Bret Easton Ellis Interview

Bret Easton Ellis talks to Vice about the ominous atmosphere in LA, why he's not Patrick Bateman or any of his other characters (despite the frequent confusion by his readers), his forthcoming novel Imperial Bedrooms and his screenplay The Golden Suicides, "about the lives and deaths of the artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan."

Having not known them, I could only guess. Maybe there was a mutual feeding of each other’s paranoia?
There was the paranoia. And I mean, I think she needed a narrative. She needed an explanation as to why she wasn’t making it in Hollywood. She’d made it before, in the video-game world, but I think she came out here and everyone expected her to be a star, this big moviemaker, and she didn’t realize that movies just aren’t getting made. It drove her crazy, and she couldn’t accept that defeat and so she had to build this narrative.

That’s where her theories about a Scientologist plot against her come into it.
The Scientologists. And then she began to build this huge narrative as to why she wasn’t successful in the film industry. I’m haunted by it. I don’t know why it resonated with me so much.

You explained it pretty well. It was the relationship that you’d been having, and your experience with The Informers. That could really put you in a place where the Blake-Duncan story would hit you hard.
And they were hot.

They were hot. Yeah.
Literally, this is how it sold with one of the producers, to get financing for it. “Who wants to see a movie about two people who kill themselves?” And then the other producer said, “Well, they were hot.”

Oh, fuck.
And he said, “Really? Well, where’s the pictures of them? Ah. Yeah.”

This was two producers talking to each other?
Yeah.