One of the films making its world premiere at this year’s edition of Sundance is ‘The Informers.’ The film is based on the oft-maligned and misunderstood 1994 book by Bret Easton Ellis (who co-writes the screenplay here). ‘The Informers’ was the 1994 follow-up to ‘American Psycho’–and as such, I suppose any let down that some readers felt was inevitable considering the cult-status achieved by ‘American Psycho.’ ‘The Informers,’ which was yet another of Ellis’ brutal dissections of the early-80’s drug and sex excess, was panned by critics because of its seemingly disjointed vignette stylization and the scatter shot character development, Quite frankly, I found it rather tedious to read at times–but well-worth the effort. If you were a fan of ‘Less Than Zero’, I think you can more easily relate to the Ellis’ rotating first-person narrative device.
As usual, Ellis is fascinated by the affectless, jaded pseudo-celebrity, family, class and the innate cruelties of human interaction when sex, drugs and alcohol are involved. How the source material translates to the big screen will be an interesting challenge and I look forward to seeing how it plays out. The film, which was directed by Gregor Jordan, will open in New York City and Los Angeles on April 10, 2009. ‘The Informers’ stars Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, John Foster, Amber Heard, Austin Nichols, Lou Taylor Pucci, Rhys Ifans, Chris Isaak, Brad Renfro and Mickey Rourke.
The book, ‘The Informers,’ will be reissued in paperback on February 24, 2009 via Vintage Contemporaries.
ABOUT THE STORY:
In such works as ‘Less Than Zero’ and ‘American Psycho’ Bret Easton Ellis brilliantly dissects contemporary American society, a culture in which too much is never enough. Now, adapting his own acclaimed novel for the screen, he returns to the Los Angeles of the early 1980’s with a multi-strand narrative that deftly balances a vast array of characters who represent both the top of the heap (a Hollywood dream merchant, a dissolute rock star, an aging newscaster) and the bottom (a voyeuristic doorman, an amoral ex-con). Connecting all his intertwining strands are the quintessential Ellis protagonists—a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs—and one another—with abandon, never realizing that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano. Filmed with uncommon glamour and grit by acclaimed Australian director Gregor Jordan (’Ned Kelly,’ ‘Buffalo Soldiers’), ‘The Informers’ is an alternately blistering and chilling portrait of hedonism run amuck.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION:
With the publication of his first novel, ‘Less Than Zero,’ in 1985, Bret Easton Ellis was catapulted to fame and hailed as the voice of a generation. In the ensuing two decades, he has remained famous (with frequent forays into notoriety) but, more importantly, he has maintained and solidified his standing as unofficial poet laureate of disenchanted youth and crushed innocence. In a career that bridges the twilight of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, Ellis continues to speak for every young person who is dissatisfied with the way things are; he also speaks for–and to–an ever-growing audience that has left youth behind, but still wants to feel connected to its various pains and pleasures.
Few writers are as “of the moment” as Ellis, and every one of his books succeeds as a time-capsule portrait of the era in which it was written. However, there is a timelessness to his work that makes it utterly contemporary. Though written or set in the past, his novels are always about “now,” and nothing underscores this quality more persuasively than the new film adapted from Ellis’ 1994 book, ‘The Informers.’ With a screenplay co-written by the author himself, the film, like the book, is set in Los Angeles in 1983. But, Ellis’ pitchperfect dissection of the Reagan years works every bit as effectively as a chronicle of Bush-era excess. ‘The Informers’ is set at a moment when America—a culture in which too much is never enough—wakes up after an extended spree with a very big hangover. An alternately blistering and chilling portrait of hedonism run amuck, the film is unmistakably about today.
‘The Informers’ is frequently referred to as a novel, although it is actually a collection of short fiction. The stories are only casually linked by occasional recurring characters, most of them college-age kids and/or their parents, and are all set in and around the most privileged sections of L.A., and. More importantly, they are all variations on the same theme, dealing in subtly different ways with the moral bankruptcy of the older generation, and its inevitable effect on the younger one. In Ellis’ universe, the adults are either unwilling or unable to set limits and, as a result, their children have none. Kids are constantly crossing thresholds in matters of sex, drugs, money, or violence, all the while waiting for someone to say “stop, you’ve gone too far.” But, that warning never comes.
