Making Bale - actor Christian Bale discusses his career, and his role in the film 'American Psycho' - Interview

Interview, April, 2000 by Elizabeth Weitzman

There's been so much talk about the American Psycho ratings-board controversy--the sex, the drugs--that we're in danger of losing the real news: The hilarious, terrifying performance of Christian Bale

When you play a character as reviled as Patrick Bateman, the protagonist (hero is not the right word) of American Psycho, you automatically take up residence in the center of a storm. And so, while Christian Bale has seen his quarter-hour come and go with each new film over the last decade, the spotlight is currently shining even brighter than usual. First came the initial shock: that feminist director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996) was adapting Bret Easton Ellis's novel, infamous for Its fetishistically violent caricature of '80s vapidity. Then Bale and Harron were temporarily ousted from the project when Leonardo DICaprio decided he'd make a great Bateman. Finally, the MPAA took objection not to the freeflowing blood but a single, satirical sex scene, forcing Harron to reedit the film to avoid a deadly NC-17 rating.

Granted, there's been hype swirling around Bale for a longtime. His film debut was as big as it gets--especially for a thirteen-year-old kid from Bournemouth, England--when he was chosen as the lead in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987). Every few years since, from the wholesome Little Women (1994) to the fulsome Velvet Gold-mine (1998), tastemakers have declared him this close to celestial heights. Now he's reached his destination, due less to any controversy than to a dazzling, gleefully charismatic performance: He altemates Bateman's mild and malevolent masks as easily as the character shrugs himself into Cerruti suits. One of the running Jokes in the film is that no one can remember Bateman's name. Thanks to him, no one's likely to forget Bale's.

ELIZABETH WEITZMAN: How do you even begin to approach a character like Patrick Bateman?

CHRISTIAN BALE: The general concept in acting is that you try to hide the fact that you're giving a performance. But Bateman is constantly performing. He really has no sense of self except for a complete lack of self. A lot of other actors had come in and tried to make him really real, tried to plug into the mind of a murderer. But I always felt that he was based on this ridiculous exaggeration that Bret got partly from that yuppie killer, Robert Chambers, but also from looking at people in ... well, the back of Interview magazine.

EW: [laughs] Care to explain?

CB: People who other people might look at and think they want to emulate, people who supposedly live this charmed life. Guys who look great, work out, and seem to have lots of money at a ridiculously early age. But what the hell is underneath it all? What if there's nothing underneath, if they're just desperate men trying to feel something? I never approached Patrick Bateman as though the first thing about him is that he's a serial killer. The first thing is that he's a symbol of the excesses of the '80s, of capitalism with no trace of ethics or spiritualism.

EW: is this a movie that's also about the current era?

CB: I think it's absolutely relevant to today, although now things are a lot quieter. Some of the guys I spoke to when I was researching the movie told me that it's still their mission to put their whole lives on hold for ten years just to go crazy earning money. But the difference between Bateman and most of the Wall Street types is that those guys actually do work their asses off. Whether people consider it to be fair that they make so much money, they do generally put in bloody eighteen-hour days.

EW: Do you see the '80s repeating itself now?

CB: I was sixteen in 1990, living in a little seaside town in England with no sense of this '80s world that I've lived in American Psycho. Frankly, I'm not really qualified to be talking about the state of the '80s in America.

EW: From your performance, it appears that you know an awful lot about it.

CB: I didn't really need anything but the book. It's so richly detailed, there was enough for me to base my entire performance upon. The rest of the research was out of curiosity. I also saw movies that Mary asked me to watch: some Alfred Hitchcock, a couple of Roman Polanskis. But just for the styling. She wanted to make sure we were on the same track as to how she envisioned the movie.

EW: Was Psycho [1960] one of the movies you watched?

CB: No. Obviously there is reference to it, down to [the character] being called Bateman, but the story that I found a closer parallel to was [Oscar Wilde's] The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891], which is very much like American Psycho.

EW: What parallels do you see there?

CB: The obsessive vanity of the character, his complete embrace of amorality, the indulgence and excess of his companions, and the apparent absolute enjoyment of glamour belying the complete bleakness and despair underneath it all.

EW: The ratings board asked Mary to cut a scene that's very much about vanity--when Patrick watches himself in the mirror while having sex with two women. Do you think it should be sacrificed for an R rating?