In any other decade, this would be a Hollywood trade story. In 2026, it is a diagnosis.

Young men now quote Bateman the way a previous generation quoted Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, which is to say that American Psycho has migrated into aspirational territory. Young men want to be the novel’s looksmaxxing, empty-sex-chasing protagonist. Mary Harron, who directed the original 2000 film version, keeps telling interviewers she is “mystified” by this. She always understood the novel as satire — specifically, “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” Harron is a careful reader and a better director, and she still cannot quite say the obvious thing. It is not mystifying at all. A culture that elected Donald Trump twice — Bateman’s explicit role model in the 1991 novel — was always going to lose the ability to distinguish satire from a mirror. The Bateman problem is not that readers misunderstand Ellis. It is that they understand him the way a thirsty man understands an oasis.

The trends that culminated in the valorization of Bateman were already latent when the novel and the Trump presidency were mere gleams in the eyes of ambitious men. When Ellis came on the literary scene, it was as part of a Bennington College cohort that also included Jonathan Lethem, whose work the new film will inadvertently eulogize. Lethem attended Bennington College in Ellis’s class of 1986 but dropped out halfway through sophomore year, having had what he later called an “overwhelming collision with the realities of class” — his bohemian parents, he discovered, had actually been poor; the Bennington students were actually rich. 

Lethem went back to Brooklyn and spent the next 30 years writing the inverse book to everything Ellis produced. Where Ellis’s characters sit sealed inside their class privilege like terrarium specimens, Lethem’s characters can’t avoid their neighbors, can’t unsee the block, can’t pretend the adjacent kid’s trouble is not also theirs. The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s breakout book, pays homage to Jane Jacobs, a pioneer of urban community preservation, who valued neighborhoods above all else. Lethem’s Fortress is the great Jacobsian novel of the post-Jacobsian era, a long aching chronicle of the Brooklyn block as moral organism and what gentrification does to it — which is not only to displace people, but to implicate the remaining residents in the displacement.

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By Richard Greenwald

Call Ellis’s model the city of fear. His urbanism is vertical, predatory, cold; the characters don’t walk, but are driven, their class positions reinforced by every sealed surface. The streets happen to other people — people they don’t look at, people for whom the correct response is either the averted gaze or the raised partition. 

Call Lethem’s model, by contrast, the city of guilt. His urbanism is horizontal, all stoops and sidewalks, the corner store whose owner knows which kid’s mother is sick, and its governing emotion is the impossibility of moral insulation. For a long generation, American urban writing ran an unofficial referendum between these two visions, with every essay on gentrification mentioning Jacobs and her opposing force, the builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed whole neighborhoods in New York City in the name of Progress. Every Jacobs-versus-Moses seminar, every fight over bike lanes and broken-windows policing contests the ground between them. 

The referendum is over. Ellis won.

He won in the obvious places. Bateman’s Manhattan is now the Manhattan that turned SoHo into an outdoor luxury outlet and converted its own middle-class adulthood into an unwinnable quest for success and hipness. He won in the less obvious ones, too: in the Ubered, DoorDashed, Amazon-Primed private-city experience of the educated young, who have been trained to encounter the public street the way Bateman encountered it, as an interruption between secured spaces. He won in the quiet disappearance of the mixed-use retail block, the conversion of the corner bodega into a ghost-kitchen, the diner into a co-working subscription. He won, most painfully, in the Brooklyn Lethem actually wrote about. The Boerum Hill neighborhood — the central nervous system of The Fortress of Solitude — was gentrifying even during Lethem’s childhood; brownstones there cost between $3.5 to $8 million today. Nearby Bed-Stuy lost its black majority during the Eric Adams mayoralty. There, brownstones that sold for $50,000 during the period the novel depicts now trade north of $3 million. The homeowners who cashed out are not, in the main, analogs to the people Lethem’s narrator grew up watching. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellis settlement.

He won, too, in Altadena, a close-knit California community that was a suburban equivalent of Bed-Stuy. A year after the January 2025 fires, nearly 70% of severely damaged homes there show no rebuilding activity, and black and Asian homeowners — Altadena was an anomaly of black homeownership, with an 80% ownership rate in 2023, roughly double the national average — are the most likely to remain stalled. Commercial lease prices in the surviving blocks have spiked. The people who understood Altadena the way Lethem’s narrator understood Boerum Hill’s Dean Street are being priced into storage. The speculators circling the burned lots understand those lots the way Ellis’s characters understood the street: as inventory, passed through tinted glass.

The TikTok embrace of Bateman is therefore not a misreading, but a graduation certificate. The readers who now quote him admiringly grew up in the city he built — organized around sealed interiors and contempt for exteriors — and correctly identify him as a role model in this new world. Guadagnino’s casting trouble is the final footnote. You can no longer play Bateman ironically if there is no longer a shared moral floor against which the irony registers. The actors who have passed on the role may or may not have theorized it this way, but they have felt it. The character no longer reads as the predator he was designed to be, because the culture has lost its capacity to recognize predation. The only honest performance now would be the straight one, which might be why so many A-list actors have turned down the role. 

Some untidiness, however, mars Ellis’s victory. On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on the most Lethemite platform of the postwar era: a four-year rent freeze on roughly a million rent-stabilized units; the addition of 200,000 permanently affordable units over 10 years; a revived Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; public grocery stores and free buses; and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. The campaign was unapologetically Jacobsian in its moral grammar — the block as moral organism, the tenant as legitimate claimant on the landlord’s conscience, the city as shared custody rather than asset class. Mamdani’s election, and the wave of younger Gothamites who embraced him, suggest a new playbook for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. Lethem’s vision returned like the repressed: the city of guilt asserting itself as policy after two decades of being merely literature.