Though published after ‘American Psycho,’ much of ‘The Informers’ was written ten years earlier, when Ellis was the precise age of his protagonists. As he recalls, “I was still at college during the early 80’s, traveling back and forth from Vermont to L.A., so a lot of the stories were about friends of mine and about the milieu I grew up in.” He goes on to say that “everyone always assumed that ‘Less Than Zero” was such an autobiographical novel. Understandably so, because it was a first novel and everyone thinks that a first novel is autobiographical.” But, in fact, he considers ‘The Informers’ his most personal book–“the one where I rid myself of a lot of autobiographical tendencies.” He also feels that, for this reason, he was able to successfully adapt the book to the screen. “I’ve done adaptations of my work for other directors that didn’t really pan out,” citing a script he did of ‘American Psycho’ for David Cronenberg that, by his own admission, “didn’t really work.” It was different with ‘The Informers,’ he says, “because I knew the material really well, and I knew these kids, knew these parents, knew these men and women. I think the other adaptations were less autobiographical, and maybe that’s why this one worked for me, and ended up as seamless as it ended up being.”
Despite his closeness to the material, it was not Ellis, but rather his co-writer, Nicholas Jarecki, who first had the idea of bringing ‘The Informers’ to the screen. Ellis recalls receiving “a phone call, followed up by an email, from someone who said, ‘I would really like to make this book into a movie; it’s one of my favorite books, and I would like you to work on the script with me.’” That someone was Jarecki, an NYU Film School graduate who had made a documentary about James Toback that Ellis had quite liked. More importantly, “he was very young—about 25 or 26 when he contacted me,” recalls Ellis, meaning that he was close to the age of the main characters, just as Ellis had been when creating them. “We sat around the Chateau during the summer of ‘04,” Ellis continues, (referring to the West Hollywood landmark, Chateau Marmont), “and started to piece together how we would take these 13 or 14 stories set in L.A., select which ones to use, choose characters we wanted to concentrate on, and make this into a movie that would flow.”
According to Ellis, “there were problems with getting the picture made,” and it languished for some time before finding its way to producer Marco Weber, whose critically acclaimed film, ‘Igby Goes Down,’ dealt with the same social class (albeit on the east coast), as well as very similar characters and crises. Nearly two years after starting his first draft of ‘The Informers,’ Ellis teamed with Weber, who then brought director Gregor Jordan on board, and the three of them refined the script until it was ready to shoot. Ellis, Weber and Jordan are all approximately the same age, and shared a perspectiveon what 1983 was like, having formed their adult sensibilities during that period. By the same token, they shared a sense of how relevant the story could be today.
As Jordan notes, ‘The Informers’ was shaped by things that happened 25 years ago to a young, unpublished author who began writing about his life, his friends, their parents, characters from popular culture at the time, as well as things from his imagination.
Three years ago, Bret, as a post forty-year-old, turned these stories from his life into a screenplay.” The result, notes Jordan, was a script that “had all of the insights into Los Angeles in 1983 that only someone who was there could have. But, it was filtered through a middle-aged man’s experiences. He continues: “There was a certain mood to Bret’s writing that I found unique—a sort of creeping miasma that really gripped me when I read the script, and then made me think about it for days afterwards. I thought that if we could somehow bring that mood out in the final film, then it would potentially be a very original piece.”
Given its multi-character, multi-generation nature, ‘The Informers’ is much less about plot than about mood, and Jordan acknowledges being influenced by at least one other L.A.-based “interlocking-lives” film. “I greatly admire Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts’” he says. “The stories are grim but completely compelling. It was a guide for me as to how to make a film with so many dark storylines palatable to a general audience.” Citing several other filmic influences, including De Sica’s ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’ and Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up,’ he says that “a film that inspired me, strangely enough, was ‘Lost in Translation.’ It is a movie that didn’t have a lot of story, but in my opinion worked because it had an interesting mood. To me, it is an example of how music and performance can help create a tone that carries an audience along more than a plot.”
