"American Psycho", "Golpe al sueño americano", "Las reglas del juego" y recientemente "Los informadores"; de las seis novelas que ha publicado Bret Easton Ellis cuatro han sido objeto de adaptaciones cinematográficas. Los resultados, variopintos. Pero, ¿qué piensa el padre de las obras originales sobre sus versiones fílmicas? En una entrevista para The Onion, Ellis ha confesado sentirse orgulloso del trabajo de Roger Avary con "Las reglas del juego", avergonzado de la adaptación de "Golpe al sueño americano", razonablemente satisfecho con el esfuerzo que hicieron Mary Harron y Christian Bale para convertir "American Psycho" en un film de culto y, por último, ha salido en defensa de "Los informadores", uno de los films con peor recepción crítica del año, firmado por Gregor Jordan.

AVC: Based on Killing Zoe and Pulp Fiction, he seems like a guy who wasn’t going to shy away from the material in the book, or apologize for it. You’ve said the film version of American Psycho was sort of done in quotation marks. There’s a kind of a reticence to really tackle the material as it is.

BEE: I think Roger was pretty fearless about it. But he’s also dealing with kind of a college movie, where it doesn’t seem on the surface that a lot’s at stake, and then by the end of it, you realize that there was quite a bit at stake. He took this material from a book of mine that I think is flawed in a lot of ways, but I thought he elevated it to another realm. And maybe it was because he didn’t feel he needed to be so careful with the material, which I’m sure [American Psycho co-writer/director] Mary Harron definitely felt she had to be. I don’t know about Gregor. I think that he felt he was doing a very honest job.

And on a surface level, I think The Informers is very beautiful, and I think he did do a really good job visually. It has this very cold, gleaming, surface-y quality to it that I like. But why did some of them work and some of them not? I have nothing more to say about that. Prod me into something else. I don’t know why Roger’s worked so well.

Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work. And American Psycho—that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. But it’s very interesting. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there’s that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn’t want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that’s all I want to say about The Informers.

Did you see Hunger, by Steve McQueen? Hunger is probably the most impressive movie I’ve seen in ’09, in the first quarter. It’s the one that put me most in awe. But it’s also going to be a battle between aesthetics and morality. If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you’re screwed. I think that’s not a way to look at movies. If you start looking at movies on a moral level—“I don’t like that, that hurts, that’s mean, that’s bad”—then I don’t even want to talk to you. Or like, someone that says “I don’t like science-fiction movies,” or “I don’t want to sit through a Western,” or “I don’t like violence in movies,” then I completely tune out.