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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 22, 2017 5:18:57 GMT
Production pics, promotion interviews, etc.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 4, 2017 4:35:03 GMT
By WENN news via IMDb: American Psycho (2000) star Christian Bale spent a sleazy night watching dirty movies - all in the name of research of course. The film's director Mary Harron instructed British hunk Bale to spend an evening watching low budget pornographic films to inspire the choreography used in the controversial flick. The I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) director says one particular scene, where Bale's character PATRICK BATEMAN takes part in a menage a trois, needed researching - and Bale was happy to put in the extra hours. She says, "I said to Christian, 'In this scene Bateman is trying to enact the fantasies from porno movies so we should probably watch a couple. So I'm going home to my house and we're gonna get you one and you go home to your house and watch and we'll compare notes in the morning before we shoot'... So I went home and watched CAN MY BEST FRIEND JOIN IN TOO. Christian actually came in the next morning and he'd done stick drawings of the different positions in his movie. "And so we just chose three or four of them. They were the cheapest, stupidest porno movies, really low rent."
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 4, 2017 7:22:05 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 3:51:10 GMT
An highly interesting and oddly prophetic report of a set visit (or at least one asking the right questions). Excerpts follow the titles. Digging Out the Humor in a Serial Killer's Tale By BRUCE WEBER, APRIL 4, 1999On the black comedy aspect: The humor being aimed for -- a swipe at the blind narcissism of the youthful privileged class during the Reagan 80's -- is crucial to the success of the movie, which may have more prerelease bias to overcome than any film in recent memory... Should the film not succeed as the black comedy and social commentary that its director, Mary Harron, intends, it is likely to sink into the same swamp of outrage that the novel did. The producer's confidence in the script: ''The name 'American Psycho' conjures up horrific experience,'' said Edward R. Pressman, the film's producer. ''But the script has made me confident that we can make a terrific film that a mainstream audience can enjoy and tolerate, that will not be overly violent or pornographic and that will sustain the wit of the book. What came across in readings is how funny the film will be, and we think that will surprise people.'' Is the film risky for Bale?: The film's humor may be crucial as well for the career of Mr. Bale, who is, at 25, a promising actor with a serious resume... none of [his upcoming] roles** is likely to draw scrutiny like his portrayal of Patrick Bateman... ''There's something nice about all the red flags this project sends up,'' Mr. Bale said... ''I got all kinds of messages on my answering machine, people saying 'This is career suicide, Christian.' ''
There is, he admitted, a desire on his part to flout expectations and succeed. ''But it's not at all that I want to do something that's shocking,'' he said. ''This is not an in-depth psychological analysis of what drives someone to become a serial killer. When Mary first sent me the script, I hadn't read the book, and that's what I thought it was, so I didn't want to do it. But I found the script really funny, and I called her and told her so. She said, 'Thank God, you find it funny.' ''
With an aquiline nose and chiseled jaw, Mr. Bale is handsome in a GQ kind of way, especially in the custom-made suits by Cerruti he wears for the film. (Many other designers whose names dot the novel donated period clothes for other characters to wear, but none wanted to be associated with a character like Bateman.)
... Still, that leaves the question of what the film may do for or to Mr. Bale. Psychotic killers tend to be memorable. Anthony Perkins, after all, never climbed out from under the weight of Norman Bates. On the other hand, Anthony Hopkins rode Hannibal Lecter to a career revival.
''I just really need to do a romantic comedy or something very quickly, before this comes out,'' Mr. Bale said. Bale's theory of and involvement with the role: He is playing Bateman as an empty shell, he said, someone who has no center, no soul. ''If you go back and look at the magazines of the 80's, the advertising, the stories about what a real man is, what a winner is, where power comes from,'' Mr. Bale said, ''Bateman has this image of himself stolen from those magazines. While he's emotionally vacant, the whole persona is an act for himself, so I'm really playing somebody who's acting the whole time, but he's acting without having anybody in his life who, when he shuts the door he can go, 'Whew, done that, this is me.' ''
''I feel more involved in this project than anything I've ever done,'' he said. ''I was on board before there was any money for it. After that much time this wasn't just another job for me, so I never accepted that I wouldn't get to play the character. I did have an awful lot of people saying, 'Christian this is ridiculous, you're becoming obsessed. Do something else!' ''Mary Harron's connection to the story: Ms. Harron said, however, that [she and her co-writer] were attracted to the book because ''it had a skewed and critical look at male behavior, macho behavior, that we'd never seen before, and that it should fit into a feminist line.''