Summarizing his approach to the material Jordan says, “as someone who was also a young man in 1983, my job as the film’s director was to interpret this story and somehow give it relevance to a contemporary audience. The themes of decadence, obsession with beauty, extravagance, emotional and physical cruelty, and hedonism seemed as pertinent to me, living through the Bush era, as they did to anyone in the Reagan era. It also seems as if the excesses of that period are being paid for now.”
A sprawling ensemble cast was assembled to give life to Ellis’ prismatic and populous portrait of an age, but if there is one “star” of ‘The Transformers,’ it is Los Angeles. As Jordan, a transplanted Australian who now resides there says, “I think Los Angeles has many essences, but the one of decadence and immorality is definitely conveyed in the book and film. The movie and music businesses are centered in Los Angeles, and their star systems are just so emblematic of this city. When you populate a city with people who have massive amounts of money and fame, combined with weak moral compasses, then decadence and excess is inevitable.” Weber, originally from Germany, though an L.A. resident for nearly two decades adds, “it can be an amazingly beautiful city, but on the other side it can be very brutal, cruel, and violent, especially if you are not successful. A lot of people forget that there are more than two standards by which you measure life; it’s not only about money and success.”
Unlike his collaborators, Ellis’ relationship with L.A. is life long, and for him it is more than a setting–to no small extent, it is his subject. As he says, “I grew up out here, and I’m a child of Los Angeles for better or for worse. Though I didn’t really behave as badly as my characters, I did see a fair amount of behavior that was a product of the city, and of the milieu of Beverly Hills and Bel Air. It was a kind of behavior that was very self-destructive, and seemed brought on by a kind of limitless freedom a lot of rich kids have. They have no boundaries, and so they actually start acting like adults, even though they’re not even fully formed people yet, they’re still teenagers. That’s why I’ve come back to L.A. a couple of times in my novels, because that’s a very interesting thing, something I really like exploring, and something I saw growing up.”
Weber notes that Ellis’ L.A. is, in fact divided. “We had two worlds we needed to film—the world of the adults in Los Angeles, and the world of their kids, which is a completely separate world.” In fact, the shooting schedule bore this out in that the older actors and the younger ones rarely worked together. “With the exception of the funeral and one dinner scene, it’s as if we have two casts on two different shoots, and they never seem to meet each other! On the one hand you have these really experienced actors like Kim, Billy Bob, Mickey and Winona, most of whom began their careers in the 80’s. On the other hand, you have these really great up-and-coming kids who have done excellent work, and who are all at an interesting point in their development.” But, the fractured nature of the contemporary American families depicted in the film dictate that these two generations of actors–and characters—share little screen time.
Ellis hastens to point out that this very issue is at the heart of ‘The Informers.’ “There’s a much more universal aspect to ‘The Informers,’” he says. “It really is a movie about fathers and sons, and husbands and wives, and friendships and all sorts of things my other books–and the movies made from them–aren’t about. Those works are all about one particular thing, like ‘Rules of Attraction’ is about acting out in college, and ‘American Psycho’ is about a serial killer on Wall Street. But, this has a much larger range to it, and I think the characters are far more relatable, and much more sympathetic than they have been in any of my other work that’s been adapted.”
Weber agrees with Ellis’ assessment, noting that a surprisingly broad audience might identify with ‘The Informers.’ “On one hand, it’s a movie for kids, because it is a film about a generation, about teenagers growing up. But, also, there are the older people who lived through the 80’s, people who were teenagers then, like Gregor and me.”
Whether one is talking about 1983 or today, ‘The Informers’ is still relevant. “I don’t think anything has changed,” says Weber “not with respect to how people deal with each other, how parents and kids misunderstand each other, and how parents are responsible for what kind of people their kids become—a responsibility that has not changed in the last 25 years. This may be a period piece, but it is probably the most modern period piece you could imagine.”
Jordan seconds this notion saying that, “now that Bush is gone” audiences should be eager for a film like ‘The Informers.’ “In a sense,” he observes, “this kind of film harks back to the 70’s, another reactionary, post-conservative era. It was a time that greatly influenced me as a person and a filmmaker, a time when films were not necessarily pleasant, but were challenging and thought-provoking. The appreciation of art, music, literature and film is definitely cyclical, and my hope is that this movie will tap into a new movement of expression that seems to have already started since the election.”
