By Kevin Lewis

American Psycho, the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, drew fire from feminists because of its main character, a Wall Street barracuda who adds new meaning to male chauvinist pig lady-killer. This did not deter director Mary Harron from the project.

Tamara Jenkins moderated a discussion with Harron after the screening of her film American Psycho at the DGA Theater in Manhattan at a March 29, 2000, Independent Feature Project (IFP) event co-sponsored by Entertainment Weekly and hosted by the Directors Guild of America.

Though the female bodies are stacked up, explicit gore is absent because Harron wanted the film to be a lampoon on those old men's magazine features such as Playboy's "Man at His Best" which aspire to James Bond attitudes.

Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner didn't feel constrained in reworking the original material, and reached mutual decisions in writing the screenplay.

"I've been lucky in collaborating with a screenwriter on the two films that I've done," Harron said. "We didn't have big, big conflicts. I ended up changing the structure of the whole last part again in the editing. It's hard to detach scenes, I mean parts of scenes, but I certainly changed the order of everything enormously. The whole scene with the detective, the last scene with the detective (Willem Dafoe) is in a completely different place. The opening is completely different from the way we wrote it."

The movie version is more satirical than its original source and Harron has the last laugh on all counts. When Leonardo DiCaprio was signed to play the lady-killer, Harron was removed from the project. DiCaprio, fearing audience rejection, got cold feet, and Harron returned with her choice, Christian Bale. To Harron, Bale is perfect casting because he is a dead ringer for those male cover boys on Men's Health and in fashion spreads.

Harron, a former rock journalist, made her feature film debut after making documentaries with the acclaimed I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). A native of Toronto, the film was shot in Toronto and in New York under DGA signatory contracts. The climactic murder spree at the bank and chase, in which Patrick Bateman blows up two police cars and kills the police, is a complicated location setup. "He's running through a street in Toronto, and he goes into a street in New York, then he runs across a plaza in Toronto."

Harron says she wanted cinematographer Andrzej Sekula to make everything "look like a beautiful commercial" and "hyper real, more real than real."

Above all, she wanted the scenes to represent a magazine spread. She wanted Bateman to have no soul, no personal history, empty and his business circle to be vapid. Bateman and his Wall Street pals are the ultimate male chauvinist pigs. At one point, Bateman's socialite fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) carries around a pet pig at a party.

"Because it's satire," Harron explained. "It's a surreal exaggerated version of the real world, but in which certain aspects of the world are there. And what I liked about it was the idea that no one cared about the follow-up [to the murder of stockbroker Paul Allen]. All these people are so uninterested in each other, and that was another direction I gave to the actors - no one ever listens to anything anyone else says."

The brokers and their lovers are more obsessed with details like the 'in' restaurant, the classiest watermarked business cards, and the best-cut clothes rather than in who's cutting whom.

To represent the soulessness of the characters, Harron instructed her production designer Gideon Ponte to strip the apartments and offices of all personal objects such as family photos. She wanted everything to be clinical and cold. The print shown at the DGA was the unexpurgated print. To obtain a general release, a three-way sex scene between Bateman and two prostitutes was reedited. The uncut scene reveals how even sex between Bateman and his partners resembles a bad pornographic movie.

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