Mamdani’s first 100 days have been a tutorial on why Ellis won. The new mayor inherited a $12 billion deficit and has cut it to $5.4 billion, in part by appealing a court order that would expand the city’s rent-voucher program — thus breaking a promise he had made on the trail. He proposed a 9.5% property tax hike that the deputy speaker of his own progressive council immediately branded “not equitable,” opening the first crack of what could become a tax revolt. Former Mayor Eric Adams, in his final weeks, stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees designed to delay the rent freeze; the preliminary vote is not expected until May, the final until June, and any freeze would not take effect before October.

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By Rosie Gray

The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan released in early April has already drawn the attention of Trump’s Justice Department. The pied-à-terre tax requires the state legislature’s cooperation, which Albany is withholding. None of this is precisely a failure — yet. It is the normal friction of governance meeting the permanent architecture of American urban capital. It is also, without exception, the machinery Ellis described. The real-estate state — the phrase is the author Samuel Stein’s — is not moved by elections. It is moved by ownership, and ownership is a formidable opponent. 

The wave of socialist mayors should be read honestly. It is not the Lethem vision reasserting itself as lived urban reality. Neither is it a victory for Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses. It is the Lethem vision appearing as electoral ethics inside cities whose physical and financial architecture is permanently Ellis. Americans now vote for the city of guilt and live in the city of fear. The vote registers the yearning; the architecture registers the verdict. You can campaign against the real-estate state, but you govern inside it. You can read The Fortress of Solitude on the F train, but the F train is delivering you to a neighborhood that priced out the families Lethem wrote about a decade before the book came out.

Guadagnino’s film, when it arrives, will be an accidental document of this settlement. He will find a Bateman, or he will not; the picture will be well-reviewed, or it will not; Bale’s ghost will be appeased, or it will not. None of that matters. Ellis’s novel, written in 1991 as a scalding joke about a world the author assumed his readers would recognize as grotesque, is now read by those readers as reportage — or even a how-to guide. Lethem’s novel, published in 2003 as an elegy for a Brooklyn block that was already mostly gone, is now read — when it is read — as speculative fiction. The city of fear won. The city of guilt is what we are now obliged to feel about having let it.

The story follows Victor Ward, a vacuous and handsome male model swanning about Nineties Manhattan. Victor’s world revolves around the most inane concerns possible: clubs, paparazzi, celebrities. But soon, weird things start happening. People keep telling Victor they’ve seen him in places he hasn’t been: a hotel in Miami, a Calvin Klein show. Victor is offered an unusual new job: finding a girl he went to college with who has supposedly disappeared in London. He’s booked into a first-class cabin on the QE2, and here the narrative starts to veer sharply from the aimless frivolity of the opening sections.

In London, Victor finds the girl, another model. He falls in with her group of roommates, also all models. Victor is thrilled to be going to such cool parties with such hot people, blinded by their good looks and designer clothes. But it soon turns out these models are terrorists. Their cover is beauty and fame, and their crimes are violent and gruesome. On a party tour of Paris, Victor is blackmailed to stay with the cell, closely controlled by its leader, the supermodel Bobby Hughes, who “had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze”. Under Bobby’s leadership, the group pulls off a series of major attacks all while air-kissing their way around the glitzy Paris fashion world. Everyone is being watched, everything is being filmed, people aren’t who they say they are, and Victor’s reality collapses in on itself, conspiracies layering and deepening.

The actual goals of the model-terrorists are never explained, and they aren’t the point. The spectacle is. The first order of business is aesthetics. During a bombing in Paris, Victor thinks: “It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.”

Yet Victor’s conscience haunts him. He tells Bobby he doesn’t want to be involved, that he’s not political. “Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby tells him. “It’s something you can’t help.” Bobby tells Victor he trusts him precisely because of his shallowness: “Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’.” Stupidity has made Victor vulnerable, and ultimately dangerous. People who are political, who do have an agenda, have taken advantage of Victor because he’s distracted by surface glitz.

There are many more potential Victors out there today. In Glamorama, the allure of beauty stupefies people, turning them into the pawns of those who know how to manipulate it. The same is true on the internet, which has provided an incredibly powerful tool for politicization, even radicalization, cloaked in soft-focus lifestyle content or in quasi-ironic memes. It’s all too easy to be misled by a pretty face — or a fine set of abdominals.

It is now commonplace for dead-serious political ideas, even extreme ones, to filter into the mainstream on the basis of aesthetics alone. The “Trump Gaza” AI video that depicted the territory as a glamorous beach resort, which went viral when the President himself shared it, was meant as “satire” according to its creator. But in Trump’s hands it became a tool to normalize the idea of a full takeover of Gaza. The puerile imagery of belly dancers and golden statues sanitized the sobering reality of what this takeover would mean.

The Right has long understood the importance of looks. Roger Ailes used to evaluate potential Fox News hosts by watching them on mute. Trump’s career can be seen as a large-scale experiment in how far one can get in politics by putting image first. More so than any recent president, Trump has generated an instantly recognizable aesthetic, turning his agenda into an easily consumable visual brand. His movement is adept at using the internet’s visual language to promote his agenda through imagery that elides its gravity — one example is the Studio Ghibli-style AI cartoon of a crying Dominican woman being arrested by ICE, which the White House tweeted this spring. In sneering at his unsubtle tastes for glitz and gold, Trump’s opponents have missed that these tastes are what many Americans find aspirational, even beautiful.

The pull of beauty — of what we most want to look at — has come to determine in many cases which news events capture the public imagination, and which don’t. Aesthetically appealing images get attention, and attention is today’s most valuable asset. Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a particularly cinematic recent example, optimized to go viral. From the first grainy surveillance video, showing a peek of Mangione’s chiseled jawline, the internet was hooked. It’s true that Mangione’s story tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with American healthcare, but I’m not sure he would have become a beloved online figure if he didn’t happen to be good-looking.

