MADE TO BE BROKEN: An interview with The Rules of Attraction director Roger Avary By Ryan Kugler 10/14/02 Part 1 of 2

A short time ago (early 90's), in a video store not so far away (Manhattan Beach, CA), a couple of film geeks were ready to share their love and knowledge of cinema with the world. One went on to make the highly praised and influential Reservoir Dogs (1992), while the other made Killing Zoe (1994). Roger Avary's film was lambasted by critics and it quickly disappeared from theaters. The bloody bank robbery drama eventually found a cult audience on home video, but it never came close to garnering the respect or achieving the success that his friend's flick did.

In late 1994, the two enjoyed tremendous acclaim and financial reward for their collaboration on Pulp Fiction (Avary wrote "The Gold Watch," while Tarantino wrote the rest and directed). They each received Oscars for their groundbreaking, non-linear screenplay (one of the finest of the last decade), but the film lost out to Forrest Gump.

The two had a falling out soon after, though. Tarantino continued to write, produce, act and direct, while Avary seemed to disappear. Turns out, he's been working on some scripts (still unproduced) and writing for television. Now, he's back in a major way with his bold, challenging and brilliant take on the Brett Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho) novel, The Rules of Attraction. The book, which follows a group of spoiled rich college kids through a semester of drugs and sex was published in 1987; Avary has been trying to make it ever since.

CinemaSpeak had the chance to sit down with Avary at The Rules of Attraction press day in Los Angeles.

(Note: This interview was conducted as part of a press roundtable, therefore not all of the questions were asked by CinemaSpeak.)

It's been almost ten years since you directed your last feature. What have you been doing since?

Though you haven't seen them, I've made about seven films in that time. I've just made them in my mind. Honestly, what happened was, after Pulp Fiction, we had insane and unexpected success with the material and my writing rate went through the roof. I've actually been doing a lot. I've been doing what most sane people would do, and I've been cashing in on that. I've been doing quite a lot of writing at studios -- fixing things up.

So, are you one of those guys that makes like half a million dollars for two weeks of work?

No, I'm not one of those guys, but I do make enough where I would do one or two of those, and then I would literally take the rest of the year and work on what I wanted to work on. I had a number of deals at studios like Warner Brothers and Image Movers and various places where I was developing material. Every project was like a year. I was on Perfect Murder and Sandman at Warner Brothers. I did a script with Neal Gaiman; an adaptation of Beowulf which I worked on for quite a long time. I wrote all these scripts and when I write, I actually watch the movie in my head and I just put it onto paper. I wrote a project with Al Pacino about Salvador Dali that I would still very much like to make.

What was it about Brett Easton Ellis' novel that attracted you?

I had read the book when I was in college and it was a very small liberal arts college in Northern California, which is sort of like a West Coast equivalent to Bennington, the school in which Camden is based on. I read the book when I was in school and it's a social satire, and Brett writes from his life about what disturbs and upsets him. So, I'm reading it and I'm laughing my ass off and yet, I'm seeing everything that I'm observing around me within the material. So, I would read the book and then I would look up and a guy would walk by from the book -- a character. I realized that as a filmmaker, you have to cultivate out of your own life into your work, and I don't know what that says about me, but I felt a very close bond to this material and to the way Brett writes.

The novel doesn't have a classic structure. Was it difficult to adapt?

I tend not to map out the way some people do -- the Syd Field style of every seven pages there must be a semi-major event and on page thirty your first act ends. And then, you reveal this at this point. I feel like that Syd Field book has been a manual in every executive's hand on what a screenplay should be like, and that was actually my discovery while working on other Hollywood scripts. They really just want the same plan on every movie and that's kind of why this thing was birthed. I believe out of explosive frustration, I made something that was very counter to the normal structure. The difficulty with this material was that it was seemingly formless, although I think that the source material has an intense amount of structure to it and it's a little bit like -- I don't know if you've read Trainspotting. I don't know if anybody here has read Rules of Attraction, but Trainspotting is not too dissimilar. You could make twenty movies out of that source material and this book is pretty much the same. There are around fifteen to twenty multiple first person narratives all told through a stream of consciousness style, with kind of a Rashomon sort of perception, verses a reality take on these various events throughout the year and how people perceive them. The common problem with Brett's films (the two films that have been adapted from Brett's novels) were that they tended to strip away one of the most important things about his work. They stripped away the literary devices, and if you take away his literary devices, you're taking away the pearl in the oyster. You're stripping him of his themes, and the problem is that it's so non-cinematic (even though it feels cinematic when you read it), that it's very difficult to put into screenplay form. I've done a number of adaptations of books and it took me a long time to think about it, and literally one year while I was in the middle of a job at Paramount, I woke up in the middle of the night and said, "That's how you do it." I sat down and I started writing.

You've written a number of unproduced screenplays. At what point did you decide that The Rules of Attraction was the right one to produce?

I didn't even own the rights when I adapted the material, which FYI, you should never do. I designed it so I never thought that anybody would make it. The source material was too weird. I wrote it and then I just put it into a drawer. I have about four scripts that I never let anybody read. It sat there for 8 months and Greg Shapiro (the producer) finally nagged me into letting him read it. He's like, come on, let me read it, let me read it. He knew that I had it in there. And so, finally, I said o.k., just to get him off my back. When he read it he was like, you're insane, you have to make this, this is fantastic. He did a rights search and found out that they were available. I hadn't made a movie in a long time, and I had always tried to make relatively normal, safe and socially friendly films. This one just happened to come at a time when it was inexpensive enough to actually get the money for it, and I was hungry enough to actually make it. I just felt like I had to do it. I just had to or else I would die, and that's usually the only way a movie gets made.

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