The Making of An Anti-Hero:
An Interview with Bret Easton Ellis

by Ram Murali

After returning from New York, where I interviewed the writer Bret Easton Ellis, I received an e-mail from a senior editor of the Review, asking me how the interview went. “If you don't answer, I'll just assume he had you as an appetizer,” he added.

Bret Easton Ellis is not shy about tackling difficult topics. The characters in his books include kidnappers, models-turned-terrorists, many, many kinds of sexual deviants, psychopathic murderers, vampires, drug-addled teenagers, bisexual college students, film producers, and investment bankers.

I've read all of his books. In some ways, I'd say that Bret Easton Ellis is my favorite writer - his love for chronicling the minutiae of excess conceals a strong Puritanical and moral streak. His books are often incredibly funny, and often incredibly lonely and nihilistic. He paints a very stylized but accurate description of the life of a certain kind of person, the kind of person that my friends erroneously think that I aspire to be.

In his books, Bret Easton Ellis constructs a disturbing view of modern urban life in America. His characters and situations are very particular to a certain scene and way of life, but are panoramic in scope; they are the people we read about in magazines, the people who are famous for no known reason. Even when they are not famous per se, they travel in the same crowds, go to the same bars, have sex with the same people.

His books tend to polarize people. Generally not popular with reviewers, Ellis has gotten skewered numerous times by the New York Times Book Review, as well as by just about every other publication out there. However, he has an extremely loyal following - one bookstore I was in went so far as to put him in the “Cult” section.

His first book, Less than Zero, was published in 1985, while he was still a student at Bennington College in Vermont. The novel, which dealt with the life of a college freshman home in Los Angeles for Christmas break, was later made into a movie starring Brat Packers Robert Downey, Jr., Andrew McCarthy, and Jami Gertz.

The book retold fairly horrific events in a deadened, nihilistic and toneless narrative style for a disquieting effect. The narrator used the same language to describe a trip to the mall as to describe injecting heroin.

Less than Zero was followed by The Rules of Attraction, which was written during Ellis' last year at Bennington. The Rules of Attraction deals with the romantic vacillations of three college students in New Hampshire.

Perhaps the most soft-hearted of Ellis' books, it provides a devastating account of loneliness and isolation in college.

Ellis' next book was undoubtedly his most controversial. American Psycho, which is about the soulless existence of investment bankers in 1980s New York City, drew virulent criticism for its outrageously descriptive, nonchalant violence. The backlash from the book drove Ellis into seclusion.

Next came The Informers, a book of interrelated short stories about life in Los Angeles. The Informers is disturbing, but in a much more quiet way; it seems like in the Los Angeles of the book, the apocalypse has already happened, and all the characters are interchangeably monotone and dead.

The book is about the death of feeling and of sensory perception. In a world where nothing changes and where nothing is natural, feeling is not possible.

Ellis' most recent book, Glamorama, was published in January, and tackles celebrity culture and the worship of popular icons in America (See review on page 10).

Because of the wide and disturbing array of topics covered in Ellis' books, I really didn't know what to expect from him. Would he be a complete psychopath, or a skinny guy dressed in black Prada? I had no idea. Adding to my sense of unease was the fact that I was meeting him at his apartment. Who knew what kind of sick things he would have there?

So I got dressed in my best head-to-toe black New York trendiness and walked over to his apartment (he lives two blocks away from me). I waited in the lobby for him for about ten minutes before he bounded downstairs to get me.

He looked nothing like I expected; more of a labrador retriever than a Rottweiler. Bret Easton Ellis is around 6'3”. He's not thin. He's not fat, but he's not thin. He looks, and talks, like a large, friendly, excited dog. In a good way, though. He was extremely likeable, eloquent, and amicable, and was dressed kind of sloppily, in a long olive-green jacket and a crookedly-knotted Armani tie. He looked like a writer.

His apartment wasn't quite what I expected either; it wasn't that large and was sparsely decorated. The primary piece of furniture was an enormous bookshelf with a ladder that stretched above his bed.

We sat down at his worktable and began.

TDR: Let's start out with a little bit of background. You're from Los Angeles. Why did you choose to go to Bennington, and did you go there wanting to write?

BEE: I had thought that I was going to be a musician when I got there, but I wasn't too thrilled with the music program. I was in rock bands in high school, and the music at Bennington was very intellectualized, very jazz oriented. I didn't fit in. It also took me a long time to shrug off my kind of valley-boy, California style of speaking and dressing, and I really stuck out like a sore thumb.

Bennington was very intense, very black, and very intellectual. I'm sure I was an object of ridicule. Then, I decided to see what the creative writing situation was. Luckily, I found a teacher who was very supportive, and got me into classes that were supposed to be only for seniors, so I ended up really liking the school.

TDR: Less Than Zero was published during your junior year, wasn't it?

BEE: It was published during the spring of my junior year, yes.

TDR: How did that change your experience at college?

BEE: Well, Bennington is very small, only about 500 people. I thought that everyone was happy for me, I found out recently that everyone hated me! A bunch of us were drunk one night about three or four months ago, and we were talking about it.