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It seems our culture can’t resist a handsome criminal. Jeremy Meeks, the “hot felon” whose mugshot for gun charges went viral in 2014, parlayed his fame into a modeling career after getting out of prison, walking in fashion week shows in Milan and New York. He now has nearly 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Even fictional killers can be influencers these days if they have the look: Ellis’s better-known protagonist, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, has recently inspired a cologne and a namesake Manhattan cocktail bar — on top of a wealth of memes.

While Patrick Bateman channels the nihilism of 4chan, Victor Ward embodies the insidious triviality of TikTok. In Glamorama, Ellis captured the feeling of scrolling through a social media feed long before such a thing existed: a barrage of decontextualized images, a flurry of brands and people and eventually ideologies. If the novel had been written today, Victor’s journey would take place somewhere in the endless scroll.

Just as Victor is sucked into a dark reality through his unquestioning participation in a culture of images, many people nowadays find themselves funneled into various ideological corners by what seems at first to be innocuous content tailored to their interests. Motherhood accounts are full of gauzy day-in-the-life videos that eventually turn out to be promoting free birth or Biblical submission to your husband. Men seeking lifestyle hacks find themselves swept up in the manosphere. People can and do become indoctrinated without realizing it, drawn in by an attractive veneer. “We’ll slide down the surface of things,” Victor often thinks in Glamorama.

The models in Glamorama understand that images define reality, and not the other way around. In a 1999 interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Ellis said he chose the fashion world as the setting for his story because “where would these terrorists want to unleash this conspiracy where no one else would look for it?… They’d do it in a world where image is truth, where surface is truth.” The terrorists operate from within a “beauty culture” that “feasts on insecurity” and “makes us act in ways I don’t think we normally would act”, Ellis said.

Today, beauty culture is even more pervasive than in the Nineties. The question is: how far will we go to keep up with it? “The better you look, the more you see,” is Victor’s catchphrase — and it takes on an increasingly sinister tone as the novel goes on. In Glamorama, beauty is a trap, a smokescreen that dulls our reason. It is a warning for the image-saturated world we live in.

A few years ago, in a conversation which presages this new book, Bret Easton Ellis invited him on to The Bret Easton Ellis Show to discuss political correctness, creative mid-life crises, and how they both fell in love with film…

Bret Easton Ellis: Quentin, it seems every week, there’s some kind of negative shit being written about you. What are your feelings about these controversies? How do you process them? And how seriously do you take them?

Quentin Tarantino: Well, it’s hard to take any of them seriously. But it’s actually ended up being kind of sobering. In a weird way, whenever I felt myself getting riled up, I came to realise that I was taking part in the riling up myself.

I never really thought of interviews as being these artistically significant things, but there used to be an artistic significance to the beginning and the end of the interview, and the beginning and the end of the published article. Well, now when they come out, they’re simply like a whale for other journalistic sharks to grab their little chunk of meat and make their big headline.

Now you’ve got 480 articles about me throwing shade on the director of Selma, from everywhere from The Guardian, to The New York Times to Variety and Hollywood Reporter, all the way to the Times of India. And so you look at all that, and just think: “Oh my God, well, I’m never going to do interviews again. This is such a drag.”

Bret: As someone who has been giving interviews for 30 years, I feel there’s something different in the air between the interviews I gave in 1995, compared to the interviews that I give today, where they are automatically dissected in social media, and things are pulled from them, that are taken out of context, like in my New York Times interview with you.

It’s part of an ideology now, and having an ideology is more important than aesthetics. Everyone really wants you to be PC, and if you don’t really toe the groupthink party line, then you are open to attack. It makes you think: why do I do this?

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One of the things that was really interesting that didn’t make it into our interview was my reaction to your love of Don Siegel’s 1973 crime drama Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau. I rewatched it after our conversation, and I was amazed by it: it seemed to inform everything that you’ve done, and it seemed like a huge influence on the Tarantino aesthetic. And yet in the published piece, it seems that I take you to task for thinking this, and they removed my parenthetical about “or perhaps he’s right, it is magnificent”.

So let’s start with Charley Varrick, and why this movie matters to you as much as it does: what does that movie do for you that speaks to you and continues to speak to you?

Quentin: Yeah, well, it’s interesting, because I didn’t see Charley Varrick at the theatres when it came out. I think I saw it in 1973 in Tennessee. And I think one of the reasons I saw it was because Joe Don Baker was in it, because he was the star of Walking Tall, which was a huge movie in Tennessee at that time. I think it was more or less that type of aesthetic. And I think that’s what I probably responded to, even though I don’t know if I was sophisticated enough to call it by name.

Bret: Sometimes I think that passion comes from being exposed to amazing movies when we’re young. And maybe the reason film culture will wane for a generation is because of what they’re being raised on now, compared to what we were being raised on.

Quentin: Hopefully they’re being raised on me and less crap.

Bret: This is true, I would say you are one of the few. But 1975 and 1976 are very different years cinematically for a 12-year-old than today.

Quentin: Imagine learning about cinema from 1969 through 1974. At the age of eight in 1970, I went to the Tiffany Theatre on the Sunset Strip, where old Hollywood gave way and rock ‘n’ roll and the hippies took over. And at eight I saw a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa?.

Bret: I remember going to a double feature of Where’s Poppa? at the Sherman Theatre in Sherman Oaks, LA, which turned into a pretty good revival theatre. And I had the same exact thing. I remember being ten, leaving my house, walking by myself to Ventura Boulevard to go into the La Reina Theatre, when school was out in December 1974, buying a ticket to The Phantom of the Paradise and going into the theatre by myself. And I sat there and it spoke to me and I loved it. And I became obsessed with the movie and I became obsessed with De Palma and I wanted to watch everything that followed. It’s very hard for me now to understand a ten-year-old doing that. The options aren’t the same. The ten-year-old now is seeing Frozen.

Quentin: Or Age of Ultron or something like that.

Bret: Or Age of Ultron, and I sometimes think that there actually is a Gen X sensibility different from Millennial sensibility, that there is this thing that we shared.

