Mary Harron, the director of American Psycho let
Black Book in on the secret of who was Christian Bale’s inspiration for Patrick Bateman.
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.
OMG! Now that I know that, I am not sure I will ever be able to watch American Psycho the same way. Just re-watching the Hip to be Square scene, Bale reminds me of Cruise in Rain Man. He even sounds like him now that I think about it. Even the hair is the same. OK, I must stop analyzing this because I love American Psycho and this new knowledge is killing me softly like Patrick Bateman did to Paul Allen.
