Talk:Christopher McQuarrie

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Christopher McQuarrie was born and raised in Princeton Junction, New Jersey where he attended high school with director Bryan Singer and Ethan Hawke. In lieu of college he took a job working as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in Perth, West Australia and later hitchhiked around the western half of the continent. Returning to the states a year later, he went to work for a detective agency in New Jersey for the next four years. In 1992 he applied to the New York Police Department and was on his way to the academy when former schoolmate Singer offered him the opportunity to write their first feature film, Public Access, winner of the 1993 Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize.

Singer and McQuarrie collaborated again on the 1995 film The Usual Suspects for which McQuarrie received best screenplay awards from Premiere Magazine, The Texas Board of Review, and the Chicago Critics as well as the Edgar Allan Poe Award, The Independent Spirit Award and the British and American Academy Awards. The film was later included on the New York Times’ list of the 1000 greatest films ever made and the character of Verbal Kint was included on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest screen characters of all time.

McQuarrie spent the next several years dividing his time between rewriting studio movies (such as Singer’s X-Men) and developing a screenplay on the life of Alexander the Great (written with Peter Buchman) for Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Sadly, Scorcese and DiCaprio chose to do The Aviator first, making way for Oliver Stone to produce his version of Alexander.)

McQuarrie also wrote and directed The Way of the Gun starring Benicio Del Toro, Ryan Phillippe and James Caan. Despite a desire to move away from the crime genre, it was the only arena in which he could find any creative control. He set out to make a crime film about criminals – characters whose actions not were motivated by contrived backstories to create sympathy. He also rejected the stylized approach that had come to define the genre - chosing instead to rely on story and performance. The uneven Gun failed to live up to the success of McQuarrie’s earlier films – dividing audiences into those who loved it and those who hated it with a passion. McQuarrie joked in interviews that he was going to make a crime film in such a way that no one would ever ask him to make one again. To date, he was right.

More recently McQuarrie has developed a script with co-writer Dylan Kussman about the life of John Wilkes Booth and The Stanford Prison Experiment with writer Tim Talbott.