Quentin: Very much so. Even the whole aspect about the fact that when I was in my 20s, before the Gen X talk started, when we were just busy living it and not writing articles about it, we were always stuck with people who were older than us who lived through the Sixties. And they were always telling us how junky our culture was in the Seventies compared to the Sixties — and usually what they were using as bully-whack to whip us with was how rock music had changed from their time. The Beatles doing their thing or Dylan…

Bret: … And becoming disco or The Eagles or whatever.

Quentin: Yeah, the pop sounds of The Partridge Family, which I still appreciate to this day. I actually think David Cassidy is one of the most underrated vocalists in rock history. But the point being, though, was that our music was junky and theirs was right-on. However, what they didn’t realise was that, okay, well, maybe you’re right when it comes to the music, but you’re not right when it comes to movies at all — you’re dead wrong.

And for that matter, you’re dead wrong when it comes to television, too. There was an aspect that we as children, literally children of the Seventies, invested in TV in a way that the generation before us didn’t. And we held on to TV in a big way.

But the thing is, though, we were invested in TV, and we were also invested in our movies. Even in elementary school we talked about the movies we saw. We talked ad nauseam about things like, not only The Bad News Bears, but even the crappy exploitation rip-off Here Come the Tigers. I remember when some kids saw that and came back the next day talking about it. And going to a pretty much all-black school, the weekend after Mandingo opened, like five students were talking about it or Black Belt Jones or whatever.

Bret: Well, also there was a kind of permissiveness in the Seventies that led us down these paths to movies. My parents weren’t going to take me to Chinatown at ten, but my dad took me to Theater of Blood and a couple of R-rated horror movies with my friends. We were nine; we loved it. They didn’t trigger anything, we weren’t cowering behind the sofa — we snuck The Exorcist on the Z channel that was here in LA. And I just keep thinking of the groovy Seventies, the permissiveness of it, seeing The Omen ten times in the summer of ‘76 because friends’ brothers and sisters took us in. And maybe this permissiveness of the Seventies, when I look at your group of filmmakers, perhaps aided in creating this movie consciousness that is definitely shared with Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson.

And I was thinking, in 2012, someone published your list of your Top 12 movies — which of course I know change at times…

Quentin: Almost always invariably, I pick ten new ones, every six years.

Bret: I just chose a random ten for my Criterion Top Ten. And I know that next week, it would have been a different ten. But it’s Apocalypse Now for you, The Bad News Bears, Carrie, Dazed and Confused, The Great Escape, His Girl Friday, Jaws, Pretty Maids all in a Row — a very strange and interesting choice…

Quentin: I kind of love that movie!

Bret: I do too!

Quentin: I show it quite a bit.

Bret: And then Rolling Thunder, Sorcerer, Taxi Driver, The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly — eight of these movies from the Seventies.

The other big two revelations for me were that you really were not a big Hitchcock fan, and that a lot of Hitchcock left you cold, especially the Fifties movies. And you also look at the Fifties as a very dubious decade for American film, almost up there with the Eighties. And that Vertigo doesn’t really turn you on.

Quentin: Vertigo, not at all. I really don’t get Vertigo. And I don’t really believe anybody who says they love it to that degree.

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Bret: Looking over your career, just to be clear, was there a period where you were unhappy? A period, a year or so, where you are like: this is it, I was probably most unhappy during this period.

Quentin: Yeah, when I was 18-22.

Bret: Really, those four years?

Quentin: Yeah. I’m sure I was hideous to women, I felt it. And I was really by myself in the world. I’d quit school a little too early, so I didn’t have any friends. I was really at odds in the world. I had kind of stopped going to my acting classes that brought me some joy at that time. My best friend at that time was a guy in even more, worse doldrums than me. And we literally were very pathetic, and we just kind of kept each other company in our own pathetic-ness.

Oddly enough though, that was actually a really good time for movies. So I just spent all the time going to movies by myself or dragging the sad-sack with me to go see films.

Things changed when I started working at Video Archives. That was basically like I joined college, not because we learned so much about stuff. It was more just that, if you don’t have your college experience, you usually find yourself working at a place where you get your college experience. And maybe you don’t learn as much as you would learn in college, but you have the whole social aspect of it. All of a sudden I had some friends, and I was working in a video store. It’s not really what I wanted to do, but it was connected enough to what I wanted to do that it actually gave me joy.

And my personality really flourished at this video store. I became like the little Andrew Sarris of the video archives and it was my Village Voice. And people came in and I started becoming a bit of a professor. They couldn’t even choose a movie unless I put it in their hands and gave them some little spiel about it.

People would come up with something like Pauline at the Beach, which has a very sexy box. And they would ask: “So how is this? What is this?” And I would explain to them what an Éric Rohmer movie was. So I’m kind of describing it, and I’m saying: “Well, they’re very interesting little stories. Not much happens; they’re usually just a tale of a group of people, some men and some women, and how they negotiate their little peccadilloes together.”

And somebody would say, “Is it a comedy?” “Well, no, it’s not a comedy. But if you watch it enough, give yourself over to it enough, it becomes slightly amusing. If you give yourself over to it enough, when it’s over, you’ll either know, okay, I like this, this was actually kind of an interesting experience. And if you don’t like it, well, then by the time you get to the end, now you know you don’t.”

Well, with a little setup like that, that was all they needed to actually watch the movie with the proper glasses, the proper response to things. And again, you have to remember again, how differently from now, as opposed to a Netflix cue, if I talked them into taking a movie out, they weren’t going to just watch it for ten minutes and turn it off. They actually wanted to watch it. They were invested in this.

Bret: It’s investment.

