Like Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley before her, Mary Harron has created a monster: American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Well, technically Bret Easton Ellis did, with his controversial 1991 source novel. But it was Harron who catapulted Bateman into the cultural consciousness via her 2000 film adaptation. Fresh off acclaim from film festivals including Cannes and Sundance for 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol—which tells the story of radical feminist Valeria Solanas’s attempted assassination of the iconic artist—Harron had her heart set on adapting Ellis’s book with a pre-Batman Begins Christian Bale as the axe-wielding yuppie.

Securing the job wasn’t without its turbulence. A litany of director-actor pairings were strongly considered: David Cronenberg and Brad Pitt; Oliver Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio. The latter two were actually hired, but after famed feminist Gloria Steinem begged the young star not to take the role so as not to corrupt his legion of teen girl fans—according to Eric Saks’ Blu-ray special feature—the casting fell through (DiCaprio and Scorsese, who was also considered to direct American Psycho, would later go on to satirize finance bros in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street). Ewan McGregor was then courted, but his Velvet Goldmine co-star Bale called him up and managed to dissuade him, too. Re-enter Harron. Re-enter Bale.

The Letterboxd community is grateful that they both won out. At the time of this article, American Psycho is the 23rd most popular film of all time on the platform, with almost four million watches (and it placed as number five in our recent Showdown rounding up the best dark comedies). It’s also heavily represented in ’ Four Faves—slightly more fans with she/her pronouns have selected it in their Four Faves than those with he/him pronouns. It’s a tidbit that may initially seem surprising, until you that the project was helmed by two women: writer-director Harron and writer-actress Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, The Watermelon Woman).

However, there is a definite dark side to American Psycho’s popularity. Certain subsects of men have claimed Bateman as a “sigma male”, a role model to emulate. “I’m always so mystified by it,” the The Notorious Bettie Page director says of this unnerving phenomenon. “I don’t think that Guinevere and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them… But, people read the Bible and decide that they should go and kill a lot of people. People read The Catcher in the Rye and decide to shoot the president.”

The filmmaker goes on to it that, yes, part of its popularity “is about memes” and “TikTok, or whatever” and that part of it is because “there’s [Bateman] being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power. But at the same time, he’s played as somebody dorky and ridiculous. When he’s in a nightclub and he’s trying to speak to somebody about hip hop—it’s so embarrassing when he’s trying to be cool.” (“We be jammin’!” Bateman earnestly says in a deleted scene, further demonstrating his status as an “absolute loser,” according to MovieHima).

The sigma Wall Street bros are missing a major piece of the puzzle: “It was very clear to me and Guinevere, who is gay, that we saw it as a gay man’s satire on masculinity,” Harron explains. “[Ellis’s] being gay allowed him to see the homoerotic rituals among these alpha males, which is also true in sports, and it’s true in Wall Street, and all these things where men are prizing their extreme competition and their ‘elevating their prowess’ kind of thing. There’s something very, very gay about the way they’re fetishizing looks, and the gym.” Rez agrees, writing: “Fellas, is it gay to have a multistep face routine, drink mineral water, hate women and go to gay bars?”

Harron cites a line from the book (that she wishes could’ve made the final cut of the film) as an example: Bateman is at the gym, and comments to himself that his co-worker McDermott (Josh Lucas) looks “puffy”. “They’re so obsessed with their looks, and Brett could see it and focus it and underline it. It was the thing that Valerie Solanas, of I Shot Andy Warhol, always said: there was a reversal of alpha male culture, which was more like the culture of teenage girls. It was about insecurity and vanity and competition and the way they gossip. The way they talk about each other is like teenage girls in a locker room at school.”

The idea of “gay panic” is exemplified in the scene where Bateman attempts to strangle Luis Carruthers (Matt Ross) in the bathroom, only to be taken aback when Carruthers comes on to him. American Psycho is set in the Reagan era of the 1980s, a time when the AIDS crisis was devastating the gay community. Today, transgender rights are under attack—the current US president is explicitly mentioned in the book as Bateman’s number one role model. 

