In late May, I went to Bret Easton Ellis’ apartment to talk to him for a feature for the Los Angeles Times (it’s in Sunday’s paper). I’d arranged to be there late on a Friday afternoon, hoping he’d be up for a cocktail, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Ellis, perfectly pleasant, met me at the door, barefoot and in jeans, and walked me to the kitchen. Like this:
He answers his door barefoot, in jeans, and leads me through into his kitchen: grey glass mosaic tiles, white Ikea cabinetry, brushed metal hardware. He hasn’t changed a thing since he bought the place in 2006.
But I didn’t write that; the London Times wrote that. Their reporter, Tom Shone, must have visited earlier in the day, because Ellis made coffee. He offered me Coke, or Diet Coke, if I preferred, in tiny cans. And while I did write an opening with the coke-haha-Coke joke, I deleted it in an early draft. But Carl Swanson went for it in New York Magazine:
Coke for Bret Easton Ellis these days comes in those 7.5-ounce mini-cans—the new, vaguely European ones containing only 90 calories. This is what he offers me, taking one for himself, after inviting me into his apartment….
In article after article, Ellis meets a journalist at his apartment in jeans, barefoot (variation: hoodie, polo shirt). Time after time, he walks to the kitchen before settling in with the reporter in his office. It’s hard not to think the Coke offer is designed to lure writers into the allusion to drugs — what, no Snapple? — and that the bare feet deliberate, tempting (successfully) each writer to mention this seemingly unique detail.
We’re all desperate for details, something that will ring true without being exactly the same thing that gets reported elsewhere. And there’s the challenge, because as a reporter, I have to tell a story that we’re all telling: there was this book, 25 years ago. It was about LA. The author, who got famous from it, was a New Yorker for a long time, but now he’s back in LA, and he’s revisiting the characters in his new book.
As an author, Ellis has to talk about the book; what he may also be do is performing a role of as a certain version of Bret Easton Ellis. During my time sitting on the low chair in his office, as he sat behind a large computer monitor — which was beeping as, I’m pretty sure, emails arrived, and his eyes flickered to it regularly — I asked him about what Lou Reed, or maybe Andy Warhol, had said: interviews are an art form. Are they?
“They are,” he said. “But you can do them as an art form and completely tell the truth, and not like stretch the truth at all. I don’t think there is anything that I have said so far in this interview that is not true.”
I considered writing about trying to get at the real Ellis, but that wasn’t this story, and I was nowhere near the real one. I only had a vague nagging sense that it wasn’t what I was getting.
That became clear when I read these other articles: he not only went through the same routine, he said the same things over and over, virtually verbatim. Quotes about narcissism, about his idea of Empire and post-Empire, a lot of things that I left out. One thing I didn’t report has surfaced elsewhere: Ellis says that his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, is like Chandler. But right now, let me say: it’s not.
- Chandler writes like this: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
- Imperial Bedrooms has sentences like this: “The blue eyes are complementing a light blue V-neck and a navy-blue miniskirt, something a girl would have worn in 1985 when the movie takes place.”
There’s nothing wrong with what Ellis has done, but seeing how much of his interview was said elsewhere reinforced the idea I had upon leaving: that whoever Bret Easton Ellis is, I had only seen a shadow of him. And I can’t help but wish there were something more authentic about this process. That Ellis was actually answering questions, rather than performing the skit starring this rehearsed version of himself.
No wonder he was reading his email — it must be boring to say the same thing to Vice, to Movieline, to the London Times and New York Magazine and the LA Times and whoever else has gone through the exercise, pieces pending.
I don’t understand…he’s a grown man. Why would he have different answers to the same questions? If he did, wouldn’t that be odd? Wouldn’t he essentially be lying or insincere to some reporters if he served up a different view on narcissism or whatever? And most people don’t wear shoes in their homes? Why would he take them on and off depending on the visitor? You seem upset that he didn’t have a variety of personalities and answers?
Michael, what makes you think the questions were the same?
Sure. I guess that was an assumption that since the interviews were all prompted by the new book they circled around the same material. But right, shouldn’t assume. Still, most grown-ups have their routines and most writers understandable go out of their way to keep interviews out of their closets and focused on the material. I guess it would seem more strange if he didn’t have his routine for reporters.
I was beginning to notice the similarities in all of these recent Ellis profiles, as well. As a writer, it was interesting to see how other journalists composed their articles from basically the same experiences and content. One story mentioned a Homer Simpson-shaped marijuana pipe. Another took place at an abandoned bar. Miss Kellogg mentioned Ellis’ actual writing process (which was much appreciated). Let’s face it…Ellis is an interesting character – perhaps more interesting than his fictional counterpart in Lunar Park. He wanted control of the interviews, so he did them in his own apartment. He wanted consistency, so he regurgatated his answers. And I can’t help but wonder if he’s running out of ideas: his last novel was about himself and featured characters from previous novels, and from all the profiles released lately detailing the content of Imperial Bedrooms, it sounds like he wrote in in his sleep. That’s unfortunate.
