In the book, Bateman’s most egregious acts of violence are immediately followed by tone-shift chapters of music criticism on Huey, Whitney Houston and Genesis. For her and Turner’s adaptation, Harron cleverly has Bateman deliver the essays in monologue form before, rather than after, a killing.
“In my early life, I had been a music critic, so I was always very amused by the music scenes,” the director recalls. “It popped into my head that if we turn them into monologues, and he did the first one just before he killed someone, then every time he starts to talk about music, you will be scared and think that he’s about to kill someone.” Part of her reasoning was due to the book being “almost avant-garde, experimental,” and so requiring cinematic structure. “It’s kind of free-form, but we needed to give it more plot in the movie, and a bit more momentum. So we did that with those scenes, and by amping up the role of the detective (Willem Dafoe) a bit.”
But what sears the Huey Lewis scene into cinema history is Bale’s screwball sensibility. “There is a lot of crazy comedy even within the novel of American Psycho,” Harron, a noted fan of ’30s screwball comedies, says. “I was lucky that Christian really, really seized onto that. He was the one who said to me the day before we shot the Paul Allen murder, ‘I think I want to moonwalk.’ When he did it, I fell off my chair—it was so funny.”
Harron says that Bale found a “manic, comic, edge of craziness and scariness” as they were shooting. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re going to do very extreme physical comedy, but it’s also going to be scary.’ We didn’t plan it out that way; it was just an intuitive thing, which is one of the best things when you’re filming.” Worth noting: since Bale’s performance in 2000, one of the only other screwball serial killers has been Matt Dillon as Jack in Lars von Trier’s (also controversial) The House That Jack Built and members have certainly noticed this. “Bro is literally Patrick Bateman if Patrick Bateman were into art history instead of music,” writes Mrclownteeth.
