Christian Bale portrayed serial killing, misogynistic yuppie Patrick Bateman in the 2000 film American Psycho. The film, also featuring Reese Witherspoon and Josh Lucas, was based on the controversial 1990s novel by author Bret Easton Ellis. I interviewed Ellis in San Francisco on his book tour in 1994. I enjoyed talking with him about his life and work since American Psycho to the release of The Informers, a book of tales about tragic banality in L.A. during the 1980s rife with rich, bored, stoned creeps and vampires. I found him to be a modest and gracious host. 2010 saw the re-release of another of his famous novels, Less Than Zero, along with the debut of a new novel Imperial Bedrooms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCicqORi8Mc

Punk Globe -Have you toned down the violence in this book, the Informers, as opposed to American Psycho?

Ellis - It’s strange, I’ve never really considered myself a writer who was interested in writing about violence. I’ve gotten a lot of flack from people because people think the Informers is a really violent book and I think by comparison it’s really not compared to American Psycho. I guess nothing really is compared to American Psycho. I don’t consider myself that interested in violence - it’s strange, even though there’s violence in my books. Violence, it interests me on a more literary level than it does on sociological level.

Punk Globe - Do you use violence to shock the reader into some sort of awareness?

Ellis - I don’t even think it goes that far.

Punk Globe - I found some of the violent scenes in American Psycho difficult to read. Were they hard for you write?

Ellis - Yeah, they were very hard to write but not so hard to write that I didn’t write them or I couldn’t finish writing them. There was a sense of duty almost when I was working on the book like I knew these scenes were coming up, I knew I had to write them and I felt they really had to be there. They were part of the package. That made them easier to write. If I felt like, “Oh screw it, let’s just throw this in and see what happens," I probably couldn’t have written them. And I had to rewrite them and work on them and by that time once you’re rewriting them and once you’re editing them and once you’re rewriting them and going over them again and then rewriting them again, they’re not as upsetting to you as they initially were when you were writing the first draft, which was upsetting. But I’d also been in this guy’s mind for so long that it was almost like automatic writing.

Punk Globe - It was like method writing almost?

Ellis - Yeah, it really was. It was, "O.K. I’m waking up and it's time to hit the pages today and all right, come on Patrick," and he would arrive and it would be - not, - not the best time in the world.

Punk Globe - The scene you read last night about the couple killing the kid really gave me the creeps and reminded me of an existentialist nightmare of interminable waiting.

Ellis - I didn’t finish reading it. I stopped before there was a couple of more pages that I felt would leave the house empty if I went on. So I stopped at a certain point and I only really read part of that section. It’s pretty rough. I felt no need to really read it there.

Punk Globe - It reminded me of an excerpt I read out of that one Dennis Cooper book where the two teenage boys kill that kid.

Ellis - All of Dennis Cooper’s books are about that.

Punk Globe - Do you like his stuff?

Ellis - Yeah, I do, and I think Frisk is much more disturbing, much more upsetting and equally if not more violent a book than American Psycho is and it’s crammed into about 150 pages so it seems even more violent, but, you know, because he’s dealing with, I guess, men killing men -

Punk Globe - You think he got more of a break?

Ellis - I don’t really know, I really don’t know why. I guess because maybe he’s not mainstream enough? Maybe that’s why, maybe because he’s working on the fringe in a lot of ways. I really don’t think that one of the top five corporate publishing houses would publish a book like Closer or Try or Wrong, even though Atlantic Monthly is publishing him now and actually selling very well. Frisk is actually being made into a movie. I think the reason why Dennis Cooper doesn’t get the sort of flack that I get is because basically he’s writing about gay men. Which is really unfortunate. You know if people are going to scream and cry and holler about men killing women you would hope there would be some sort of uproar about men killing men. There shouldn’t be any uproar anyway, but still, I always ask the question when American Psycho came out, I thought, “what if Patrick Bateman only killed men and he described killing men in exactly the same way he killed women? Would there be an uproar?” Well if there’s an uproar over men killing women, I would hope there would be just as much as an uproar over men killing men - but I don’t know, women took this sort of victim stand where it was like, “oh, well all the women in the book are victims, all the women in the book are bimbos, sluts and prostitutes.” Well all the men are - (pause) - the main character is this murdering asshole, so acchh, I don’t know.

Punk Globe - How did you deal with the reaction to American Psycho with the feminist backlash? Did it affect your sales?

