The film adaptation of American Psycho sparked outrage in 1999 – though reports of street protests were strangely exaggerated…
Published in 1991, American Psycho was arguably the most controversial novel of its era. Bret Easton Ellis’s withering story of a 1980s Wall Street investment banker and his seemingly endless appetite for violence provoked outrage, censorship, protests, and accusations of misogyny. It’s difficult to imagine, in a publishing sector decimated by the internet, something as archaic as a book creating quite such a sensation today.
American Psycho was widely considered so violent as to be unfilmable, so when news broke that it was to be adapted into a film as the 1990s ended, the reaction was surprise and yet more outrage. Pressure groups condemned the film before its script was written; one lawyer threatened to sue its production company if it received an NC-17 rating rather than an R. While the film was in post-production, now-defunct British newspaper The News Of The World called it “The most disgusting film of the year.”
As Canadian director Mary Harron later observed, critics formed a queue to condemn her American Psycho movie before they’d seen it – just as, years earlier, some condemned the novel without having read it. Perhaps the most bizarre moment in the flap surrounding American Psycho came in February 1999, when at least one Hollywood trade outlet reported on a street protest that never happened.
That March, Harron and her collaborators had begun filming American Psycho in Toronto on a budget of just $7m. Harron, who’d previously made the critically admired I Shot Andy Warhol, could have landed a much bigger budget had she caved into Liongate’s demands and hired Leonardo DiCaprio; instead, she chose the lesser-known actor Christian Bale to play the sociopathic yuppie Patrick Bateman. (Lionsgate even fired Harron for a time; Bale later joked that the movie’s make-up artists were better paid than he was.)
By the time Harron had finally begun filming American Psycho in March 1999, a news story about a real-world serial killer threatened to cause yet more problems.
Seven years earlier, following a lengthy investigation, Ontario police had arrested serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo. During a search of Bernardo’s house in 1992, detectives found a copy of American Psycho – a discovery which later led to a tabloid paper reporting that the killer had used the novel as a ‘bible’ when committing his crimes.
When word got around that American Psycho was about to be filmed in Toronto, a group called Canadians Concerned About Violence in Entertainment (C-CAVE) tried to block the production from going ahead. “Nothing good can come from putting American Psycho on the screen,” Dr Rose Dyson, the group’s chairperson, wrote in a news release at the time. “It will only add further pollution to our cultural environment.”
The group initially tried to lobby Toronto’s administrators into denying Lionsgate permission to film in the city.
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“This is a disgusting project, and it should be stopped,” C-CAVE’s Valerie Smith told Variety that February. “If people knew the reality of this book, they would not want people filming in their neighbourhood.”
Toronto city councillor Mario Silva dismissed that appeal, however, arguing that it wasn’t the city’s job to make judgements on a film’s subject matter.
“We don’t care about content,” said Silva. “We’re not the censor board. We don’t even have the staff for that. We’re only concerned with neighborhood issues, and I don’t think we’ll change our policy because of this one issue. If we start drawing lines in the sand, you’re setting a dangerous precedent. It’s a slippery slope.”
With that avenue closed, C-CAVE began faxing its objections around local newspapers, and one, the Toronto Sun, published a piece echoing the group’s opposition to American Psycho’s shoot. It also put forward the story that Paul Bernardo had been inspired by the book.
Writing for The New York Times in April 2000, Harron recalls that she and a producer were on their way to the location that would serve as Patrick Bateman’s office one morning when they received a text message which read, “Don’t bother showing up.”
“The Sun article had reported that street protests against the film were being threatened, and the bank that owned the office building was scared of the potential bad publicity,” Harron wrote. “It refused permission, as did all the rest of Toronto’s financial institutions.”
It didn’t take long for the problem to spread. One by one, owners of various filming locations around Toronto – clubs, bars, restaurants – began to pull out of the production, leaving the filmmakers scrambling to find other places to shoot. Ultimately, the scenes in Bateman’s office had to be shot on a sound stage.
