F-Listed Interview: Miles Fisher On Tom Cruise Impressions and Shooting a Sex Scene With Lydia Hearst

Last week, we showed you a neat music video, a Daft Punk-ized cover of the Talking Heads‘ “This Must Be the Place,” made by singer/actor Miles Fisher. The video shows Fisher singing and dancing through some of the memorable scenes of American Psycho, with himself in the Patrick Bateman role and Lydia Hearst playing one of the two hookers he hires.

We asked Miles how this video came about, whether Tom Cruise ever responded to his notorious spoof of the actor last year, and what it was like to shoot a cheesy sex scene with Lydia Hearst.  Interview, videos, and screenshots, after the jump.  

So there are a lot of iconic movies and a lot of acclaimed Talking Heads songs out there – what made you choose American Psycho and “This Must be the Place”?  Do you see a kinship between the two pieces?

American Psycho has always been a favorite film of mine and the Talking Heads will always be one of my favorite groups. The same can be said for many of my friends – they can quote the fim verbatim, and their Stop Making Sense CD is as worn as any other in their collection. When you break down and examine the lyrics of This Must Be The Place up close, you see hints of fatalism echoed in “the less we say about it the better.” Pat Bateman’s fatalism serves as bookends in the film with his monologues about just who he is and how he isn’t there at all. The director of the video, Dave Green, and I sat down and tried to see if there were visual parallels of the film between the lyrics of the song. After a few rounds of the storyboards, we felt that there were.

Lydia Hearst’s turn as a call girl in your video got some tongues wagging – how did you get her on board and what was she like to work with?  The people, I feel, want to know as much as possible about the filming of the bedroom scene.  Did it take some convincing to arrange that with her?

Lydia has been a good friend from many years now. I sent along the concept and story boards to her, asking if she’d been keen on playing the main girl’s role. It’s amazing the resemblance that she has to the actress in the original film, though perhaps a bit more glamorous. She’s really a great actress – some of those reaction shots are hilarious, her expressions are perfect. The hardest part about shooting the bedroom scene wasn’t the sexy nature of it, but rather shooting such a racy scene with personal friends. Because so many people love the film, we knew that it wouldn’t work unless we fully committed. Hence…we fully committed.

This is your second uncanny celebrity impersonation that has made the rounds online.  Did you ever get wind of what Tom Cruise and his people thought of your impression in Superhero, or what Christian Bale thinks of this one – or David Byrne for that matter?

Thanks alot. I can’t be certain that either Cruise or Bale has seen the impersonations, but if so, I certainly hope they take it as nothing but an homage. My childhood, like everyone else I know, is earmarked with Tom Cruise films. Christian Bale became a real icon for me and my friends around the time that American Psycho became a cult favorite. Problem was, everyone thought I was a one note actor with the Tom Cruise bit. I figured that the only way to get that out of people’s heads was to replace it with something new. Of course, imitation is not all that I do – I act as original characters in film and TV and will continue to do so – but these types of videos are an original way to showcase what is really just a form of flattery.

What’s next for you?

Watch this upcoming season of Mad Men and you’ll see a familiar face. In the meantime, I’ll keep on aiming to make relevant music and videos so stay tuned.

Here is Miles Fisher’s website.  You can download his full EP here.

Gawker has the rest of the screenshots.