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With Bateman, I thought he was trying to learn how to be a human being, so if he wanted to learn how to have sex, of course he watches porn. I talked to Christian a couple days before we shot it and he decided that because Bateman had watched pornography, we would watch pornography, so he got one of the PAs to get us a couple of videos and we both took notes. He came in the next day before rehearsal and he had done these little stick drawings, and there was one where two girls were giving Bateman a blow job at once. We were laughing, thinking, That’s ridiculous and it doesn’t make logistical sense, but we’ll do it anyway.

When we came to rehearse the thing, the little room they had given us happened to have a mirror on the door. When I saw that, I said, “Christian, watch yourself in the mirror as you’re having sex,” and then he really went with it and was so hilarious. But the thing I said to the actresses playing Christie and Sabrina is, “For your characters, it’s just a job. You just have to get through this.” I think that’s where a male director would have directed it differently. When does the prostitute ever find these things sexy? It’s a job to suck this guy’s dick. He’s having his fantasy, and their faces are adding a sort of counterpoint.

There’s not a lot of nudity in the scene — Christian wore a sock, and I think the girls were wearing underwear — but there was definitely a lot of digital removal if you saw this or that. Still, it was a very lengthy process in the editing room of taking out frames. The MPAA was okay with the violence, but they really objected to that three-way sex scene where it looks like there might be rear-entry sex. At the time, I had very young children, and the studio was sending me VHS tapes of the latest cuts of the sex scene. I had one of those VHS tapes next to a children’s video from the library, and I remember I put the wrong one in the envelope. Fortunately, I checked it before I turned it in, and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s the American Psycho sex scene! This is not Barney.”

Mary Harron on directing the sex scenes in American Psycho