Quentin: They were invested in actually watching it for a while. If they really didn’t like it after 45 minutes or a half hour, they’d turn it on and off, and they come back pissed. But in the case of Éric Rohmer, with that kind of preamble, all the Éric Rohmer movies ended up renting like 90 times because if you saw Pauline at the Beach, and you liked it, you came back and you saw Claire’s Knee. And if you really liked Claire’s Knee, then you saw Full Moon in Paris.

And I was able to do that. Not only that, but that time at Video Archives, in a weird way, almost became a primer to some degree of what it would later be like to become famous. Because in Manhattan Beach, where the store was, we were famous. The guys at Video Archives were famous. We were the Video Guys. I’d walk down the street and people would drive by: “Hey, Quentin, hey, hey, hey, hey.” Everyone knew me: I was the Video Guy. The Man’s Theatre, that was right by us. We’d walk into the theatre, and then here we hear: “Those are the guys from Video Archives. Those guys from Video Archives.”

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Bret: It’s a different time… So have you had a midlife crisis? You’re about my age. I know I definitely had one about five years ago. You’ve escaped that, you did not fall into the mid-40s depression, or “where am I going”?

Quentin: My 40s were pretty good!

Bret: I guess my 40s weren’t so good — that’s why I had it! But you’ve also said that you are going to retire at 60 or after you complete your tenth film. You want to get to your tenth film. You think there are a few impediments. You think that there’s the idea that film is not going to be available to you, and you really don’t want to shoot on anything else. So if that happens, then maybe you’re going to be writing that novel, or whatever you’re going to be doing before that. So is that really the one impediment, the idea that there is no film?

Quentin: I think, especially if I’m talking about only doing two more, I think I’ll get past that. I think we’re okay. We’ll see what happens…

Bret: You’re right, because there is enough film: there’s a three or four or five-year stack.

Quentin: Look, things can change four years from now. But more or less, I don’t think that would be the thing that would stop me. It’s interesting because there is an aspect about the idea of saying you only have two movies left that I actually think is almost doubling and tripling down on my artistic vitality. I think that’s an interesting way to look at it, because I think most directors when they talk, especially if they get around my age, they all think they have more time than they really, truly do. I’m going strong after 20 years but going strong after 30 years… that’s a different story. And I’ve been very lucky.

But part of it all is just that nothing is more important than this. This is what this is; this is the time. And it’s not about wives, and it’s not about kids, and it’s not about anything. It’s about this.

Now, I don’t know if I can keep that up for a 40-year stretch, and I don’t even know if I would want to. But the thing about it, though, is I do think most directors think they have more time. And they talk about this book that they would like to do, and then this movie, and this genre movie, and this one and that one, and either they don’t live long enough, or their circumstances commercially change.

But if you’re actually thinking “you only have two movies left”, and asking what are those movies going to be and what is it that you want to say — well, then you’re not just going to be derailed by a bestseller that comes out, or a project with a big actor you want to work with, or any of the things that can possibly come up. Right now, in my brain, from stories that I have come up with in my head, I could do four or even four and a half movies. Now if I only do two, which of those four and a half will I end up doing, committing the next six years of my life to do?

That’s interesting, to see which of those two end up being the ones that I put my mark on. Which will be the ones that I end on, meaning they define me? Maybe I change and do 1. Who knows? Maybe I don’t. If the tenth one is bad, maybe I will. The idea is to kind of go out, you know, with a good one.

This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation from The Bret Easton Ellis Show.

Filmmakers had made massive bombs before Heaven’s Gate and they have made massive bombs since. Three or four were released last year, including Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which is by far the best film Del Toro has created. Both of these films are nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year and have probably lost far more money for their studios than Heaven’s Gate. How is it that Cimino became so famous and was able to create two towering works of art in the space of three years? And then become a pariah?

*** 

Cimino lived for 77 years, having had so much plastic surgery by the end of his life that it was rumoured he transgendered. In the end, he looked like the cliché of a middle-aged lesbian. When he was barely 40, at the height of his career, he was briefly the world’s most famous youngish director, after winning the Oscar for directing The Deer Hunter, a new Hollywood masterpiece that spoke powerfully to Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation about the cost of war. It was a huge, serious R-rated movie for adults that was also a big popular hit, a work of movie art that resonated with filmgoers everywhere. (Well, that was 1979 for you.) But the following year, when his follow-up Heaven’s Gate bombed, Cimino instantly became the most disgraced director in Hollywood history and his career was mostly over. What happened? A big part of it had to do with the perils of obsession and perhaps not being as talented as your only great film implies.

Cimino was born in 1939, a third-generation Italian American who grew up on Long Island. His father was a music publisher, and his mother was a costume designer, and Michael was considered a prodigy from a very early age at the private schools he attended. But Cimino resented what was expected of him and he began to rebel in high school. He started hanging out with juvenile delinquents and getting into fights and coming home drunk. His parents couldn’t believe this was happening to their well-behaved little boy and they couldn’t stand his new friends. But these new friends lived with a passion and an intensity that Cimino, as a rich kid, just never found among his peers. They were the outsiders and the individuals that Cimino would be attracted to for the rest of his life; men with their own code — all of his seven movies are about criminals, soldiers, policeman, mob bosses, murderers.

Cimino found it strange that his father, not so much his mother, disapproved of his delinquency because his father was, according to Cimino, the life of the party. He travelled a lot, he was an intense womanizer, he loved martinis and chain-smoked and died young.

Cimino graduated high school in 1956 and then enrolled in Michigan State in East Lansing, where he majored in graphic arts and was a member of the weightlifting club. He was a popular student and in the 1959 yearbook he was described as someone who “loved blondes, Thelonious Monk, and drinking, preferably vodka”. After studying at Yale, Cimino moved to New York City and worked in advertising on Madison Avenue, where he directed commercials for everything from Kodak to United Airlines to Pepsi to cigarettes. The added incentive, Cimino said, was to meet beautiful girls.

