[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," we're joined by screenwriter Guinevere Turner to discuss her process writing the infamous slasher film, "American Psycho."

Turner deep dives into her process of translating the original novel and satirizing 1980s culture, while striking a tonal balance of black comedy and horror.

- She said, "Oh Guin, you're going to hate me, because I really don't like scary movies, "I really think you should read 'American Psycho' because they're asking me to adapt it."

And I was like, [sighs] like seriously, I see like a trailer for "Saw," and like I have tears in my eyes and I'm haunted for days.

I'm really not that guy.

And now, I'm like the cool horror movie girl.

And so I read it and I was like, "You're right.

I hate you and I especially hate Bret Ellis."

[audience laughs] But I saw what she saw.

She said, "I think this can be a great satire and a profoundly feminist movie."

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [typewriter ding] - I want to ask you, as somebody who's been writing as long as you can remember, what you remember about the first screenplay you wrote and what you learned in the process of writing that first screenplay.

- The first screenplay I wrote was a film called "Go Fish" that came out in 1994.

[audience applauds] I and the director Rose Troche were girlfriends at the time.

Maybe someday I'll write a book about when we broke up in the middle of making that movie.

And I had never read a screenplay.

I knew nothing.

I'm a writer.

How hard can it be to write a screenplay?

I literally said these words.

What I learned was maybe nothing.

What I see now in that screenplay is what we had then that we don't have now, is we thought we were writing it for the lesbian community and therefore, there's a purity to it and an earnestness that we laugh to this day.

She's still obviously my good friend but we're like teen moms and this is our teen child who's now 30.

[typewriter dings] - Before we talk about "American Psycho," you started with "The Notorious Bettie Page."

Walk us through that, how you got from there to then the, the three-act Ibsen play of actually making "American Psycho."

- So I met Mary Harron because Christine Vachon, who just got an Academy Award for producing "Past Lives," but has produced two of my films, our films, was talking with Mary about producing her amazing film, please see it if you haven't, "I Shot Andy Warhol," and so we just ended up in the same room at the same time and we're just introduced and Mary said, "You look an awful lot like Bettie Page."

And much like when she said, "Have you ever heard of the book 'American Psycho'?"

I was like, "What's that?

Who's that?"

I don't know where I would be if I wasn't for Mary Harron keeping me culturally aware.

And so we just started talking about Bettie Page and how she wanted to make a movie about Bettie Page.

And for years, I was supposed to play Bettie Page, but it took us nine years and no kidding, I just got too old.

But we did write the screenplay.

And while we were doing that and having a hard time getting the money for it, you know, her film, "I Shot Andy Warhol" had gone out in the world and it is, as the title might suggest, about the woman, Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol.

And suddenly she was on a list of like women directors who do-- - Challenging films.

- Yes.

And so she said, "Oh Guin, you're going to hate me," because I really don't like scary movies or scary things, "But I really think you should read 'American Psycho' because they're asking me to adapt it."

And I was like, [sighs] like seriously, I see like a trailer for "Saw" and like I have tears in my eyes and I'm haunted for days.

I'm really not that guy.

And now I'm like the cool horror movie girl?

I'm really not.

And so I read it and I was like, "You're right.

I hate you and I especially hate Bret Ellis."

[audience laughs] I can say that because we're friends.

But I saw what she saw, which is what she said, "I think this can be a great satire and a profoundly feminist movie."

And I said, "Okay."

[Guinevere laughs] - And so the difference between writing your first screenplay and writing with Mary.

- To be clear to Rose Troche, director of "Go Fish," we co-wrote that.

It was similar.

I'm actually a very collaborative person.

I kind of go off the rails slash become less focused if there isn't another person to be accountable to.

And so, you know, Mary at that, in the course of us writing "Bettie Page" and "American Psycho," she met a man.

She got pregnant, she had a child, she got pregnant, she had another child.

So that was an interesting evolution because I actually had to sort of go through these major life stages with her.

And then somehow, Mary and I still managed to do this.

Our fourth film is in pre-production right now.

So it's very, to me, it's a lot about sort of inhabiting a physical space with someone and having the sort of room to not be like, "Okay, let's write this.

What is act one?"

- I know you've got to be so tired of distilling this, but Mary was the director and then Oliver Stone was the director and then Mary was the director again.

Can you walk us through what that process was like and how it all went down?

- They were happy with our script and that is shorthand because there were a lot of notes, including, "The lead character just isn't very sympathetic."

[audience laughs] We learned how to power through that and we were both kind of learning how to take sort of bigger studio nuts, which neither of us had at that point.

