A lesser known fact about the classic character, Patrick Bateman, is that Christian Bale modeled the Phil Collins-loving killer after Tom Cruise. When director Mary Harron talked to Blackbook about the film, she let the proverbial cat out of the ATM.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return some videotapes.

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.

It turns out that this ad campaign in New Zealand for American Pyscho had an alternate creative direction.  Hit the jump.

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