Clients were soon clamouring to work with Cimino, but he had one drawback: because of how meticulous his work was he almost always went overtime, and yet most thought the results were worth it, even if Cimino went overschedule and over budget. Through advertising he met a woman named Joann Carelli, who was an agent for commercial directors, and they began what would become a 30 year on-off relationship and she would be the only credited producer on the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate. She is also the only woman Cimino has been quasi-romantically linked with; he never married, he never had children.

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As the Seventies began, Cimino decided to move to Los Angeles, where he began his career as a screenwriter. It was Carelli who encouraged this, even though Cimino had never written a script before. But by 1978 he had written about a dozen and was making a decent living. Cimino would have rather directed, but he didn’t have any money to option properties or buy books or pay someone to write a script and the only chance he had to direct something was if he owned the screenplay that a movie star wanted to make. And that’s exactly what happened with a screenplay Cimino wrote called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which was shown to Clint Eastwood who bought it for his production company.

Eastwood had planned on making the movie himself but allowed Cimino a chance to direct it, his first feature, after being impressed with his rewrites on the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. Cimino had been hired in to revise a second version of the script, and the film turned out to be a massive hit — the sixth-highest grossing movie of 1973, a much bigger hit than the original Dirty Harry. Cimino has said that if it weren’t for Clint Eastwood, he would never have had a career in film, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was the 17^th highest grossing film of that year and Jeff Bridges was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Cimino was 35.

Because of the success of the movie Cimino was deluged with offers, but he didn’t like any of them and decided that he would only get involved with a project that he wanted to do. This was the Seventies. This was the era of the filmmaker as auteur. This was the decade of freedom and studios were willing to take big risks.

So Cimino kept rejecting offer after offer until he decided to pitch a big ambitious Vietnam movie to a few EMI executives who had approached him in November 1976 about another script called The Man Who Came To Play, whose central conceit was about people going to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette. But the script needed to be heavily rewritten and revised: EMI loved the premise but it wasn’t a movie yet.

Cimino had read the script and told EMI he was confident that he could elevate the script into an actual movie, but it was unclear who these people in Vegas playing Russian roulette were, why they were there, and what had happened to them. Cimino was intrigued and decided to hire Deric Washburn, who had worked with him on a previous script, on the revision. Washburn went ahead and wrote a first draft and when Cimino read it he thought it was so bad that Washburn must be mentally deranged. Cimino and Washburn supposedly had a confrontation at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood where Washburn said he couldn’t take the pressure of working on the script with Cimino’s attitude and gave up. So Cimino fired him and threw everything out and wrote the first draft completely alone. The Deer Hunter was born.

Now, Washburn has said that this is all a lie. He claimed that the two of them spent three days together at the Sunset Marquis and hammered out the new plot and agreed that Washburn would do the bulk of the writing. Washburn claimed he had been given a time limit of a month — the clock was ticking — and he had spent the entire time writing and rewriting the script. When he was finished, according to Washburn, Cimino and Carelli took him to a cheap restaurant somewhere on the Sunset Strip where Carelli told Washburn: “Well, it’s fuck-off time.” And Washburn was fired.

Washburn saw this as a classic Hollywood situation: you get a dummy to write the goddamn thing, then tell the dummy to go fuck himself, then put your own name on the dummy’s script, and make sure the dummy never comes back. Washburn admits he was so tired that he didn’t really care if he was fired. He’d been working 20-hour days for a month and was completely burnt out. He left LA the next day, got on a plane and flew back to Manhattan.

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EMI was surprised by the new The Deer Hunter script and how it turned one man into three — and how these men now worked in a steel town in Pennsylvania and were all drafted into Vietnam. In the original script it is Mike, played by Robert De Niro, who stays in Vietnam and Christopher Walken’s Nick who comes back to the steel town and returns to Linda (Meryl Streep). It is Mike who meets his tragic fate at the Russian roulette table and not Nick. Cimino revised all this, but the Writer’s Guild of America in their arbitration process awarded Washburn sole screenplay by credit and the original authors of the script The Man Who Came To Play were given story credit along with Michael Cimino. Cimino was pissed. But he had a movie to make.

The Deer Hunter started shooting in June of 1977, and it took six months to complete at double its original budget. The cast, along with De Niro and Walken, was made up of John Savage, John Cazale and Cazale’s girlfriend at the time, Meryl Streep, who De Niro recommended to Cimino after seeing her in a play. Streep didn’t really respond to the role of Linda — she saw her as a vague, stick girlfriend — but Cazale was dying of lung cancer and she took the role so she could be near him on set.

There was an arduous year of post-production — the film editor Peter Zinner, who won an Oscar for his work, was handed about 110 miles of printed film to edit. This was a monumental task in 1978. How did so much film get shot, one wonders. How did the already large budget double? The answer is Cimino had become obsessed. He was now a film artist who wanted to create a masterpiece, something that could be compared to The Godfather and The Godfather Part II — movies that are looked at as the pinnacle achievements of the New Hollywood.

The wedding sequence that opens The Deer Hunter was supposed to be about 20 minutes long but in the finished film it’s over 50 minutes and it’s grand and ominous. Visconti would be proud. Cimino’s instincts were so right: to give us this much time to spend with these characters until the horror of Vietnam interrupts everything and destroys their lives. The moviemaking in the wedding sequence and then in Vietnam is monumental. An artist has painted this movie and seems to know exactly what he’s doing with every brush stroke, every camera pan, every edit.

The first cut of The Deer Hunter was three and a half hours. EMI and Cimino were pleased with it but executives at Universal, the studio which had bought the film before production and were releasing it in the United States, were not so enthusiastic. According to an exec at EMI, the Universal contingent were shocked and thought the use of God Bless America in the final scene was anti-American. They really did not like it and they really didn’t like it any more when it was cut down by 30 minutes to just over three hours. Michael Deeley, the EMI executive who had overseen the film’s production, said that he realised too late that Universal was the wrong home for The Deer Hunter.