''I went to Oxford,'' she continued. ''It was my one experience meeting upper classes, and upper class men in gangs, and when I read 'American Psycho,' I recognized these wealthy, privileged, handsome young men, who travel in gangs, who have such a sense of entitlement and who are so obsessed with each other and competitive with each other that they're only interested in sleeping with a woman if one of the other guys wants her.''
"I feel like there's something to do here that hasn't really been done, a portrait of the late 80's that's worth putting on the screen.''** Metroland and A Midsummer's Night Dream
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 17:40:52 GMT
From a report of the awards season party scene in early 2000: www.nytimes.com/2000/01/30/style/parties-films-free-food-that-s-entertainment.htmlChristian Bale, who stars in ''American Psycho,'' said he was dodging the intense party scene whenever possible. For one thing, the airline had misplaced his bag, leaving him with only the clothes he wore on the plane, nothing like the Master of the Universe duds by Nino Cerutti he wears in the film. ''They promised me the entire wardrobe,'' he said. ''I don't know what I'd wear them for, but I just want to have them. I want to open up my closet and have 15 suits -- all pinstriped, 80's, double-breasted.''
In preparing for the role of a Wall Streeter who is a serial killer, Mr. Bale had to develop a fit body to show off the sharp-tailored suits. His hair is creepily long in the film, and he has the ultrasmooth complexion of a well-tended prince. ''They would give me hot towels at the end of every day, and facial massage,'' he said. ''A lot of pampering.'' He also used a sun bed to work up a full-body tan.
''There are a fair amount of nude scenes in the movie, so I couldn't have lines,'' he said. (One of those nude scenes earned the film its NC-17 rating.) But weren't there any delicate areas that needed protection during tanning? ''Well, I did wear goggles,'' he said.
It's a huge role for Mr. Bale, who is best known in this country for playing the handsome next-door neighbor in ''Little Women.'' Which makes his role in a controversial movie like ''American Psycho,'' based on a book by Brett Easton Ellis that was condemned for its violence toward women, something of a surprising turn. He was apprehensive about the premiere. ''Beforehand, we all met up and had dinner,'' he said. ''And I had a fair few drinks, to calm myself. Pinot grigio. It did the trick.''
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 19:08:24 GMT
The film's producer Edward R. Pressman shares with NYtimes' Dave Kehr his quest to bring the novel to screen (d. 25 FEB 2000). Highly interesting read! Source: www.nytimes.com/2000/02/25/movies/at-the-movies.htmlThe Path To a 'Psycho'
Edward R. Pressman has been living with ''American Psycho'' for eight years, ever since Stuart Gordon, the director of the ''Re-Animator'' films, gave him a copy of Brett Easton Ellis's notorious best seller in 1992. ''I remember it vividly because I was reading the book at my home in the Hollywood Hills, and I could see downtown in the distance,'' Mr. Pressman said. ''It was ablaze, the sky was bright with fire, and on TV people were lugging away television sets and air-conditioners.''
It was, in fact, the height of the Los Angeles riots. ''It was a very impressionable period,'' he said. ''So I bought the rights.''
But for Mr. Pressman, an independent producer based in New York whose films include ''Badlands,'' ''Sisters'' and ''The Crow,'' that was only the beginning of the long process that led to the premiere of ''American Psycho'' at the Sundance Film Festival last month.
''Stuart wanted to do a real X-rated version, black and white, very hard-core and very true to the novel,'' Mr. Pressman said. ''I felt that was a very difficult challenge to make work, and I started to explore other ways to solve it.''