Ellis - Umm - in terms of ... probably ... I mean if you want to look at the whole thing in a very cynical fashion, the feminist reaction to the book, probably, maybe undoubtedly helped sales, though you never know. I know tons of people who read my earlier books but who won’t read this one. I mean, even people taking me around, for example, this woman who’s taking me around here (literary escort - editor’s note) who has read my other books just can’t bring herself to read American Psycho because of what she heard from - um - other women who actually did read the book. Uh, how did I deal with the whole situation? I don’t know, I mean my publishers were very protective, uh maybe overly so, they didn’t let me really do any interviews except one or two that they had a lot of control over - I didn’t really go out and meet the public or get to see what the reaction to the book was and I guess I kept a pretty safe distance from the whole situation. I just sort of like, uh, hung out in my apartment and watched it from afar.

Punk Globe - I defended the book to some of my friends. It was controversial. I liked it because it seemed to symbolize men that really do just objectify women and hate anything else they might be. To women that got mad at your book I just said (to quote Robert Anton Wilson) the map is not the territory.

Ellis - I know, I guess they assume because they thought that I was advocating Patrick Bateman’s behavior. When, in fact, the book is, need I even say this, a criticism of a certain kind of masculinity and a certain kind of white male, heterosexual, capitalist, yuppie scumbag behavior. I thought women would really like the book in a lot of ways - and that they would agree with the portrayal of this guy, but no, they just focused in on this idea that women are treated terribly in the book - Well they are through Patrick’s eyes, they are treated terribly. And I really don’t know if he differentiates between the women or men or animals or children or, you know, what have you. I think he’s just the uber slasher who just is cutting this wide swath through flesh and blood. I’ve said this before, I always really thought that yuppies would protest the book or serial killers would have a fit but I really didn’t think that women would freak out like they did and I really think that they freaked out for a lot of the wrong reasons so I don’t know.

Punk Globe - So are you expecting a little bit of flack for this book as well?

Ellis - I’m not expecting really any flack, no. It’s very hard to attack the violence in this book because I think it's really placed within a certain context and it really is organic to the material. I don’t think it’s there just to shock or upset people. I’m not interested in shocking or upsetting people. But people just get shocked and upset. There was some violence cut from the final draft of the Informers. In the galleys there’s stuff in it that did not make the final draft but only for aesthetic reasons. I just didn’t think it’d work, not because I thought, “Oh, this book is too violent, I have to cut that out.” But except for that section the book really isn’t that violent. I mean there's violence in the periphery. People are disappearing and their bodies are being found in certain places and there’s this whole theme of vampirism that’s subtly mentioned throughout the book until the very end when you realize that maybe they do exist in this world.

Punk Globe - I have read about vampire fetish people in Hollywood and San Francisco who dress the part and drink their own blood. How did you pick up on such an obscure fringe cult like that?

Ellis -I don't know. I have no idea where any of it comes from. I have no idea. It’s really an intuitive thing that just hits you.

Punk Globe - The collective unconscious?

Ellis - Yeah, it’s the collective unconscious. I guess as a writer, certain things, you just soak up and you have a certain kind of temperament, or a certain kind of sensibility, your radar moves toward a certain point. God, that sounds so vague and evasive but it’s true. I can’t really tell you where things come from or why I decided to write about something. It just happened.

Punk Globe - Why don’t you give me a basic ‘what this book is about’?

Ellis - The Informers was written over a long period of time between 1983 and 1993 and it was something that I never really expected to publish. It was a book I would go to every time I had writer’s block on another book and, since all of my books are narrated by people, I would go to the Informers, just sort of practice writing in the first person. Because whenever I would get stuck in a book it usually had to do with,"I’m not getting the voice right. This voice, it’s becoming incoherent now. I’ve got to fix this stylistically," and so I would go to the Informers which was a much longer book with many more voices and I would just practice. I would just try to write in a different voice for a little while. Try to figure out stylistic problems, aesthetic problems, literary problems and once I felt relaxed enough and loosened up enough then I would go back to the other books. Eventually what happened was I had a bunch of material that seemed to intersect, a lot of stories about Los Angeles in the early to mid 1980s, and a lot of the same minor characters seemed to be overlapping. And so I fooled around with it and I put it in a sort of sequential order, rearranged the stories a couple of times, tried to figure out a way to make this work as a cohesive whole and basically turn it into my publishers because I was stuck on the book I was working on.