The head of Universal at that time was Thom Mount, who has described the post-production process on The Deer Hunter as a continuing nightmare from the moment Cimino finished it to the day it was released. Cimino was wedded to every single frame he shot. He was an artist obsessed with his own creation.

When The Deer Hunter was released in December 1978, it was given just a one-week run in two theaters in North America: one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The one in Los Angeles was The National in Westwood, which, along with the Village, was the grandest of all the theaters in LA. It was always a thrill, no matter what was playing, to go see a movie at The National: even if we had no interest in a particular movie and it was playing at The National, we’d still go.

My movie-mad friend and I — we were 14 — bought advanced tickets for the Saturday matinee. Four of us went with his parents, who had to take us because The Deer Hunter was R-rated. We sat in the last row and the movie began, no trailers, in 70mm. It remains one of the most powerful and overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had. The Russian roulette sequence was so suspenseful, so violent — no one had ever seen anything like this — that I was terrified, wiped-out.

Of course the literal-minded press complained that there weren’t any recorded cases of Russian roulette in the Vietnam War, but Cimino said The Deer Hunter was a personal and an autobiographical film. This is the kind of film an artist makes. The Deer Hunter for Cimino was not political, polemical or supposed to be historically accurate. This is what an artist says. And Cimino sometimes teasingly defended these scenes by saying he had news clippings from Singapore stating that Russian roulette was used during the war though  never showed these clippings to anyone. Cimino was a prankster and liked to make fun of the press and toy with them. This is what an artist does. I’ve done it before. Often you can’t help yourself. You think: they need to be tricked. They need to learn a lesson and get fucked with a bit. You think: why do we even have to talk to them?

In some factions — and this is so tiresome — The Deer Hunter was called a racist movie because of its depictions of the Vietnamese soldiers who torture the Americans. The whole film was apparently a racist rewriting of that tragic war. But Christopher Walken has said that while making the movie no one ever mentioned Vietnam — it was simply a war film and Russian roulette was its metaphor. Michael Deeley, that EMI exec, also said that The Deer Hunter wasn’t really about Vietnam but about how individuals respond to pressure in an unworthy war and how they face the horrible choices presented to them.

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The Deer Hunter is a parable and many Vietnam veterans who responded favourably to the film thought the Russian roulette sequences were a valid allegory. Maybe not the liberal entertainment press who, despite admiring the film, kept pushing the racist angle. But this is what an artist is often up against: a wilful misreading of your intentions in order to satisfy someone’s own ideological outlook. This is so boring and it was happening in 1978 just as it happens now. Some things don’t change.

That the movie was originally released in just two theatres in December — in order to qualify for Oscar nominations — was the brainchild of a flamboyantly gay Grease producer called Allan Carr. He had become a fan of the movie at early screenings and devised a PR campaign that would ensure the movie would be talked about and then rereleased nationwide at the end of February, when we saw it again at The Village Theater and where it played even more powerfully.

My friends and I were in awe of this movie. And most critics were too, with many of them writing that The Deer Hunter was the best American epic since The Godfather. Roger Ebert called it one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made and David Thomson has called it one of the great American films of all time. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won five: Picture, Director, supporting actor for Walken, editing and sound. De Niro, Streep and John Savage were also nominated for their performances — as was Vilmos Zsigmond’s extraordinary cinematography.

And this sweep at the Oscars happened despite a pushback campaign against the film once the nominations were announced. It was spearheaded by Warren Beatty, a famously liberal Hollywood insider, whose comedy Heaven Can Wait was also up for nine Oscars and was competing with The Deer Hunter in many of the same categories. Jane Fonda, the star of Coming Home, another Vietnam War film that was The Deer Hunter’s main competition at the Oscars that year, also criticised the film for its racism in public, even though she had never seen it. There were demonstrators outside the auditorium where the awards were given out. Robert De Niro was so anxious over the controversy that he decided not to go and stayed in New York, but then Jon Voight was the heavy favourite to win for Coming Home that night, which he did. A week after that Oscar ceremony, Cimino, newly minted as New Hollywood’s latest boy wonder, flew to Montana to begin shooting his follow-up to The Deer Hunter — a movie called Heaven’s Gate.

***

Heaven’s Gate was a script Cimino had written in 1971 called The Johnson County War, a western set in 1892 about cattle barons versus immigrants that didn’t get any traction because no stars wanted to sign on. It was shelved, but in the days leading up to the 1979 Academy Awards, when it seemed certain Cimino would triumph and The Deer Hunter would win him both a Best Picture and a Best Directing Oscar, United Artists was convinced to resurrect what was now called Heaven’s Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges and John Hurt.

United Artists approved a budget of $11.6 million and offered Cimino complete artistic freedom. The studio was coming off a heady run: it had won the Best Picture Oscar three years in a row, with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky and Annie Hall, and it was considered the go-to studio in a town for filmmakers who didn’t want to be constrained by the politics and bureaucracy and interference of some of the other bigger studios. This was the headiest time in Cimino’s career: he was offered the most freedom as an artist, and he took full advantage of it. He was going to paint the screen with not only the most amazing western ever made but one of the grandest achievements of the New Hollywood. It would be the ultimate auteur movie, aiming not only for a stunning work of visual art but also a violent and popular movie that would connect with a mass audience.

Cimino was drunk on the possibilities and when a filmmaker becomes this obsessed with a movie, the first thing to go out the window is judgment. There was only one thing that United Artists asked of Cimino, and that was to have his film ready to premiere in December — to make sure it was eligible for a truckload of Oscar nominations and also have it play during the lucrative Christmas season.

But by the sixth day of filming, Heaven’s Gate was already five days behind schedule. Cimino had become an artist whose fanatical attention to detail led to an entire street being built to his precise specifications, and then being torn down because it just didn’t look right. The artist’s mania was settling in. An entire tree that Cimino approved of was cut down and moved in pieces and rebuilt in a courtyard in Oxford, England, where the opening Harvard graduation scene takes place. An entire irrigation system was built under the land where the climactic battlefield scene would unfold so that it would remain vividly green.