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Continue reading the main story Other writers and directors came and went, he said, including David Cronenberg, Oliver Stone, Rob Weiss and Mr. Ellis himself, whose script, ''was completely pornographic and ended with a musical number.''
''Then I saw 'I Shot Andy Warhol' and set up a meeting with the director, Mary Harron,'' Mr. Pressman said. ''She was very interested in tackling it and thought she could find a solution to the script, which she would do with Guinivere Turner. She reduced the pornographic and physically disgusting elements in the book because what she was really interested in was the social satire.''
To play Patrick Bateman, the novel's serial-killing yuppie, Ms. Harron had only one actor in mind: the former child star Christian Bale (''Empire of the Sun'').
But then an executive at Lion's Gate, the Canadian company that had become Mr. Pressman's partner, sent the script to Leonardo DiCaprio, red-hot from the success of ''Titanic.'' ''And lo and behold,'' Mr. Pressman said, ''he responded, and said, 'I love the script and I want to do it.' No one, including Mary, took it too seriously. But for a couple of months, Leonardo insisted that he was going to do it but just wouldn't give a date. He never said no, actually. Finally, after a couple of ultimatums, we said, 'We've got to go on and do it without you.' And so we went back to Mary, and she was still committed to it. She stuck to what she thought the film should be throughout all of this Hollywood madness. In the end, she made the film she wanted to make, and we're all very happy with it.''
Well, everybody but the Motion Picture Association of America, which wanted to slap a commercially fatal NC-17 rating on the film. Apparently it wasn't the sex or violence that disturbed the ratings board, but a sequence in which Mr. Bale watches himself in the mirror while sporting with two prostitutes. ''It's a scene about self-absorption,'' Mr. Pressman said. ''If it were eliminated, it would hurt the film significantly.''
As it turns out, it won't be. On Tuesday, the association granted the film an R rating after Ms. Harron agreed to shorten a few explicit shots of sexual positions in the controversial sequence. Mr. Pressman's long odyssey will reach an end on April 14, when ''American Psycho'' is scheduled for a wide release.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 11, 2017 7:53:15 GMT
From Bale's interview for LATimes: As the cosmetically obsessed Bateman, Bale assumes a crisp American accent and immaculate designer clothing. He also inhabits a new, buffed-to-the-max body, the result of two months of intensive personal training. Gone is the pointy, gapped smile that warms "Little Women," "Portrait of a Lady" and his extraordinary debut at age 12 as the star of "Empire of the Sun." In its place, a gleaming, straight-rule set of teeth, the product of two weeks of retainers and splitting headaches.
"Mary described Bateman to me as an alien who has landed on Earth and is trying to understand humans and assimilate with them," he says from a window seat at Brooklyn's River Cafe, glancing out over the high-finance, downtown Manhattan locus of his new film, which opens Friday. (It is one of several tony watering holes name-dropped by Bateman and his platinum-card colleagues.) "Like someone who recognizes, well, humans appear to experience joy and feel some emotion from this thing called music. So he picks the biggest mainstream music he can find and chooses to identify with that.
"And in the same way he knows exactly what it is he is meant to say, meant to feel, because there are no real limits to him. He has no conscience or guilt. He could easily get up and maim somebody for life or give him a compliment.
"Because there is no heart to any of his decisions, there really is no absolutely genuine moment with Bateman. It's horrific, but it's still ridiculous at the same time. He isn't a Hannibal Lecter kind of villain, just because you can't help but laugh at him so much. A lot of people felt I would be hypnotized by this evil character. But he was an easy character to just turn off, precisely because we went through this stylization. I slept very well every night."
As if on cue, a waiter deposits a dessert in front of Bale that could be a prop in one of the movie's ultra-chic locales: a meticulously wrought berry pastry with red spears shooting out from a dollop of whipped cream. Painted on the plate is a G-clef swirl of fruit glaze, punctuated to the side with blood-red drops of raspberry sauce. "This is very 'American Psycho,' isn't it?" he exclaims, grinning.