After making I Shot Andy Warhol (which Harron tells me will finally be getting a long overdue Blu-ray release, thanks to the Criterion Collection), the filmmaker had garnered experience with examining the grit of societal ills. In order to ensure that the satire stayed sharp, she had to stray from the source material. Ellis fully taps into the psychotic psyche of Bateman, with the book taking place entirely inside his twisted mind (there is one disorienting section near the end, as his mask of sanity is fully slipping, where the perspective suddenly changes to third-person, disembodied). But in Harron and Turner’s version, there are a few brief perspective switches to two different women: Christie (Cara Seymour), a sex worker and victim, and Jean (Chloë Sevigny), Bateman’s mousy secretary.

Sketching these women out more fully was intentional, in order to preserve a distance from Bateman—Harron says that if the story is “too much on the pursuer, then you’re inevitably going to be on their side,” and that, “Whoever you make your main person in the frame, they’re going to be your focus and your source of sympathy.” She adds: “I wanted to make either Christie or Jean the main focus, the one that you’re worried about. Most of the film is through Bateman’s eyes and it begins and ends with his narration, but in the ‘date’ scene with Jean, it’s equally between Bateman and Jean, but you’re worried about Jean. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s he gonna do?’”

In the book, Bateman’s most egregious acts of violence are immediately followed by tone-shift chapters of music criticism on Huey, Whitney Houston and Genesis. For her and Turner’s adaptation, Harron cleverly has Bateman deliver the essays in monologue form before, rather than after, a killing.

“In my early life, I had been a music critic, so I was always very amused by the music scenes,” the director recalls. “It popped into my head that if we turn them into monologues, and he did the first one just before he killed someone, then every time he starts to talk about music, you will be scared and think that he’s about to kill someone.” Part of her reasoning was due to the book being “almost avant-garde, experimental,” and so requiring cinematic structure. “It’s kind of free-form, but we needed to give it more plot in the movie, and a bit more momentum. So we did that with those scenes, and by amping up the role of the detective (Willem Dafoe) a bit.”

But what sears the Huey Lewis scene into cinema history is Bale’s screwball sensibility. “There is a lot of crazy comedy even within the novel of American Psycho,” Harron, a noted fan of ’30s screwball comedies, says. “I was lucky that Christian really, really seized onto that. He was the one who said to me the day before we shot the Paul Allen murder, ‘I think I want to moonwalk.’ When he did it, I fell off my chair—it was so funny.”

Harron says that Bale found a “manic, comic, edge of craziness and scariness” as they were shooting. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re going to do very extreme physical comedy, but it’s also going to be scary.’ We didn’t plan it out that way; it was just an intuitive thing, which is one of the best things when you’re filming.” Worth noting: since Bale’s performance in 2000, one of the only other screwball serial killers has been Matt Dillon as Jack in Lars von Trier’s (also controversial) The House That Jack Built and Letterboxd have certainly noticed this. “Bro is literally Patrick Bateman if Patrick Bateman were into art history instead of music,” writes Mrclownteeth.

But back to Bale: his comic intuition is a gift that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everyone. “I taught a class for NYU and I realized that the hardest thing that students can almost never do is physical comedy,” Harron observes. “People can do sensitive, they can do scary, they can do poetic, but physical comedy is such a skill.” A few of her favorite cinematic comedians: Buster Keaton, Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther and even Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents.

“We love the Tom Cruise thing, but we would never have gotten Tom Cruise to be in such a heinous production as American Psycho!” Harron laughs. (In any case, Cruise was busy being “heinous” in another capacity—as an unhinged sex guru in 1999’s Magnolia). Other parts of the book that the director was sorry to cut: an argument with McDermott about the brittleness of thin crust pizza, and Bateman and his girlfriend Evelyn’s (Reese Witherspoon) “romantic” getaway to the Hamptons, where the former attempts to microwave a jellyfish—Harron wanted to shoot it in soft focus like a “mad J. Crew commercial”.