Punk Globe - You’re still working on it?

Ellis - It’s right over there. (he motions to a neatly stacked pile of about seven notebooks resting on his hotel bed) I tried to work on it this morning, yes I did.

Punk Globe - What’s the basic theme of the Informers?

Ellis - The theme I think is summed up in the epigraph in the beginning by John Fante, L.A. writer
One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed. from Ask the Dust by John Fante

Punk Globe - I love that. I read about a third of Ask the Dust last year.

Ellis - I read a third of it too. I love John Fante’s concept of L.A. I love his idea of what L.A. is but most of his fiction I really, I don’t think he’s ever really written a fully coherent book that I could get through. But I loved this first paragraph in Ask the Dust because it really seemed to sum up, even though he’s writing about Los Angeles in the thirties or forties, it really seemed to sum up what I feel Los Angeles is still about. It’s a city where I think it’s very, very easy to become passive about things. And the theme of The Informers I think is how dangerous that passivity is and where does that passivity lead to? When you have everything, you have money and looks, you have an enormous amount of freedom in a lot of ways. You really hop over a lot of hurdles that society places in front of you.

Punk Globe - No meaning.

Ellis - Where does it lead?

Punk Globe - Spiritual vapidity.

Ellis - Spiritual vapidity, yeah. It leads to, I think, really bad behavior on an immense scale.

Punk Globe - The banality of evil.

Ellis - Yes, it is, that’s where it comes from, that’s why it's so banal is because it comes from the most normal place.

Punk Globe - That’s what I like about your books. Especially those passages in American Psycho about top 40 record albums like Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News where you just deadpanly described the artist and the music. I get that weird shiver just looking at those record albums.

Ellis - Oh, I know, I do to. I have to admit, I do to.

Punk Globe - Back to John Fante. I read that he was one of Bukowski’s favorite writers and that Bukowski went to visit him on his deathbed. Bukowski, I think, described him as a shadow of the man he used to be.

Ellis - He was supposedly. He really wanted so badly to be a writer and it never really clicked for him and he made a living mostly by writing screenplays.

Punk Globe - I’m stumped for a second.

Ellis - That’s totally fine, I’m stumped period

Punk Globe and Ellis - (mutual stumped silence for a moment)

Punk Globe - I wanted to ask you about writers who have influenced you. Are you into F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Ellis - You know, never Fitzgerald, but the best book I read recently was the Beautiful and the Damned. It was great. Everyone tells you to read This Side of Paradise which I didn’t like or Tender is the Night which I really didn’t like. My friend Jay McInerney is a huge Fitzgerald freak and he’s always been trying to get me to read Fitzgerald and I’ve always been resisting it because, except for the Great Gatsby which is of course his perfect, perfect little novel, I never really got into him even though I think the Last Tycoon could have been his best book if he finished it. But yeah, I just read the Beautiful and the Damned and I thought it was awesome and I also was so shocked at how contemporary it seemed like, you know, these young guys hanging around going to restaurants and clubs and talking about women and current books and movies and it just seemed incredibly modern to me in a way that a lot of new books don’t seem. So I really liked it. It was very playful and experimental in a lot of ways and overall a really good book. So, but I can’t ever say - No I wasn’t influenced by Fitzgerald, no. Definitely, I mean if you want to look at the triocha, whatever, of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, um, definitely Hemingway, when I was like fifteen or sixteen I would type out pages from the Sun Also Rises or Enter our Time. I really was incredibly impressed with stylistically his work. Definitely after Hemingway was Joan Didion.

Punk Globe - What did she write?

Ellis - She writes about Southern California. She went to Berkeley, she grew up in Sacramento, she lived in L.A. for a long time. She wrote a very famous novel about Hollywood called Play It As It Lays and she’s very famous for her journalism. She wrote two books of journalism. One called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, another called the White Album and she’s just really great. Someone to definitely to look up. Mostly about San Francisco and California and a very dark view of California. Also, stylistically there’s no way I could ever hope to be as good a writer as she is, but she influenced me a lot. Less Than Zero, I mean, I completely ripped off Play It As It Lays for Less Than Zero. So she really influenced me a lot. Everyone says well who influences you now? I mean, I think influences sort of stop at a certain age once you find your own style.

Punk Globe - You mentioned at your reading that, you were embarrassed to admit that you were reading the Robert Evans book. That actually seemed like it would be an interesting book after I read the article about him in Vanity Fair lying on that bed in his Hollywood House with ashes on the pillowcase.