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But why not? This was the era where Francis Ford Coppola shot a million feet of footage for Apocalypse Now. Kubrick had shot almost as much footage for The Shining. Spielberg had lavishly overspent on 1941. Even Martin Scorsese had spent $20 million on Raging Bull. What was United Artists supposed to do except trust the artist they hired to make the movie they agreed upon?

But Heaven’s Gate was soon haemorrhaging money, and by the time Cimino was finished with principal photography he had shot more than 220 hours of footage. The movie was costing around $200,000 a day to produce at one point. But Cimino was in the grip of something: he wanted to make his perfect movie and soon he was demanding up to 50 takes of individual scenes. Cimino had become the kind of director who delayed filming for the day until a cloud that he liked rolled into frame. Actors and musicians who had been brought to Montana where most of the movie was shot would wait around and end up stranded, endlessly waiting to be called to shoot their scenes that never materialised. John Hurt, who plays Kristofferson’s best friend, temporarily left the set to shoot David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and claimed no one noticed that he’d been gone.

Heaven’s Gate didn’t finish shooting until March 1980, and ended up costing $44 million dollars, four times the agreed budget. Cimino then locked himself away with his editor — William Reynolds, who had edited The Godfather and The Sound of Music — and worked obsessively on putting the movie together for its new release date: Thanksgiving weekend, 1980 — a year after the original release date.

After I watched it for a third time during lockdown, I think Michael Cimino had convinced himself that he’d created a masterpiece, and that all the expense and hard work and time spent had been worth it. And though there are dozens of images in Heaven’s Gate that are as stunning as any ever shot and there is undeniable genius in it, the movie does not work.

In late June 1980, Cimino previewed a rough cut for the execs at United Artists that ran to 5 hours and 25 minutes, with Cimino promising to cut about fifteen minutes. UA flatly refused to release the film at that length and conspired to fire Cimino. Cimino finally relented and said that he could re-edit the film to about 3 hours and 40 minutes, but no less. In the end, he cut it down to 3 hours and 39 minutes.The premiere took place on November 19 at a theater on the Upper East Side in New York, packed with celebrities including the stars of the movie. During the intermission, Cimino noticed no one was talking excitedly to him or drinking the complimentary champagne. He went up to his publicist and asked why everyone was so glum and subdued and the publicist reportedly told him: “Because they hate the movie, Michael.”

The critical reception the following day was an avalanche of negativity. The New York Times called it “something quite rare in movies these days: an unqualified disaster”. Instead of reviewing Heaven’s Gate as a flawed ambitious epic — with some of the most gorgeous cinematography ever seen in an American movie — it was reviewed mostly as a business story, with everyone blinded by the cost rather than what was in the movie itself. When he realised what was happening — that his movie was being cancelled! — Cimino complained that it wasn’t finished yet and that he had been pressured to cut the movie for a Thanksgiving release. After a one-week run in New York, Cimino and UA pulled the movie.

Cimino recut it down to 2 hours and 29 minutes and it was released in late April 1981. It might have been shorter, but it was far worse than the original version — which, despite being a mess, has a feeling and coherency that is lacking in the truncated version. Roger Ebert proclaimed it was still one of the most scandalous cinematic wastes he had ever seen in a consensus reappraisal. The film closed in two weeks having only grossed $3.5 million.

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In the years since, there has been a major reassessment of Heaven’s Gate and what Cimino was trying to do. This began in the mid-Eighties, with European critics such as Robin Woods calling Heaven’s Gate one of the supreme achievements in Hollywood cinema. David Thomson called Heaven’s Gate “a wounded monster” that demands re-exploration. Martin Scorsese has said that it has many overlooked virtues. And it must be said that it does have a few overlooked virtues and that it does play better today that it did 40 years ago — its grandeur has become more powerful as the notions of movies are dying. But the damage to its reputation and to Cimino had already been completed in the early Eighties. The New Hollywood that thrived in the Seventies, where directors were often given free reign, had a stake driven into its heart. The New Hollywood was officially over. A decade of high-concept movies followed, negotiated by agents and lawyers as well as a return to studio control.

Heaven’s Gate damaged Cimino’s career considerably, but he still worked throughout the Eighties. It wasn’t until 1996, after a series of flops, that Cimino made his final film, Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson, with a budget of $31 million and only grossing $21,000. This was when Cimino supposedly snapped: reports of him arriving to set late, seemingly under the influence of drugs. The editor on Sunchaser said that Cimino emanated an eerie, freaky vibe and that he had his face covered during the editing process with a handkerchief. Over the years, I always wondered what happened to Cimino. He very rarely opened up or gave interviews after Heaven’s Gate. And yet colleagues and financiers and executives and producers continued to talk about him: vain, self-indulgent, egotistical and megalomaniacal. How can one make a movie like The Deer Hunter and then nothing else that remotely rivals it? The rest of Cimino’s movies are mostly bad; in fact, all of them are bad to one degree or another. How did Cimino get so lucky that one time out?

He seemed to be an incredibly intelligent man: his tastes were wide-ranging and he had real moviemaking fever. But something went wrong. Something got fucked up. And I think part of it was that he was working in the wrong business and believed that the sheer force of his talent was going to keep the lights on — that no matter what, his talent was going to let him thrive in the jungles of Hollywood. In the end he became a recluse of sorts, hiding in his Beverly Hills mansion on Coldwater, looking, on the few occasions he was spotted, as if he were transitioning into a woman. He died in 2016 but no one knows how or from what — the cause of death was never revealed.

He once said: “When I’m kidding, I’m serious, and when I’m serious, I’m kidding. I am not who I am and I am who I am not.” To me, this sounds like an artist.

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