Bret Easton Ellis on The Informers

Bret Easton Ellis, one of my favorite authors, sat down for a series of interviews with Movieline about the film adaptations of his books. In this interview, Ellis discusses the recent adaptation of his novel The Informers. The film was regarded by a disaster by most critics (it ranks fourteen percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) and Ellis is candid about the film's failure.

An excerpt:

But you were involved with it the whole time, weren’t you? You were a producer on the film.
I was involved until the writer’s strike hit, and that banned any writers from visiting the set. Everyone followed that rule because everyone was really scared about what might happen. So, I was involved with The Informers until about a week or two after filming [began], because I was on set rewriting scenes. Then when the writer’s strike hit, I was told I could not go back on that set or I would be…whatever. Whatever happens to writers when they do that.

There are some writers who thought that was sort of a boon because the scripts couldn’t be rewritten during the strike. The dialogue had to be performed exactly as written, with no modifications.Right. But then half the scenes I wrote ended up on the cutting room floor anyway. Half the movie is on the cutting room floor.

The most notable cut was to the vampire storyline. Brandon Routh had been cast as the mysterious Jamie and all his scenes are totally gone from the movie, although there are still some loose ends there where you can tell those scenes would have linked up.The vampire subplot is gone, yeah.

What would be the rationale for cutting that? If anything, I would think it’d make the movie more interesting.I believe there was a concern about an NC-17 rating.

It was that explicit?There was a lot of sexuality mixed with violence. I think there was a prestige factor involved — like, I think they thought they had a shot at making an Oscar movie if they concentrated on the main families and their stories. To have a guy who thinks he’s a vampire committing all these terrible crimes, it put it into the horror/cult genre. And then they said it was budgetary, that they just didn’t have the movie to really shoot those scenes.

You can also check out Ellis' thoughts on the film adaptation of American Psycho, ten years after the release of the film.