people laughing the theater. We seem so crazy.” Now we’re in pre-production on our fourth film.
S-T: Really? What is that one about?
Turner: Yeah, it’s called “The Highway That Eats People.” It follows four teenagers who are homeless kids out of the foster care system and a serial killer is pursuing them. Weirdly, it’s also funny [laughs], as well as being dark and about things. We’re ready to go. We just been waiting for that chunk of change to make that movie and we’re saying to ourselves, “Do they think we don’t know how to do it?”
S-T: Done it three times together already. Is the plan to shoot this year?
Turner: Yeah, and it was also [the plan] last year. We keep almost having the money and then it falling apart. But it’s cast, we’re ready, if somebody just sent us a check, we would be running to the camera. It just doesn’t get easier with independent film, no matter what you’ve accomplished. To do another one is always the same crazy mix of luck, some rich person and some good actor.
S-T: “Charlie Says” is an interesting take on the Manson family that focuses on the girls who committed the murders, rather than Charles Manson himself. The film is based on two books — “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion” and “The Long Prison Journey of Leslie van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult.” How did you go about adapting both these books into one screenplay?
Turner: The producers came to me with the one book that’s just called “The Family” and I read it. It will have an entire elaborate chapter that talks about how Charlie Manson was actually a CIA plant and how they were all doing ecstasy before anyone knew what it was. Then [the author] will be like, “But maybe that was just a rumor.” Then why am I reading this book? It’s just a person who was briefly connected to these people speculating some truths and was obsessed with cars. [The book] would be like, “In June of 1969, he drove a lime green blah, blah, blah Chevy from San Antonio.” I’m just like, “What? Why? Who cares? What am I supposed to do this book?”
[The producers] optioned it and were open to suggestion. I was like, “What about this story has not been tried?” I found the second book, which is called “The Long Prison Journey of Leslie van Houten” and written by the woman who’s played by Merritt Wever in the movie. Then I was like, “This is a movie. Can we option this book, please?” Because this is a story that hasn’t been told. How is it in the collective consciousness of this country we’re like, “Oh yeah, orgies, acid, murders, trial. And nobody’s like then what happened?” It’s a really interesting story what happened to them. How they were isolated and how this grad student just didn’t even want to be there, ended up changing their perspective. I was like, “Yay, here’s some untread tales.” In my mind, it’s mostly that and endless research.
There are rabbit holes to go down on this particular topic and so many people peripherally involved wrote memoirs. I was digging through fourth-generation Xeroxes of San Francisco weeklies from the late ‘60s. I found a lot of good stuff, but it was at a point where I was just using research as procrastination. I know the story I want to tell, a compassionate view of people who joined a cult, even if they are people who famously murdered strangers. It’s just because they’re white, middle-class women that everybody lost their damn minds.
S-T: It’s an empathetic movie about these women, who obviously did bad crimes, but were influenced by and were sold false promises from Manson. While set in the late 1960s, but I couldn’t help think that it was still relevant to our time in regards to devotion in our political landscape over the last decade or so. Does the movie feel more prescient for you now?
Turner: Yeah, I felt like I wanted to show how coercion works. How so much of it depends on the person who’s doing the coercing, seeing someone who’s vulnerable, seeing someone who has a space where they want an ideology. That is incredibly relevant now. Outside of how [Trump’s] trying to dismantle very basic structures, in 2016 there was still enough chaos that there was a whole bunch of people who were like, “That man is the answer.” And he was like, “Let me pander to the working man.” While being fake wealthy and nobody noticed. It’s just kind of amazing. It’s about identifying your vulnerable population and feeding into their worst fears, basically.
S-T: The last shot of the movie really stuck with me. It’s a fictional callback to an earlier scene of a biker trying to save Leslie (Hannah Murray) from Manson. Except this time, Leslie gets on his bike and the two ride off into the sunset and she’s not there for the murders. Made me think about how minor decisions can have major impacts later on. Was that always the final scene in the script?
Turner: In fact, I struggled with how to end it. Because the ending is neither happy nor even conclusive. They’re just still in prison, one of them died, etc. I just really tried to put myself in the mindset of what it feels like to have that much time to think about what you did. I actually had written a segment like that for each of them. Mary said it’s more impactful if we just choose one and Leslie is obviously the main character. When we shot that, everybody got really quiet. It was so profound and sad.
We can all kind of connect with that. I think that was part of my mission there too. We all can think back to a decision we made that we had no idea was going to be such a pivotal point in our journey. That one still gets me every time I see it. It’s one of my proudest movie moments, because I feel like it just works. It’s weirdly, even though it’s the saddest thing in the world, it feels like it ends on a note of hope. Telling the world to make good choices.
S-T: Last question for you: What are you looking forward to with these two screenings in Dallas?
Turner: It’s always fun to be with Mary, because we do a lot of “American Psycho” things, but often apart. We live in the same state, but we’re often apart. It’s fun to just spend time with her. I look forward to an audience for “Charlie Says,” because I feel like people haven’t realized how great it is, which I guess we’re used to by now. I don’t know, it’s just exciting. I also love a cool movie theater.
Turner and Harron will be at the Texas Theatre for Q&As after screenings of “American Psycho” on Feb. 14 at 7:30 p.m. Buy tickets online here or in person at the Texas Theatre box office.