And then out of the blue in Variety, big, big, big splash, Lionsgate offers Leonardo DiCaprio, who was just coming off of the movie "Titanic," $30 million at Cannes to star in "American Psycho."

Nobody, nobody called us.

And this was before the internet, so like, we're literally looking at Variety.

And that was shocking because that was nowhere close to even the budget of the movie that we had imagined, much less a salary for a star, but he was literally the biggest star in the world.

And I was like, "Okay, so, I guess we're going to do this because I'm obviously just anybody's date."

And Mary was like, "No, I don't want to direct a movie with the biggest star in the world.

It's going to come with a team of people who are going to tell me how to make the movie, and like also this movie is kind of predicated on a person who isn't the most famous person in the world."

Like you kind of have to believe, if you can now in this modern day, that Christian Bale's face isn't super recognizable and it is interchangeable with other handsome men.

And so Oliver Stone all of a sudden was going to direct it.

And there were meetings, there was casting.

And legend has it, Gloria Steinem, for those of you who don't know, the "mother of feminism," let's say white feminism, took Leonardo DiCaprio to a baseball game, I believe it was the Mets, and asked him to please not be in "American Psycho" because she had spoken out extensively about the book when it came out.

And she said, you know, "There are just a globe of 13 to 16-year-old girls who are just waiting for the next thing you do and"-- [Michael] This should not be it.

- "This should not be it."

And apparently, he heard her and backed out.

Mary and I laugh all the time because honestly, we think that, well, we know that we were the sixth team or individual to be asked to adapt.

And that basically they were going to give up.

Lionsgate was going to give up on the property, it's unadaptable.

Do not tell me and Mary Harron that something is un-anything.

We're like, "We can do this."

But we laugh because it seems pretty obvious that they were like, "You know what we need?

Women."

Let's get some women up in the front lines so that when this movie comes out and if it's lambasted, they'd be like, "Well, ladies made it, so we can't say anything."

[everyone laughs] [typewriter dings] - Among the things Ellis was doing was a very dark satire about American culture.

Bringing that to the screen and keeping the satire and yet having sufficient realism and making it all cohere is like the big picture challenge.

How did you guys go about endeavoring to do that?

- We went away for a couple of weeks and endlessly read the book to each other.

And then we'd wake up and be like, "What nightmares did you have?"

And we would be like, "Okay, that's a scene.

That's a scene."

But what we started with was two edicts.

Number one, there's no way we want this movie to be as violent as the book is.

That would be such a hard movie to watch or even conceive of.

For those of you who haven't read the book, it is pages and pages and pages of kind of explicit sexuality that turns into explicit violence and a combination of those two things.

Like it is a very difficult read, but we also didn't want to shy away from it because the violence has to feel real and important.

And so we talked a lot about what it feels like to let the audience fill in the blanks and how there's a complicity there when we were like, "What do you think happened offscreen?

We didn't write that.

That was your brain."

And sort of playing with that.

And then secondly that, and this is laughable, we really wanted the ending not to be ambiguous because we both really dislike movies that were all in someone's head or were all a dream, and we're like, "We're not doing that," because the, the book is very ambiguous in many ways.

We really, really failed on that second one.

But then I'm like, no, we didn't really fail because if you have people arguing about what the ending of your movie means, that's a success.

- That means they care.

- The intention at the end was that once he talks to the lawyer and even the lawyer doesn't recognize him, his own lawyer.

And I had so much fun because we're like, "What is the worst, most insulting thing that his lawyer could call him?

I think it's lightweight."

[Michael laughs] Because he says Patrick is such a da-da-da, and he goes, "He's such a lightweight."

I'm like, if anyone ever called me a lightweight, I'd be like, call me mean, horrible, blah.

Don't call me a lightweight.

So the end of the movie is just that he has done all of these things.

He cannot stand out for anyone, including his lawyer.

And I mean, do his friends even really know his name?

And that is the sort of existential crisis of being him and being a man in this world, in this world, but in the world that we're presenting as well, that's striving for all of these achievements within this, you know, culture, actually just makes you completely, um, what's the word?

Bland, I guess.

But yes, acknowledgement.

We didn't succeed.

It does kind of seem like it was all in his head.

We didn't mean to do that.

- What were the toughest calls in terms of what to leave in and what to leave out?

- We love, in the book, it's just pages and pages of like, this is the suit, the brand of the suit.

This is the brand of the chair, this is the brand of everything.

And while that's beautiful and works beautifully as this, you know, sort of shocking, capitalistic, materialistic fabric of the book, how do you do that in a movie?

- And in a way, you distilled it all in that sword fight over the business cards.

[David] Look at this.

[Timothy] That is really nice.

- Eggshell with Romalian type.

