That answer may leave folks a bit frustrated, as it seems Turner and Harron are still playing coy about American Psycho's infamous late-in-the-game rug pulling. Initially, that's just what happens: Harron refuses to answer whether Bateman's murders were real or imagined outright by stating bluntly, "I would never answer that." Thankfully, the director and American Psycho co-writer went on to offer a more straightforward reading of a moment in the film that should prove revelatory in regards to everything that comes after: "I will say there's a moment where it becomes less realistic, and that's the moment when the ATM says 'Feed me a stray cat.'"
By this point in the film, Harron and Turner had playfully taken to blurring the lines between what was real and what was fantasy when it came to Bateman's violent outbursts; his world got even more surreal after that ATM incident. Per Harron's statement, we can now infer that was intentional — which means everything that came after can now be viewed with at least a tinge of psychotic embellishment, if not seen as an outright hallucination.
Later in the interview, Turner explained that the ending of American Psycho was supposed to be ambiguous, noting that she and Harron find it "annoying" when a movie's "big reveal is that it was all in someone's head or it was all a dream."
"To me and Mary, the book left it up in the air, too, what was real and what was not real. We didn't think that everything was real because some of it is literally surreal," she stated. "We just said we're going to make a really conscious effort to have it be real, and then at some point... he's sort of perceiving things differently, but they're really happening."
Turner further expounded on her and Harron's approach to the film (particularly its ending) by looking to another over-the-top moment in American Psycho: "Like he shoots at a cop car, and it just bursts into flames, and she just directed him to look at the gun like, 'Hmmm, how did that happen?'"