Something très important that did make the cut from book to screen: Les Misérables. “Patrick Bateman has a Les Mis poster in his apartment? He’s just like me!” jokes Sophie, referring to the Les Mis framed poster shown during his introductory morning routine scene—a nod to the novel’s constant references to the hit musical, as the businessmen are always taking their clients out to go see it on Broadway.

“I thought it was hilarious,” Harron says, emphasizing the ironic humor of a rich man connecting to the impoverished struggles of the French Revolution. “It was just something that Gideon [Ponte] and the art department put up in the bathroom. There was this framed poster of Les Mis above the toilet, and it just happened that when we were shooting it, that it was perfect to get his reflection superimposed over the face of the little girl.”

On the topic of musicals: one of the reverberations of American Psycho’s deep impact was the musical adaptation, penned by composer Duncan Sheik of the multi-Tony-winning Spring Awakening. It opened on London’s West End in 2013 and on New York’s Broadway in 2016—the former starred Matt Smith, singing, dancing and slaying in the role of Patrick Bateman (and Wicked star Jonathan Bailey as Tim, Justin Theroux’s character). Harron re attending opening night of the Broadway production, where she reunited with Ellis and Turner.

The director opines that, whenever people try to do other adaptations of the novel (see: the ill-fated American Psycho II: All American Girl), “they want to give it a bit of heart. They want to give Bateman a bit of conscience,” which can muddy the message. “The sets were amazing, influenced by the movie,” she adds. “I’m a big fan of Duncan Sheik, but I would have used the pop songs of the time. If you have the actor sing original songs, you’re trying to express their inner life in a way. I don’t think that works here, because what is their inner life?”

The director hopes that Charlie Says, which she co-wrote with Turner, will get its place in the sun someday. That place, at least in part, is on Letterboxd: “The victory of Mary Harron’s film is [that] it accurately understands and portrays why Charles Manson was so seductive,” praises Comrade_Yui in a four-star review. “Manson promised the world to these women, and instead he clipped their wings and put them in a box. We’re still in that box today.”

Although Charlie Says premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, her hometown of Toronto refused to show it at TIFF in 2018 because it was “too violent and exploitative”, according to Harron. “It was their year of the woman as well,” she recalls. “And I kept getting postcards from the Toronto Film Festival saying, ‘Share her journey’. So I was like, ‘Well, share my journey, you know?’”

Over the last 25 years, Harron has continued to direct, though perhaps not as frequently as she deserves to. In fact, Bale shouted her out on the Thor: Love and Thunder red carpet in 2022, urging the world, “Let’s see more movies from Mary Harron, please,” after naming American Psycho as one of his favorite comedies (in a full circle moment, Bale will be seen next in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! as... Frankenstein’s Monster).

Harron’s most acclaimed recent work was the miniseries Alias Grace, adapted from the Margaret Atwood novel and currently sitting at a superb 3.9 average star rating on Letterboxd. “Strongly recommend this one, y’all,” writes Darcy. “Thank you Mary Harron and Sarah Polley for this gift. Come for the wonderful performances and script, stay for a shockingly non-creepy David Cronenberg.”

That’s right—Harron cast fellow Canadian director David Cronenberg, who, as a reminder, was originally attached to direct American Psycho, in the role of Reverend Verrenger. Harron re reaching out to the body horror maestro for advice about visual effects during American Psycho’s production, and that his eldest daughter, Cassandra, worked as her third assistant director. “He called me after the film came out and said how much he liked it,” the filmmaker reminisces. “I was very touched by that. It’s funny; a lot of people make these scary or dark films—the same is true of David Lynch—but they’re really lovely people. There’s something to be said for just getting it all out into the world.”

The same could be said for Harron herself. Despite the grim material she handles, her outlook on the filmmaking process is ultimately laced with an empathy that Bateman sorely lacks. Will Luca Guadagnino’s modern-day adaptation, starring Austin Butler in the title role, ensure the same care for the audience? Don’t answer that now—we have to return some videotapes.