Apparently, according to an interview that American Psycho director Mary Harron did for BlackBook Magazine, Christian Bale's character Patrick Bateman was based loosely on TOM CRUISE...
It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn't actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy
YES. You can see it now, can't you?
The art of the onscreen murder was never staged with such graphic gusto as when Mary Harron filmed Christian Bale slicing and dicing his way through the excess of 80s Wall Street in American Psycho. Since then, the Canadian-born director has dabbled in television, filming episodes of Big Love and Six Feet Under, as well as feature The Notorious Bettie Page. Harron's latest project is an entry in the Fear Itself anthology, a television series broken down into 13 different episodes and featuring some of the biggest names working in horror today.
How did you and Christian Bale develop his character in American Psycho?It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn't actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy
YES. You can see it now, can't you?
Absolutely. I just got a shiver...
"...intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes..." says it all.