Bret Easton Ellis

Every one of my books is an exercise in voice and character, an exploration, through a male narrator who is always the same age I am at the time, of the pain I'm dealing with in my life. [Interview with Jon-Jon Goulian, 2012.] Show less «

(on the negative reception of Less Than Zero (1987)) "Well, who was happy with it? I don't know anyone who was happy with it. The director wasn't happy with it, and it was this compromised movie for many, many reasons. I don't think it began that way - I think that Scott Rudin and Barry Diller, who were the ones who brought it to 20th Century Fox, had a very different movie in mind. I think when there was the regime change at the studio with Leonard Goldberg taking over, who was a family man who had kids, it became a different beast. I grew up around Hollywood, and I had no real desire to see the book made into a movie. I thought, 'Well, we'll take the money, and 98% of all books optioned never make it to the screen, so...'" Show less «

It's interesting. It's interesting to be a producer and a writer on a movie that's going to be shot in this town. It's very interesting to see what happens with actors and actresses....It's very interesting... what is available to you. Show less «

(on The Informers (2008)) "I was involved until the writer's strike hit, and that banned any writers from visiting the set. Everyone followed that rule because everyone was really scared about what might happen. So, I was involved with The Informers until about a week or two after filming [began], because I was on set rewriting scenes. Then when the writer's strike hit, I was told I could not go back on that set or I would be...whatever. Whatever happens to writers when they do that." Show less «

When a movie doesn't take itself seriously, then why are we taking it seriously?

Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors. But I have to get over it, because so far this year, two of my favorite movies were made by women, Fish Tank (2009) and The Runaways (2010). I've got to start rethinking that, although I have to say that a lot of the big studio movies I saw last year that were directed by women were far worse than the shitty big-budget studio movies that were directed by men. Show less «

[on his screenplay for American Psycho (2000)] [I wrote the script] in the early 90s with a young actor attached named Brad Pitt. David [director David Cronenberg] was lovely - is lovely, I still like David - but he had strange demands. 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. [2016] Show less «

When you become well known the first year is really, really fun and then you spend the rest of your life humiliated or trying to avoid humiliation. Everyone is so nice to you in that first year and then they all want to see something different. They want to see you get fucked up a bit and they want to take you down. It's just the nature of the world. You can deal with it or you can fight it. Whatever. Then I realized how - this sounds like such a cliché - empty it all is. There is nothing there. It's an idea. It's a concept. It's not real. Show less «

(on what went wrong with The Informers (2008)) "You need someone who understood that milieu. You need a Breck Eisner, you need someone who grew up around here. You also need someone with an Altman-esque sense of humor, because the script is really funny. The movie is not funny at all, and there are scenes in the movie that should be funny that we wrote as funny, and they're played as we wrote them, but they're directed in a way that they're not funny. It was very distressing to see the cuts of this movie and realize that all the laughs were gone." Show less «

(Movies are) much more powerful sensory experiences than novels. A novel is a different kind of transport, I guess, and it's very easy to let a movie envelop you. It's difficult for a novel to have that same power, because one is a passive experience and one is an active experience. You're working with the novel as you read it, creating your own virtual reality. You're picturing what everyone looks like, what everyone's wearing, what the scene looks like in your mind, and the movie's doing all that for you. It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a way that a movie does. Even a not-so-good movie can kind of give you some thrills or a rush. I mean, we all see so many more movies than we do read novels. It's not a problem, it's just how it is. Show less «

(why The Rules of Attraction (2002) was not set in the 1980's) "I think there were some sort of commercial problems with that. The studio thought its main audience was college kids today - which it wasn't, because no one went to see the movie. I think there was a compromise, because the movie doesn't announce so strongly that it's taking place now. It's in this hazy middle period of 80's music and 80's references, and yet there are cell phones and computers. But that's just wallpaper. I think the movie itself is the one movie that captured my sensibility in a visual and cinematic language." Show less «

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically. That's why I think, personally, that they're very tricky to adapt - that, and the fact that my narrators are semi-secretive and unreliable at times. Show less «