People smiled and said hello, but inside, they hated my guts because they were so jealous. I really didn't understand that could happen. But since I didn't know that, nothing changed really. No matter who you were on that campus, it was so small that everyone really knew everyone else. Everyone knew everyone else's business: who they were sleeping with, what drugs they were taking, what classes they were taking, what teachers they were sleeping with, what teachers they weren't sleeping with. There really was no privacy. I didn't care about things like that. A good thing about Bennington is that it gets rid of your notion of giving a damn about what people think about you. The people who couldn't deal with privacy issues weren't seen as real artists. So I got out of that really early.

TDR: Well, you've been quoted as saying that “you don't give a sh*t about anyone else,” including reviewers. Do you think that comes from your time at Bennington?

BEE: Well, I don't know if it's true that I don't give a sh*t about anyone else. I think I've said that too often. The problem is that reviewers and responses from people aren't part of the process of writing a novel.

By that time, when the reviews are printed, it's more than a year since I finished the book. At that point, I'm like, “Who asked you? Who invited you to the party?” I'm seeing this now with Glamorama - I really feel like I'm reviewed more moralistically than any of my peers are, or even than anyone else who writes books. That's something that I've started to care about, that I've started not to like, when they start talking about things like motivation, or my social life, or why they think I write this way, I've realized that the name Bret Easton Ellis - you either like it or you don't. It doesn't even matter what's in the book, in a way.

TDR: It's funny that you say you're reviewed moralistically, because when I read your books, I feel like they're showing the amoral lifestyle as the wrong lifestyle. I've actually always thought of you as almost puritanical.

BEE: You see, I think I am too. I think you really have to be a dumb reader not to get it. The morality, or the moralistic side of me, needs, maybe to be a little more subtle. It's so out there. I don't understand how reviewers don't get it. I can work myself up into a frenzy thinking about these stupid reviews, but I try not to.

TDR: When I was reading Glamorama, it almost seemed like you were reacting to the backlash from American Psycho by punishing all your characters, because they went unpunished in both American Psycho and in all your other books. Do you think that played a role?

BEE: Actually, I think a lot of it was just getting older. Actually, I never really looked at it that way, that the characters in Glamorama get punished. I think it's true, but I never saw it as punishment exactly. I know it sounds disappointing to hear, but I just saw the events of the book as having to happen. It was much more of a structural thing.

TDR: What makes you write about violence in such great detail? This isn't the case in Glamorama, but in every other one of your books where there's been violence, it has been tied to sex. Why do you see it that way?

BEE: Well, for some reason in my fictional world they often come together. In my real world, my sexual side and my violent side tend not to merge. It was about the characters. I mean, I never really talk about this kind of stuff with my shrink. We never discuss my books, so it could mean something that I'm not aware of. But I tend to think that they're just honest descriptions of options or situations and narrative. They seem natural.

TDR: Is it difficult to write them?

BEE: It's difficult to have a character sitting with his girlfriend at a table and having a conversation for forty-five pages. That's really hard. Writing about violence is also really hard. Writing about sex is really, really, difficult. I don't think one is harder than the other.

TDR: But what about on an emotional level? I don't think I could ever imagine violence in that kind of detail.

BEE: You know what? It becomes, at least in the way I work, part of the outline, and I know exactly when it's going to happen in the book, and by the time I actually write the scene, I've been thinking about how it should play out on the page. I'm not thinking about it on an emotional level, I'm responding on a purely literary, technical basis. I don't get freaked out, I don't get scared, I don't get turned on by the sex, I don't cry at the sad parts. It takes too long. It took me a week to write the sex scene in Glamorama, it took me a week to write the plane crash scene. The emotional response to the book is gone by that point, and it's just technical.

TDR: But you're literally destroying your characters as you're going through the book.

BEE: Actually, I made a mistake when I wrote American Psycho, because I saved all the violent scenes until the end. That wasn't particularly pleasant, and I was depressed at the time. I don't mean to sound like a victim, because it was definitely my decision to write those scenes, but it was kind of upsetting in a way. It was so relentlessly gory, and I was thinking, well, he would probably do this, and yeah, I should probably describe it this way.

TDR: Did you like the end result?

BEE: Yes, I did, and I actually thought that everyone else would like it as well. Silly me.

TDR: I didn't like that book.

BEE: Well, I can understand that.

TDR: One of my friends thinks you're a jerk because of it.

BEE: Let's discuss this a little bit. Why does your friend think so?

TDR: Well, I think it's a little bit difficult to separate the author from what he writes.

BEE: I think, emotionally perhaps, or intellectually, I've never written a sequence in a book that is autobiographical. It really is not historical for me. I think American Psycho is such a metaphor. I can understand that, I guess. But it's really not autobiographical.

TDR: Well, what about The Rules of Attraction? Was that book also not autobiographical?

BEE: Autobiographical, well, I mean, there's nothing in that book that I experienced first hand, in terms of the dynamics between the characters. That book and American Psycho are definitely autobiographical perhaps in the mood that I was in, in my sense of being, not what was on my mind, not what I was fantasizing about, but they're not based on real people.

TDR: Do you actually like your characters? I mean, they're not very likeable people.