Ellis - He’s so disgusting.

Punk Globe - Living with all of these movie industry mementos adorning the walls.

Ellis - I know, he’s really disgusting. He’s like a character out of one of my books in a way.

Punk Globe - That tanned George Hamilton archetype.

Ellis - I wanted to make clear that when I said that, I was really reading this because when you’re doing a tour like this you’ve just got to read, you know, crap. You can’t really read anything serious. It’s impossible to concentrate on anything.

Punk Globe - What do you want to read?

Ellis - I have huge, huge stacks of books at home that I want to read. It’s sort of hard to find the time to but I read a lot. This last spring when I was down in Richmond doing work, I had no friends down there, I never went out, I read like a book a night literally. I would just get into bed, I would start reading at like nine and finish about two or three and not go out, not do anything but just read. Not turn on the t.v. or anything, just spend those hours reading. Just spend those hours reading and that was really satisfying. That was really great.

Punk Globe - Who were you reading?

Ellis - Everybody, a lot of contemporary writers. Everyone from sort of William T. Vollmann to Dennis Cooper’s last book to Tom McGuane who I’d never read before - is a western writer, to new writers, first novelists to Hemingway that I somehow missed. Just a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff.

Punk Globe - Is there some grand theme with all of your books? Are you trying to break new ground in terms of exploration of man’s motivations or you trying to write a good novel?

Ellis - I don’t think any of the above. I don’t think any of that. I don’t really even feel that I’m trying to do anything. And I don’t really feel that I have this great theme in my head that I really want to explore on paper. For some reason a character comes to mind or place. It really starts with place first. So, no, I don’t really have any grand design though I think the more you write you find a theme emerging in your books.

Punk Globe - Well what was the motivation behind American Psycho? Were you at a bar one day and you saw all these gross yuppies and you were like, “God, I hate these guys! I want to write a book about them.” Is there any sort of basic motivation like disgust for people?

Ellis - That’s a valid point. Disgust, yeah I think disgust. Loath is a motivating factor in a lot of ways. Disgust at the human race. At how evil we can be. At how the facade that man puts on to hide his more primal instincts really is scary. It’s really weird. How we’re all so repressed in so many ways. Because we follow society’s rules or we’re supposed to follow society’s rules and if we don’t and we just act like ourselves, and that’s from anything like killing someone because you’re married to them and you find them in bed with someone to yelling at someone at a dinner party. I mean we’re not supposed to do these things.

Punk Globe - Civilized.

Ellis - Right, it’s civilization and how phony it all is really. That interests me a lot. Also the typical theme that so many writers are interested in, and this is since the beginning of the twentieth century, is the interchangeability of men. How man has lost his individuality. I mean it’s definitely a theme in American Psycho and it’s definitely a main theme in this book I’m working on now. Also, just about how society really makes you less human - how it really can sap the life out of you.

Punk Globe - Do you believe in God?

Ellis - You’re only the second person to ever - I’ve been interviewed I don’t know how many times, you’re only the second person to ever ask me that - um - no, I don’t believe in God - um - but the older I get I understand people’s belief in God and I think when you’re older you realize what God means - that God is not a man with a robe and a cane, you know, handing out your fate. It’s an abstract idea.

Punk Globe - So perhaps you believe in something different.

Ellis - I don’t. No, I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in something different either. No. This is all random, this is all an accident. There’s no grand plan here. There’s no narrative that we’re on. It’s - no, I don’t believe in that. It’s all chaos, randomness, uh - accidental.

Punk Globe - But you do believe in good and evil?

Ellis - Um . . .yeah I do believe in good and evil.

Punk Globe - Because if god is dead there are no morals.

Ellis - No, I know, no. But God’s not dead because God was never really alive. I don’t really believe that exists. I mean it’s something, you know, people made up sort of like what I do for a living is make things up.

Update: Bret Easton Ellis has written an epilogue for his controversial 1991 novel, "American Psycho," which will be included in a special 20th anniversary hardcover edition of the book in stores the spring of 2011 .

Punk Globe would like to thank Rebecca G. Wilson for the very informative interview with Bret Easton Ellis...... Punk Globe would like to congratulate Mr. Ellis on his 20th Anniversary celebration and book release.

Please follow Rebecca G. Wilson on Twitter twitter.com/writerebecca