As the first day of filming beckoned on the 1st March 1999, the movie-makers braced themselves for their work to be disrupted by “screaming demonstrators.” To mitigate the likelihood of reprisals, the production hired additional security and stopped using the American Psycho title on paperwork that might have been spotted by the public.
It wasn’t as though film productions hadn’t been disrupted by protestors before. In 1991, the controversy surrounding Paul Verhoeven’s thriller Basic Instinct was such that members of the LGBT+ community staged demonstrations during its San Francisco shoot. Despite the presence of city police during filming, a major stunt sequence was thrown into chaos when protestors began disconnecting the lights. The pressure group Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), reading a draft of Basic Instinct’s script, argued that a Hollywood film depicted its lesbian characters as “psychopaths and man-killers,” and the outrage only spiralled from there.
The filmmakers behind American Psycho may have had that incident in the backs of their minds when C-CAVE began agitating over their film’s level of violence against women.
To Harron’s surprise, though, the armies of angry Canadians never emerged.
“No protestors turned up,” Harron later wrote. “Not that day, or the next, or the next. During the whole of our seven-week shoot, not one person turned up to protest the filming of American Psycho.”
Phantom protesters were something of a theme during American Psycho’s production. A week before filming began, under the headline ‘Psycho rabble,’ a piece in Variety reported that “anti-violence and victims’ rights groups” had already “mounted a public protest” in Toronto, though no record of those protests appears to exist today.
When filming in Toronto wrapped seven weeks later, Harron flew back to New York and was “met with concerned phone calls asking how I had coped with all the protests on set,” she wrote. “As so often happens, a tabloid frenzy had been mistaken for real life.”
The furore surrounding American Psycho was such that Harron’s stated aims for the film were largely ignored. Months earlier, the filmmaker had insisted that her script – which she’d co-written with Guinevere Turner – would tone down the violence described in the book, and that it was intended as a satire of masculinity rather than a glorification of Bateman and his unholy appetites.
“We wanted to make him kind of absurd and somewhat pathetic,” Harron told Rue Morgue magazine in 2015.
When it came to American Psycho, few in the media, it seemed, particularly wanted to know the truth. Even the story that caused so much trouble in Toronto – the one about the serial killer keeping a copy of Ellis’s novel by his bed – didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Bernardo began committing his crimes in 1987 – four years before the book was even published. Author Stephen Williams, who wrote a book about Bernardo, later told Harron that the copy of American Psycho more than likely belonged to Bernardo’s wife, Karla Homolka, and that Bernardo himself was largely illiterate.
As for C-CAVE, Harron maintained that the whole thing was “one woman and a fax machine. It was one of those totally manufactured crises… nobody ever demonstrated.”
In the wake of all the controversy, it felt as though the film itself was in danger of being swept away. Harron described its Sundance premiere as “divisive,” adding to Rue Morgue that, “People didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody knew if they could laugh.”
Instead, American Psycho’s reputation grew over time, as the media frenzy ebbed and audiences began to appreciate the brilliance of Bale’s performance in all its absurd vanity and lizardlike ferocity. In its critique of society’s tendency to judge a person’s presentation over their moral content, and to reward cruelty and narcissism with money and power, it feels more relevant today than ever.
Back in April 2000, when Harron was still in the eye of the storm, and before her work’s excellence could be recognised, she appeared admirably calm. In a piece for The New York Times, Harron argued, rationally and with intelligence, against suggestions that violent films should be censored.
“In the end, as uncomfortable and disturbing as the process of making this film has been, I do not regret it,” she wrote. “Although when I set out I thought I was making a social satire, it was only during filming that I realised how much I was drawing on my own deepest fears. I began to see American Psycho as a scenario of female terror, with Patrick Bateman as, quite literally, the date from hell […] There is something to be said for bringing those fears to light. Movies, after all, express not just our communal dreams but also our communal nightmares, and the director has responsibility for both.”
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