BEE: I don't think of them that way. I think of them as necessary, and whether they fulfill my needs as a writer. I'm not a writer that's motivated by sympathetic people. I'm not motivated by hope, or glory, by people saving each other at the last minute, by understanding that love is possible, or that kindness exists. It does not make for interesting writing. F*cked up people are much more interesting to write about. Realizing too late that you've screwed up your life, that you've made all of the wrong choices, that you've missed the point, is interesting.

There's a lot more tension in that. I think, at heart, that I'm a satirist, so I'm interested more in milieu or in a group of characters. I think I differ from other writers in that - I'm not as interested in the characters themselves, but in how the milieu created them. What their flaws are, why they mess up.

TDR: Is that why you use so many of the same characters in your books? A lot of the main characters in your books have appeared in others of your books.

BEE: I really don't know. I wish there was some really brilliant answer, but I don't know why I do it. It just seems natural to me. Sometimes, if an interviewer really pushes it with me, I try to think up some smart, really intellectual answer, like “it's a symbol of a lost generation of youth that's doomed to repeat itself,” but I don't believe that. I just don't know.

TDR: I read an interview where you said that human nature is intrinsically evil. Do you really think that?

BEE: I can't believe someone's reminding me that I said that. It's so weird. I believe that we are very flawed, as animals, and that our circuitry is very flawed, and the way we construct society and our needs are completely at odds.

TDR: What specifically do you think is wrong?

BEE: I think we're basically animals apart, and more often than not, we feel oppressed by the lack of choices, but that shouldn't be the way it is. There should be much more of a sense of freedom.

TDR: Do you think that goes from the top down?

BEE: Nirvana is unattainable. What life teaches you is that everything is about unattainability. I really think that human beings are more about suffering than anything else. At the same time, you try to find things that make you happy. You know, I really sound too sappy when I talk about this stuff. I should start being like, “Evil is good! Cannibalism - thumbs up! Vampires - love them!”

TDR: But through your public image, I mean you're always photographed wearing black, don't you think you've set yourself up for having that kind of image? Don't you think that's what restricts your freedom?

BEE: It restricts other people's freedom, not mine. There's this persona that I have, this public persona. I don't know how faithful to it I am. Having a kind of noticeable persona is, in some ways, the best thing a writer can have, because it leads to a long career. A lot more people have heard of me than have read my books.

TDR: On to a slightly different topic; I saw the movie of Less Than Zero the other day and I know that they're filming American Psycho now. How much creative control did you have over Less Than Zero, and are you retaining more over American Psycho?

BEE: I knew from the beginning that the movie of Less Than Zero wasn't going to be any good. When it was optioned, I knew what the odds were. I thought there was no way the movie was going to be made. The book didn't have a plot. It didn't have characters. It would never happen. And then it did happen. They kept hiring writers, finding ways to do it, it's a long story, but basically, what happened was I didn't pay any attention.

One day, I found out that the movie was going to start filming. I had no idea. When I saw it, I didn't really recognize it because there wasn't a single line of dialogue from my book in it. The character's names were the same but that's it. Actually, not even that. They gave Clay, the main character, a last name - Easton. That was slightly humiliating. I never would have imagined that they would change the ending like that.

I thought my eyes were deceiving me. It should have been in an independent film, but there weren't really independent films then. It was a big, glossy studio film, that should have been low-budget.

But I don't think the people who were running the studio were going to make a movie that was criticizing their children! I mean, the book was about kids in Los Angeles. They turned it into the biggest anti-drug movie. Everyone who did drugs died. All I have to say is that the 80s were really pretty lame.

TDR: So, are you staying uninvolved with American Psycho as well?

BEE: Well, I really have nothing to do with it. I did in the beginning. I did a script. Everyone brought in a writer. Another director. Another writer, etc. Mary Barron, who's directing it now, finally wrote a script that was really faithful to the book. All of the dialogue and all of the scenes came from the book.

TDR: What did you think of all the stuff with Leonardo DiCaprio signing up for doing the movie and then dropping out?

BEE: Well, I was totally into it. I wanted him to do the movie. I wish he hadn't dropped out. But I have a feeling I might be in the minority in that, and that a lot of people that it would have been stupid. I think he got what he wanted, by making people think that he would consider a role like that. Without having to play the role, he made himself seem more adventurous than he was.

TDR: Do you want to keep writing books about similar things? It seems like Glamorama was, in some ways, the culmination of everything you've written before.

BEE: After I finished it, I didn't think I would write anything else. I'd just write screenplays, but no more books. I thought writing Glamorama would be easy to write. But then, all of a sudden, it hit me, how to write my next book, the key just came to me. I wasn't even thinking about the book at the time.

I immediately sat down for a couple of hours and started making notes. But you don't have control necessarily over what to write. You have to know your limitations. I can't make the decision about whether to write, or what to write about, it's made for me in a way. I'm kind of afraid - I remember how hard it is to sit down to write. And I'm afraid of going back to that. But I'm going to, probably.

TDR: Do you write with a specific audience in mind?

BEE: No, I don't. I don't think about anyone but myself. It's an incredibly selfish process. I don't make any decisions by thinking about what other people want.