Bret Easton Ellis’s books are notoriously hard to adapt, so, naturally, Ryan Murphy is circling The Shards

Of provocateur writer Bret Easton Ellis’s books that made the leap to screen, American Psycho is the most artistically successful.

Adapted by Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron, her version of killer yuppie banker Patrick Bateman is a scathing satire about greed, consumerism and artifice.

Her Bateman is not just the ultimate unreliable narrator for the audience, he can’t even rely on his own internal dialogue. He’s losing his mind. Did he kill everyone, anyone or no one? Were the other characters too self-absorbed to notice or were all those murders in his head?

Christian Bale as Bateman is a combustible bundle of anxiety, desperation and inhumanity, and Harron once told BlackBook magazine that Bale based the character’s outward projection on an interview between Tom Cruise and David Letterman. As Harron recalled Bale telling her, “(Cruise) just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes”.

A modest commercial success, American Psycho had its detractors, especially those that didn’t realise it was a dark comedy, but in the 25 years since its release, it has been recognised as a cult classic, beloved for its irreverent and kind-of-unhinged take.

But one person who didn’t love it was Ellis, who told IndieWire the film was “fine” even though he doesn’t really think it works because “that book is unadaptable because it’s about consciousness, and you can’t really shoot that sensibility”.

For something that’s “unadaptable”, American Psycho is proving to be alluring for filmmakers. According to reports, Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria, Call Me By Your Name, Queer) is signed to make another version, with Austin Butler circling the Bateman role.

Worth noting that Ellis dismissed the Guadagnino project as “fake news” on an episode of his podcast, but then conceded he has nothing to do with the production if it exists.

He’s also known for not having a filter - he has previously dubbed Millennials as “Generation Wuss”.

Ellis is, again, proving hot property with The Hollywood Reporter writing today that prolific uber TV producer Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Nip/Tuck) is in talks to produce a TV adaptation of Ellis’s most recent novel, The Shards.

The project has been in the works at HBO for at least a year but has been plagued by problems. Names attached included actor Jacob Elordi and filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario) but, apparently, it fell apart in September, which led Ellis to complain that it felt as if “eight months of the year had been wasted”.

Murphy, who is no stranger to controversial material that deals in the seedier, bloodier side of life, could be a perfect fit for an Ellis adaptation.

Published in 2023, The Shards first appeared as a serialised audiobook, and is the author’s first work since his 2010 novel Imperial Bedrooms.

The Shards is a 1980s-set, semi-autobiographical memoir of Ellis’s final year at high school in Los Angeles (the lead character is called Bret Easton Ellis), a heady tale of drugs and dread, with a dash of murder thrown in.

It’s a loose, spiritual prequel to Less Than Zero, which Ellis wrote while still a university student at Bennington College, which catapulted him into the literatti and earnt his reputation as an enfant terrible.

Before it was even published, the book had been optioned by a Hollywood producer and in 1987, Less Than Zero was released as a movie starring then Hot Young Things Robert Downey Jr, Andrew McCarthy, James Spader and Jami Gertz.

But the book was too much for the studio and it softened its edges by changing lead character Clay’s bisexuality to heterosexuality as well as writing out his casual drug use. Ellis’s book was a sharp look at youth and nihilism but the film became a morality tale.

Ellis originally hated it but years later admitted he was much more sympathetic to it even though he still believed that its potency as a tale of disillusionment was “diluted” because it had been made by a big studio.

He did, however, love the 2002 screen version of the Rules of Attraction, set at the fictional New England institution of Camden College, a stand-in for Bennington, and follows the perspectives of different characters over one year across their various sexual entanglements, culminating at the “End of the World” party.

The chaotic movie starred James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossaman, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel and Kate Bosworth. It made its production budget back but was critically derided.

“I thought it was a knockout movie. I think half of it is genius. I think some of it is a little weak but overall, (director) Roger Avary did a f—king great job and he can shoot whatever he wants of mine. I think that film captured my sensibility in that medium better than anything else has done.

“I’m a big fan of it, but I am in a very small minority.”

Still, Rules of Attraction was a masterpiece compared to The Informers, which Ellis co-wrote with Nicholas Jarecki (the first time he was properly involved in one of his own adaptations) and directed by Australian Gregor Jordan.

The Informers was Ellis’s collection of short stories published in 1994 and stretching them out into one cohesive narrative was a challenge. The result was an unfocused B movie that, to this day, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 12 per cent.

Not every Ellis book has had the big screen treatment. Avary had the rights to Glamorama, which intersects the world of soulless models and terrorism (Zoolander has been accused of borrowing from it, and Ellis has alluded to an out-of-court settlement), but a screen version never took after off a few aborted attempts.

Ditto with Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms.

Perhaps that’s for the best, given the patchy history of adapting Ellis’s often stream-of-consciousness prose and anarchic characters caged in the prisons of their own dark interiorities.

But with Murphy potentially on board for The Shards and Guadagnino for another go at American Psycho, the journey continues.