Anyone who caught Kanye West’s Yeezus promo video that recreated an iconic scene from American Psycho might have thought it was just a cheap rip-off. But don’t judge too fast. It turns out the parody video was actually written by novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote the book that became the film.
The original scene saw Christian Bale’s character give Jared Leto an axe in the back with a longwinded speech to the sweet tunes of Huey Lewis & The News. West’s version stars Keeping Up With the Kardashians star Scott Disick in Bale’s Patrick Bateman role, and Kim Kardashian’s BFFJonathan Cheban as Leto’s Paul Allen.
“Kanye came to me and asked me to write it, so I wrote the promo,” Ellis told MTV recently. “I just got a text one day … it said, ‘It’s Kanye, do you have time to rap?’ And then suddenly my phone rang and someone said, ‘Kanye got your number and he wants you to write this promo for Yeezus. And so we went back and forth on it and he wanted it done, like, that day. So I wrote it very quickly and they shot it two or three days later.”
Ellis also revealed that he and the Windy City rapper are collaborating on something else, though he would not reveal any details. He said, “Kanye and I have been meeting about writing a script for him, so that’s a project that’s kind of in the works.”