What do you think?

- Nice.

- Jesus, that is really super.

How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?

- I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.

- But wait, you ain't seen nothing yet.

- The thing that we struggled with the most and that we almost let go of was, you know, in the book, there are just chapters that are just basically music reviews and they're brilliantly written by Bret and they're so funny and there's so much about who this character is because he's so passionate about, you know, these artists that are not that cool.

Sorry, Huey.

[audience laughs] Our biggest breakthrough was figuring out how to make that cinematic, which is now, you know, when he picks up a CD and starts ranting about it to, you know, like, oh no, oh God, he's talking about music.

- Here it comes.

- People are going to die.

[glass thuds] [glass thuds] [footsteps thudding] [ax thuds] - He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.

- Hey, Halberstram.

- Yes, Allen?

- Why are there copies of the Style section all over the place?

Do you have a dog?

A little chow or something?

[laughs] - No, Allen.

- Is that a raincoat?

- Yes, it is.

In '87, Huey released this.

"Fore!," their most accomplished album.

I think their undisputed masterpiece is 'Hip to be Square."

A song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics.

But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself.

Hey, Paul!

[screams] - When you're writing a character as villainous as Patrick Bateman, how do you get the audience to identify and buy in to the characters?

- It's funny because this movie came out at the beginning of what would become a wave of people like Tony Soprano and, you know, the main character of "Breaking Bad" and "Nurse Jackie"-- - Don Draper.

- Don Draper, "Dexter," et cetera.

And all of a sudden, that was the thing.

Those people are actually humanized.

For us, it's hard to really talk about in any concrete way, but it was the entire thing lives in a heightened reality.

The entire thing lives in a satirical space that is sometimes a little bit surreal, and so we hope we can get away with having a character who you don't really want to know how he grew up.

He is a symbol.

The tone of this movie is so specific that it was more about maintaining the tone that can support this character who is both a loser and a villain.

And yet, I even find myself feeling empathetic for him because he just wants to be noticed.

[typewriter dings] - We were talking beforehand about the casting of Chloe Sevigny.

Tell that story about your reaction to that when Mary had the idea that Jean was going to be played by her.

- So Jean, who is his assistant, was for us as we're writing is the real person.

The actual person who isn't just all of the craziness and hideousness of every other character.

We wanted her to be grounded and a person that's sort of, you know, a person watching, some kind of people watching, could identify with.

The every woman, so to speak.

And then she said Chloe.

And of course, I'm not the director, casting is hers, but she's always, you know, listening to my opinion and showing me tapes and whatever.

And I said, "I love Chloe Sevigny," and this was, you know, 1999, Chloe had just been in a couple of movies, but she's so otherworldly, she's so unique.

Like this doesn't seem like a good fit to me.

That's when she always goes.

[clicks tongue] [Michael] Trust me.

- "I'm the director."

[laughs] Which I was like, "Okay."

And actually I think she does a brilliant job and the performance kind of ripens with age because you sort of now know who she became or what kind of performances she did and know that she must have just been squeezing in her specialness to play this part.

[Michael] She's so constricted.

- What's that?

- Duct tape.

I need it for, uh, taping something.

- Patrick.

Have you ever wanted to make someone happy?

- What?

No, put it in the carton.

- Sorry.

- Jean?

What?

- Make someone happy.

Have you ever wanted to?

- I'm looking for, I guess you could say, I just want to have a meaningful relationship with someone special.

- Hmm.

[phone rings] - An important thing about this scene is that it's the only scene in the movie that is completely invented and not based on a scene in the book.

- Do we think that Patrick, at this time, in the rest of this scene is sparing her?

Is this some glimmer of a conscience on the part of the killer, or did the phone call just happen at the wrong time?

- I think it's a glimmer.

We didn't want to make him too real.

- Right.

- But we kind of want to make him childlike in the sense that he can be like, "Maybe I want this, maybe I want this."

And so it's just sort of like, it's like he lost his focus.

And then maybe had a moment, not of conscience, but of like, "Who's going to be my secretary if I kill her?"

[everyone laughs] And I think that's as far as we got with that.

Like you know, it was really, we needed her to live and we needed him to be confused by how real she is.

- Right.

And before we watch this, we're talking mainly about screenwriting, but this is a scene that Guinevere's in.

And one of the definitions for me of stellar acting is you may only have two or three minutes on screen, but everybody remembers it, and that is an example of this scene.

- You look really familiar.

Did you go to Dalton?

I think I met you at the Surf Bar, didn't I?

With Spicey.

Well, maybe not with Spicey, but it was definitely at Surf Bar.

You know, Surf Bar?

