BRET EASTON ELLIS became a 21-year-old literary sensation in the 1980s with his novel Less Than Zero – more than 20 years later, he has returned to the characters he created in that cult classic, and ALASDAIR DUNCAN sits down with Ellis to find out what drives him as a writer.

“Clay’s a screenwriter ... a screenwriter ...” Bret Easton Ellis whispers as he draws in closer to me. “Clay’s a screenwriter.” It’s a bright, cold day and we’re sitting at the bar of the Stamford Plaza, discussing his latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms over gin and tonics. The book –  a terse, noir-ish thriller set in contemporary Los Angeles – is vastly more plot-driven than any of his previous novels, which were all about atmosphere and surface sheen. Why the stylistic change, I wonder?

As Ellis explains it, this time out, the idea of the plot-driven book stems from the narrator. Clay, who first appeared as a teenager in the ‘80s classic Less Than Zero, is now a 40-something screenwriter, and as such, Imperial Bedrooms takes on the stripped-back feeling of a screenplay. “He makes himself the star of his own movie,” Ellis continues, “and writes it like a screenplay, complete with a first, second and third act. The dialogue, the prose – everything comes from how a screen writer would tell this particular story.

“There’s a scene where Clay is in a restaurant, early on, meeting this young actress,” he says. “It’s a restaurant that I’ve been to, and there’s this big silver wall at the back that I think is beautiful. I wrote a description of that wall that I think is among the best writing that would have been in this book – beautiful poetry, but flat, DeLillo-ish. Here’s the thing, though – never in a million years would Clay ever see that wall in that way,” Ellis laughs. “Clay is not interested in the wall. He’s there for one reason –” he pauses, pounding the table for emphasis, “to fuck the woman. It’s not about the decor.”

Ellis’s first-person narrators and his accounts of glamorous debauchery are so convincing that many assume his novels are autobiographical, but he sees himself as more of a detached observer, documenting the high life rather than living it. In fact, he once told an interviewer ‘I don’t like any of my characters’ – strong words, but perhaps not surprising ones, given the rogue’s gallery of narcissists and psychopaths that populate his fiction.  When I ask Ellis to clarify why this is, he pauses for reflection. 

 “‘Like’ is a very bland, over-arching word,” he says after a while. “Do I want to hang out with Sean Bateman or Patrick Bateman? No. Do I really like them as people – as people? No. Do I want to hang out with Clay? No. Do I want to hang out with the Bret Easton Ellis from Lunar Park? Nooooooooo,” he says, drawing out the word, laughing. “I think that’s what I meant. I have to like them on a level – when I was writing the last book, for example, I had to have a certain amount of empathy for Clay.

“I might not have to like them,” he continues, “but I have to understand them to a degree, because the genesis of them is me. I might have said that a long time go, but I’m going to backtrack now and say that I don’t agree with that anymore, and I probably never really did, I just never could figure out...” he pauses again. “You can’t sit down and write a novel about someone and not like them, you can’t do it. If I said that, I was wrong. I now look back at all the narrators and think to myself ‘they’re all you – they all come from some aspect of you, so does that mean you don’t like yourself?’ Some days I don’t like myself.”

Ellis’s next project, if all goes according to plan, is a TV series that pushes the seedy, fake-tanned world of scripted reality shows like Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami – a current favourite of his – to their logical, extreme conclusion. “When I initially sold the idea to HBO,” he says, “I kept saying, I picture this show as being like The Hills, but where you get to see them really do drugs and really fuck, and where Brody Jenner is like this psychopath, and we get to see him kill people when no-one’s around. HBO kept saying, ‘don’t bring up The Hills, we don’t like it, it’s degrading television,’, but I had to disagree.” When Ellis and HBO parted ways, he took the idea to Starz, the network behind the fantastic Party Down. The development process is ongoing, but for now, he’s enjoying working on the script.

When I put it to Ellis that a lot of the best writing today is on television anyway, he agrees, with some reservations. “You can say that Season 3 of Mad Men made the novel superfluous, because it was so novelistic, and it was so visual, it was subtle, dramatic and multi-faceted,” he says. “As a means of giving us information, the novel is seriously over. I’m not painting it black or anything – I’m genuinely excited by what’s to come. I talked with my agent about the idea of creating a novel specifically for the iPad, but I realised after a while that I was more interested in the TV project. I think there is going to be that writer who writes that novel that’s downloaded that is going to blow people away. Will it be a called a ‘novel’, or will it [be a called] something else new? I don’t know.”

A youthful 40-something, Ellis still has a long career ahead of him, whether he’s writing content for the iPad, working on film and TV projects, or even, though the chances seem slim, publishing traditional novels. Nonetheless, he feels that, as a 21-year-old publishing sensation in the 1980s, he lived through a golden age. “Did I feel lucky?” he says, when I ask him about the time, “I was lucky. Did I feel privileged? I was privileged. A young novelist writes a novel that, over a period of five or six months spreads by word of mouth, and people are waiting to buy it at a book store but they can’t because it’s sold out, then they read it and it affects them somehow and they spread the word, and then more of these hardcover things are sold? That’s not going to happen again. It feels like there can’t be another Bret Easton Ellis.”

IMPERIAL BEDROOMS is out now through Macmillan.

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