Last week we wrote up a post titled “Does Bret Easton Ellis Hate ‘The Informers?'” due to an interview with MTV.com we came across that suggested the novelist was perhaps less than thrilled about the way the film adapted his self-penned screenplay.
“The director shot it a certain way, and he made all these choices to drop certain stuff, and focus on this. As a writer, you definitely feel a certain lack of control.” he said. “It’s a painful process.”
Well, apparently Ellis, an avid reader of ThePlaylist, read the piece and disagreed with our assumption. In an interview with the A.V. Club, the author responded to a question regarding the trouble he had getting a faithful representation of his original script by saying, “Someone told me yesterday, “Oh, you know, it’s on the ’net that you really hate The Informers,and you’re really down on it.” And I had to look this thing up. The headline was, “Does Bret Easton Ellis hate The Informers?” Because of some online interview I did, there’s this suggestion that I’m not truly happy with the movie. But no, that’s not true at all. I’m friendly with Gregor and the producers and…”
There you go, we were apparently wrong. Ellis — who previously said, “The script that I wrote is not really on the screen,”– says he approves of the film.
“The Informers,” comes out Friday, April 24th and currently holds a certified 11% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Reading between the lines, it does still seem like he hates it though:
AVC: The tone of The Informers is really funereal. This isn’t a terribly funny movie.
BEE: No, and the script was really funny. [Laughs.] So what do you do? This is why the screenwriter should never be interviewed when a movie’s premièring. This really should be the director’s job, because it’s a director’s medium. It’s not a screenwriter’s medium. And actually going through this, being on the set and meeting the actors, you’re even more aware that it’s an actor’s medium, much more than it is a screenwriter’s medium, because they change so much of what you’re doing in terms of how they interpret it. Personally, I always think a lot of my work is funny—at least, I think it’s funny, I’m amused by it. Certainly I think in Rules Of Attraction that comes through, and in American Psycho. I think a lot of the work is funny, and in the script for The Informers,there was a lot of comedy in it. I wrote the script, it was made, and now it’s not funny. What do you do? What do I do? Do I sit around and complain about it? Not really.
This is how [Gregor] read the script and interpreted it, and this is how he decided to shoot it, and this is also how he decided to cut the movie. And again, I’m on the same page with Gregor and Marco in terms of… Well, in terms of being friendly and social with each other. I said, “Look, you know I have issues about this cut of the movie. There were cuts of the movie I thought were much better.” And they said, “This is the cut we like. This is what we want to go out with. There are DVDs. Maybe you can do a cut, Bret.” [Laughs.] Which I’m not particularly interested in doing.
oh totally, we just did that to sort of state his case because he did call us out, but yeah, it basically speaks for itself.
Sounds like damage control on his part which you can’t really blame him for. But yeah, he definitely does not dig the movie and seems to be uncomfortable with having to promote it.