User:Wildroot/American Psycho

Production
The palaver surrounding the making of the film is well documented: Harron cast Bale, project owners Lion's Gate wanted box office friendly Leo DiCaprio, Harron protested and was replaced by the laughably inappropriate Oliver Stone. Only after DiCaprio bolted to make The Beach did the original team reconvene.

When Christian Bale first asked to meet with you to get your approval for the role, he actually showed up at the restaurant in character. That was in 1998, I think, when that happened. I didn't have an issue with Christian Bale doing that at the time, it was just seriously unnerving. He was very intense!"

American Psycho eventually began shooting in March 1999 in Toronto, Canada, against a backdrop of protest from an activist group called Concerned Canadians Against Violence in Entertainment. Apparently, local police had found a copy of American Psycho in the home of a convicted murderer called Paul Bernardo - though a recent article suggests it actually belonged to his wife. None of these protesters had read the script, much less seen the film, and Harron found herself again forced to live down the book's reputation. "If people are objecting to a level of graphic violence," she says, "then the attacks on American Psycho are very inaccurate." Most of the film's clothing, for instance, came from Cerruti and Vivienne Westwood, because American designers like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren "didn't want to be associated with anything so horrible." In an ironic marketing strategy, Psycho's German distributor will use this image of a taut-bodied, well-groomed, and somewhat homoerotic Bale to sell the actor as a sex symbol. Go figure.

Release
Ellis - ambiguous ending. "Well, the book has this reputation and it has its following, and if you're going to take that material from one medium to another, you're just going to have to make some decisions about it. The book itself doesn't really answer a lot of the questions it poses, but by the very nature of the medium of a movie, you kind of have to answer those questions."

Cult following

January 2000: the MPAA has slapped Lions Gate Films’ “American Psycho” with an NC-17 rating. The company plans an appeal. The MPAA has applied its restrictive NC-17 rating due to a single scene that depicts the film’s star, Christian Bale, in a three-way encounter with two prostitutes, played by actresses Cara Seymour and Krista Sutton. Lions Gate Releasing co-presidents Mark Urman and Tom Ortenberg jumped to Harron’s defense: “We still feel that the scene in question is integral to her vision, and to establishing the soullessness of the film’s title character.” “The film is not about sex, but about sex as a transaction, so we made it deliberately banal and distant,” Harron said. “That Baterman (Bale’s character) is looking at himself in the mirror and not at his partners seems to be an issue for the MPAA, but his expression sums up his frighteningly detached relationship to the world around him. To me it’s one of the most significant scenes in the film and to cut it would cause serious damage.”

January 23, 2000: Premiered at Sundance Film Festival. Lions Gate is unspooling the pic in April, attempting to capitalize on early buzz and the controversy that comes with showing rough sex and chain-saw massacres on camera. The company is appealing the MPAA’s NC-17 rating, which may keep the pic from reaching the intended 1,100-screen audience. ""It always comes down to taking out a few seconds of pelvic grinding.""


 * http://variety.com/2000/digital/news/psycho-babble-1117780048/

Remake

 * http://variety.com/2001/film/news/lions-gate-reps-rights-to-psycho-sequel-1117799389/
 * http://variety.com/2011/film/news/lionsgate-to-remake-american-psycho-1118047212/
 * http://variety.com/2013/legit/reviews/london-theater-review-american-psycho-starring-matt-smith-1200949492/