Christian Bale's inspiration for his role as a dead-behind-the-eyes sociopath in the film "American Psycho" was none other than Tom Cruise, the film's director revealed.

In an interview with Black Book, director Mary Harron said she spent a lot of time on long-distance phone calls with the hunky actor when he was in L.A. and she was in New York trying to hash out how to best play the merciless murderer Patrick Bateman in the 2000 horror flick.

"It was definitely a process," Harron told the magazine. "We talked a lot."

Then, one day it clicked for Bale.

"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," Harron said.

"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 news comes on the heels of Bronson Pinchot's accusations that the actor made "constant unrelated homophobic comments" on the set of the 1983 "Risky Business."

Cruise's rep denied the allegations to told Entertainment Weekly.

"Obviously, this is so far removed from who Tom Cruise is as a person, this must have been said in jest," the rep said.