20 Things You Didn't Know About American Psycho

13. David Cronenberg Was Attached To Direct A Version Starring Brad Pitt In The Early 1990s

Before Mary Harron came aboard and the project picked up significant traction, American Psycho was actually being prepped for the movie treatment in the early 1990s, shortly after Ellis' novel was first published.

David Cronenberg, hot off a streak of acclaimed genre films in the 1980s, became attached to direct, with Brad Pitt intended to play Patrick Bateman.

However, Cronenberg wasn't a fan of the restaurant and nightclub scenes from the novel and also didn't want to shoot the violence, bizarrely enough.

Ellis didn't much care for cowing to the director's demands, and so Croneberg brought in his own writer to re-jig the project, but when the results were unsatisfactory, the filmmaker walked away.

The project then languished for several years before Harron came aboard and her vision for the film, sans-Pitt, took hold.