Ellis’ novel is an intense undergraduate hell, but it is also just one volume in the writer‘s millennial Comedie Humaine, an ongoing series of deadpan assaults upon the overprivileged Bright Young Things of the Eastern WASP elite. As in Balzac, characters carry over from book to book: The title character of American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, is the elder brother of Rules’ Sean Bateman, played here with clenched intensity by James Van Der Beek. And Lauren‘s horrendously misjudged love object, Victor Ward, graduates from supporting-player status to the leading role in Ellis’ most recent novel, Glamorama, in which he is shadowed across Europe by bomb-planting terrorist supermodels. (Avary is already at work on a Glamorama screenplay; he plans to film the story next year, with Rules actor Kip Pardue returning as Victor.)
Avary actually extends the reach of Ellis‘ satire by injecting deliberate anachronisms into the novelist’s impeccably detailed period tapestry: In what appear to be the Reagan ‘80s, characters have DV cameras, pop Viagra and log on to the Internet. “When I first wrote the script,” he says, “I was worried that this Bret Easton Ellis 1980s nihilism was peculiar to that time period. I was worried that post-AIDS and everything else, maybe things had changed. But what I discovered is that things are even more extreme than when I was in college. There’s much less restraint. Kids use this expression ‘hooking up’ now. It‘s no big deal to ’hook up‘ with somebody at a party. It’s not even related to primarily in sexual terms.”
Avary refuses to let his audience off the hook by implying that these are phenomena unique to the 1980s: “My movies tend to be spatially and temporally non-specific. You can look at Rules and say, ‘That doesn’t look like a college in New Hampshire.‘ [The film was actually shot at the University of Redlands in California.] But that isn’t important to me. Most of Killing Zoe takes place in a bank in Paris, but it doesn‘t look like any bank I’ve ever seen in Paris. It‘s more a bubble reality designed to enclose someone inside his own psychology. That sounds pretentious, but it’s really what I like to think that I do.
”In a sense, I tried to make the whole movie as if you were inside those people‘s heads. With most films you sit back and watch the action, you’re separated from it, and that somehow makes it easier to watch something that by its nature is difficult to watch. When you crawl inside of the situation and you‘re looking at it from inside the psychology of the character, that’s when people can‘t handle it, because all of a sudden you’re forcing them to see through someone else‘s eyes. And that, to me, is what makes cinema such a fabulous art form, that you really do get to look through someone else’s eyes, almost as if you‘re watching a dream. Or a nightmare.“
