5 Screenwriters That Ended Up Hating Their Own Movies

2. Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers

Though more famous for being a controversial and sometimes celebrated novelist, Bret Easton Ellis has dabbled in writing screenplays, too. After having his novels American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction and Less Than Zero adapted into films with varying results, Ellis took a stab at being more directly involved with an adaptation of his book The Informers. Ellis co-wrote and co-produced the film version of his collection of short stories, which ended up ironically being the film adaptation he disliked the most out of all the movies made from his material. Ellis credits the movie going wrong with the writer's strike, as well as a bit of management shifting behind the camera which allowed the material's meaning to get somewhat lost in translation. Ellis was originally adapting his book with Nicholas Jarecki for the latter to direct, until Jarecki brought on Marco Weber to finance, who in turn fired Jarecki as director. To Ellis' dismay, Gregor Jordon was then hired to direct the movie and Jordon did not see any of the humor in the piece and decided to play the film straight, as well as cut chunks of story out. Once the 2007 Writer's Strike occurred in Hollywood, there was nothing Ellis could do, since he was banned from visiting the set or continuing to adapt his screenplay. Despite being Ellis' first official foray into scriptwriting, he repeatedly expresses disappointment with the movie when it's brought up in interviews... and he's not afraid to shell out the blame: Ellis clearly states that the problem with the movie was the fact that it had "an Australian director and a German producer."