In one of those absurd rolls of the dice that could happen only in show business, Bale followed his portrait of Patrick Bateman by playing Jesus Christ a few weeks later. The occasion was "Mary, Mother of Jesus," an unintentionally ludicrous dramatization of the gospels bankrolled by Eunice Shriver Kennedy and Bobby Shriver (it aired on NBC in November). To Bale's enduring credit, he came off with dignity intact.
Bale defends taking the impossible role: "So many naysayers about 'American Psycho' were saying, 'OK, Christian, if you must do Bateman, you've got to do a romantic comedy or play somebody good immediately afterward, if possible.' Play somebody good? And suddenly Jesus Christ landed in my plate? I thought, I can't resist."
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 14, 2017 9:43:26 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 23, 2017 5:35:45 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 26, 2019 4:37:41 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 22, 2020 12:29:37 GMT
A comment from CB in from the days of Entertainment Weekly Online (2000): ew.com/article/2000/04/28/psyched-out-cybertalk-christian-bale/”I played Jesus in this TV thing after doing American Psycho — I had nightmares the whole time, like I haven’t had since I was 10 years old. Sitting up in bed, sweating. Stigmata nightmares, those dreams where you think you’re awake and then suddenly you realize you’re still asleep and there was blood dripping from the ceiling and hitting my palms and things like that. And I was waking up going ‘Aaaaaaahh!’ — rubbing my palms in the middle of the night, heart going. But Patrick Bateman? Nothing.” — American Psycho‘s CHRISTIAN BALE, when asked if he was ill at ease playing a serial killer, on ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY ONLINE
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 22, 2020 13:25:57 GMT
An interesting write-up on production, at a time when DiCaprio was out but Bale was not officially back in: ew.com/article/1998/09/11/casting-american-psycho/"By now, everyone knows that the casting of American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel, got about as gruesome as the serial-killer thriller itself. The whole bloody mess came to a head Aug. 21, when Lions Gate Films decided that the film would go on without proposed megastar Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead. The official reason? Scheduling conflicts. (Negotiations fell apart after an Aug. 12 reading with DiCaprio, possible costars Cameron Diaz and James Woods, and director Oliver Stone. DiCaprio’s spokeswoman has no comment.) But there’s still one body unaccounted for. According to a source at Lions Gate, the film will revert to coscreenwriter-director Mary Harron. But where is Harron’s choice for the lead, Little Women heartthrob Christian Bale? ”He intentionally kept a window open to make this film,” says the actor’s attorney, Jeremy Barber, who adds that Bale is still interested. ”He would be 100 percent committed to doing the project with her.” But things don’t look good: Harron’s deal gives Lions Gate shared control over casting, and as one insider there sniffs, ”Lions Gate never approved of making an offer to Bale.” Since the company has upped Psycho‘s budget by $5 million (to as high as $15 million), it would seem Lions Gate is still hoping to ink an A-list star. ”I guess you could argue that they had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to hire DiCaprio, says Barber, ”but it really is too bad all this happened.”
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 25, 2020 1:23:40 GMT
Just learned this delightful tidbit re film's official website (back-then) from Empire Online. "While American cinemagoers may not be able to see the full version of American Psycho, they will be able to see the bits that had to be snipped from the movie for it to attain an all-important R rating. The film’s official site www.americanpsycho.com has a natty little device whereby if you sign up for email on the film, you’ll also receive video clips that didn’t make it into the final version of the film – including outtakes from the sex scene between Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) and two prostitutes which caused all the fuss in the first place." Now crawling through the Way Back Machine to check if the original look and pages of this website are still preserved by the internet archive!
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 25, 2020 1:25:07 GMT
So this is the official landing page from 2000!
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 25, 2020 1:28:44 GMT
So that Business Card Link on the landing page was apparently signing up people for giving up prizes. Here's what it said: "Enter here to win killer prizes from American Psycho and Lions Gate Films! • The American Psycho Soundtrack • American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis • Screening tickets • Autographed posters • Gifts from Patrick Bateman's favorite designers, including Nino Cerruti and Oliver Peoples Plus lots more! Check back weekly for new prizes and contests!" web.archive.org/web/20000510124512/http://americanpsycho.com/bizcard/index.html
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