Film Festival: American Psycho

Playing a killer yuppie may be just the career move former child star Christian Bale needs, reports HELEN BARLOW.

If you're expecting blood and gore in the screen version of Brett Easton Ellis' 1991 novel, American Psycho, which is screening at the Auckland International Film Festival, think again.

Not only is the film directed by a woman of feminist inclinations, Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol), but Christian Bale makes Wall St's cultivated, Harvard-educated Patrick Bateman more of a tortured soul than the callous serial killer of the novel. We don't see the killings on screen and the film leaves any terror to your imagination.

What we do witness, however, is a career-making performance by Bale, a sensitive young Welsh actor who started out as the kid in Steven Spielberg's Second World War epic Empire of The Sun, and who has had small roles in The Portrait of a Lady, Little Women and was in the little-seen Velvet Goldmine.

He has not made a huge impression as an adult actor - until now. Though it was not as if the Bateman role fell into his lap.

Bale, 26, had been developing the role for over a year with Harron, and had assumed it was his. Then at the 1998 Cannes Festival, when he was talking up his latest movie, Velvet Goldmine, he discovered an attempt for American Psycho to be Hollywood-ised starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

"It's not DiCaprio's fault that he gets $20 million for a movie and it's not his fault for recognising that the script is brilliant," the good-natured Bale said at the time. "I have no gripes against him."

But DiCaprio soon abandoned any American Psycho ambitions and it was six months later before Bale and Harron regained their project and were able to start filming.

"I wasn't very happy at that time," Bale now admits, lowering his naturally deep voice. "I was being sent other scripts by my agent who was telling me to get over my American Psycho obsession and do something else, because it might never happen. I looked at other parts but it didn't matter what it was, I couldn't help but imagine it as Bateman.

"It was a ludicrous amount of time, that some might see as wasted, but Mary and I were talking continually, pretending it wasn't happening, and it paid off. We had spoken so much about it all, that by the time we actually came to filming, there was this shorthand between us which is beneficial for a small-budget film shot in 35 days."

It certainly is Bale's film, he's in every scene, and he embodies Bateman's narcissism, down to his remarkably buff body and cultivated accent.

"Even my mum could hardly recognise me," he laughs. "She told me I looked like I was 40."

As a reference point, he mainly used the book's profuse details, with its exhaustive lists of what Bateman wore and the products he used.

"I met with some Wall St people, but I think that just satisfied my curiosity rather than being useful," says Bale. "And then I used images from 80s men's magazines. Those adverts of successful men with high-wattage smiles is where Bateman gets his whole persona from.

"To a certain degree I had to become obsessed like Bateman to be able to play the part properly. But while you can fake all the character traits, I had to do the workout regime for real.

"That's not just about an actor being vain, about taking your shirt off on film. It's an essential part of that character. He has to be obsessed and incredibly vain. So I had to become manic about getting down the gym, essentially adopting all those nauseating characteristics for a few months."

All hell broke lose when the film came up for the American censor earlier this year. To avoid the dreaded NC17 rating, which would prohibit exhibition in most cinemas and turn off advertisers, 17 seconds were cut from the pivotal sex scene, where Bateman is looking at himself in the mirror as he has sex with two prostitutes.

"If anybody's going along expecting to see The Silence of The Lambs, it isn't that at all," says Bale who, like Anthony Hopkins, is Welsh.

"Some of these big mainstream movies are much, much more violent. I guess it's just because this movie doesn't have the hero standing up and saying he's the good guy or the bad guy, and his only punishment is his own existence at the end. Somehow that becomes objectionable.

"There's an ambiguity as to his intention. [Some readers of the book even believe the killings are all in his mind] I don't have an answer to what it is and because I don't go into any sort of background, I didn't go into any future either. Certainly the movie gets far more surreal as he goes from being psychopathic to being completely psychotic by the end, having no grasp whatsoever."

Bale comes from what he terms "quite an eccentric family" and clearly bears some scars from the Spielberg experience. His early years were far from ordinary, though he insists he wasn't a child star.

"I wasn't like Macauley Culkin or someone like that. I hated doing the press so much that after my first film I didn't do anything after that. I just sort of disappeared. The problem is that it can be too much responsibility for someone so young - to feel like they've got to have something to say."

American Psycho screens at the Auckland International Film Festival on Saturday at 10 pm and July 12 at 3.45 pm.

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