14 DAY TRIAL // As the latest edition of Blackbook magazine says, onscreen murder changed for ever when Christian Bale took on the iconic sociopath Patrick Bateman in the 2000 classic “American Psycho.” It’s a known fact that Bale, an actor who rose to prominence after doing this disturbing role, also contributed to the creation of the character and, according to director Mary Harron, Bateman was inspired from Tom Cruise.
Fans will know that part of the reason why Tom Cruise had what the media called a “sudden fall from grace” a couple of years back was that he had started acting somewhat erratically during media interviews. The couch-jumping episode on Oprah, when Cruise declared his undying love for now-wife Katie Holmes, is the most cited example in this sense. However, other scenes of the kind also exist and it’s from them that Bale drew inspiration for his Bateman characters, Harron tells Blackbook.
“It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in LA 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.” Harron explains.
From here on, the two started working on the character, but, basically, this is where it all began: the glazed look that reveals nothing, because nothing is there to reveal. And a wonderful work they did both in pre-production and while the cameras were rolling, as Bateman (and, implicitly, “American Psycho”) is one of the best done psychopaths in the history of cinematography, while the film remains to this day among the most appreciated psychological thrillers out there.
Harron has to thank her idols for that, directors who have proven an inspiration with their work. “Roman Polanski, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch have. I don’t make films like them, but I admire them very much, and I admire their careers very much, and the way they deal with their nightmares as well. I have been thinking about Polanski a lot because I’m doing ‘The Moth Diaries’ and watching ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ and I am very interested in the way he did the horror of atmosphere – psychological horror. It’s not so much what you see but what you don’t see.” Harron says in the same interview.