I have to admit, I didn’t totally understand this piece. You told Michael that your questions weren’t the same as everyone else’s, but that Ellis’s answers were the same as always, almost verbatim, to things he’d said in other interviews.
So I’m guessing you’d ask a question and then he’d kind of ignore the actual question and launch into one of his familiar talking points, like the guests on political shows do? The confusing thing is I didn’t get that feeling from the article but from reading the comments section.
Otherwise, it just seems like Ellis is like those actors who have to promote their new movie by going on a press tour and, like you said, get bored by having to say the same thing to multiple sources.
This is a smart piece of speculation that doesn’t take into account the rising number of dumb interviews and useless interviewers bottom feeding a celebrity culture that is very close to the bottom to begin with—and that the press that Brett received early was, shall we say, exaggerated and not interested in truth or anything like it (by the way,Jennifer Egan’s new novel, Visit from The Goon Squad, has a very accurate parody of the contemporary celebrity interview)
I’ve chatted with Brett 2 or3 times (though the last time was maybe 10 years ago) and I didn’t get the feeling that he was doing some kind of stchick or giving me canned answers when I went beyond the boiler plate interrogatory.
I am of two minds about checking other published interviews (even my own) and have settled on not reading much about my intended co dialogist other than all or some of parts of their ouevre.
Apropos of nothing, I have asked some very smart writers some very banal questions—What’s your favorite color? or the like and received surprising answers. Ultimately, the “results” of a long form interview or conversation is. I believe, in the hands of the “interviewer” — I have always felt that if that conversation was uninteresting (though they rarely have been) than the writer is such. Nor are those people obliged to be exciting interview subjects—their work should be sufficient, no?
Robert, your most recent Ellis interview was one of the ones I read before I talked to him, and I agree, I think he went past the boilerplate. In my case, I spent 2 hours with him, and I was happy to see that in my feature, the parts of the interview I avoided were what later surfaced, verbatim, in other articles.
I reviewed A Visit From the Goon Squad for the LA Times and it’s one of my favorite books of the year, not for that chapter (an interview gone very, very wrong) but for the way it allows the reader to connect all the separate pieces.
As for whether or not writers should be good interview subjects: a) since they’re wordsmiths, so they have a head start on say, musicians; b) they’ve got to be alone to work, so that puts them several social-skill steps behind, say, musicians; c) whether or not the work should stand on its own, talking about the work in interviews is one way to try to reach readers, which most writers find worthwhile.
Very interesting. I did Less Than Zero and American Psycho for a dissertation recently and read through a heap of old interview transcripts and detected a vaguely similar pattern; Ellis is clearly a troublesome interviewee in that his answers are, as the recent piece in the ‘London’ Times wrote “about an inch to the left” of the question asked.
What I get frustrated with, from a fan’s point of view, is the way in which every interview is concerned with Ellis himself, particularly the pattern of events in his life (young, hedonistic, drugs, father dies, depression, his long term partner’s death, more drugs and depression) as opposed to any discussion about his work. This allows him to adopt the sort of set in stone life story of a character in a novel, a basis he seems to work off from in interviews by never truly expressing himself.
It seems, from reading earlier interviews, Ellis perhaps gave away too much about himself and his works. Maybe now he’s seeking to correct that by closing up, deploying, again as the Times in the UK commented on, his “defence mechanisms”.
Anyway, while we’re on speculation, I would also note that the first stop of Ellis’ concerns, beyond addressing society/culture’s ills, is identity. The more I read into the works the more I kept thinking Clay was a lot more autobiographical, a lot more like Ellis, than either Ellis realises or, I suspect, is willing to admit. In his interviews he always stresses this is never the case but one, in particular, always struck me as if Ellis could have been talking about himself even when he was discussing Clay. Having said that Clay “troubles him more than any other character”, Ellis explains: “The reason why he troubles me more than the other characters is because at least he has a bit of a conscience. Yet he still refuses to break out of his passivity.” Ellis, by writing and being so acutely aware of the problems of his time and yet clearly being a part of them at the same time, always struck me as something of a hypocrite.
Of course, all of this is conjecture I guess! And whoever ‘Bret Easton Ellis’ is (for the record, how many authors use their middle name in such an obvious manner?), ‘Ellis’ the body of works is more interesting than ‘Ellis’ the person; if this were not the case, what would be the point of reading him? Surely, the book always reveals more than the author.
I’ve always thought one of Easton Ellis’s talents lay in his manipulation of the author image inside and outside of the page. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d practiced his interview routine with friends. I remember one interview he did for Lunar Park in which he said he’d consciously changed his author photo for each book, and that the style of portrait was to reflect the tone of the associated novel. It’s all very extra-textual and amusing.
-Ryan