Anyway, Surf Bar sucks now, it's terrible.

Went to a birthday party there from Malcolm Forbes.

Oh my God, please.

- This is nicer than your other apartment.

- Oh, it's not that nice.

[liquid pouring] - Where did you two meet?

- Oh God.

We met at, oh God, at the Kentucky Derby in '85 or '86.

You were hanging out with that bimbo Allison Poole.

Hot number.

- What do you mean?

She was a hot number.

- If you had a platinum card, she'd give you a blowjob.

Listen, this girl worked at a tanning salon.

Need I say more?

What do you do?

- She's my... cousin.

- Uh-huh.

- She's from France.

- Okay, so first question.

Did you write it and then Mary cast you or did Mary cast you and then you wrote it?

- Well, the character Elizabeth is in the book and she went to Sarah Lawrence and is not a lesbian.

I went to Sarah Lawrence and I am, [audience laughs] and I went to Sarah Lawrence on a scholarship with a lot of very wealthy, privileged women, some of whom are still my good friends.

And when we were going through the book, I said, "I'm not writing another word unless you let me play this character."

I know her, I went to school with her.

I get to say all these ironic things.

[typewriter dings] - Okay, last clip, and this is the reckoning, if you will.

The confession.

[phone beeping and ringing] - Howard, it's Bateman, Patrick Bateman.

You're my lawyer so I think you should know I've killed a lot of people.

Some escort girls in an apartment uptown, some homeless people, maybe five or 10.

An NYU girl I met in Central Park.

I left her in a parking lot behind some donut shop.

I killed Bethany, my old girlfriend, with a nail gun, and some man, some old [bleep] with a dog.

Last week, I killed another girl with a chainsaw.

[crying] I had to, she almost got away.

And there was someone else there, I can't remember.

Maybe a model, but she's dead too.

And Paul Allen.

I killed Paul Allen with an ax in the face.

His body is dissolving in a bathtub in Hell's Kitchen.

- Walk us through, knowing that this is the scene where finally after this person, seemingly without conscience cuts this wide swath through New York, finally faces up to it.

- I wrote that speech and I was like, "Mary, let me see if I can put every single horrific scene that's in the book that we didn't put into the movie into one speech."

So it's an homage to the book in many ways.

It's just sort of one of those writer moments where I'm like, "We are standing on the backs of this original book.

Let's just give it a nod."

[typewriter dings] - Do you think most people understood the film the way you and Mary wanted it to be understood?

- Our premier was at the Sundance Film Festival in the year 2000.

And to much, you know, pomp circumstance in a very crowded, the largest theater at that festival, you know, jam-packed, and was met with polite applause.

You could just feel the audience just being really like, "What is this?

This is not what I expected."

We of course were like, "Wait, you guys don't see that we're geniuses?"

[everyone laughs] And the reviews like on the ground on the day, you know, reviews come out pretty quickly during festivals, were mediocre to like actually lambasting it.

And none of that made us think we didn't make a good movie.

We were like, "Did we make a movie too soon?

Or you know, what is it?"

We're like, "What's the misconnection here?"

And then like 10 years later, women I knew, acquaintances, colleagues would say, "Oh, I never saw 'American Psycho,' but I just saw it finally and you know, it's actually a feminist movie."

And I'm like, "Yay, but what the [bleep] did you think about me for the last 10 years?"

[everyone laughs] That I just went from making a movie, like a scrappy lesbian movie like "Go Fish," to being like just go into genre, exploit and kill women for no reason on the screen.

And then a new generation, I think, and Christian Bale's fame and continuous, like sort of the incredible way he's embodied, embodied, is that the word?

All of these roles as an actor kind of made a new generation and an existing one go back and say, "What else?

Where did this begin?"

- And so now, a quarter-century after the film came out, what is your favorite response or review to the film that you've read or heard?

- So of course, the initial sort of anxiety and criticism about the book and then the movie is that, is it going to encourage violence?

Does it celebrate violence?

Is it shining a light on violence against women or is it just violence against women?

My personal belief is, and my experience now is that at some point your art just lives without you, and how people respond to it is not your responsibility necessarily.

This is a very complex area of conversation.

Cut to, I don't know, five years ago, this film in general has a fan base, a passionate fan base who are kind of, you know, a new generation of the main characters in the film who love it and don't see the satire.

And that's like meta success slash a little bit disturbing slash speaks to the entitlement of the characters themselves that you just see what you need to see and take away what you need to take away.

But it's all just been an incredibly interesting journey all these years to see that kind of passion for it and the approval it gets from an audience that I'm not sure I knew we were talking to.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching "Script to Screen: American Psycho" on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about "On Story" and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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