Mary Harron, the director of the film adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’ 1991 classic novel, American Psycho, sat down for an interview recently and was asked about Christian Bale’s inspiration for the book’s Manhattan serial-killing monster, Patrick Bateman. He found it on David Letterman. BlackBook reports:
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.
The movie was the Disney version of the book, but whatever. This might be the greatest thing you read all day, because if anything has ever made more perfect sense in your life someone needs to let me know. Every time I see Tom Cruise, I fully expect him to unzip his skin suit to tell me I’m gonna be a slave worker on his home lizard planet. Dude is creepy. But I gotta go right now, I have to return some videotapes.
Lifeless Eyes and secret Scientologist, Will Smith:
